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>> PREDATOR'S BALL?

Iran hosting global terrorist conference
Event includes Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, al-Qaida allies
Posted: February 7, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern
Editor's note: JosephFarah's G2 Bulletin is an online, subscription intelligence news service from the creator of WorldNetDaily.com - a journalist who has been developing sources around the world for the last 25 years.
? 2004 WorldNetDaily.com
Just as the U.S. State Department approves wider contact with Iran and as members of Congress begin planning the first official trips in 25 years, Tehran is sponsoring a 10-day conference of major terrorist organization beginning next week.
The purpose of the conference is to discuss anti-U.S. strategy.
Among the groups headed to Iran to participate are: Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and al-Qaida allies Ansar Al Islam.
The conference, dubbed "Ten Days of Dawn," is designed to mark the 25th anniversary of the return to Iran from exile of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who led the revolution that ousted the shah of Iran in 1979.
Officials said the conference, ordered by Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei, marks Iran's investment in sponsoring Islamic insurgency groups in the Middle East, Asia and South America.

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>> COVERUP?
Proof That Tehran Backed Terrorism
Posted Feb. 4, 2004
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
Published: Tuesday, February 17, 2004

Nineteen U.S. Air Force personnel died here when terrorists attacked with a truck full of explosives. Freeh testified it was planned, funded and sponsored by Iran.
As a former Iranian intelligence officer was providing testimony in a courtroom in Germany detailing operational ties between the September 11 hijackers and the government of Iran, lawyers from the U.S. departments of State and Justice and appeals-court judges in Washington were working hard to overturn a law that has allowed victims of terrorism to sue foreign governments for sponsoring terrorist crimes that have killed Americans.
The measure, known as the "Flatow amendment," was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in October 2000. Terrorism experts believe it has had a sobering effect on terrorist sponsors, including Iran and Libya, because it has made them financially accountable for the crimes of their proxies by awarding damages to victims from frozen assets held in the United States.
The simple message of the Flatow amendment is this: If you direct terrorist groups to kill Americans, you will pay. Damage awards to victims from Iranian government assets in the United States in some 50-odd cases now top $3 billion.
Among those victims have been U.S. hostages held in Lebanon, the families of U.S. citizens killed by Iranian government proxies in suicide bombings in Israel and the Palestinian territories, and the families of the 241 U.S. Marines who were killed when an Iranian government agent rammed a truck full of explosives into their barracks outside of the international airport in Beirut on Oct. 23, 1983 [see "Invitation to September 11," Jan. 6-19].
Now the U.S. government, apparently without the consent or knowledge of the Bush White House, is about to engage in what observers call "an act of unilateral disarmament" that will comfort state sponsors of terror, especially Iran.
"We always knew the State Department was against these lawsuits and tried to scuttle them from day one," a representative of a group of victims' families tells Insight. "At every step of the way, they intervened - whether to block efforts to discover where frozen Iranian government assets were held, or how we could get them released once we found them on our own."
But in the opinion of congressional sources, the attorneys for the victims and the family members themselves, the decision handed down by Judge Howard Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on Jan. 16 is an act of judicial activism that violates the will of Congress and delivers an overwhelming victory to terrorist states. "By vacating the Flatow amendment pure and simple, the U.S. government is sending a crystal-clear message to the terrorists: Go right ahead," said one attorney who has followed these cases for several years.
Pleading the case to repeal the law was Peter D. Keisler, an assistant attorney general in the Bush administration. He was assisted by U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Roscoe C. Howard Jr. and Mark A. Clodfelter, a legal adviser to the secretary of state.
"We ran this up the flagpole and went through the whole interagency process before sending our recommendation up to the Solicitor General's Office," an official involved in the litigation tells Insight. "The solicitor general approved our approach and set out the guidelines for our appeal."
If true, that would be astonishing. Barbara Olson, the wife of U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson, was among those killed during the 9/11 attacks when American Airlines Flight 77 was crashed into the Pentagon by al-Qaeda hijackers. As solicitor general, Ted Olson vigorously has defended every aspect of the U.S. war on terror, including the USA PATRIOT Act and the government's right to detain illegal combatants for indefinite periods without access to counsel. When pressed about who had authorized their appeal, government attorneys interviewed by Insight declined to respond.
Lawyers from the State and Justice departments argued that the law crafted by Congress, and vetted by their own attorneys at the time, allowed victims of terrorism to sue in U.S. courts but not to seek damages because the language provided "no private cause of action against foreign governments." In response to questions from Insight, they insisted that the distinction was not just "splitting legal hairs." But attorneys who helped write the legislation contested that view and revealed that State Department attorneys made last-minute "technical changes" to the bill that required victims of terrorism to sue "officials, employees and agents" of a foreign state, rather than the government itself.
"We had no objection to that change during the conference," one of the attorneys told Insight, "because they are one and the same thing. But what they are saying now is that Congress is a bunch of incompetents who don't know how to draft legislation. We'll be back in a year's time with a much more muscular bill."
These are not lawsuits like any other. They involve U.S. foreign policy, national security and the rights of victims of murderous crimes to seek redress under the law.
What makes the decision by Judge Edwards and the active intervention of the State and Justice department lawyers particularly odious, lawyers and family members of victims tell Insight, is the potential cost in human lives it could entail. As President Ronald Reagan was fond of saying, weakness or the perception of weakness invites attack.
The shabbiest treatment of all was reserved for the families of the 19 U.S. airmen and Air Force personnel who lost their lives when Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorists drove a truck bomb into the Khobar Towers barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in June 1996. After keeping them waiting two weeks for their day in court, Magistrate Judge Deborah A. Robinson sent some 100 family members back to their homes around the country in mid-December after she single-handedly attempted to block the testimony of former FBI Director Louis Freeh [see "Is Khobar Towers Testimony Being Silenced," posted Dec. 17, 2003].
Freeh already had testified in open session on Oct. 8, 2002, to the Joint Intelligence Committee about involvement of the Iranian government in the Khobar Towers bombing and told Insight when he first appeared in Robinson's courtroom on Dec. 2, 2003, that he planned to give the same testimony. But Robinson kept disappearing from her own courtroom for brief, unexplained recesses. When she returned, she read out long lists of questions, apparently dictated to her by others, that raised objections to Freeh's testimony and to every other witness the victims' attorneys tried to call. A longtime observer of the court called Robinson's courtroom behavior "disingenuous" and "out of line" and "in violation of federal rules of evidence."
To family members, Freeh had become a hero. "He was the only man in Washington during this whole thing who gave a damn," said Katherine Adams, mother of U.S. Air Force Capt. Christopher Adams, a pilot who had been taking another officer's tour of duty in Saudi Arabia so he could stay home with his wife while she was having a baby. "He was the only man who kept his word to the families, who cared, who met with us. [President] Clinton never did anything, except to show up for a photo op," Katherine Adams says.
When Robinson finally allowed the former FBI director to testify to an empty courtroom on Dec. 18, Freeh got straight to the point. "My own conclusion was that the [Khobar Towers] attack was planned, funded and sponsored by the senior leadership of the government of Iran," he said. Freeh's breathtaking conclusion, and the hard evidence of the Iranian government's role in the attack, is widely seen as far more compelling than the evidence used by the Bush administration to justify the war in Iraq. Making all evidence public could increase pressure on the administration to move militarily against Iran, a step most observers agree the administration would prefer to avoid.
Robinson also took the unprecedented step in a terrorism case of disqualifying the most qualified nongovernmental witness on Iranian government funding of terrorism, Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute of Near East Policy, in a written order handed down Jan. 27. Clawson has testified in more than a half-dozen lawsuits against the government of Iran, providing hard data culled from Iranian government reports on state budgets allocated to international terrorism. Robinson ordered that his testimony be "stricken in its entirety" because Clawson would not reveal all the sources for his expert opinion on Iranian government sponsorship of terror. Clawson was unable to attend one hearing, an affidavit shows, because he was scheduled for all-day briefings at CIA headquarters in McLean, Va.
Sources familiar with the U.S. government investigations tell Insight that Iran "supplied the explosives" for the 1998 al-Qaeda bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa that killed more than 200 persons, and designated top terrorist operative Imad Mugniyeh as their liaison to Osama bin Laden's groups.
U.S. intelligence agencies consistently have argued that Iran could "not possibly" have a connection to al-Qaeda or to Sunni Muslim terrorist networks because Sunnis and Shias "do not talk to one another." And yet, a handful of intelligence analysts resisted this consensus view and compiled "B-Team" reports on al-Qaeda/Iran contacts for Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith. After an Oct. 26, 2001, briefing, Wolfowitz expressed astonishment that this information had been kept from him, and he asked to be given more information as it became available. Instead, the Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who compiled the report, Kai Fallis, was fired by his superiors.
"What has been done is incredibly hypocritical," says Stephen Perlis, a lawyer involved in a dozen similar cases, including the original Flatow case. "They used the Flatow amendment to facilitate rapprochement with Libya by resolving the Pan Am 103 case, but now they want to destroy it when it applies to Iran."
As the war on terror progresses, the Bush administration is seeking to put pressure on hard-line clerics in Iran, deter their use of terror, stop weapons of mass destruction and encourage pro-democracy forces - at least, that is what the president says. But the message sent by the repeal of the Flatow amendment, and by the refusal of the State Department to back up the president's promise to support the pro-democracy movement in Iran, suggests a policy process the president does not control, say former National Security Council officials.
Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior writer for Insight magazine.
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Breaking News: Is Khobar Towers Testimony Being Silenced?
Posted Dec. 17, 2003
By Scott L. Wheeler
Published: Tuesday, December 23, 2003
A senior government official says the State Department is interfering with a civil lawsuit, creating setbacks for family members of victims of the 1996 bombing of a military barracks in Saudi Arabia. The official, who spoke on condition that he not be named, told Insight that the State Department is taking "active measures" to prevent family members of some of the 19 victims of the Khobar Towers bombing from proceeding with a civil court case that alleges Iran sponsored the bombing and seeks a judgment against the Islamic nation which the State Department itself lists as a country that sponsors terrorism.
Former FBI Director Louis Freeh and the former head of the FBI's counterterrorism unit, Dale Watson, had been slated to testify in the trial and had even shown up in court to testify on one occasion but were told they couldn't appear, even though lawyers for the victims said they had received permission from the Justice Department for their testimony to go forward. In court, attorneys stated that there was another agency that had not granted permission and was holding up the testimony. The government official, who does not work for the State Department but who does have dealings with it on matters pertaining to terrorism, told Insight that State was the agency holding up testimony and attempting to prevent it from occurring altogether. "First they did everything they could to prevent Freeh and Watson from testifying," the official says, "and now they are putting pressure on the judge to dismiss the case."
A spokesman for the State Department said that "We reviewed the request without objection," but could not say when the Justice Department was notified of State's clearance of testimony by Freeh and Watson.
Another source close to the Justice Department told Insight that U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, the boss of presiding judge U.S. Magistrate Deborah Robinson, was approached by the State Department and told that the Khobar Towers case was "still under investigation" and a "matter of national security" and that the case should be dismissed. When asked about allegations that the State Department applied pressure on the judge, a department spokesman told Insight, "We do not discuss ongoing cases."
Last Friday, after two weeks of hearing testimony, Robinson indicated her desire to dismiss the case even if Freeh and Watson are allowed to testify. "What evidence will be presented to make the trial worth holding over?" the judge asked attorneys for the families of the victims. Freeh and Watson both had concluded and previously had testified in other venues that Iran's assistance in the Khobar Towers bombing amounted to state sponsorship of the attack.
Robinson, however, raised questions over whether testimony of the two would divulge "classified" information. Attorneys responded that they only intended to pursue information provided by Freeh and Watson that already had been made public in other court depositions. The government official says that claims of national security in this case are "specious at best. This is about the State Department putting the interests of Iran and Saudi Arabia ahead of that of their own citizens." Testimony by the two former FBI officials is viewed as the cornerstone of the case for the family members and, according to several attorneys without an interest in the outcome of the case, would go well beyond the evidence necessary to win in a case where the defendant doesn't show up and put on a defense.
On Tuesday the court learned that the Justice Department had agreed to allow testimony from Freeh and Watson to go forward. However, family members of victims of the Khobar Towers bombing said they were disheartened by Robinson's statement about whether the family members who previously were scheduled to testify would be allowed to testify. Last week the judge told the victims' family members who had traveled at their own expense to testify at the trial to just "go home." Marie Campbell, wife of Air Force Sgt. Millard Dee Campbell, fighting back tears, told Insight, "It hurts a lot to have to prepare to testify about the loss of my husband" and then to be told "to just go home." Campbell says being involved with the lawsuit "may be the only justice we get" for the attack.
"My tears never stop," said Jennie Haun, wife of Air Force Capt. Timothy Haun, another Khobar Towers victim.
"We have so many things that make us suffer. Our loved ones were murdered and we only want what little bit of justice this provides," Haun told Insight. Haun also was scheduled to testify but says that after what happened in court yesterday she sees a chance for "a little bit of peace" slipping away.
Attorneys for the victims' families had no comment.
Scott L. Wheeler is a contributing writer for Insight.
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Invitation to September 11
Posted Dec. 22, 2003
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
Published: Tuesday, January 6, 2004

The spider holes where terrorists and the nation-states who back them hide from public view lie in the murkiest recesses of the murky world of intelligence. Rarely do victims of terrorist attacks get to face their attacker, let alone know his identity, especially when the attacker is a foreign government. Individual terrorists such as Osama bin Laden or Ilich Ramirez Sanchez (aka "Carlos the Jackal") - who openly boast of their evil deeds and thus can be tracked, targeted and eventually taken out - are the exception, not the rule.
Or so said the conventional wisdom until a recent groundbreaking public trial in a federal courtroom in Washington that blew the lid off the world's most elusive terrorist sponsor: the Islamic Republic of Iran. That legal action was brought by the families of the 241 U.S. Marines who were killed when terrorists crashed an explosives-filled truck into their barracks near the Beirut airport on Oct. 23, 1983. It raises disturbing questions concerning some of our most basic assumptions about the war on terror.
New intelligence revealed at the March 2003 trial, and independently confirmed by Insight with top military commanders and intelligence officials who had access to it at the time, shows that the U.S. government knew beyond any reasonable doubt who carried out the bombing of the Marine barracks 20 years ago and yet did nothing to punish the perpetrators. Even more disturbing is the revelation, which Insight also confirmed independently, that intelligence then available and known within the government gave clear forewarning of the attack. But this warning never was transmitted to operations officers on the ground who could have done something to prevent or reduce the impact of the devastating assault.
Among the intelligence information initially uncovered by Thomas Fortune Fay, an attorney for the families of the victims, was a National Security Agency (NSA) intercept of a message sent from Iranian intelligence headquarters in Tehran to Hojjat ol-eslam Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, the Iranian ambassador in Damascus. As it was paraphrased by presiding U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth, "The message directed the Iranian ambassador to contact Hussein Musawi, the leader of the terrorist group Islamic Amal, and to instruct him ... 'to take a spectacular action against the United States Marines.'"
Rear Adm. James "Ace" Lyons was deputy chief of naval operations for plans, policy and operation at the time and remembers well when he first learned of the NSA intercept. It was exactly two days after terrorists had driven a truck laden with military explosives into the fortified Marine barracks complex just outside the Beirut airport and detonated it, producing the largest, non-nuclear explosion in history, the equivalent to 20,000 pounds of TNT. "The director of naval intelligence carried the transcript to me in a locked briefcase," he tells Insight. "He gave it to me, to the chief of naval operations, and to the secretary of the Navy all in the same day."
At trial, Lyons described the general contents of the message. In a personal tribute to the slain Marines and their families, he had obtained a copy of the NSA transcript and presented it in a sealed envelope to the court. "If ever there was a 24-karat gold document, this was it," Lyons said, "This was not something from the third cousin of the fourth wife of Muhammad the taxicab driver." Lamberth accepted the still-classified NSA intercept into evidence under seal to protect NSA sources and methods. It was the first time in nearly a dozen cases brought against the government of Iran by victims of terrorism that material evidence emanating directly from the U.S. intelligence community was brought forward in such a direct manner.
The existence of this intercept - just one of thousands of messages incriminating the governments of Iran, Syria and Saddam Hussein's Iraq (among others) in deadly terrorist crimes against Americans - long has been rumored. Insight reported in May 2001 on similar electronic intelligence that unequivocally revealed how Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat personally ordered Palestinian terrorists to murder U.S. diplomats Cleo Noel and George Curtis Moore after a PLO commando took them hostage in Khartoum, Sudan, in March 1973 [see "Arafat Murdered U.S. Diplomats," June 25, 2001].
Then as now, the release of such information shocks many Americans who find it hard to believe that the U.S. government could have had such clear-cut indications of impending terrorist acts and done nothing to stop them or to punish those responsible. And yet that is precisely what the intelligence indicates. And the reasons, far from some dire government conspiracy, appear to be the laziness and incompetence of intelligence officials and bureaucratic gatekeepers who failed to pass on information to the political appointees or Cabinet officers making the decisions.
The message from Tehran ordering Iranian-backed terrorists to attack the U.S. Marines in Beirut was picked up "on or about Sept. 26, 1983," Lamberth said, noting it was nearly four full weeks before the actual bombing. With all that lead time, why did no one take steps to protect the Marines or to head off the attack? "That's a question I've been waiting 20 years for someone to ask," Lyons tells this magazine.
Insight has learned that the CIA station in Damascus received a copy of the terrorist message almost as soon as it was intercepted and transmitted it back to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. "The response I heard back from headquarters was, 'The Marines? We don't want to know about the Marines,'" a former CIA officer who saw the intercept and was involved in transmitting it to his superiors tells Insight.
Marine Col. Tim Geraghty, commander of the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit then stationed at the Beirut Airport, tells Insight that he never received a warning or even a report based on the message, although he was well aware that his Marines had become "sitting ducks" to hostile militias on the ground. "Generally, yes, we knew the problem," he said, "but we never received anything specific."
This was not because the CIA was stonewalling him, Geraghty believes. "I became personal friends with Bill Buckley, who was CIA station chief in Beirut, and he was giving me everything he had. But we never got a warning mentioning a possible attack on the barracks or mentioning Iran." And yet, as Geraghty himself learned at the trial, such warnings indeed had been picked up and they were very specific indeed.
For one thing, there was no other place but the barracks near the airport where a "spectacular operation" could have been carried out. It was the only major Marine bivouac in all of Lebanon. And then, there was the mention in the intercept of Hussein Musawi by name and the group he then headed, Islamic Amal - a precursor of what later became known as Hezbollah. Both were under direct Iranian-government control. But as former CIA officer Robert Baer tells Insight, in this case the warning "did not mention a specific time or place and so was not considered [by CIA managers] to be actionable." Because of this, the warning never was sent on to Beirut, where Buckley could have passed it on to Geraghty. Until 9/11 such a lack of specificity was a standard excuse.
Michael Ledeen, author of The War Against the Terror Masters, was working as a consultant to the Department of Defense at the time of the bombing. The failure to share intelligence "drove a change in the structure of the intelligence community," he said at trial, "because what they found was that we should have seen it coming, we had enough information so that we should have seen it coming [but] we didn't because of the compartmentalization of the various pieces of the intelligence community. So the people who listen to things weren't talking to the people who looked at things weren't talking to people who analyzed things and so on." That failure, he said, led CIA director William Casey to establish the Counter-Terrorism Center, a new, cross-discipline unit whose sole purpose was to prevent terrorism and, when that failed, to fight back against terrorists.
After the Beirut attack the intelligence on Iran's involvement all of a sudden looked different. And yet, despite evidence that Ledeen categorized as "absolutely convincing," the Reagan administration not only didn't fight back, but within three months of the attack secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger ordered the Marines to leave Beirut altogether, opening the United States to accusations that it had "cut and run" and inviting terrorists to have at Americans with impunity.
Exactly why that happened is still a mystery to many of the participants, Insight discovered in interviews with Weinberger, former Navy secretary John F. Lehman, former deputy chief of naval operations Lyons, Geraghty, former CIA officer Robert Baer and others. To Baer, a self-avowed "foot soldier" in the war on terror, "The information we had on the Iranians in 1983 was infinitely better than anything we had on Saddam Hussein." The failure to retaliate for the attack "was all politics."
For example, the CIA managed to identify the Hezbollah operative who built the bomb in the truck. "His name was Ibrahim Safa. He was working with the Pasdaran - the Iranian Revolutionary Guards - out of the southern suburbs of Beirut," Baer tells Insight. "In the hierarchy of things, he was just a thug who'd found God. He'd been a bang-bang man in the civil war in the 1970s who knew explosives."
One option available to military planners was to target the actual planners of the operation, such as Safa, but that was rejected because of the congressional ban on assassination. "Assassination was forbidden, so we couldn't target individuals, the heads of Hezbollah," Ledeen recalls. "We would have had to go after Hezbollah training camps and kill a lot of innocent civilians." That was something Weinberger says neither he nor the president wanted to do.
Soon the primary target became the Sheikh Abdallah barracks in Baalbek, the capital of Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. A former Lebanese-army barracks, it had been taken over by Iran's Pasdaran and was being used to train Hezbollah and house Iranian troops stationed in Lebanon. "We had the planes loaded and ready to take out the group," says Lyons, referring to Hezbollah and their Iranian masters in Baalbek, "but we couldn't get the go-ahead from Washington. We could have taken out all 250 of them in about one-and-a-half minutes."
President Ronald Reagan was demanding retaliation, and asked the U.S. Navy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to draw up target lists, Lehman tells Insight. According to several participants, the Syrian government also had played a role in the plot and several named Syrian officers were suggested as potential targets, as was the Syrian defense ministry.
"It is my recollection that I had been briefed on who had done it and what the evidence was," Lehman says. "I was told the actual names of the Syrians and where they were. I was told about the evidence that the Iranian government was directly behind it. I was told that the people who had done it were trained in Baalbek and that many of them were back in Baalbek. I recall very clearly that there was no controversy who did it. I never heard any briefer or person in the corridor who said, 'Oh maybe we don't know who did it.'"
Insight has learned that, within three weeks of the attack, enough intelligence had been gathered to determine exactly where and how to hit back, and a counterstrike package was briefed directly to the president. Planners say it included eight Tomahawk missiles launched from the battleship New Jersey against the Syrian defense ministry and other command targets in Syria. Carrier-based A6-A Intruders were assigned to bomb the Sheikh Abdallah barracks in Baalbek in a joint strike with the French, who had lost 58 marines when their own barracks, known as the "Drakkar," was bombed just minutes after the U.S. Marines. It also included selected "snatches" of Syrian officers based in Lebanon who had helped carry out the operation.
Coordinates already were being programmed into the Tomahawks, and the A6 pilots and snatch teams were being briefed, say the intelligence and defense officials Insight interviewed, when someone pulled the plug. By all accounts, that someone was Weinberger.
In his memoirs, Weinberger made clear that he had opposed deployment of the Marines to Beirut in the first place because they were never given a clear mission. He also expressed regret - which he repeated in an interview with Insight - that he had not been "persuasive" enough at White House meetings to convince the president to withdraw the Marines before the October 1983 attack occurred. "I was begging the president to take us out of Lebanon," he tells Insight. "We were sitting right in the middle of the bull's-eye."
Weinberger believed the United States should only deploy U.S. troops in situations where "the objectives were so important to American interests that we had to fight," at which point, the United States should commit "enough forces to win and win overwhelmingly." Those conditions were not present in Lebanon in 1983, he argued. But Weinberger was overpowered by secretary of state George Shultz, who argued at the White House meetings that the United States could not afford to give the impression it would "cut and run" after the attack since that would only encourage the terrorists. As it soon did.
Speaking with Insight, Weinberger insists today that the only reason the United States did not retaliate for the October 1983 attack on the U.S. Marines "was the lack of specific knowledge of who the perpetrators were. We had nothing before the bombing, although I had warned repeatedly that the security situation was very bad. We were in the middle of the bull's-eye, but we didn't know who was attacking the bull's-eye."
Weinberger insists that he has "never heard of any specific information. If I had known, I wouldn't have hesitated" to approve retaliatory action. "Clearly the attack was planned. But it was hard to locate who had done it out of all the different groups. The president didn't want some kind of carpet bombing that would kill a lot of innocent civilians. There were so many groups and not all of them were responsible to the government of Iran. All we knew was that they were united in their hatred of America."
Weinberger's account surprised several other participants who had firsthand knowledge of the intelligence information. "Perhaps Weinberger was never given the intercept by his staff," one participant suggested.
At the time highly classified NSA material such as the Damascus intercept would have been given to the chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, Gen. John Vessey, and to the military aide to the secretary of defense, who would determine whether the secretary would be apprised of the information personally. Weinberger's aide at the time was Maj. Gen. Colin Powell.
But Vessey tells Insight he has "no recollection" of seeing the intelligence on Iran's involvement in the attack. "It is unbelievable to me that someone didn't bring it through the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency up to me and the secretary of defense." Somewhere along the line, the system broke down. "I just don't know what happened," Vessey says. Sources close to Powell suggest the intercept never made it into the president's daily briefing.
On Nov. 16, 1983, Weinberger received a telephone call from Charles Hernu, the French minister of defense, informing him that French Super-Etendard fighter-bombers were getting ready to attack Baalbek. In his memoirs, Weinberger states that he "had received no orders or notifications from the president or anyone prior to that phone call from Paris," which he said gave him too short a notice to scramble U.S. jets.
This reporter was covering the fighting between Arafat and Syrian-backed PLO rebels in Tripoli, Lebanon, at the time, and vividly recalls watching the French planes roar overhead en route to Baalbek. The raid was a total failure.
Whatever the reasons behind the refusal of the United States to join that French retaliatory raid, there can be no doubt that the terrorists and their masters took the U.S. failure to retaliate as a sign of weakness. Just five months later, Iran's top agent in Beirut, Imad Mugniyeh, took CIA station chief William Buckley hostage and hideously tortured him to death after extracting whatever information he could. Since then, notes former Navy secretary Lehman, Osama bin Laden has "directly credited the Marine bombing" and the lack of U.S. retaliation as encouraging his jihadi movement to believe they could attack the United States with impunity.
"The first shots in the war on terror we are in now were fired in Beirut in October 1983," says Geraghty. "The [Bush] administration is now doing exactly what we need to be doing, attacking the enemies of freedom where they live instead of letting them attack us in our home." But the failure to strike back against Iran and Syria in 1983 was a dreadful mistake, he says. "This was an act of war. We knew who the players were. And, because we didn't respond, we emboldened these people to increase the violence."
Never again.
Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior writer for Insight magazine.
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A Marine 'Peacekeeper's' Story
Posted Dec. 22, 2003
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
Published: Tuesday, January 6, 2004
Steve Edward Russell, an E-5 sergeant with the 2nd Marine Division out of Camp Lejeune, N.C., was in the guard post directly in front of the lobby when he heard a loud snap, "like a two-by-four breaking" out by the main gate. When he turned to look, he saw a large Mercedes water truck coming through the open gate, leaning heavily as it swerved around barriers. Russell fiddled briefly with his sidearm, but realized it was not loaded - in keeping with the rules of engagement for this "peacekeeping" mission. Then he saw that the truck was coming straight for him.
He made eye contact with the driver - a man in his mid-twenties with curly hair and an olive complexion, wearing what looked like a camouflage shirt - "and the only thing on my mind was to warn." He began running, screaming to Marines who were milling around to get out, but got one last look at the driver. He had "a sh--ty grin, a smile of success you might say." Russell made it to the other side of the building when the truck exploded, wounding him severely.
As he gave his testimony to a courtroom packed with family members of victims, Russell exploded with 20 years of guilt for not having been able to stop the truck. "I hope I've done some good today," he said, "and if I step down right now and drop dead I'd be happy because I've been a good Marine."
Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior writer for Insight.
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Defector Points Finger at Iran in September 11 Plot
Posted Feb. 4, 2004
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
Published: Tuesday, February 17, 2004
An Iranian defector stepped forward to provide key testimony in the trial of an alleged 9/11 conspirator, a 31-year old Moroccan named Abdelghani Mzoudi, just hours before a German court was preparing to drop all charges against him. The defector, Hamid Reza Zakeri, told a court in Hamburg on Jan. 30 that a Mzoudi colleague, 9/11 hijacker Ziad Samir al-Jarrah, met in Iran with Zakeri's former bosses at the Ministry of Information and Security (MOIS), Iran's intelligence service, two years before the September 11 terrorist attacks. "I saw him at a training camp in eastern Iran with [Lebanese terrorist] Imad Mugniyeh and [top al-Qaeda operative] Saef al-Adil," he said.
Mzoudi himself was in Iran for training in 1997, Zakeri says. The Germans had charged Mzoudi with providing material support to the al-Qaeda cell in Hamburg that included al-Jarrah and two other 9/11 hijackers, but they were preparing to drop the charges before Zakeri stepped forward with new information. Insight first published Zakeri's allegations of an Iranian government link to the 9/11 conspiracy last year [see "Defector Alleges Iranian Involvement in Sept. 11 Attacks," posted June 10, 2003, at Insight Online]. At the time, the CIA responded to Insight inquiries regarding Zakeri's credibility by calling him a "serial fabricator."
Zakeri claimed that he met with a CIA officer at the U.S. Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, in July 2001 and provided warning of the 9/11 attacks. The CIA acknowledged the meeting, then claimed Zakeri had provided no credible evidence of a terrorist plot against the United States. But German prosecutors and the German intelligence agencies who have interviewed Zakeri don't appear to share that assessment. Germany's counterespionage service, the Bundeskriminalamt, supplied prosecutors with a 30-page transcript of its interview with Zakeri on Jan. 21, prompting the court to halt Mzoudi's trial and expected release.
In his original interview with Insight, which was picked up by American media organizations only after Zakeri's name surfaced in the German 9/11 trial on Jan. 21, the former MOIS operative said he personally handled security at two meetings between top al-Qaeda operatives and Iranian officials held in Iran just months before the September 11 attacks.
Zakeri's information dovetailed in many respects with an earlier report on Iran's al-Qaeda ties produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency that Insight first revealed in November 2001 [see "Iran Cosponsors Al-Qaeda Terrorism," Dec. 3, 2001]. Both reports have been spiked until now.
Zakeri backed up his original account of the two meetings between al-Qaeda and Iran with a document signed by Hojjat-ol eslam Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, who headed the Intelligence Department for Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The letter, dated May 14, 2001, carried instructions from Khamenei to his Intelligence Ministry regarding relations with al-Qaeda.
In a follow-on interview with Insight just hours before he appeared in the Hamburg courtroom on Jan. 30, Zakeri reiterated his earlier allegations that Saad bin Laden, eldest son of the Saudi terrorist, and bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, both came to Iran in the months prior to the 9/11 attacks to discuss the logistics and strategy of a major attack on the United States with Iranian intelligence officers.
Saad bin Laden "spoke good English" during his talks with MOIS officials when he came to Iran four months and seven days before 9/11, Zakeri tells Insight.
Another top al-Qaeda operative, Saef al-Adil, currently is in Iran, Zakeri tells Insight, where he has met with the deputy military commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Gen. Mohammad Baqr Zolqadr. Training of al-Qaeda operatives by the IRGC took place at the "Fathi Shiqaqi" camp to the northeast of Iran, he adds. Shiqaqi was the leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), an Iranian-backed terrorist group, until Israeli intelligence operatives assassinated him in Malta in October 1995. Shiqaqi was replaced as head of PIJ by Ramadan Shallah, who left a teaching job at the University of South Florida where he had worked alongside professor Sami al-Arian, now awaiting trial in the United States on terrorism-related charges.
U.S. officials say they believe Saad bin Laden currently is in Iran, where he is being given refuge and safe harbor, but repeated requests to the Iranian government to hand him over for trial have gone unanswered. The Iranian government says only that a number of al-Qaeda operatives crossed into Iran from neighboring Afghanistan and that they currently are awaiting prosecution for unspecified violations of Iranian law.
Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior writer for Insight.
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Stacking the Deck Against Science By Kristen Philipkoski
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,62119,00.html
02:00 AM Feb. 03, 2004 PT
Under the guise of promoting sound science, the Bush administration is advancing a policy that could make it more difficult for federal agencies to protect health and the environment, U.S. scientists say.
A White House Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, bulletin (PDF) drafted in August 2003 would allow the government to hand-pick scientists to second-guess scientific research, opponents say. The text of the bulletin says its purpose would be to ensure that all research affecting federal regulations, such as environmental or health advisories, would be thoroughly peer reviewed by unbiased researchers.
But scientists feel the government is commandeering a term that is near and dear to their hearts.
Peer review is the backbone of all serious science. It's a process by which top experts in a given field examine research for flaws, and often send it back to researchers for more work before it's disseminated to the public. But scientists say the White House version of peer review would allow the government to stack review committees in favor of the government and industry.
"It wouldn't be peer review as we're used to," said William Schlesinger, president of the Ecological Society of America, which represents 8,000 scientists in academia, government and industry.
The OMB bulletin would require that peer reviewers be "independent of the agency" involved when it comes to "significant regulatory information." Experts receiving funding from the agency involved, who have performed multiple peer reviews for that agency in recent years or just one review on the same topic, would be eliminated as potential reviewers.
That would eliminate the top experts in a given field, scientists said in letters responding to the bulletin.
"Anyone really good has done some science and made a conclusion," Schlesinger said. "If you eliminate those people, probably the researchers did multiple reviews because they were recognized as being good at it. (Also,) anybody any good on an issue is always looking for research funding."
Many also complain that the bulletin does not address ways to combat conflict of interest when it comes to researchers working in the private sector.
Opponents of the bulletin also said the definition of "significant" or "especially significant" regulatory information was so broad that it could lead to an unmanageable number of federally mandated peer reviews.
The OMB did not return repeated phone calls, and it's unclear when the OMB will advance the bulletin or if it will be revised.
Five congressmen and members of the Committee on Science wrote a response to the bulletin saying items as disparate as Alan Greenspan's decisions on interest rates, Veterans Affairs drug prices and weather warnings could fall under this rule and require peer review.
"When the National Weather Service predicts a major storm, it has immediate implications for businesses and governments in affected areas," they wrote (PDF). "It would appear completely unworkable, however, to obtain peer review of this information on a regular basis."
The peer-review proposal could dangerously slow down the process of warning the public about health dangers, said Winifred DePalma, regulatory affairs counsel for Public Citizen.
"This is explicitly taking control over when the public health and environmental agencies can make an announcement to the public," DePalma said. "You would have to go through peer review before disseminating that information to the public unless peer review is waived."
Respondents to the bulletin are divided between industry and scientific or environmental groups. For example, the Gas Appliance Manufacturers Association and the Industrial Minerals Association favor the proposal. The American Academy for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Sciences and the Natural Resources Defense Council oppose it.
Opponents also say the measure is trying to fix something that's not broken.
"There's nothing wrong with the system," said Georges Benjamin, president of the American Public Health Association. "People might not like the way the good science comes out, so they want to look for an opposition to second-guess it. I don't know what OMB's motives are, but I think they've got a solution looking for a problem."
"It is really amazing that OMB has not pointed out a single instance of bad rule-making or decision-making based on (scientific) information," DePalma said.

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Andrew Jewett
Science & the promise of democracy in America - D?dalus Fall 2003
Andrew Jewett, a visiting scholar at the American Academy in the academic year 2002-2003, is a lecturer in history at Yale University. He is completing a book on the understanding of scienti?c democracy in early-twentieth-century America.
http://www.amacad.org/publications/fall2003/jewett.pdf


The intellectual skirmishes known as the science wars have centered on whether scienti?c facts and theories are socially constructed. This is, of course, a substantive argument over meaningful issues: the nature of truth, the possibility of objective knowledge, and the proper methodology for scholarly inquiry. But why in the past decade has debate over this particular set of abstract questions become so acrimonious, so deeply politicized? And why has the debate erupted most stridently in the United States?
Commentators sometimes claim that sociological factors explain the intensity of the conflict, and that this philosophical quarrel gains its emotional tenor from an underlying struggle over academic turf. Thomas F. Gieryn argues, for example, that sociologists and literary theorists are trying to portray their own disciplines as the only sources of authoritative judgment-an assertion that physicists, chemists, and biologists naturally dispute. The science wars, he writes, are a series of "credibility contests in which rival parties manipulate the boundaries of science in order to legitimate their beliefs about reality and secure for their knowledge-making a provisional epistemic authority that carries with it influence, prestige, and material resources."1
For Gieryn what is really at stake is social status. But I am not convinced. I believe that the science wars express something more than a substantive debate over epistemological issues, and something deeper than a dispute over academic status. What we are witnessing is a new chapter in an ongoing struggle over the meaning of modern science for American democracy.
This is a struggle that took shape in the ?rst half of the twentieth century, especially during the 1920s and 1930s. The vigorous debates of that period about the political meaning of science inform today's political, institutional, and cultural climate, and by reconsidering them we may discover the deep roots and true stakes of the science wars today. In the late nineteenth century, a few Americans began to argue that the nation could best guarantee its political health by expanding its scienti?c institutions. After the turn of the century, an increasingly broad group of academics- some based in the natural sciences but most in the social sciences, philosophy, history, and educational theory- were joined in this endeavor by journalists and educators outside the academy who agreed that science held great social promise.
This group of `scienti?c democrats' included (to name only a few of the most famous) the philosopher John Dewey, President Herbert Hoover, the physicist Robert A. Millikan, the anthropologist Franz Boas-and Vannevar Bush, the electrical engineer who directed the wartime effort to build the ?rst atomic bomb.2 They constituted a large proportion, perhaps even an outright majority, of those Americans engaged in research, study, and writing during the ?rst half of the twentieth century. And, although their views were far from uniform, they shared enough ideas that we can consider them a social movement.
For the scienti?c democrats the most salient fact of American life during the Gilded Age was the spread of egoistic and self-seeking behavior. As the frontier closed and the economy industrialized, the nation seemed increasingly indanger of developing some of the most feared solvents of a republican society: a permanent class of dependent wageearners and an economically parasitic elite.
One response was the Social Gospel movement in American Protestantism. Theologians of this bent emphasized that the path to individual salvation ran through social salvation, and they advocated for, among other moralities, the worker's right to a living wage and safe working conditions. Other responses included socialism and trade unionism. But the scienti?c democrats felt that none of these programs could adequately address the political challenges of an industrial society. Since most of these democrats had been raised in evangelical Protestant environments, they still believed that personal benevolence was central to solving the nation's industrial woes. They therefore rejected what they saw as the narrowly material goals of the socialists and the trade unionists. Yet they also moved away from institutional Protestantism, believing that it was still tainted by a stringent Calvinist emphasis on self-denial and failed to explain how benevolence, by itself, could transform a complex industrial society. The "major problem of life," as Ralph Barton Perry put it, was to foster simultaneously "sentiments" and "modes of organization" by which "human suffering may be mitigated, and by which every unnecessary thwarting of human desire may be eliminated."3
To solve this problem, the scienti?c democrats proposed a return to the scienti?c method, as they understood it. (By the standards of contemporary physics or biology, what they meant by `science' was quite broad-it implied a general commitment to the experimental investigation and theoretical explanation of a variety of phenomena, both natural and social.) In their optimistic view, modern science had proved its power in practice, by harnessing natural resources and creating new inventions such as the steam engine and the rail- road, creating an industrial society with the potential to overcome scarcity. The task now was to apply the methods of modern science to the improvement of social organization itself. The application of such methods might allow the nation to close the gap between its professed ideals and the realities of industrial social life, by organizing a new kind of political community that was capable of enlightened self-rule.
By taking as givens both political democracy
and an industrial system based on extensive personal interdependence, the scienti?c democrats were forced to reject the nineteenth-century equation of civic virtue with economic independence. In effect, the scienti?c democrats neatly severed the two halves of what Sacvan Bercovitch describes as the nineteenth-century American model of "representative selfhood": "independence of mind" and "independence of means."4 What virtue, they asked, was economic independence supposed to have protected in the ?rst place? Their answer was intellectual freedom, a social-psychological state that allowed the individual to participate constructively in collective action and decisionmaking. The problem, as they saw it, was to restore the intellectual freedom that had been lost during the rise of the industrial economy. According to Lyman Bryson, "scienti?c or objective thinking" was the source of "the only kind of freedom that is worth having, the freedom to use the mind in all its untrammeled strength and to abide by clearly seen conclusions." And in order to keep the people from "suffering at the hands of those who have knowledge and would use it against them," Bryson continued, society had to provide for "common ownership" of such "effective thought." Science would protect the public against not only errors in judgment, but also "enslavement" by the more knowledgeable. 5 Universal access to science would liberate the public from its mental bondage. To modern ears, the scienti?c democrats' program may sound as deeply authoritarian as the intellectual tyranny they feared. But the now common charge that these ?gures imposed a concrete ethical system under the cover of absolute neutrality misses the point, for the scienti?c democrats de?ned intellectual freedom in far different terms than we do. Scholars have long noted that Progressive Era reformers developed a positive notion of political freedom, in which removing obstacles to action was only the ?rst step toward making freely chosen action possible. The scienti?c democrats understood intellectual freedom in equally positive terms, conceiving it as the possession of suf?cient resources to think effectively in a social setting, rather than as merely the absence of coercion. "No man and no mind," Dewey wrote in 1927, "was ever emancipated by being left alone."6 Freedom was a product of social relations, not of the escape from them. Meanwhile, science seemingly reinforced the point that an attitude of pure neutrality or pure self-seeking was counterproductive; what characterized science as a cultural practice was the participants' emotional commitment to the pursuit of collective truths.
During its ?rst phase, in the years before World War I, the movement for scienti?c democracy centered on two goals. The ?rst was increasing the cognitive and social authority of science. This meant familiarizing the public with the inevitability of industrialization, as well as expanding the predictive power of the physical and social sciences, establishing these disciplines on a ?rmer professional basis, and strengthening the universities with which these disciplines were increasingly associated. Despite internal divisions, the nascent movement united during these early years behind a general program of persuading Americans that a commitment to `science'-however vaguely de?ned-promoted social integration and the only kind of democracy compatible with an industrial society. The second shared goal prior to World War I was more subtle, though equallyconsequential: rede?ning how scienti ?c inquiry itself was understood. Nineteenth-century American interpreters of science offered a narrowly empirical reading based on the work of Francis Bacon, as ?ltered through the writings of the Scottish common-sense realists. They held that all individuals possessed a truth-?nding faculty that could perceive the orderly, lawful structures of the universe, just as the eye perceived light and shape. Scienti?c facts were like objects to be collected or discovered, available to all and requiring little analysis beyond systematic classi?cation. The scientist was like a pioneer on the prairie, struggling to organize the elements of an inhuman but morally responsive nature.7
But to the scienti?c democrats it was abundantly clear that morally normative facts were not simply strewn about the landscape to be collected and assembled by any frontiersman. The general public consistently got the facts wrong, and, more importantly, consistently read the social implications of even the most well-established facts-in particular, the irreversible rise of the industrial economy-incorrectly. Abandoning common-sense realism, then, the scienti ?c democrats developed a range of new theories based on the work of European thinkers such as John Stuart Mill, Karl Pearson, and Ernst Mach. These theories, typically designated either positivism or pragmatism, held that the production of scienti?c knowledge required coordinated effort by specially trained individuals.
When these scienti?c democrats invoked objectivity as a characteristic of scienti?c knowledge, they meant neither that the knowledge was absolutely certain nor that the generalizations would necessarily hold permanently true. As one researcher summarized recently, "All the great scientists of the last hundred years (and some much earlier ones) have in one place or another clearly stated that their purpose was to create plausible theoretical models for the organisation of experience and that these models must not be considered representations of absolute reality."8 Objectivity, for these theorists, meant that scienti?c knowledge was as immune as possible to the influence of the observer's own desires. Science was, in the new theories, most fundamentally a means of error correction, producing not perfect truths but simply the best available truths. In the wake ofWorld War I, a new variant of scienti?c democracy appeared,
endorsed by such ?gures as Dewey, Perry, Bryson, and Eduard C. Lindeman. Rather than leave the organization of society to the political-economic conclusions of a small group of scienti?c experts, this group of `deliberative democrats' wanted to engage the public in the intellectual freedom represented by science. If science was the preeminent form of free communication, then it was also the preeminent means by which the social organism could alter itself democratically. By Dewey's account, "Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication."9 Even if substantial socialization of property was the wave of the future, the process would attain political legitimacy only through the public's active intellectual participation. The deliberativists agreed with their predecessors that the scienti?c method as such was value neutral, in that it neither forced any particular values nor produced facts that were inherently normative. Yet they suspected that the scienti?c methodologies inherited from
their European predecessors were themselves part of the social problem; science would have to be puri?ed or Americanized so that it could perform its appointed task of buttressing democratization. So the deliberativists set out to create not merely a new science but what they often called `a science of science'-a methodologically self-conscious form of inquiry that, by going beyond both realism and positivism, would automatically generate democratic knowledge. The most influential formulation of this idea was Dewey's instrumentalism. This philosophy held that all intellectual constructs and even the scienti?c method itself were merely tools for the achievement of human values, available for use by any and all actors in the pursuit of any and all conceivable ends. A purely methodological conception of science had positive consequences for the organization of intellectual life. It allowed the specialized disciplines to claim scienti?c authority without stepping on each other's toes. In lieu of transcendent or universal principles, standards of explanation could be determined locally, according to the speci?c characteristics of the phenomena under investigation. It also provided a quasipolitical role for a new group of scienti ?c democrats: ?rst- and secondgeneration immigrants, almost all of them Jews. These ?gures were deeply committed to the tenets of democracy, but found the United States far less egalitarian and open than it proclaimed itself to be. Suspicious of crass business values, and harboring idealized images of the highly integrated Old World communities they or their parents had left behind, they faced what one historian has called a standing ideological challenge "to relate the myth of America to the context and conditions of modern America."10 Tools of inquiry that retained their validity no matter who cre-ated or used them offered an important means by which they could help close the cultural gap.
On the other hand, installing this methodological de?nition of science at the heart of American democratic theory forced a split between institutionally committed religious thinkers-no matter how supportive they were of modern science's ?ndings-and scienti?c democrats. A strict insistence on scienti?c methods ruled out reference to biblical authority or mystical visions as guides to political action. The program of the deliberative democrats was, in this regard, radically secular. And because it denigrated in principle the beliefs and religious convictions held by many ordinary Americans, the movement was never able to win the democratic support its own vision demanded.
The ascendancy of the movement to create a scienti?c democracy did not in any case last long. The Great Depression, the rise of fascism and Nazism, and America's entry into World War II and subsequent emergence as a global power with a large standing army presented formidable new challenges to the ideal of a deliberative democracy. By the 1950s, with new support in all quarters for research and a seemingly endless Cold War underway, the language of scienti ?c democracy had lost much of its critical edge.
The rhetorical identi?cation of science with democracy remained a staple of Cold War rhetoric, but in the publicly visible invocations of this equation, both science and democracy were de?ned in strictly material fashion and shorn of the deliberative idealism championed by Dewey.11 Defenders of science had jettisoned Dewey's emphasis on science as a tool for the pursuit of human values in favor of rigorous new theories of objectivity that gained their support from the work of the logical empiricists in the new ?eld of philosophy of science. The new, postwar emphasis was summarized by Harvard economics professor John D. Black, writing that the growth of science secured a new Bill of Rights for Americans: To every man shall be given a job suited to his abilities, or a shop of his own in which to turn out products or services needed by his fellow men, or a piece of land upon which to make a living for his family. To every woman shall be given a home or these same opportunities. To every father and mother shall be given the same opportunities for their children to be well-fed and educated and successful as are given to any other children. No man or woman is entitled to any share of the world's goods larger than he produces; but he shall be given an opportunity to produce according to his abilities and his ambition and a necessary minimum of food, clothing, and shelter, regardless of his means; and the child shall not be denied an equal opportunity merely because of the poverty of the parent.12
Such a deeply chastened consensus set the stage for an inevitable reaction. When the ideological pressures of the Cold War eased in the early 1960s, a new generation began to wonder why consumption and military spending were politically untouchable. The situation was galling, in part, precisely because educated middle-class Americans- and the generation of the 1960s was no exception-had entertained such lofty political hopes for science and the universities. Faced with the argument that not even those scientists funded by the Department of Defense bore responsibility for the use of their discoveries, many social critics turned against the language of scienti?c objectivity itself. Believing that they were forced to choose between democratic values and the bene?ts of science, many Americans were prepared to reject the dream of the scienti?c democrats and their Enlightenment- inspired vision of a society modeled on the intellectual freedom of scientists. As they entered academia, these critics retained their focus on science as the ideological core of the American social and political system. Assuming, as had the scienti?c democrats, that intellectual and institutional change were causally linked, they insisted that the critique of objectivity offered a theoretical lever for moving society toward social justice. In fact, historian Edward A. Purcell, Jr., writes, the "most characteristic and signi ?cant intellectual endeavor of the Sixties" was the "attempt to reevaluate the nature of science: to analyze its sociological bases, to illuminate its political functions, and, above all, to deny its pretensions to exclusive and total access to truth." The goal was to "dethrone objectivist science as the supreme intellectual authority."13
And as the conservative ascendancy of the 1970s and 1980s swept away hopes of social reconstruction, the critics redoubled their efforts to unmask the pretensions of science to enlighten and liberate. Meanwhile, defensively minded scientists dug in their feet and took a stand for the possibility of objectivity, even if they personally sought different political goals than those articulated by Black. The outspoken entomologist Edward O. Wilson wrote in a characteristic recent passage that "The propositions of the original Enlightenment are increasingly favored by objective evidence, especially from the natural sciences."14 The stage was set for the science wars. Still, the original vision of scienti?c democracy has yet to disappear fully from the American scene. Despite the sound and fury of contemporary arguments in the academy, the prospect that science can have cultural as well as material bene?ts for ordinary Americans has not entirely lost its hold on the national imagination. And while it seems unlikely that any group of academics will ever voluntarily surrender its hard-won claims to institutional authority, the time may come again when America's natural and social scientists, leaving behind the disputes of the 1990s, undertake a new joint effort to redeem the promise of American democracy under the banner of intellectual freedom.
1 Thomas F. Gieryn, Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 337.
2 I use the term `democrat' in a relatively loose sense to refer to those who rejected authoritarian solutions to the nation's problems and who retained a place for universal suffrage and the consent of the governed. We have, of course, come to see many of their proposals as something less than democratic in the wake of the New Left's renewed emphasis on the value of political participation.
3 Ralph Barton Perry, "Realism in Retrospect," in Contemporary American Philosophy, ed. George P. Adams and William P. Montague (New York: Macmillan, 1930), 187-209, 206.
4 Sacvan Bercovitch, "The Rites of Assent: Rhetoric, Ritual, and the Ideology of American Consensus," in The American Self: Myth, Ideology, and Popular Culture, ed. Sam B. Girgus (Albuquerque, N.Mex.: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 5-42, 13.
5 Lyman Bryson, The New Prometheus (New York: Macmillan, 1941), 74, 82, 99, 107.
6 John Dewey, "The Public and Its Problems," in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, vol. 2, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 340.
7 Historians have demonstrated that science flourished in the nineteenth-century state only where it was linked ?rmly to the colonization of the continent. The government scientist was, in many cases, a pioneer in actual as well as metaphorical terms, accompanying various expeditions to work in relatively unpopulated areas on the frontier. See Philip J. Pauly, Biologists and the Promise of American Life: From Meriwether Lewis to Alfred Kinsey (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), esp. 44-70.
8 Ernst von Glasersfeld, "Comment on Neil Ryder's `Science and Rhetoric,'" Pantaneto Forum 10 (April 2003), .
9 John Dewey, "Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education," in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899- 1924, vol. 9, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976), 7.
10 Sam B. Girgus, "The New Covenant: The Jews and the Myth of America," in The American Self: Myth, Ideology, and Popular Culture, ed. Girgus, 105-123, 111.
11 As Rebecca Lowen shows in her study of Stanford University, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), evenduring the depths of the Cold War there were scientists who fought against a militaristic reading of their enterprise. The socio-political meaning of science has always been contested, both inside and outside the scienti?c disciplines. David Hollinger discusses scienti?c intellectuals' participation in the cultural battles of the midcentury in "Science as a Weapon in Kulturk?mpfe in the United States during and after World War II," in Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century Intellectual History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 155-174.
12 John D. Black, Design for Defense: A Symposium of the Graduate School, U.S. Department of Agriculture (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Public Affairs, 1941), 40.
13 Edward A. Purcell, Jr., "Social Thought," American Quarterly 35 (Spring/Summer 1983): 80-100, 84.
14 Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 8.
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Wendy L. Freedman
on the age of the universe
Wendy L. Freedman, a Fellow of the American Academy since 2000, has been appointed as the next director of the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California, where she is presently a faculty member and astronomer. For almost a decade she has been one of three principal investigators using the Hubble Space Telescope to determine the rate at which the universe is expanding. With a group of Carnegie Astronomers, she has recently begun a project to study dark energy.
http://www.amacad.org/publications/winter2003/freedman.pdf

How did the world begin? How old is it? Do mysterious and invisible forces determine its fate? Surprisingly enough, such questions are now at the forefront of scienti?c research.
Over the past century, old ideas about the cosmos and our place in it have been dramatically overturned. We now know that the Sun does not occupy the center of the universe, and that in addition to our own Milky Way, space is ?lled with hundreds of billions of other galaxies. Even more astonishingly, we know that the universe itself is expanding everywhere, and that as space expands, galaxies are being swept apart from each other at colossal speeds.
In the last few years, tantalizing hints have begun to appear that the expansion of the universe is even accelerating. These results imply the existence of a mysterious force able to counter the attraction of gravity. The origin and nature of this force currently defy explanation. But astronomers have reason to hope that ongoing research will soon resolve some of the deepest riddles of nature.
It was Edwin Hubble, a Carnegie Astronomer based in Pasadena, California, who ?rst learned that the universe was expanding; in 1929, he discovered that the farther away from our Milky Way galaxies are, the faster they are moving apart. A few years before, Albert Einstein in his general theory of relativity had published a mathematical formula for the evolution of the universe. Einstein's equations, like Hubble's observations, implied that the universe must once have been much denser and hotter. These results suggested that the universe began with an intense explosion, a `big bang.'
The big bang model has produced a number of testable predictions. For example, as the universe expands, the hot radiation produced by the big bang will cool and pervade the universe-thus we should see heat in every direction we look. Big bang theory predicts that by today the remnant radiation should have cooled to a temperature of only 3 degrees above absolute zero (corresponding to a temperature of -270 degrees Celsius). Remarkably, this radiation has been detected. In 1965, two radio astronomers, Arnold Penzias and Robert Wilson, discovered this relic radiation during a routine test of communications dishes, a discovery for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize.
The current expansion rate of the universe, known as the Hubble constant,determines the size of the observable universe and provides constraints on competing models of the evolution of the universe. For decades, an uncertainty of a factor of two in measurements of the Hubble constant existed. (Indeed, determining an accurate value for the Hubble constant was one of the main reasons for building the Hubble Space Telescope.) However, rapid progress has been made recently in resolving the differences. New, sensitive instruments on telescopes, some flying aboard the Hubble Space Telescope, have led to great strides in the measurement of distances to galaxies beyond our own. In theory, determining the Hubble constant is simple: one need only measure distance and velocity. But in practice, making such measurements is dif?cult. It is hard to devise a means to measure distances over cosmological scales accurately. And measuring velocity is complicated by the fact that neighboring galaxies tend to interact gravitationally, thereby perturbing their motions. Uncertainties in distances and in velocities then lead to uncertainties in their ratio, the Hubble constant.
Velocities of galaxies can be calculated from the observed shift of lines (due to the presence of chemical elements such as hydrogen, iron, oxygen) in the spectra of galaxies. There is a familiar analogous phenomenon for sound known as the Doppler effect, which explains, for instance, why the pitch of an oncoming train changes as the train approaches and then recedes from us. As galaxies move away from us, their light is similarly shifted and stretched to longer (redder) wavelengths, a phenomenon referred to as redshift. This shift in wavelength is proportional to velocity. Measuring distances presents a greater challenge, which has taken the better part of a century to resolve. Most distances in astronomy cannot be measured directly because the size scales are simply too vast. For the very nearest stars, distances can be measured using a method called parallax. This uses the baseline of the Earth's orbit, permitting the distance to be calculated using simple, high-school trigonometry. However, this technique currently can be applied reliably only for relatively nearby stars within our own galaxy.
In order to measure the distance of more remote stars and galaxies, astronomers identify objects that exhibit a constant, known brightness, or a brightness that is related to another measurable quantity. The distance is then calculated using the inverse square law of radiation, which states that the apparent brightness of an object falls off in proportion to the square of its distance from us. The effects of the inverse square law are easy to see in everyday life-say if we compare the faint light of a train in the distance with the brilliant light as the train bears down close to us. To get a sense of the (astronomical) scales we are talking about, the nearest star to us is about 4 light-years away. One light-year is the distance that light can travel within a year moving at the enormous speed of 186,000 miles per second. At this speed, light circles the Earth more than 7 times in 1 second. For comparison, the `nearby' Andromeda galaxy lies at a distance of about 2 million light-years. And the most distant galaxies visible to us currently are about 13 billion light-years away. That is to say, the light that left them 13 billion years ago is just now reaching us, and we are seeing them as they were 13 billion years ago, long before the Sun and Earth had even formed (4.6 billion years ago). Until recently, one of the greatest challenges to measuring accurate distances was a complication caused by the pres-ence of dust grains manufactured by stars and scattered throughout interstellar space. This dust, located in the regions between stars, absorbs and scatters light. If no correction is made for its effects, objects appear fainter and therefore apparently, but erroneously, farther away than they actually are. Fortunately, dust makes objects appear not only fainter, but also redder. By making measurements at more than one wavelength, this color dependence provides a powerful means of correcting for the presence of dust and allowing correct distances to be derived.
Currently, the most precise method for measuring distances is based on the observations of stars named Cepheid variables. The atmospheres of these stars pulsate in a very regular cycle, on timescales ranging from 2 days to a few months. The brighter the Cepheid, the more slowly it pulsates, a property discovered by astronomer Henrietta Leavitt in 1908. This unique relation allows the distance to be obtained, again using the inverse square law of radiation-that is, it allows the intrinsic brightness of the Cepheid to be predicted from its observed period, and its distance from Earth to be calculated from its observed, apparent brightness.
High resolution is vital for discovering Cepheids in other galaxies. In other words, a telescope must have suf?cient resolving power to distinguish individual Cepheids from all the other stars in the galaxy. The resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope is about ten times better than can be generally obtained through Earth's turbulent atmosphere. Therefore galaxies within a volume about a thousand times greater than accessible to telescopes from Earth could be measured for the ?rst time with Hubble. With it, distances to galaxies with Cepheids can be measured relatively simply out to the nearest massive clusters of galaxies some 50 to 70 million light-years away. (For comparison, the light from these galaxies began its journey about the time of the extinction of the dinosaurs on Earth.)
Beyond this distance, other methods- for example, bright supernovae or the luminosities of entire galaxies-are employed to extend the extragalactic distance scale and measure the Hubble constant. Supernovae are cataclysmic explosions of stars near the end of their lives. The intrinsic luminosities of these objects are so great that for brief periods, they may shine as bright as an entire galaxy. Hence, they may be seen to enormous distances, as they have been discerned out to about half the radius of the observable universe. Unfortunately, for any given method of measuring distances, there may be uncertainties that are as yet unknown. However, by comparing several independent methods, a limit to the overall uncertainty of the Hubble constant can be obtained. This was one of the main aims of the Hubble Key Project.
This project was designed to use the excellent resolving power of the Hubble Space Telescope to discover and measure Cepheid distances to galaxies, and to determine the Hubble constant by applying the Cepheid calibration to several methods for measuring distances further out in the Hubble expansion. The Key Project was carried out by a group of about 30 astronomers, and the results were published in 2001. Distances measured using Cepheids were used to set the absolute distance scale for 5 different methods of measuring relative distances. The combined results yield a value of the Hubble constant of 72 (in units of kilometers per second per megaparsec, where 1 megaparsec corresponds to a distance of 3.26 million light-years),with an uncertainty of 10 percent. (The previous range of these measurements was 40 to 100 in these units.) Unlike the situation earlier, all of the different methods yield results in good agreement to within their respective measurement uncertainties.
The Hubble constant is the most important
parameter in gauging the age of the universe. However, in order to determine a precise age, it is important to know how the current expansion rate differs from past rates. If the universe has slowed down or speeded up overtime, then the total length of time over which it has been expanding will differ accordingly. Is the universe slowing down (as expected if the force of gravity has been retarding its expansion)? If so, the expansion would have been faster in the past before the effects of gravity slowed it down, and the age estimated for the universe would be younger than if it had always been expanding at a constant rate.
Indeed, this deceleration is what astronomers expected to ?nd as they looked further back in time. The calculation for a Hubble constant of 72 and a universe with a slowing expansion rate yields an age for the universe of about 9 billion years. This would be ?ne, except for one not-so-small detail from other considerations: the measured ages of stars.
The best estimates of the oldest stars in the universe are obtained from studying globular clusters, systems of stars that formed early in the history of our galaxy. Stars spend most of their lifetimes undergoing the nuclear burning of hydrogen into helium in their central cores. Detailed computer models of the evolution of such stars compared with observations of them in globular clusters suggest they are about 12 or 13 billion years old-apparently older than the universe itself. Obviously, this is not possible.
The resolution of this paradox appears to rest in a newly discovered property of the universe itself. A wealth of new data over the past few years has begun to evolutionize cosmology. Probably the most surprising result is the increasing evidence that instead of decelerating as expected, the universe is accelerating! One implication is the existence of a form of energy that is repulsive, acting against the inward pull of gravity. Astronomers refer to this newly discovered universal property of the universe as `dark energy.'Before the expansion of the universe was discovered, Einstein's original mathematical equation describing the evolution of the universe in general relativity contained a term that he called the cosmological constant. He introduced this term to prevent any expansion (or contraction) of the universe, as it was thought that the universe was static. After Hubble discovered the expansion, Einstein referred to the cosmological constant as his greatest blunder. He had missed the opportunity to predict the expansion.
However, a recent discovery suggests that, although the universe is expanding, the term in Einstein's equation may have been correct after all: it may represent the dark energy. In a universe with a Hubble constant of about 70, and with matter contributing one-third and dark energy providing approximately twothirds of the overall mass plus energy density, the resulting estimated age for the universe is 13 billion years, in very good agreement with the ages derived from globular clusters.
It is too soon yet to know whether the existence of dark energy will be con- ?rmed with future experiments. But to the surprise of an initially skeptical community of astronomers and physicists,several independent observations and experiments are consistent with this theory. Perhaps most exciting is the prospect of learning more about an entirely new form of mysterious energy, a property of the universe that to date has evaded all explanation.
The dark energy observed is smaller by at least 10 billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion times than the best theories of elementary particle physics would predict from ?rst principles. Hence, by studying the behavior of the universe, astronomers are posing new challenges to fundamental physics. It is often the case in science that as old questions are resolved, novel, perhaps even more exciting, questions are uncovered. The next decade promises to be a fruitful one in addressing profound questions about the nature of the universe we live in.
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Oil: The illusion of plenty
By Alfred Cavallo

One hundred and twelve billion of anything sounds like a limitless quantity. But in terms of barrels of oil, it's just a drop in the gas tank. The world uses about 27 billion barrels of oil per year, meaning that 112 billion barrels--the proven oil reserves of Iraq, the second largest proven oil reserves in the world--would last a little more than four years at today's usage rates.
In the future, 112 billion barrels will likely prove even shorter-lived. In the United States, gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles and larger homes are deemed essential. As the underdeveloped world industrializes, demand for oil by billions of people increases; China and India are building superhighways and automobile factories. Energy demand is expected to rise by about 50 percent over the next 20 years, with about 40 percent of that demand to be supplied by petroleum.
Ever-increasing supplies of low-cost petroleum are thought to be vital to the U.S. and world economies, which is why the invasion of Iraq and the belief that controlling its 112-billion-barrel reserve would give the United States a limitless pipeline to cheap oil were so dangerous. The war in Iraq will definitely have an effect on the U.S. and world economies, but not a positive one. The invasion, occupation, and rebuilding of Iraq will cost the people of the United States both blood and treasure. But more to the point, Iraq could be a fatal distraction from many fundamental and extremely unpleasant facts that actually threaten the United States--one of which is the finite nature of petroleum resources.
Petroleum reserves are limited. Petroleum is not a renewable resource and production cannot continue to increase indefinitely. A day of reckoning will come sometime in the future. The point at which production can no longer keep up with increasing demand will mean a radical and painful readjustment globally to everyday life.
In spite of that indisputable fact, people behave as if the global petroleum supply is unending. Predictions of the exhaustion of oil reserves seem to have lost all credibility. The public assumes that inexpensive oil will be available essentially forever. The idea that petroleum resources are finite and that petroleum production might peak in the near future seems to have vanished from all discussions of energy policy in Congress, in the press, and even among public interest groups.
This surreal situation is due to several factors. One, certainly, is that pessimists have cried wolf too often. Forecasts of imminent shortages of oil, food, and other natural resources are confounded by the enormous display of material goods that envelops consumers in the West. For most people, the market price of any commodity is what signals shortage or plenty. Time and again, collapsing oil prices have succeeded rising oil prices, leading to the belief that oil will always become cheap again. That oil supplies are currently abundant and inexpensive and have been for nearly 20 years, and that the models used to predict peak oil production are not easy to understand, appear to ignore economic factors, and are based on proprietary data, explain to some degree the present feeling of permanent abundance.
In reality, the differential between petroleum production cost and market price is so large that market price cannot be used as a measure of resource depletion. For example, the variation in the average price of oil between 1998 ($10 per barrel) and 2000 ($24 per barrel) had nothing to do with depletion of reserves and everything to do with an attempt to exercise "market discipline" by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).
But the most important reason there seems to be an unending supply of oil is the activity of non-OPEC producers. Oil production is immensely lucrative. Large amounts of petroleum have been and will continue to be produced outside the Middle East at costs that are very low, $5-$10 per barrel, compared to the desired OPEC price range of $22-$28 per barrel. The opportunity to realize extraordinary profits provides irresistible pressure to produce as much oil as possible, as soon as possible.
Yet oil is a finite resource, and there are only so many places to look for it. Sooner or later petroleum production will decline, so sooner or later the prophets of depletion will be correct. The question then becomes: Can a peak oil forecast be made that is useful to the petroleum industry and to consumers, one that will alert them to the problems and allow for a redeployment of resources?
Answering that question requires an understanding of why the world's rising petroleum needs are being met without skyrocketing prices or supply shortages.
Everyone knows that the science and technology underpinning computers, telecommunications, and medicine have advanced dramatically over the last 20 years. The proof is everywhere, from ever more powerful personal computers, to increasingly sophisticated cell phones, to new medical imaging technologies and pharmaceuticals.
Unknown to most people, however, advances in geological sciences and petroleum technologies have been equally profound and dramatic. Since the 1970s, plate tectonics has been providing a uniform framework for understanding the geology of the Earth's surface (including petroleum formation). Much as X-ray and nuclear magnetic resonance tomography examine structures within the human body non-invasively, three-dimensional seismography now allows potential oil-bearing formations to be evaluated in great detail. Nuclear magnetic resonance probes are used to determine porosity and hydrocarbon content as well as to estimate the permeability of these formations. Petroleum deposits are being brought into production on the continental shelves off Texas, Brazil, and West Africa in water up to 8,000 feet deep--areas that were, until recently, inaccessible. Technological advances like sub-sea terminals, directional drilling, and floating production, storage, and offloading ships have been developed to exploit smaller, previously uneconomic or unreachable deposits. Sophisticated science and technology coupled with unparalleled profitability has provided the foundation for the wide availability of oil.
Yet the same advances in geology and engineering that have provided consumers with seemingly limitless petroleum also allow much better estimates to be made of how much oil may ultimately be recovered. After a five-year collaboration with representatives from the petroleum industry and other U.S. government agencies, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) completed a comprehensive study of oil resources. The "USGS World Petroleum Assessment 2000" is the first study to use modern science to estimate ultimate oil resources. [1]
The importance of this assessment is difficult to overstate. Previous world oil resource evaluations have ranged from crude "back-of-the-envelope" calculations to estimates based on proprietary databases, and have often lacked enough detail to allow a comparison between production and estimated reserves. We now have credible, easily accessible long-term production records and science-based resource estimates for all of the important oil producing regions in the world--crucial for understanding how oil production might evolve over time.
The USGS assessment allocates reserves to three separate and distinct categories. The first is "proven reserves," or petroleum that can be produced using current technology. The second category is "undiscovered reserves"--oil deposits that are highly likely to exist based on similar areas already producing oil. The third category is "reserve growth" and represents possible production from extensions of existing fields, application of new technology, and decreased well spacing in existing fields. Oil in this last category can be extracted much less rapidly than oil in the proven and undiscovered categories. (For purposes of determining the approximate year of peak or constant output, the best that can be hoped for is that all proven reserves are produced and all undiscovered reserves are found and produced as rapidly as needed. Petroleum from reserve growth, produced at much lower rates, can be ignored. According to the USGS, it is available only to lengthen the period of peak production or to reduce the decline in a field's output.)
As of January 1, 1996, OPEC's proven and undiscovered reserves amounted to about 853 billion barrels, while similar non-OPEC reserves were 769 billion barrels, according to the USGS assessment. Based on actual production patterns in many non-OPEC oil producers, output can increase until there remains between 10 and 20 years of proven plus undiscovered reserves (as determined by the USGS), at which point a production plateau or decline sets in, depending on the reserve growth that is actually available.
Given that non-OPEC production rates are nearly twice as great as OPEC rates, and assuming stable prices and 2 percent per year market growth, non-OPEC production will reach a maximum sometime between 2010 and 2018 based on resource limitations alone (assuming complete cooperation of producers and that all undiscovered oil is actually found and produced as rapidly as needed). [2] Once this happens, OPEC will control the market completely, and it is unlikely that production will increase much longer.
Yet this simplistic analysis is too optimistic. There is no such thing as "non-OPEC oil," but rather U.S. oil, Norwegian oil, and oil produced by various other countries. In particular, about 39 percent of non-OPEC proven plus undiscovered reserves are located in the former Soviet Union. It is only a matter of time before these countries reach an agreement with OPEC on how to divide the oil market, at which point the current illusion of unlimited oil resources will end, not due to resource constraints but to political factors.
Yet the U.S. public, industrial and political leaders, environmentalists, and policy-makers in general do not believe that they need to be concerned with the finite supply of oil and its unfavorable (from the U.S. perspective) geographic distribution. As noted earlier, the overwhelming majority behaves as if inexpensive oil will be readily available far into the distant future.
This attitude is reflected in U.S. policy toward Iraq. One might expect that a major consequence of the U.S. conquest of Iraq would have been full control of Iraqi oil reserves, reducing or eliminating the ability of OPEC to set prices, and giving the United States a permanent--because oil is forever--overwhelming strategic advantage. It would allow the United States to dictate production rates and lower prices, which would serve two important aims. Reduced prices would reward consumers in the West, buying their support for U.S. policies. It would also deprive oil producers of the revenues with which they could challenge the U.S. domination of the Middle East. Oil prices could be expected to drop to between $15 and $20 per barrel once existing Iraqi fields were refurbished and large new deposits were developed.
However, lower prices would stimulate consumption and decrease the incentive to develop more inaccessible reserves, essentially those of the non-OPEC producers. If non-OPEC producers fail to develop those harder-to-get-at reserves, peak oil production will more likely occur earlier, at the front end of the 2010-2018 forecast. So the very success of the current effort to seize control of the Middle East would doom U.S. imperial ambition to failure within the next 10 years, from an oil supply standpoint.
This scenario is now implausible given the bitter Iraqi resistance to U.S. occupation, and it is not clear when Iraqi production might reach, much less significantly exceed, its pre-invasion level.
To understand what may unfold, given current levels of sabotage and chaos in Iraq, one must examine how the petroleum marketing system has changed over the past year, and in particular the role that OPEC producers have played.
In 2002, Iraqi oil production averaged two million barrels per day. The United States must have understood that an attack might interrupt production, which would in turn cause a large increase in the price of oil. Since this would have a severe negative impact on the world economy, it would further inflame anti-American sentiment throughout the world and even turn U.S. voters against the enterprise. The conclusion: Lost Iraqi production had to be replaced. Thus, an agreement was reached with OPEC to stabilize the markets by increasing production levels as needed.
In March 2003, the Saudi oil minister reassured the International Energy Agency of Saudi Arabia's longstanding policy and practice of supplying the oil markets reliably and promptly, and highlighted the collective responsibility that producing countries have shown in addressing the concerns of world oil markets. This was most likely viewed as a temporary measure, as it was assumed that Iraqi production would be restored and expanded rapidly after the United States took charge.
In addition to the impending interruption of Iraqi production, in early 2003 Venezuelan oil production was far below its OPEC quota due to a conflict between populist president Hugo Chavez and the business community; Nigerian production was also depressed by civil strife.
OPEC rose to the occasion (or, more likely, felt compelled to rise to the occasion, given the huge U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf in preparation for war) and increased production by about 3.2 million barrels per day--equivalent to the production of the Norwegian North Sea sector--virtually overnight, more than compensating for lost Iraqi, Venezuelan, and Nigerian production.
About 65 percent of the increase came from just two countries, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait; Saudi Arabia alone contributed more than half and probably controls what remains of any spare production capacity.
The critical role that OPEC, in particular Saudi Arabia, plays as the swing producer for the world oil market is clearly evident from this episode, which allows one to quantify the ability of the Saudis to affect the world oil market and the world economy.
The U.S. assault on Iraq has not undermined the power of OPEC and Saudi Arabia. On the contrary, it has if anything enhanced that power. This will not change until Iraqi oil production significantly exceeds its pre-invasion level. Thus, even in the short term, and on the most cynical level, U.S. Iraq policy vis-?-vis oil has been a failure.
Oil supplies are finite and will soon be controlled by a handful of nations; the invasion of Iraq and control of its supplies will do little to change that. One can only hope that an informed electorate and its principled representatives will realize that the facts do matter, and that nature--not military might--will soon dictate the ultimate availability of petroleum.
Alfred Cavallo is an energy consultant based in Princeton, New Jersey.
1. T. Ahlbrandt (project leader), "The USGS World Petroleum Assessment 2000." The assessment is available at www.usgs.gov and on compact disc. A detailed analysis using the assessment appears in Alfred Cavallo, "Predicting the Peak in World Oil Production," Natural Resources Research, 2002, vol. 11, pp. 187-195. Production statistics, based on data from the International Energy Agency, are available in a variety of trade publications, including Oil and Gas Journal, World Oil, and Petroleum Economist.
2. The most popular method used to predict a peak in oil production is in M. King Hubbert's monograph, Energy Resources: A Report to the Committee on Natural Resources, National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council, Publication 1000-D, December 1962. Hubbert noted that resource production often (but not always) could be described by a logistic growth curve, and used oil production records and estimates of proven oil reserves made by the American Petroleum Institute's Committee on Petroleum Reserves to estimate the year of U.S. peak production. Hubbert does not discuss the assumptions implicit in his model, among which are stable markets, excellent profitability, and affordable prices for oil. See also Colin Campbell and J. H. Laherrere, "The End of Cheap Oil," Scientific American, March 1998, pp. 78-83. The Oil and Gas Journal has also recently published a series of articles discussing the future of petroleum and its alternatives. See Bob Williams, "Special Report: Debate Over Peak Oil Issue Boiling Over, With Major Implications For Industry, Society," Oil and Gas Journal, July 14, 2003.
? 2004 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
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The Imminence Myth
From the February 16, 2004 issue: What the Bush administration really said about the threat from Iraq.
by Stephen F. Hayes
02/16/2004, Volume 009, Issue 22

THE Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, my hometown newspaper, unintentionally broke some news on its website last Thursday after Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet defended his agency in a speech at Georgetown University.
"In his first public defense of prewar intelligence, CIA Director George Tenet said today that U.S. analysts never claimed Iraq was an 'imminent threat,' the main argument used by President Bush for going to war."
I followed the debate over the Iraq war closely and wrote about it extensively. Yet somehow I missed what, according to the Journal-Sentinel, was the "main argument" for the war: an "imminent threat" from Iraq.
The Tenet speech got similar treatment in newspapers and on broadcasts throughout the country. But was this line--8 words out of the 5,400 he spoke--really the "gotcha" moment the media would have us believe? Hardly.
Here is what Tenet actually said, speaking of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate:
This estimate asked if Iraq had chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. We concluded that in some of these categories Iraq had weapons, and that in others where it did not have them, it was trying to develop them.
Let me be clear: Analysts differed on several important aspects of these programs and those debates were spelled out in the estimate.
They never said there was an imminent threat. Rather, they painted an objective assessment for our policy-makers of a brutal dictator who was continuing his efforts to deceive and build programs that might constantly surprise us and threaten our interests. No one told us what to say or how to say it.
With the hundreds of stories over the past year about how CIA analysts were influenced and pressured to adjust their analyses to fit the Bush administration's political agenda, one might think the most important news from this passage was found in the last sentence. This is especially so since Tenet is the fourth person in the past two weeks to reject explicitly the allegations that politicized intelligence came from the CIA. The others: Iraq Survey Group head David Kay; former Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Richard Kerr, the official tapped by Tenet to conduct an in-house CIA review of prewar intelligence; and Senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, a panel that has just completed its own review of prewar intelligence.
"We've interviewed over 200 people, and not one person to date in very tough interviews has indicated any coercion or any intimidation or anything political," says Roberts, whose committee will be distributing its 300 pages of findings next week. "And that was also replicated or agreed to by Dr. Kay, who had 1,400 people under his command."
That conclusion was not terribly important to most journalists covering the speech. Instead, headlines screamed that Tenet's analysts had not concluded Iraq presented an "imminent threat," and the reporting implied that the CIA director's words somehow conflicted with the public case made by the Bush administration.
It's worth dwelling on that for a moment. It should not be terribly surprising or newsworthy even that the CIA never deemed Iraq an imminent threat. If agency analysts had ever concluded that an attack from Iraq was "about to occur" or "impending," to use the dictionary definition of imminent, it's fair to assume that they would have told the president forthwith, rather than holding the information for inclusion in a periodic assessment of threats. And the president would not have taken 18 months to act to protect the nation.
In fact, the case for war was built largely on the opposite assumption: that waiting until Iraq presented an imminent threat was too risky. The president himself made this argument in his 2003 State of the Union address:
Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained. Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans--this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known. We will do everything in our power to make sure that that day never comes.
Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.
It didn't take long for the media to get it wrong. One day after Bush said we must not wait until the threat is imminent, the Los Angeles Times reported on its front page that Bush had promised "new evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime poses an imminent danger to the world." Also, "Bush argued that use of force is not only justified but necessary, and that the threat is not only real but imminent." Exactly backwards.
Is this nitpicking? After all, there were occasions when, under badgering from the media about whether the threat was "imminent," administration spokesmen Ari Fleischer and Dan Bartlett responded affirmatively. And various administration officials described the threat as "grave" or "immediate" or "serious" or "unique" or "gathering." What's the difference? The administration clearly sought to communicate that Saddam Hussein posed a threat we could no longer tolerate.
In doing so, of course, Bush administration officials were considerably less melodramatic than their predecessors in the Clinton administration. Who can forget then-Defense Secretary Bill Cohen's appearance on ABC's "This Week" on November 16, 1997, when he hoisted a 5 lb. bag of sugar onto the interview table. "This amount of anthrax could be spread over a city--let's say the size of Washington. It would destroy at least half the population of that city," Cohen warned dramatically. He then produced a small vial of a substance he likened to VX. "VX is a nerve agent. One drop from this particular thimble as such--one single drop will kill you within a few minutes."
In their prepared speeches, in the National Security Strategy, in media appearances, Bush administration representatives mostly avoided such hype. They did consistently advocate preempting the Iraqi threat--that is, acting before it was imminent. That's precisely what was controversial about their policy.
Senator Ted Kennedy, for one, objected. The day after the 2003 State of the Union address, he introduced a short-lived bill that would have required the administration to show that Iraq posed an imminent threat. It was the administration's willingness to go to war even while conceding that the threat was not imminent that provoked opponents of the war. Inspections could continue, the critics urged, because there was no imminent danger.
But in the present politically charged season, positions have shifted. Many of the same people who criticized the Bush administration before the war for moving against a threat that was not imminent are today blaming the administration for supposedly having claimed that Iraq posed an imminent threat.
There are serious questions to be answered about the prewar intelligence on Iraq's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. But, as Tenet noted last week, "you rarely hear a patient, careful or thoughtful discussion of intelligence these days."
Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.

? Copyright 2004, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

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Civil Rights Undermined by Antidiscrimination Laws
Wednesday, February 04, 2004
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,110482,00.html
By David E. Bernstein
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (search). The accomplishments of the civil rights movement in achieving a more just and equal society are undoubtedly well worth celebrating.
However, these achievements have not come without costs. In particular, it's worth pausing to consider the growing threat more recent and draconian anti-discrimination laws pose to American civil liberties.
While the civil rights laws of the 1960s were generally sensitive to civil libertarian concerns, contemporary antidiscrimination laws often are not. For example, in deference to freedom of association and privacy considerations, the 1964 Act prohibited discrimination only in public facilities such as restaurants, hotels, and theaters. Newer laws, however, often prohibit discrimination in the membership policies of private organizations ranging from large national organizations like the Boy Scouts of America to small local cat fanciers' clubs.
The framers of the 1964 Act also were sensitive to religious freedom, and wrote into the law a limited but important exemption for religious institutions. Many recently enacted state and local laws, however, contain no religious exemption. Moreover, courts have unnecessarily stretched the definition of "discrimination" to force religious groups and individuals to conform to secular social norms. For example, courts have required conservative Christian schools to retain teachers who become pregnant out of wedlock. The schools' attempts to ensure their teachers are proper religious role models have been interpreted as invidious sex discrimination.
The authors of early federal civil rights legislation also cabined the laws' intrusions on civil liberties by limiting coverage to race, national origin, religion, and, sometimes, sex. In the past two decades, however, the federal government has prohibited discrimination based on family status, age and disability in a variety of contexts. Meanwhile, state and local antidiscrimination laws go even further, covering the obese, the ugly, and the body-pierced, cohabitating unmarried couples, and even (in Minnesota) motorcycle gang members.
In yet another show of concern for civil liberties, Congress exempted landlords from the 1968 Fair Housing Act (search) if they rented four or fewer units and lived on the premises. This "Mrs. Murphy exception" is a reasonable compromise between the goals of antidiscrimination law and privacy concerns. Recently, however, the laws of several jurisdictions have been interpreted to ban discrimination in the selection of roommates. And the Fair Housing Act's ban on discriminatory advertising has been interpreted so broadly that it's almost impossible to convey useful information in a real estate advertisement.
It's illegal, for example, to advertise that a house is in a neighborhood with many churches, lest the advertisement be interpreted as expressing an illicit preference for Christians. For fear of liability, some realtors even avoid using such phrases as master bedroom (either sexist or purportedly evocative of slavery and therefore insulting to African Americans), great view (allegedly expresses preference for the nonblind), and walk-up (supposedly discourages the disabled).
Federal civil rights laws were once intended to ban only actual discrimination. Modern law, however, attempts to ensure that no member of a protected group is subjected to a "hostile work environment," a "hostile educational environment," or even a "hostile public environment." The result has been a wild proliferation of speech and behavior codes throughout the nation's workplaces, universities, and other public spaces. Surely the authors of the 1964 Civil Rights Act never imagined that the law could be used to ban all "sexually suggestive" material from a workplace. But that's exactly what a federal judge did in one of the leading "hostile environment" cases.
Forty years ago, Congress responded to the moral urgency of ending Jim Crow (search) and bringing African Americans and other minorities into the American mainstream by enacting the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Since then, the primary justification for antidiscrimination laws has shifted from this relatively limited goal to an authoritarian agenda aimed at eliminating all forms of supposedly invidious discrimination. Such a goal cannot possibly be achieved-or even pursued-without grave consequences for civil liberties.
Today, we need to accept that attempting to totally eradicate discriminatory attitudes and actions is not feasible if we want to preserve civil liberties. Preserving the liberalism that defines the United States, and the civil liberties that go with it, requires Americans to show a certain level of virtue, including a phlegmatic tolerance of those who intentionally or unintentionally offend and sometimes--when civil liberties are implicated--even of those who blatantly discriminate.
Admittedly, asking Americans to display a measure of fortitude in the face of offense and discrimination is asking for a lot. But in the end, it is a small price to pay for preserving the pluralism, autonomy, and check on government power provided by civil liberties.

David E. Bernstein is a professor of law at George Mason University and the author of "You Can't Say That! The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties from Antidiscrimination Laws" (Cato Institute, 2003)

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Iraq Raid Yields Cyanide Linked to Al Qaeda
Saturday, February 07, 2004
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,110749,00.html
WASHINGTON -- U.S. forces in Iraq found seven pounds of cyanide (search) during a raid late last month on a Baghdad house believed connected to an Al Qaeda (search) operative, U.S. officials said.
The cyanide salt was in either one or several small bricks, and U.S. officials said they believe it was to have been used in an attack on U.S. or allied interests. Cyanide is extremely toxic and can be used as a chemical weapon, although it was unclear if the cyanide was in a form that could be used that way easily.
The raid took place on Jan. 23, a defense official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. It was unclear if anyone was captured in the raid. Parts for making bombs also were found in the house, the defense official said.
The house was inhabited by a suspected subordinate of Abu Musab Zarqawi (search), U.S. officials said. Zarqawi is a Jordanian whom CIA officials have described as a senior associate of Usama bin Laden (search).
Zarqawi is believed to have tried to direct Al Qaeda operations inside Iraq, although it is unknown if he is in the country now.
He also is connected with Ansar al-Islam (search), an Islamic extremist group from northern Iraq. He and his followers are believed to have sought cyanide and other chemical weapons for use in attacks in the past, American officials say.
U.S. officials say they have mounting evidence to suggest Zarqawi has had a hand in multiple attacks in Iraq, including those on a mosque in Najaf, the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad and Italy's paramilitary police station in Nasiriyah.
Another alleged Al Qaeda member, Hassan Ghul, detained this year while trying to enter northern Iraq, is believed to have met with Zarqawi to plan attacks against U.S. and coalition forces, said another U.S. official speaking on condition of anonymity.
Now in U.S. custody, Ghul is believed to be cooperating with interrogators. He is known as a facilitator who can move people and money around and is the highest-ranking member of to Al Qaeda have been arrested in Iraq.
The U.S. official said Ghul also is thought to have worked closely with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who officials say masterminded the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The official said attacks in Iraq for which Zarqawi is a suspect include a truck bomb in August that hit U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, killing 23 people; a car bomb that exploded outside a mosque in Shiite Muslim holy city of Najaf and killed more than 85; and a suicide truck bombing in November that devastated Italy's paramilitary police headquarters in southern city of Nasiriyah, killing more than 30.
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Musharraf reportedly aware of nuke technology transfers
2004-02-04 / Associated Press /
The father of Pakistan's nuclear program told investigators he gave nuclear weapons technology to other countries with the full knowledge of top army officials, including now-President General Pervez Musharraf, a friend of the scientist said yesterday.
Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan's top nuclear scientist, told the friend he hadn't violated Pakistan's laws by giving "disused centrifuge machines" and other equipment to Iran, North Korea and other countries, the friend told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
"Whatever I did, it was in the knowledge of the bosses," Khan's friend quoted him as saying last week. Khan also told the friend that two former military chiefs - General Mirza Aslam Beg and General Jehangir Karamat - and even Musharraf were "aware of everything" he was doing.
"I am also convinced that (Khan) couldn't act unilaterally," the friend said.
Military spokesman Major General Shaukat Sultan denied Musharraf was privy to any transfer of nuclear technology or authorized Khan to do it.
"It is absolutely wrong," Sultan said. Musharraf "was not involved in any such matter," he said. "No such thing has happened since he seized power in 1999."
Musharraf has headed the army since 1998, and before that held a number of top positions in the military.
Khan, who gave Pakistan the Islamic world's first nuclear bomb, was removed Sunday from his post as scientific adviser to the prime minister after he confessed to investigators he had leaked nuclear secrets to other countries.
Khan's admission has shocked many in Pakistan, and raised questions about how Khan could have spread nuclear technology without consent of the military - which has often ruled Pakistan since the country gained independence from Britain in 1947.
The two retired army chiefs, Karamat and Beg, have told investigators they didn't authorize nuclear transfers. Musharraf and other government officials have repeatedly ruled out official involvement in proliferation.
Meanwhile, officials said yesterday that Khan smuggled high-tech centrifuges - used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons - and other equipment to Iran, Libya, North Korea and Malaysia through an international black market network.
"In some cases, chartered planes were used to smuggle out centrifuge machines and other sophisticated equipment to these countries," a senior government official told AP.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said two "individuals" from Sri Lanka and Germany operated on behalf of Khan.
"This practice began in the 1980s and continued at least until 1997," the official said.
Pakistan began its probe into allegations of nuclear proliferation in November after Iran and Libya gave information to the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
So far, investigators have questioned two former heads of the army, scientists, engineers and security officials to determine whether they knew about the leak of nuclear technology to other countries.
Authorities are focusing on seven suspects - three scientists including Khan and four former security officials at Khan Research Laboratories, or KRL, a nuclear weapons facility named after Khan.
Investigators told Pakistani journalists Sunday that Khan didn't sell nuclear technology for personal gain.
But two intelligence officials said Tuesday that money was a motivation.
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? 2001-2004 Taiwan News. All Rights Reserved.


China ready to open classified diplomatic files
2004-01-21 / Associated Press /
China's secretive communist government says it has declassified thousands of diplomatic documents from the 1940s and 1950s, offering a glimpse into its early years in a move it frames as part of the country's opening to the world.
The first cache of 10,000 items from the Foreign Ministry's diplomatic archives includes telegrams on establishing relations with Moscow after China's 1949 communist revolution, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Monday. It said most come from between 1949 and 1955.
The state-controlled newspaper China Daily cast the decision as "an indication of social progress and the country expanding to the outside world."
"It is not easy to take the first step," said Li Jiasong, the archives' former director-general, quoted by China Daily.
The newly opened files include directives and speeches by then-Premier Zhou Enlai, who also was the country's foreign minister, and documents from international conferences, Xinhua said, citing Zhang Sulin, a ministry archivist.
It wasn't clear how comprehensive the files would be or whether they include material about such sensitive issues as the 1950-53 Korean War, when China fought alongside North Korea against U.S.-led United Nations troops.
Anyone who wants to see them must apply 20 days in advance, the government said. It didn't say how officials would decide what applicants would be allowed to see.


China to open up secret files from politically sensitive 1950s
2004-01-20 / Associated Press /
Offering a rare glimpse into its early years, China's secretive communist government said yesterday it has declassified thousands of diplomatic documents from the 1940s and 1950s.
The first cache of 10,000 items includes telegrams on establishing relations with Moscow following China's 1949 revolution, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. It said most come from 1949-55.
It wasn't clear how comprehensive the files would be or whether they cover such sensitive issues as the 1950-53 Korean War, when China fought alongside North Korea against U.S.-led United Nations troops.
The ministry is opening the files under rules requiring historical records to be opened to the public 30 years after they are compiled, Xinhua said.
"Archives should serve the state interests and the public," Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing was quoted as saying.
The newly opened files include directives and speeches by then-Premier Zhou Enlai, who also was foreign minister, and documents from international conferences, Xinhua said, citing Zhang Sulin, a ministry archivist.
Anyone who wants to see them must apply 20 days in advance, the report said. It didn't say how officials would decide what applicants would be allowed to see.
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? 2001-2003 Taiwan News. All Rights Reserved.

Private property amendment on agenda for PRC legislature
2004-02-05 / Associated Press /
China's nominal legislature will convene March 5 for a session expected to enshrine the notion of private property in the communist nation's constitution.
The government announced the March 5 session of the National People's Congress via the official Xinhua News Agency in a report yesterday that also said the legislature's companion body, the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, would convene two days earlier.
The CPPCC is an advisory body that helps the Beijing leadership know what is happening in far-flung regions.
The government typically does not announce the date of the National People's Congress session until a few weeks before it takes place.
The legislature has little real power and largely carries out the directives of the ruling Communist Party, but is an opportunity for delegates from different regions to exchange views - and be feted in the hulking Great Hall of the People, Chinese communism's flagship building.
This year's NPC will be less dramatic than last year's, when President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao - both top party officials - were installed in their equivalent government posts as part of a generational leadership change.
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? 2001-2004 Taiwan News. All Rights Reserved.


Former BBC man pleads guilty
2004-01-31 / Associated Press /
A former director of BBC Worldwide Ltd. has admitted accepting bribes from two men who helped secure contracts from the broadcaster for the production of toys including those based on the BBC children's program "Teletubbies," officials said yesterday.
Jeffrey Everard Taylor, 42, pleaded guilty on Thursday to accepting 2.65 million Hong Kong dollars (US$339,743) from Daniel Jonathan Berman and Sydney Edels, who acted on behalf of toy suppliers, Hong Kong's Independent Commission Against Corruption said.
Berman, 31, director of supplier Eurasia Management Services Ltd., or EMS, and Edels, 59, director of the Hong Kong-based EMS Asia Ltd., both pleaded guilty to offering Taylor the money, the anti-graft agency said in a statement.
Berman and Edels received payments totaling 6.46 million Hong Kong dollars (US$828,200) from the five toy manufacturers awarded the BBC Worldwide order between July 9, 1999 and Oct. 18, 2001. Part of the money was directed to Taylor, according to the anti-graft agency.
The three defendants, who were remanded in custody pending sentencing on Monday, could each face a maximum penalty of seven years in jail and a fine of 500,000 Hong Kong dollars (US$64,000), it said.
The toy suppliers, which made toys and bags based on characters including those from the "Teletubbies" show, generated the bribes by inflating their invoices, the agency said.The defendants' lawyers did not immediately return calls from The Associated Press.
BBC Worldwide is a wholly owned subsidiary of the BBC.
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? 2001-2004 Taiwan News. All Rights Reserved.


Hong Kong politicians accuse government of colluding on reforms
2004-01-16 / Reuters /
Pro-democracy politicians accused the Hong Kong government yesterday of colluding with Beijing to delay and limit any election reforms.
Though capitalist Hong Kong was promised a high degree of autonomy when it was returned to Chinese rule in 1997, many politicians fear the Beijing government will set limits on how far democratic reforms can go.
"You are asking the central government to build a bird cage and once it is built, Hong Kong people will live inside," Lee Cheuk-yan told Chief Secretary Donald Tsang during a meeting of the Legislative Council.
"Where is the high level of autonomy for Hong Kong people?"
The Hong Kong government last week said it would not make a move on constitutional reforms without first consulting Beijing, drawing howls of protests from democracy groups who said it was ignoring the wishes of the people.
The government said it has to clear up legal and technical issues before it can hold public consultations, but opponents say it is stonewalling on growing calls for democratic reforms because they clearly unsettle China's communist leaders.
Tsang told lawmakers that talks will begin with Chinese officials in Beijing on the city's political reforms after the Lunar New Year holidays, which begin on January 22. He did not specify any dates.
Unhappy with their Beijing-backed leader Tung Chee-hwa, most Hong Kong people want direct elections for the chief executive and all their legislators from 2007.
Hong Kong's constitution, which was agreed by Britain and Beijing before the city was handed back to China, allows the possibility of direct elections from that date "if there is a need."
But it does not spell out who determines if reforms are needed, or at what pace, other than to say it should be gradual, which pro-democracy forces interpret to mean that Beijing wants no major changes at all.
Tung said last week his government would hammer out broad principles and legal issues with Beijing before opening the issue for public consultation.
China's leaders fear growing calls for more political self-determination in Hong Kong could spread to the mainland and shake their grip on power.
Tsang promised to seek the views of the community in coming months and convey Hong Kong residents' aspirations for more and quicker democracy to Beijing.
"We will be open and take into account all views. We don't have any preconceived ideas, we want frankness," Tsang said.
"Any views they want me to convey to Beijing, I will gladly do so, we will reflect them to the central government."
But some lawmakers were not convinced.
They slammed the government for seeking what could be exhaustive legal opinions from Beijing which may not settle the only truly important question at hand: Will China agree to give more democracy to Hong Kong?
"If we go through such a process, even your grandchildren will not see universal suffrage," said lawmaker Emily Lau.
Lawmaker Margaret Ng said: "This is not consultation but taking instructions from the central government."
Nearly 100,000 people took to the streets on New Year's Day to press for more democracy and recent public opinion polls show overwhelming support for more voting rights.

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? 2001-2003 Taiwan News. All Rights Reserved.

Taiwan ready to send team to PRC over 'spies'
2004-01-19 / Reuters /
China has again called on the United States to oppose any separatist moves by Taiwan, which said yesterday it wanted to send a delegation to the the PRC to meet eight men accused of spying.
"China urged the United States to abide by its promises and continue to oppose any activities of the Taiwan authorities aimed at Taiwan independence," Xinhua news agency quoted Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan as saying on Saturday.
"China has noticed U.S. President George W. Bush's clear stance of adherence to the one-China policy...opposing any word or activity of the Taiwan authority to change the status quo of Taiwan and the U.S. authority has reiterated this stance several times," Kong said.
China on Saturday accused President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) of using a planned referendum alongside elections in March to prepare for a formal declaration of independence.
"This is a one-sided provocation to the peace and stability of the Taiwan Strait, and its essence is to use the referendum to realise Taiwan independence in the future," Xinhua quoted the cabinet's Taiwan Affairs Office as saying.
Chen outlined plans on Friday for the referendum which he said was aimed at preventing China from attacking Taiwan and from unilaterally changing the political status quo.
In Taipei, an official said Taiwan wanted to send a delegation to China to meet eight men locked up after being accused of being spies for the island.
China paraded seven of the men before reporters on Friday in an apparent move to embarrass Chen, but Taiwan says the men are businessmen, not spies.
"We want to negotiate with the Chinese side to allow a group, including lawyers, relatives and members of the Straits Exchange Foundation, to go to China and see the people who are under arrest," said Chen Ming-tong (陳明通), vice chairman of the Mainland Affairs Council, which is Taiwan's top China policymaking body.
The delegation would provide legal assistance to the detainees and try to secure their return, Chen said.
Taiwan's semi-official Straits Exchange Foundation, which handles communications with Beijing in the absence of diplomatic ties, sent a written request to its opposite number - the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait - on Saturday, Chen said.
An estimated one million Taiwan citizens live in China and Taiwan businesses have invested up to US$100 billion in the there since the 1980s.
On a visit to China last week, U.S. General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reaffirmed that the United States was against any change in the status quo with regard to Taiwan, echoing President George W. Bush's line to Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) last month during a meeting in Washington.
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U.S. looks at reopening Iraq-Israel oil pipeline
Pentagon asks Israel about feasibility of reactivating Mosul-Haifa facilities

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Posted: February 7, 2004
12:46 p.m. Eastern
Editor's note: Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin is an online, subscription intelligence news service from the creator of WorldNetDaily.com - a journalist who has been developing sources around the world for the last 25 years.
? 2004 WorldNetDaily.com
The U.S. has asked Israel to report on the feasibility of pumping oil from the Kirkuk wells to the refineries in Haifa.
G2 Bulletin reported exclusively last April that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon offered to reactivate the old Mosul-Haifa oil pipeline in a move certain to bring sharp reactions in an already tense Middle East. The U.S. request came in a telegram last week from a senior Pentagon official to a top Foreign Ministry official in Jerusalem.
The original pipeline was built by the Iraqi-British oil company in the late 1920s and early 1930s and was among the main targets of the 1936-1939 Arab revolt.
The pipeline carried Iraqi crude oil to the Haifa refineries on the Mediterranean. From there it was shipped to Europe. But the facility was constantly attacked by Arab guerrillas. Most often it was targeted by Sheikh Az-Adin Kassem, who was finally killed in an engagement with British forces.
Kassem is buried in Haifa, and his name was adopted by Hamas as a symbol of heroism. The defense of the pipeline gave birth to the organization of Jewish underground forces which cooperated with the British and formed special night squads led by legendary Bible-carrying British officer Charles Orde Wingate.
A Christian hero of the Israeli military legacy, Wingate was killed in Burma during operations in 1944.
Immediately following the news report of Israel's readiness to cooperate with the U.S., Iraq and Jordan on reactivating the pipeline closed down in 1948, the Az-Adin Kassem Brigades issued a warning that they would never allow the plan to materialize.
Sources in Amman said the Jordanian intelligence agency warned both the Jordanian and the Israeli governments that pro-Iraqi and pro-Palestinian terrorists might focus their hostile attention on the proposal.
Turkey is also reportedly concerned over the Israeli idea.
Turkish experts believe that Israel plans to revive the pipeline, a potential rival to the pipeline linking the oil-rich city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq with the Turkish Mediterranean port of Yumurtalik.
They also say that the Mosul-Haifa pipeline has been closed for 55 years, and it could not be able to meet the world's demand for oil. But it might be activated with a $3 billion investment in a period of five to six months.
If the Iraqi-Israeli pipeline is reactivated, very little will remain for repair, he said, adding that although the pipeline was closed in 1948, its route is very comfortable and its hydraulic projects are ready.
The annual capacity of the Kirkuk-Yumurtalik pipeline is 71 million tons, while the capacity of the Mosul-Haifa pipeline is 5 million tons.
The new pipeline would take oil from the Kirkuk area, where some 40 percent of Iraqi oil is produced, and transport it via Mosul, and then across Jordan to Israel. The U.S. telegram included a request for a cost estimate for repairing the Mosul-Haifa pipeline that was in use prior to 1948. During the War of Independence, the Iraqis stopped the flow of oil to Haifa and the pipeline fell into disrepair over the years.
The National Infrastructure Ministry has recently conducted research indicating that construction of a 42-inch diameter pipeline between Kirkuk and Haifa would cost about $400,000 per kilometer. The old Mosul-Haifa pipeline was only 8 inches in diameter.
Iraq is one of the world's largest oil producers, with the potential of reaching about 2.5 million barrels a day. Oil exports were halted after the Gulf War in 1991 and then were allowed again on a limited basis to finance the import of food and medicines. Iraq is currently exporting several hundred thousand barrels of oil per day.
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U.S. Taxpayers Could Back Iraqi Reds
Posted Feb. 6, 2004
By J. Michael Waller
Published: Tuesday, February 17, 2004

Iraqi Communists take to the streets of Baghdad to celebrate the capture of Saddam Hussein. Effort is afoot to finance them with U.S. tax dollars.
With the Soviet Union gone, who is to take up the communist cause in Iraq? If some in the U.S. relief effort have their way, it will be the American taxpayer. As U.S. officials continue to map out a strategy to help Iraqis build a democratic system, some are urging that the Iraqi Communist Party be made a beneficiary of U.S. aid and assistance programs. Some American operatives in the political reconstruction process even claim to see the communists as the anchor of Iraq's fractious secular political parties and a bulwark against Islamist fundamentalism.
Leading the charge, sources at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) tell Insight, is the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), a private, taxpayer-funded group chaired by former secretary of state Madeleine Albright that is chartered to promote democracy abroad. The NDI has won bipartisan praise for its work in the former Soviet bloc and the developing world, but by supporting the Iraqi Communist Party, friends say, the NDI is embarrassing itself and the United States.
The initiative likely will raise the ire of USAID administrator Andrew Natsios, an Army veteran of the Persian Gulf War. Natsios is trying to revamp USAID in an effort to return it to its original purpose as an instrument of national-security policy.
As senior Iraqi communists publicly hinted to their loyalists that they were prepared to use violence against American and Coalition forces and that they were organizing front groups and infiltrating civil organizations across Iraq to gain political power, some American aid workers nonetheless were convinced that the communists are committed to European-style social democracy. "At present, the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) boasts the most significant organizational structure of the secular parties," NDI Middle East director Leslie Campbell wrote in a January bulletin by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "With dues-paying members and small offices nationwide, the credibility of long opposition to Saddam, and a newly adopted European-style social democratic platform, the ICP could anchor a secular democratic coalition that could rally some former Iraqi National Congress parties and the newly formed or reinvigorated parties of moderate, secular Governing Council members."
The Governing Council, the standing group of leaders of tribal, religious, regional and political groups, is designed to become a transitional government under the Coalition Provisional Authority led by U.S. Ambassador L. Paul Bremer. At first the ICP refused to collaborate, but then Communist Party Secretary General Hamid Majid Mousa was given a seat on the council.
While appearing to cooperate publicly, the ICP Central Committee wrote a letter to its faithful in October 2003 explaining that it would use its position on the Governing Council to wage political warfare from within, to complement its fight from the outside. "Our Party," the letter said, "has regarded the Council as an arena of struggle rather than being a final, fixed and definitive authority.... Our Party can play a more influential role from within this process, to push in the required direction, while struggling, from without, to mobilize the people to effectively ensure that the process develops in the right direction. It is, in this sense, an arena of struggle because diverse forces and sides are influencing the political process both inside and outside the Council."
But NDI seems to treat the Communists as a representative voice of secular Iraqis. The group issued an on-site assessment report in July 2003 that stated, "When asked if the military or the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) should withdraw from Iraq, most people expressed a sentiment similar to the one we heard from a former secretary general of the Iraqi Communist Party, 'If the CPA were to withdraw from Iraq, there would be a civil war and democrats would have no chance.'"
That isn't what the party has been telling its cadres at home and its comrades abroad. On April 10, 2003, the day after U.S. and Coalition forces toppled Saddam Hussein, the ICP issued a statement denouncing the Americans, de-manding "an immediate halt to the war" and "ending U.S. unilateralism." Mousa told the radical Italian paper Il Manifesto in June, "If the U.S. wants stability for the country, then it should accept our solution."
"And if they don't agree," asked the Il Manifesto questioner, "would you then be ready to fight?" Mousa avoided the question, replying, "We are now acting in a legitimate and peaceful way."
For now. But the party reserved the right to fight the Americans. On July 9, Iran's Communist Tudeh Party journal Tareeq Al-Shaab ran an interview with "Comrade Salam Ali," a member of the ICP Central Committee, who assailed the Americans as "occupiers" who were denying the Iraqi people their sovereignty. Ali appeared to threaten the liberators: "Failing to respond to the just demands of the people can only intensify sentiments of anger and resistance against U.S.-British occupation." Another senior ICP official, Raid Fahmi, made a similar veiled threat in an interview with the Communist Party USA weekly paper: "We are for a speedy end to the occupation and the creation of an Iraqi provisional government. It should arrange for the transfer of power from the occupying power and prepare the withdrawal of troops. Of course if the Americans don't respond, each party could resort to other forms of struggle."
Although U.S. officials say the ICP has been behaving responsibly, they add that the Communists would be foolish to do otherwise. For the first time in its 70-year history, the ICP is able to operate freely throughout Iraq without fear of persecution. Well-organized, well-trained, and supported from abroad, the party maintained networks of clandestine front organizations inside Saddam Hussein's Iraq and abroad. It was the first to publish a regular newspaper after the U.S. liberation, even as the Coalition was struggling to establish a credible daily of its own. For now, the ICP is content to pursue the nonviolent road. In its October letter to members and followers, the ICP Central Committee explained, "Resisting occupation is not limited to employing violent means in struggle, but rather includes various forms of peaceful political struggle." Ironically, the ICP owes its survival to American and British forces. "In the '90s the party reconstituted itself in Iraqi Kurdistan and after the Gulf War in 1991 the Party worked publicly there" under the protection of the U.S./U.K.-enforced northern no-fly zone, Raid Fahmi told the People's Daily World. "We had our own headquarters, publications, several radio stations and a television station," and an Arabic-language newspaper as well. The overthrow of the Hussein regime brought new opportunities too.
Since April, Fahmi said, "The Party has reorganized. We had a large number of comrades abroad. We were present in practically every European country and everyone was doing an enormous job. We had an underground structure that was working in Baghdad and southern Iraq. So when the regime collapsed, the Party was able to be on the ground very rapidly. Because we [were] already publishing our paper in Kurdistan, we could rapidly get it to Baghdad. We are now starting radio broadcasts from Baghdad."
That organization has allowed the ICP to infiltrate new political and social institutions, including human-rights groups, and provoke them to take and maintain an anti-U.S. position while benefiting from U.S. protections. "A lot of effort has been put into rebuilding the democratic and trade-union movement," the ICP's "Comrade Ali" told the Iranian Communist Tudeh Party. "Women, youth and student organizations have emerged in the open, after long decades of clandestine work."
A senior Pentagon official says the Coalition Provisional Authority and USAID lack the means to screen the ICP, Islamist agents and other troublemakers from receiving taxpayer funds. "It's pretty hard to screen them out when people in the middle USAID machinery want to bring them in," he said.
The ICP and its front groups set about undermining U.S. and British leadership. According to Comrade Ali, "Workers are flexing their muscles, setting up their national trade unions and protesting the rampant unemployment. The first dem-onstration against violations of workers' rights by a U.S. multinational company took place last month in Basra and was organized by the Workers Democratic Trade Union Movement." That movement is a front of the ICP, according to the People's Daily World.
Reaching out beyond its own membership, the ICP has set up "local Political Coordinating Committees which encompass various political organizations, to help with mobilizing the people, representing their interests and articulating their demands," says Comrade Ali. The coordinating committees are working against - not with - the Coalition, he told his Iranian counterparts: "There is an ongoing political battle on the ground, in all major cities, with the occupation authorities that are trying to usurp the people's legitimate right to elect their own representatives to bodies of local government." That said, skeptics within USAID are wondering how their colleagues can justify financing the ICP.
Shaping Iraq's secular culture also is high on the ICP agenda. "The party is also helping with efforts to revive and support various cultural activities, sponsoring theatre, art and folk groups, especially young talents," according to Comrade Ali. "In the current circumstances, under the existing climate of freedom, the Iraqi political forces, including our Party, are in almost unanimous agreement that violent means are not the most appropriate and effective," the party Central Committee said in its October letter, "as long as peaceful means have not been exhausted."
The Iraqi Communist Party says it is depending on the international antiwar movement - the same movement that tried to save Saddam Hussein - to protest for the U.S. and the Coalition to get out of Iraq. Says Comrade Ali, "Active solidarity by peace movements all over the world is therefore of great importance."

J. Michael Waller is a senior writer for Insight.

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SPIEGEL ONLINE - 07. Februar 2004, 17:46
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/0,1518,285429,00.html
Sicherheitskonferenz

Rumsfelds emotionaler Tadel
Aus M?nchen berichtet Severin Weiland
Auf der Sicherheitskonferenz in M?nchen hat US-Verteidigungsminister Donald Rumsfeld nichts zur?ckzunehmen. Im Gegenteil. Er verteidigt den Krieg gegen den Irak und r?ffelt die Berichterstattung der Medien. Manche Schreiber h?tten die Koalition der Willigen mit Saddam Husseins Regime gleichgesetzt.
DDP
Rumsfeld in M?nchen: Der Verteidigungsminister wollte nicht klein beigeben
M?nchen - Donald Rumsfeld hat diese Geschichte schon einmal erz?hlt, zuletzt bei seinem Besuch in S?dkorea im vergangenen Jahr. Ein amerikanischer Journalist kennt sie. "Nothing new", sagt der Mann von der Nachrichtenagentur Reuters. Doch hier in M?nchen, wo die Frage, warum sich Deutschland nicht an einer milit?rischen Stabilisierung des Irak beteiligt, insgeheim in der Luft liegt, bekommt die Geschichte eine ganz besondere Bedeutung.
Pl?tzlich, mitten in seinen Ausf?hrungen, spricht der US-Verteidigungsminister von jener jungen s?dkoreanischen Journalistin, die ihn bei seinem Besuch auf der Halbinsel fragte, warum S?dkoreas Truppen um die halbe Welt reisen m?ssten, um ausgerechnet im Irak stationiert zu werden.
Korea ist weit weg, aber es hat auch etwas mit Deutschland zu tun. Als die Amerikaner Westdeutschland vor den Russen sch?tzten, gaben in den 50er Jahren Zehntausende von US-Soldaten f?r den nichtkommunistischen S?den Koreas ihr Leben. Das sagt Rumsfeld nat?rlich nicht. Er erz?hlt nur die Geschichte S?dkoreas und vom Namen eines Football-Sportlers seiner High-School-Mannschaft, der auf dem Mahnmal in S?dkorea steht. Am letzten Tag dieses Krieges sei er gestorben, sagt der US-Minister in den Saal hinein.
Seine Stimme schwankt mit einem Mal. Dann hat er sich wieder in der Gewalt und man wei? nicht so recht, ob das nun eine Geschichte f?r das heimische Fernsehpublikum war oder sich Rumsfeld wie einst Helmut Kohl von den Emotionen hat mitrei?en lassen.
Die Distanz bleibt
Auf jeden Fall zeigt das Beispiel, wie sehr ein Teil der Europ?er und der Amerikaner aneinander vorbeireden, hier in M?nchen. Denn Rumsfelds s?dkoreanische Episode ist im Kern eine Geschichte von Solidarit?t, von Beistand und nat?rlich auch von der Entt?uschung eines Amerikaners f?r das Unverst?ndnis, das ihm entgegengebracht wird.
In M?nchen versuchen die Beteiligten nach vorne zu blicken. Die Spannungen der Vergangenheit, die kaum ein Jahr alt sind, bleiben dennoch unterschwellig pr?sent. Der deutsche Au?enminister Joschka Fischer macht noch einmal klar, dass sich die Bundesregierung im Falle des Irak "durch den Gang der Ereignisse in ihrer damaligen Haltung best?tigt" sieht. Verteidigungsminister Peter Struck betont, dass Multilateralismus kein "l?stiges Beiwerk oder Zugest?ndnis an kleinere Partner" sei, dass auch Amerika nicht ohne starke Partner auskommen k?nne.
Fischer hat auch seine Zweifel an einem Nato-Einsatz deutlich gemacht. Deutschland werde keine Truppen entsenden. Er hat aber auch angek?ndigt, dass es im Falle eines Nato-Einsatzes keine Blockade der Deutschen geben wird. Rumsfeld kann also einen Punktsieg verbuchen, auch wenn ein formeller Beschluss zu einem Irak-Einsatz erst im Juni in Istanbul auf dem Nato-Gipfel zu erwarten ist.
Fischer hat in M?nchen eine neue Nahost-Initiative vorgelegt, ein breiter Ansatz, der die USA und die Europ?er aneinander binden soll. EU und Nato, so will es Fischer, sollen eine Schl?sselrolle im Friedensprozess spielen. Das ist ein gewagter Ansatz. Einer, der wie viele andere in Nahost im Papierkorb enden k?nnte.
AP
Struck und Fischer: Starkes Europa liegt in US-Interesse
Rumsfeld nimmt Fischers Vorschlag nur indirekt auf. Im Juni, wenn sich die Nato zum Gipfel in Istanbul trifft, sollte die Ausweitung des Mittelmeer-Dialogs "oben auf der Tagesordnung stehen", sagt der Amerikaner. Mehr nicht.
Was den Sinn des Krieges angeht, weicht Rumsfeld keinen Millimeter. 25 Millionen Menschen im Irak, weitere 25 Millionen in Afghanistan seien befreit worden. Rumsfeld ist sich seiner Sache sicher. Wenn die Saat der Freiheit im Nahen Osten aufgegangen sei, werde sie sich ausbreiten, sagt er. Er verweist auf das Beispiel Japans und Deutschlands nach dem Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges. Rumsfeld, das ist erkennbar, will wie Fischer und Struck keine Schlacht der Vergangenheit schlagen. So vergisst er nicht zu erw?hnen, dass Japan Truppen in den Irak, Deutschland nach Afghanistan entsandt hat.
Aber er will auch nicht klein beigeben vor jenen, die den Krieg nach wie vor f?r falsch halten und sich durch die bis jetzt nicht aufgefundenen Massenvernichtungswaffen in ihrem Zweifel an dem eigentlichen Kriegsgrund best?tigt sehen.
Und so bringt er das Beispiel Libyens auf, das k?rzlich Inspektionen zugestimmt hat. Rumsfeld stellt eine These auf. "Wenn der Irak den Schritt getan h?tte, den Libyen geht, dann h?tte es keinen Krieg gegeben." Er wei? nat?rlich, dass die Welt in den letzten Wochen dar?ber geredet hat, dass die F?hrung in Tripolis wohl nicht so nachgiebig geworden w?re, wenn nicht der Krieg im Irak gewesen w?re. So ist auch diese Rumsfeld-These eine, die zu seinen Gunsten ausf?llt.
Die Nato vom Mars aus gesehen
Rumsfeld hat in der Sache nichts zur?ckzunehmen. Er verteidigt die Strategie des pr?vemptiven Krieges. Diese habe es schon immer gegeben, sie sei nichts Neues. Auch die Situation der Nato will er nicht in einem schlechten Licht sehen. Daf?r hat er einen typischen Rumsfeld-Vergleich parat: Jeder Affe auf dem Mars, der auf die Erde blicke, w?rde sehen, dass die Mitglieder der Nato die gleichen Interessen und Werte vertrete. Er sei jetzt 71 Jahre alt und habe manches Auf- und Ab in der Allianz schon erlebt. Das sei schon fast "ein Muster", sagt er.
Rumsfeld hat in M?nchen nichts gesagt, was er nicht schon an anderer Stelle gesagt h?tte. Nur eines ist deutlicher geworden: Wie sehr die Entt?uschung noch nachwirkt, dass mit Deutschland einer der engsten Verb?ndeten im vergangenen Jahr von der Fahne ging.
REUTERS
US-Soldaten im Irak: Schockierende Gleichsetzung
Als ihn der deutsche Botschafter in Washington, Wolfgang Ischinger, fragt, ob nicht das derzeit in vielen Telen der Welt schlechte Ansehen der USA eine Hypothek f?r den Vermittlungsprozess im Nahen Osten sei, sagt er: "Das ist eine harte Frage."
Und dann holt er aus zu einem Exkurs. Der f?hrt ihn zu den arabischen Fernsehsendern, schlie?lich auch zur Presseberichterstattung in Deutschland. Da seien Artikel geschrieben worden, die den Eindruck erweckt h?tten, es sei eigentlich gleichg?ltig, wer im Irak gewinnen sollte. Diese Gleichsetzung sei "schockierend" gewesen, sagt Rumsfeld, "wirklich best?rzend."

? SPIEGEL ONLINE 2004
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* Portfolio : la carri?re d'Alain Jupp?


UMP : le d?part pr?vu de M. Jupp? entrouvre la voie ? M. Sarkozy
LE MONDE | 07.02.04 | 14h01
Le parti r?unit ? Paris, dimanche 8 f?vrier, son congr?s pour lancer la campagne des ?lections r?gionales. Peu disert sur la condamnation du maire de Bordeaux, le ministre de l'int?rieur entend s'y investir et montrer qu'il est indispensable ? la formation chiraquienne et au gouvernement.
L'image a tout juste quatorze mois et elle semble d?j? jaunie. Flanqu? de Jean-Claude Gaudin et de Philippe Douste-Blazy, Alain Jupp? vient d'?tre ?lu ? la pr?sidence de l'Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP) avec pr?s de 75 % des suffrages.
Il triomphe. C'?tait le 17 novembre 2002, au Bourget (Seine-Saint-Denis), lors du premier congr?s de l'UMP. Pr?s de 20 000 militants applaudissaient ? tout rompre. Dimanche 8 f?vrier, 10 000 d?l?gu?s, les m?mes pour la plupart, se retrouvent, porte de Versailles, ? Paris, pour le deuxi?me congr?s du parti chiraquien. Officiellement, ils valideront les listes de leurs candidats aux ?lections r?gionales des 21 et 28 mars. Rituellement, ils feront un nouveau triomphe ? leur pr?sident, apr?s sa condamnation par le tribunal de Nanterre dans l'affaire du financement du RPR. Mais, avec neuf mois d'avance sur le calendrier, la succession de M. Jupp? hantera tous les esprits.
"GENTIL, GENTIL"
Car c'est lui qui, ? sa fa?on, a ouvert la course ? sa succession en annon?ant, mardi 3 f?vrier, sur TF1, qu'il faut "un nouveau pr?sident ? l'UMP" et qu'il entend "pr?parer un vote tout ? fait serein". Il pr?cise les r?gles de ce "passage de t?moin", le 6 f?vrier, dans un entretien ? Sud-Ouest. "Je n'ai pas ? d?signer mon successeur. Il va y avoir des ?lections, elles seront libres et transparentes, elles l'ont ?t? la premi?re fois."
Pour l'heure, aucun candidat ne s'est encore d?clar?, mais un nom revient dans toutes les conversations : Nicolas Sarkozy. Entre le 30 janvier, date du jugement de M. Jupp?, et le 3 f?vrier, o? il a annonc? qu'il conservait ses mandats et la pr?sidence de l'UMP jusqu'en novembre 2004, le ministre de l'int?rieur est rest? en retrait. L'?pisode du printemps 1997 est s?rement revenu ? la m?moire de M. Sarkozy : apr?s la dissolution de l'Assembl?e nationale et l'?chec retentissant de la droite aux ?lections l?gislatives de juin, M. Jupp? avait, pour la premi?re fois, manifest? des vell?it?s de d?part. "Jamais je n'ai pens? qu'il se retirerait d?finitivement", affirme le ministre de l'int?rieur.
Depuis le commencement de cette crise au sein de l'UMP, M. Sarkozy - qui ne devait pas prendre la parole dimanche - n'a qu'un souci : montrer qu'il est indispensable. Tant au parti, o? rien ne peut se jouer sans lui, qu'au gouvernement, et donc ? Jean-Pierre Raffarin, qui mesure ? quel point la popularit? de son ministre de l'int?rieur rejaillit sur sa propre action ? la t?te du gouvernement. "L'UMP est sensible au fait que M. Raffarin est un bon chef et que M. Sarkozy est le moteur de cette popularit? ? l'int?rieur du parti", r?sume un d?put? chiraquien.
Pour l'heure, M. Sarkozy observe, non sans plaisir, cette situation. "Je n'ai qu'une ambition, tout faire pour participer ? la victoire de mon camp aux ?lections de mars", rel?ve-t-il, avec une modestie inhabituelle. Pour les semaines ? venir, M. Sarkozy a noirci les pages de son agenda de r?unions publiques. R?clam? dans la plupart des r?gions par les t?tes de listes UMP, il r?pondra ? un maximum d'invitations, ? commencer par celle de Xavier Darcos, t?te de liste en Aquitaine, sur les terres de M. Jupp?.
Le num?ro deux du gouvernement est convaincu d'une chose : se porter en premi?re ligne dans la bataille ?lectorale ne peut que lui profiter. Un ministre lui recommande d'ailleurs d'adopter, dans les mois qui viennent, un comportement "gentil, gentil". "Si M. Sarkozy veut prendre l'UMP, personne ne pourra l'en emp?cher. Pas m?me le premier ministre", ajoute-t-il.
SOLUTION N?GOCI?E
Dans le contexte politique actuel, la majorit? des responsables de la droite partage cette analyse. M?me les plus farouches adversaires du ministre de l'int?rieur l'admettent : "Sarkozy a les moyens de prendre le parti s'il le d?cide." Les adh?rents ?lisant le pr?sident du parti au suffrage direct, sa victoire ne souffre gu?re de doutes aux yeux de la plupart de ses dirigeants. Aussi plusieurs voix commencent ? se faire entendre en faveur d'une solution n?goci?e pour l'?lection ? la pr?sidence du parti. "Je ne crois pas ? la possibilit? de passer en force pour imposer le successeur d'Alain Jupp?, explique un dirigeant de l'UMP, proche du maire de Bordeaux. Je sais que certains en ont la tentation contre Sarkozy, mais ce serait une erreur fatale qui nous ferait perdre l'?lection pr?sidentielle de 2007."
Reste le r?le d?volu ? M. Raffarin. Le r?sultat des ?lections r?gionales permettra de mesurer, pour partie, le niveau de sa cr?dibilit? au sein de la droite. Durant les quatre journ?es qui ont secou? l'UMP, il n'avait pas dissimul? qu'en tant que chef de la majorit? il ?tait pr?t ? prendre le relais en cas de retrait imm?diat de M. Jupp?.
Le maire de Bordeaux ayant choisi d'"organiser" un repli progressif, les conditions de la passation de pouvoir ont chang?. "Il ne pourra se pr?senter que s'il signe un accord politique avec Sarkozy. Un conflit entre le num?ro un et le num?ro deux du gouvernement n'est pas concevable", note un ministre. "M. Raffarin ne peut y aller que s'il est s?r de gagner. Perdre contre Sarkozy serait catastrophique pour lui", insiste-t-il.
Le 29 janvier, ? la veille de la condamnation de M. Jupp?, les deux hommes ont d?n? ensemble, avec leurs ?pouses, ? Angoul?me. Ont-ils, ce soir-l?, scell? une alliance en vue de cette ?ch?ance ?
Yves Bordenave

* ARTICLE PARU DANS L'EDITION DU 08.02.04
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Ce qu'Alain Jupp? d?clarait sur les affaires, la justice et les "p?ch?s" du PS avant sa condamnation
LE MONDE | 07.02.04 | 14h01
"Le seul souverain est le peuple (...). Qu'en est-il des juges, d?s lors qu'ils constituent ? leur tour un "pouvoir"", d?clarait-il dans un livre d'entretiens publi? en 2001.
Depuis le milieu des ann?es 1980, Alain Jupp? a fait, ? plusieurs reprises, des d?clarations sur la moralisation de la vie politique, les affaires et le r?le des juges. Le Monde en donne de larges extraits.
Le financement des partis : "Je regrette que nous ayons tard? ? mettre en place un cadre l?gal.
"
"Faut-il faire payer par les contribuables les campagnes des partis politiques ? J'?tais moi-m?me pour un syst?me lib?ral parce que la r?glementation ne me semblait pas mettre ? l'abri des combines. Personnellement, je reconnais que j'ai ?volu? sur ces questions-l?." (Lib?ration, 6 novembre 1987)
"On a atteint un bon ?quilibre dans le domaine du financement des partis politiques. La suppression des dons des personnes morales -aux partis- est une fausse bonne id?e parce que c'est le retour ? un encouragement de la corruption." (Grand Jury RTL-Le Monde, 9 octobre 1994)
"C'est ? partir de 1988 qu'on a commenc? ? s'attaquer au probl?me. On a b?ti petit ? petit un cadre qui est devenu plus strict. Je me suis trouv? aux responsabilit?s durant cette p?riode-l?. Qu'ai-je fait ? J'ai naturellement demand? aux gestionnaires du RPR de se mettre en conformit? avec les lois successives. Si j'ai eu un tort, c'est sans doute d'avoir abord? ce dossier de mani?re trop g?n?rale et de ne pas l'avoir r?gl? imm?diatement. (...) On n'en sentait pas l'urgence comme on la ressent aujourd'hui ! L'interdiction totale du financement des partis politiques par les entreprises priv?es date de 1995. Avant 1995, une entreprise pouvait contribuer au fonctionnement d'un parti politique. Ces contributions ont pu prendre des formes diverses que l'on pensait, ? tort, admises (...)
Le financement des syndicats : "des centaines de fonctionnaires travaillent pour les syndicats"
"Je regrette que la soci?t? fran?aise ait tard? collectivement ? s'interroger sur le co?t de fonctionnement de la d?mocratie et que nous ayons tard? ? mettre en place ce cadre l?gal. Les Fran?ais savent que ces pratiques ?taient un fait g?n?ralis?es. La mise ? disposition de personnes par une administration ou une collectivit? ?tait tr?s r?pandue. Il y a plusieurs centaines de fonctionnaires qui sont pay?s par leur administration d'origine et qui travaillent, en fait, dans des syndicats ou des associations priv?es." (Le Point, 26 septembre 1998). M. Jupp? a repris ces critiques, le 3 f?vrier, sur TF1.
"En 1995, on a ?t?, ? mon sens, trop loin en interdisant totalement les dons des entreprises." (Entre quatre z'yeux, entretien avec Serge July, Grasset, 2001)
Le partage des responsabilit?s avec Jacques Chirac : "C'est moi qui suis en cause."
"La justice n'est pas une affaire de sentiment. Quand on a ?t? le patron - passez-moi l'expression -, il faut assumer ses responsabilit?s." (Le Figaro, 26 ao?t 1998)
"Avant tout, je souhaite rappeler qu'il s'agit d'un probl?me de financement et de fonctionnement d'un parti. Il ne s'agit en aucun cas d'une affaire personnelle". (Le Figaro, 26 ao?t 1998)
"Il s'agit d'un probl?me de r?mun?ration du personnel et d'emplois dits fictifs. J'esp?re que cela sera trait? avec un certain sens de la relativit?." (Le Figaro, 26 ao?t 1998)
"Quant au fond, j'ai assum? mes responsabilit?s au RPR ? une p?riode, je l'ai dit, qui a ?t? une p?riode de transition. On est pass? d'un ?ge ? un autre." (Le Point, 26 septembre 1998)
"C'est moi qui suis en cause. J'assume mes responsabilit?s de secr?taire g?n?ral de 1988 ? 1995, puis comme pr?sident de 1995 ? 1997. Vous me permettrez de ne pas faire de proc?s d'intention aux juges." (Le Figaro, ao?t 1998).
Les hommes politiques face ? la justice : "Je ne suis pas un adepte de la th?orie du complot."
"Je me suis fix? une r?gle que je crois n'avoir jamais enfreint, c'est de ne pas commenter les d?cisions de justice. (...) C'est un fondement de la d?mocratie. (...) Ce n'est pas au premier ministre de commenter des d?cisions de justice. Si je le faisais, je crois que j'enfreindrais un principe d?mocratique fondamental. J'ajoute que cette s?r?nit? de la justice doit aussi r?gner ? l'int?rieur de l'institution judiciaire." (TF1, 17 mars 1996).
"Il faut convaincre nos concitoyens que la justice est ?gale pour tous et que le pouvoir n'intervient pas dans les affaires sensibles." (Le Figaro, 23 mai 1997)
"Je ne m'y attendais pas -? la mise en examen dans l'affaire du financement du RPR-. D'autant que les chefs retenus sont durs. Tr?s durs. Les termes employ?s frappent au c?ur et ? l'esprit." (Le Figaro du 26 ao?t 1998).
"La justice a son temps propre. Je me pr?pare ? une longue ?preuve." (Le Point, 26 septembre 1998)
"Je ne suis pas un adepte de la th?orie du complot -des juges-. Je respecte les institutions de mon pays. Je souhaite que la justice se fasse dans la s?r?nit?." (Le Figaro, 26 ao?t 1998)
"La premi?re chose qui me choque, c'est la pression m?diatique qui s'exerce sur les hommes politiques pour qu'ils abandonnent leur charge au moment o? il sont mis en examen, voire avant m?me qu'ils le soient. Depuis qu'Edouard Balladur a formul? et appliqu? la r?gle de la d?mission imm?diate de tout ministre en examen, on a m?me donn? aux juges d'instruction le pouvoir de faire et de d?faire les gouvernements !" (Entre quatre z'yeux, entretien avec Serge July, Grasset, 2001)
"Le seul souverain est le peuple ; c'est donc le suffrage universel, direct ou indirect, qui conf?re la l?gitimit? d?mocratique (...) Qu'en est-il des juges d?s lors qu'ils constituent ? leur tour un -pouvoir'' (...) et qu'ils prennent leurs d?cisions -au nom du peuple fran?ais'' ?" (Entre quatre z'yeux, entretien avec Serge July, Grasset, 2001)
L'amnistie : "L?gif?rer pour apurer le pass?, les Fran?ais y sont-ils pr?ts ?"
"Il ne faut pas abuser des amnisties. Mais je ne suis pas pr?sident de la R?publique." (Lib?ration du 5 mai 1995).
"Faut-il l?gif?rer pour pr?ciser encore les r?gles en vigueur, pourquoi pas ? Par exemple, la question du statut de l'?lu. L?gif?rer pour apurer le pass?, les Fran?ais y sont-ils pr?ts ?" (Le Point, 26 septembre 1998).
L'affaire de l'appartement parisien : "Je reste droit dans mes bottes."
En juillet 1995, Alain Jupp? s'?tait expliqu? dans le "20 heures" de TF1, sur son appartement parisien dont le loyer ?tait jug? inf?rieur ? ceux du march? : " Je n'ai rien cach?, il n'y a eu aucune irr?gularit?, aucune entorse, je paie un loyer normal pour le type d'immeuble que j'habite (...) -Je suis- " profond?ment bless? par tout cela. -...- J'ai fait de l'int?grit? dans ma vie politique une r?gle de tous les jours, ainsi que dans ma vie personnelle. (...) Je ne me laisserai pas impressionner par toutes les campagnes qui vont continuer (...) Je reste droit dans mes bottes. -Je refuse- les le?ons de morale de professeurs de vertu qui feraient bien de balayer devant leur porte. (...) Si elle estime qu'il y a mati?re, que la justice fasse son travail ! Croyez bien que personne ne contrarierait son action, et je m'y engage personnellement. (...) Il y a un procureur, qu'il instruise sa plainte. " En janvier 1996, le tribunal administratif de Paris n'avait pas autoris? de poursuites contre M. Jupp?.
Les affaires et la gauche : "Le PS a p?ch? de mani?re industrielle."
"[ Nous avons ] la gauche la plus pourrie au monde." (Le "Grand jury RTL-Le Monde", 22 janvier 1989 )
"Ce n'est pas moi qui vais pr?tendre que seul le PS a p?ch?, mais il a p?ch? de mani?re industrielle." (Europe 1, 21 avril 1991)

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M. Schwartzenberg veut poursuivre les ministres
Roger-G?rard Schwartzenberg, d?put? (app. PS) du Val-de-Marne, a ?crit, samedi 7 f?vrier, au garde des sceaux pour lui demander d'engager des poursuites contre les ministres qui, en commentant le jugement d'Alain Jupp?, "ont enfreint l'article 434-25 du code p?nal". Cet article dit que "le fait de chercher ? jeter le discr?dit publiquement sur un acte ou une d?cision juridictionnelle dans des contidions de nature ? porter atteinte ? l'autorit? de la justice est puni de 6 mois d'emprisonnement". Pour le d?put?, "la loi doit ?tre respect?e par les citoyens en g?n?ral et les ministres en particulier", et ceux qui ont critiqu? la d?cision dans l'exercice de leurs fonctions devraient m?me relever de la Cour de justice de la R?publique.

* ARTICLE PARU DANS L'EDITION DU 08.02.04
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Pour l'Elys?e, le probl?me de la succession "ne se pose pas" aujourd'hui
LE MONDE | 07.02.04 | 12h14
L'ump , parti du pr?sident ? "Oui, je pense bien !", s'exclame un proche conseiller de Jacques Chirac, tout en nuan?ant aussit?t ce cri du c?ur : " C'est le parti de la majorit? qui soutient l'action du pr?sident et du gouvernement.
" Alors que le deuxi?me congr?s de la grande formation de droite se tient, dimanche 8 f?vrier, ? Paris, l'Elys?e a bien l'intention que l'UMP continue ? jouer ce r?le, m?me si Alain Jupp? a annonc? qu'il en quitterait la pr?sidence en novembre.
Premier souci de M. Chirac, ?teindre la guerre de succession qui s'annonce, pr?figurant celle qui se jouera pour la pr?sidentielle de 2007. " Le probl?me ne se pose pas, puisqu'Alain reste jusqu'en novembre, veut croire l'un des plus proches conseillers du pr?sident de la R?publique. Il se poserait s'il avait pris une autre position." C'est-?-dire si M. Jupp? avait imm?diatement abandonn? la pr?sidence de l'UMP. C'est d'ailleurs la premi?re fonction que M. Jupp? a laiss? tomber. Mais il est l? jusqu'en novembre, " ce qui laisse plus de six mois pour r?gler le probl?me. ?a se pr?cisera apr?s les vacances d'?t?", estime-t-on ? l'Elys?e. Que les candidats suppos?s ou r?els se le tiennent pour dit : " Personne n'est en mesure de r?gler le probl?me aujourd'hui." Autrement dit, le bal des pr?tendants a beaucoup agac? " alors qu'il y a d?j? tellement de probl?mes ? r?gler avant". Notamment passer le cap des ?lections r?gionales et europ?ennes en mars et juin. A l'Elys?e, on compte beaucoup sur M. Jupp? pour ?tre ? la barre du parti ? ce moment-l?.
M. Chirac a toujours franchi une ?tape apr?s l'autre. Cette r?gle est d'autant plus sage qu'il y a d?sormais, dans le jeu, une inconnue nomm?e Jupp?. "Les choses ne sont pas aussi tranch?es qu'on veut le dire. Jacques Chirac l'a conseill?, oui, mais il y a des situations ?volutives", admet un vieux conseiller du pr?sident. M. Jupp? esquisse d?sormais une strat?gie de d?fense bien diff?rente de celle qu'il avait adopt?e lors du proc?s sur le financement du RPR, en octobre 2003. Certains de ses amis pensent qu'il aurait tout int?r?t ? arriver en appel d?gag? de ses mandats ?lectifs - maire de Bordeaux, voire d?put? de la Gironde - pour montrer au juge qu'il ferait amende honorable. " C'est une jurisprudence non ?crite. Les tribunaux sont plus indulgents quand la personne a quitt? ses mandats", assure l'un d'entre eux.
Sur France Bleu Gironde, vendredi, le pr?sident de l'UMP a d'ailleurs laiss? entendre qu'il pourrait quitter, selon un calendrier qu'il n'a pas pr?cis?, la mairie de Bordeaux. " Mais ce n'est pas ce qu'il a dit mardi soir ? la t?l?vision", s'?tonne un conseiller et ami de Chirac. "Si vous vous appliquez ? vous-m?me et par avance la peine d'in?ligibilit?, ce n'est m?me pas la peine de faire appel, s'insurge-t-il. On ne s'inflige pas une peine qu'on conteste."
Quoi qu'il en soit, M. Jupp? a promis de garder la maison UMP jusqu'en novembre. " Je maintiendrai la coh?sion", a-t-il dit sur France Bleu Gironde. Ce parti est " loyal", estime un cacique de l'ex-RPR : "Jusqu'au jour o? il pensera que Chirac est d?pass? et qu'il faut passer ? autre chose."

B?atrice Gurrey

* ARTICLE PARU DANS L'EDITION DU 08.02.04
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Les autres pr?tendants possibles ? la pr?sidence de la formation chiraquienne
LE MONDE | 07.02.04 | 14h01
Jean-Louis Debr?
Pr?sident de l'Assembl?e nationale, 59 ans
Ecart? du gouvernement Raffarin, il a gagn? en autonomie et en visibilit? depuis qu'il s'est install? au perchoir de l'Assembl?e, contre la volont? de l'Elys?e, qui souhaitait r?server le poste ? Alain Jupp?.
Ses critiques ? l'?gard de M. Raffarin - qu'il soup?onne de lorgner l'Elys?e - en font le chef de file d'un front antilib?ral qui pourrait un jour devenir un courant au sein de l'UMP. Cette gu?rilla contre le premier ministre, qu'il a r?cemment trait? de "boutiquier", lui vaut davantage de sympathie ? gauche que dans son propre camp.
Mich?le Alliot-Marie
Ministre de la d?fense, ancienne pr?sidente du RPR, 57 ans
C'est la derni?re pr?sidente du RPR, dont elle n'a jamais accept? la disparition, en septembre 2002. Elue en 1999, au suffrage direct des militants, elle s'?tait impos?e contre le candidat de l'Elys?e, Jean-Paul Delevoye, ce qui lui a valu un brevet d'ind?pendance ? l'?gard du chef de l'Etat et la sympathie de la base. Ses proches sont persuad?s qu'elle seule est ? m?me de contrer une offensive de Nicolas Sarkozy sur l'UMP. "Je -le- pourrais, reconna?t-elle, mais je n'en ai pas envie." Une mani?re d'avouer qu'elle y songe.
Philippe Douste-Blazy
Secr?taire g?n?ral de l'UMP, 51 ans
L'ancien pr?sident du groupe UDF de l'Assembl?e nationale (1997-2002) a ?t? l'un des principaux organisateurs de l'UMP au c?t? d'Alain Jupp?. D?s 2001, il pr?nait le ralliement des centristes ? la cause de Jacques Chirac. Elu au poste de num?ro trois du nouveau parti chiraquien en novembre 2002, il a, depuis, multipli? les visites dans les f?d?rations du parti, nourrissant l'espoir de se tisser un r?seau de partisans. Le retrait annonc? de M. Jupp? r?veille en lui des ambitions qu'il tente vainement de dissimuler.
Fran?ois Fillon
Ministre des affaires sociales, du travail et de la solidarit?, 49 ans
Le ministre des affaires sociales a r?ussi ? faire oublier qu'il fut un proche de Philippe S?guin pour devenir un soutien de Jacques Chirac. Fort de son succ?s sur le dossier des retraites, M. Fillon a conquis une certaine notori?t? et renforc? son poids au sein de l'UMP. Pourtant, il n'est jamais all? au bout de ses ambitions, ?chouant dans la conqu?te de la pr?sidence du RPR en 1999, et renon?ant ? constituer un courant sur la base de son club, France.9. S'il souhaite contrer M. Sarkozy, il devra ?largir la base des ses soutiens.
Herv? Gaymard
Ministre de l'agriculture, 43 ans
Ce pur chiraquien n'a gu?re de mal ? faire avancer ses dossiers aupr?s du pr?sident de la R?publique, qui a mis la ruralit? au programme de sa campagne de 2002. Fid?le et discret, M. Gaymard est l'un des quadrag?naires sur lesquels M. Chirac compte pour renouveler le personnel politique. Il a ?t? l'un des promoteurs de la cr?ation de l'UMP et figure parmi les proches de Jacques et Bernadette Chirac. Sa femme, Clara, est la fille du professeur Lejeune, d?couvreur du g?ne de la trisomie 21 et militant contre l'avortement, un ami du couple Chirac.
Dominique Perben
Ministre de la justice, garde des sceaux, 58 ans
C'est le plus proche d'Alain Jupp? parmi les pr?tendants ? sa succession. Aux avant-postes de la cr?ation du parti chiraquien au sein du club Dialogue et initiative, il pourrait ?tre le garant d'une succession en douceur. Ancien secr?taire g?n?ral adjoint du RPR (1990-1993), il sait faire fonctionner un parti sans avoir le charisme du chef. Alors qu'il s'est engag? dans la conqu?te de Lyon aux municipales de 2007, la pr?sidence du parti chiraquien pourrait s'av?rer un handicap dans une ville r?put?e centriste.
* ARTICLE PARU DANS L'EDITION DU 08.02.04

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