>> PALACE INTRIGUE?
Happy Birthday, Dear Leader - who's next in line?
By Yoel Sano
The scepter in the Hermit Kingdom passed from the Great Leader to the Dear Leader - and will he in turn pass it on to his youngest son, already extolled by some as the Morning Star King?
The lack of fanfare surrounding North Korean leader Kim Jong-il's birthday celebrations this year has much to do with his inauspicious age, 62. It lacks the symbolism of 60, an important Korean milestone, described as hwangap, completing one big circle or life cycle and beginning another. However, as the Dear Leader celebrates his birthday on Monday, it is precisely because of his chronological age that the question of succession must be weighing on his mind, even as it tantalizes Korea watchers.
The Great Leader Kim Il-sung was succeeded by his son, the current and Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, and who will succeed him has Pyongyang watchers watching closely for omens, signs in the heavens, entrails or tea leaves. Could it be the oldest disgraced - and possibly illegitimate - son, the middle son dismissed as "effeminate" by his father, or the younger son now called by some "The Morning Star King." It's far from settled and the family saga is in its early stages.
Because Kim leads a regime long cemented by vested interests, the process of succession should be relatively painless, though regime collapse in an impoverished nation maintained by a brutal hierarchy is possible. Too many concessions to the United States, Japan and South Korea over the nuclear issue could undermine the current regime. Still, Kim assumes - and so do most observers - that he will stay in power. The main issue therefore is not if the regime will survive, but which of his three sons is standing next in line.
Kim inherited power from his own father, the late "Great Leader", Kim Il-sung, and it is inconceivable that any organized succession process will not involve one of Kim Jong-il's own sons. Given the fact that the Dear Leader himself was groomed for the top leadership position for more than 20 years, he will presumably want plenty of time to prepare whichever of his sons he chooses for the role. He has several daughters, but the highly patriarchal nature of the regime and most East Asian societies precludes a female successor.
Kim Jong-il was his father's eldest son and was chosen as successor for this reason. Traditionally, the eldest son is the natural successor in any dynastic succession, so in theory, the identity of Kim Jong-il's successor should be obvious: his eldest son, Kim Jong-nam, born on May 10, 1971, to his second wife, Sung Hye-rim, a leading actress in North Korea.
Eldest 'bad boy' son may be illegitimate
Kim Jong-il's first marriage in 1966 was to Hong Il-chon, with whom he had a daughter, Kim Hye-kyong, in 1967. But within the space of a few years, Kim apparently separated from Hong in favor of Sung. This, however, is where the succession process gets complicated. It is not known whether Kim Jong-il ever actually married Sung, and it has been suggested that his eldest son Kim Jong-nam - the obvious heir-apparent - may have been illegitimate, and not so apparently the next in line.
Evidence seems to point in that direction. According to Kim Jong-il's adopted daughter, Ri Nam-ok - who is actually the daughter of Sung's sister, and who defected to Western Europe in 1997 - Kim Il-sung never knew of his first grandson, and would not have approved of his son's liaison or conjugal partnership with Sung. As such, the senior Kim apparently arranged for young Jong-il to marry a general's daughter, Kim Yong-suk in 1973. This union resulted in the birth of at least one child, a daughter, Kim Sol-song, in 1974. According to some reports, there may have been other offspring, but Kim Sol-song is the only one definitely known. As in many other ruling dynasties, the details of Kim Jong-il's private life are rather sketchy.
In 1980, Kim Jong-il married again. This time to Japanese-born ethnic Korean dancer, Ko Yong-hui, who bore him two sons, Kim Jong-chol in 1981 and Kim Jong-un in 1983. Though Kim Jong-nam may appear to be Kim Jong-il's obvious successor, because of the uncertainty of his legitimacy, over the past three years, attention has turned to the latter of Kim's sons.
And, indeed, while it appears that Kim Jong-nam had initially been in line for the succession - having been appointed to a senior post in the domestic intelligence agency and also placed in charge of North Korea's fledgling information technology industry - he subsequently fell from favor after May 2001. In that month he was very publicly arrested and deported from Tokyo's Narita International Airport, with his son and two female aides, after attempting to enter the country on a false Dominican Republic passport. Adding to the bizarre scenario, he had apparently been seeking to visit Tokyo Disneyland - although it has not been ruled out that he was on a sensitive mission to acquire Japanese technology.
Kim Jong-nam's weakened position became even more apparent in 2002, when he spent much of the year in Russia, tending to his sick mother Sung Hye-rim, who had been living in Moscow after falling out with Kim Jong-il many years earlier. Sung passed away from natural causes in August 2002.
May the best Jong win
Just after his mother's death, another development increased Kim Jong-nam's marginalization. At the end of August 2002, Japan's Jiji Press, citing Chinese diplomatic sources, reported that a hitherto unknown son of Kim Jong-il - named Kim Hyon (also known as Kim Hyon-nam, then aged 30) - had been appointed head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the ruling Korean Worker's Party (KWP). Given that Kim Jong-il had himself once headed this department when he began his political ascendancy in the early 1970s, speculation naturally arose that the younger Kim Hyon was being groomed to succeed his father.
However, nothing more has been heard about Kim Hyon, raising doubts about the veracity of Jiji's story.
By early 2003 reports emerged that the Korean People's Army (KPA) had begun a propaganda campaign centering on the personality of Ko Yong-hui - although in typical to North Korean fashion, without actually naming her. A similar campaign had been created for Kim Jong-il's long-deceased mother, Kim Jong-suk, ahead of his succession, and as such, the development points to one of Ko's sons, rather than the bad-behaving and possibility illegitimate Kim Jong-nam or the perceived late entry, Kim-hyon, as the heir-apparent.
Attention naturally turned to the elder of the two brothers, Kim Jong-chol, and Newsweek magazine published a dated and blurred black and white photograph of him during his school days in Switzerland. More recently, though, the emphasis has been on the younger brother, Kim Jong-un (also spelled Kim Jong-woon). The main proponent of this theory is Kim Jong-il's former Japanese sushi chef, Kenji Fujimoto (a pseudonym), who, in his memoir, published in Japan, stated that Kim regards Jong-chol as too effeminate, and Jong-un to be more like his father.
Complicating this complicated picture, however, were reports in October 2003 that Ko Yong-hui had been critically injured in a car accident. Other reports suggested that she was suffering from breast cancer. Her current status is unknown, and any disagreement over the succession could potentially cause problems for the process. Although Ko has no formal role in the process, she presumably wields some influence over Kim Jong-il's decision.
In this regard, Kim Jong-il will be keen to avoid any schisms developing within the ruling family, as happened with his own succession. Kim himself displaced his father's younger brother, Kim Yong-yu, from the position of heir apparent in the early 1970s. Kim Yong-ju subsequently vanished from public life in 1975, and would not reappear until July 1993, only to be appointed one of North Korea's four vice presidents later in that year. This move was said to be aimed at reassuring North Korea's old guard that a massive generational shift would not take place once Kim Jong-il took power.
In addition, it seems that Kim Jong-il had to stave off a challenge from his half-brother, Kim Pyong-il, the oldest son of his hated stepmother, Kim Song-ae. Pyong-il was widely said to have been better leadership material, possessing greater skills and having served as a major general and deputy director of the strategy bureau at the Ministry of People's Security in the 1980s. However, because Kim Jong-il saw him as a rival, and Kim Song-ae favored Pyong-il as successor, he was sent abroad in 1988 as ambassador to Hungary, followed by Bulgaria, Finland, and most recently, Poland, in order to keep him out of Pyongyang politics. Another half-brother, Kim Yong-il, died of cirrhosis of the liver in May 2000 in Germany, where he had been serving as counselor at the North Korean interests office.
Military backing key to smooth succession
One thing that is certain is that whoever succeeds Kim Jong-il will have to win the support of the powerful Korean People's Army. The 1.1 million-strong military is the only institution that can challenge the regime. Indeed, the power and profile of top military leaders has increased substantially under Kim Jong-il, who relies on the armed forces to maintain order and stability in the face of widespread famine and economic decay. While Kim Il-sung was alive, the generals mainly kept out of the limelight. However, senior commanders now accompany Kim Jong-il on virtually all his public appearances, reinforcing the image of a military state.
Kim Jong-il has ruled North Korea exclusively as supreme commander of the army since his father's death in July 1994. Since that time, Kim Jong-il has very skillfully won the backing of the Korean People's Army by waiting for the natural demise of some of the octogenarian veterans of his father's anti-Japanese guerrilla struggle - such as former defense ministers O Jin-u and Choe Kwang - to pass away through natural aging. And he has appointed his own loyalists to key positions. The most important of these are Vice-Marshal Jo Myong-rok, the first vice-chairman of the National Defense Commission (NDC) and head of the KPA's political bureau; Vice-Marshal Kim Yong-chun, the chief of the general staff; and Vice-Marshal Kim Il-chol, the minister of the People's Armed Forces - North Korea's system of defense. More recently, General Ri Myong-Su, the director of the operations bureau of the general staff, and KPA political bureau deputy directors Hyon Chol-Hae and Pak Jae-gyong have gained prominence. These men form the core of Kim Jong-Il's power base in the army.
Kim Jong-il's moves to control the military have been a remarkable success, considering that for many years prior to 1994, it was said that the KPA disliked the Dear Leader so much that it would depose him in a coup immediately after Kim Il-sung left the scene. Kim Pyong-il, with his military background, was often mentioned as a possible military-backed replacement.
However, Great Leader Kim Il-sung gradually phased out senior officers who would pose a threat to his son, Jong-il's succession, and in December 1991 he appointed Jong-il as supreme commander of the army, despite the fact that he had no military experience, except for a brief unconfirmed stint at the East German Air Force Academy in the early 1960s. Kim Jong-il was subsequently elevated to the rank of Marshal of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in April 1992 and then a year later to chairman of the National Defense Commission - a post that he now holds as head of state.
Kim Jong-il has also successfully bound his family to the top ranks of the military structure through his full sister Kim Kyong-hui's husband, Jang Song-taek, who serves as the first vice director of the Korean Workers Party 's organization and guidance department, headed by Kim Jong-il himself. Jang's eldest brother, Jang Song-u, is a KPA vice marshal and commands the Third Army Corps, which surrounds the city of Pyongyang. According to Sin Kyong-wan, a former KWP official, the second-oldest brother, Jang Song-yop, is the vice director of the Kim Il-sung Higher Party School. A younger brother, Jang Song-Gil, is a lieutenant general and tank commander, while the youngest, Jang Song-ho, is a political vice president of the Mangyongdae Revolutionary School - an elite establishment which Kim Jong-il and many top leaders attended.
Kim Jong-il has nurtured the army
In any case, the KPA - which has increased its influence under Kim Jong-il - benefits from his continued rule, adopting a Military First Policy under the banner of "Kangsong Taeguk" - a great and militarily powerful nation. The military's position allows it to guide national policy without having to take administrative blame for North Korea's ongoing economic problems. As such, the KPA has a vested interest in a stable succession, especially since many senior military leaders are developing business interests as heads of military-dominated conglomerates. The largest such enterprise, Chungwoonsan, is headed by Vice Marshal Jo Myong-rok, according to North Korea watcher Selig Harrison.
Although there have been several reports of coup attempts - most notably in 1992, by a group of Soviet-trained perestroika [restructuring]-oriented generals, and again in 1995, by elements of the Sixth Army Corps in remote North Hamgyong province - none has come remotely close to succeeding because of the efficiency of the security apparatus.
There are really only two circumstances in which a military coup would take place. First, if the economy continues to disintegrate, and national survival becomes an issue, "reformist" elements in the Korean People's Army may conclude that North Korea is better off without the Korean Worker's Party and Kim Jong-il. The second scenario involves Kim Jong-il making too many concessions over North Korea's nuclear program to the United States, South Korea, or Japan, and accelerating economic reforms that cause social unrest. The latter situation could lead to a "reactionary" coup of the sort that befell Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991.
Another reason why a second dynastic succession is likely to be upheld is that it is not just the ruling Kim family that benefits from nepotism and connections. While the predominance of a small number of surnames in Korea (North and South) makes it difficult to track family links, it is known that many top leaders are the sons of the revolutionary generation that fought against Japanese imperialism, or have siblings in high positions. For example, Kim Kuk-tae - a senior KWP central committee secretary in charge of cadre affairs - is the son of general Kim Chaek, who served as the KPA's frontline commander during the Korean War, in which he was killed. General O Kuk-ryol, the head of the central committee's special operations department, is the son of a veteran guerrilla, as is Colonel General O Kum-chol, the commander of the air force.
North Korea's titular head of state, Kim Yong-nam, who serves as president of the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly (SPA, or legislature), has two brothers in high positions: General Kim Du-nam, a one-time military adviser to Kim Jong-il, and Kim Ki-nam, a senior central committee secretary. Yang Hyong-sop, the vice president of the SPA Presidium, is married to Kim Jong-Il's aunt. Many others benefit from similar ties.
Not a one-man show, a regime of vested interests
Therefore, North Korea, far from being a one-man show, or even a one-family show, is an entire regime bound together by vested interests, under the leadership of Kim Jong-Il. This should make the succession process easier, provided that the identity of the heir is decided upon without causing fractures in the first family or the army.
Assuming that the regime survives - and it has proved remarkably durable, against all odds - it may still be some years before North Korea formally announces the identity of the successor.
Although Kim Jong-Il's political rise began in the early 1970s, when the official media began to speak of the "Party Center" as a code word for Kim, his actual status as heir apparent did not become clear until the Sixth Korean Worker's Party Congress in 1980, when he was appointed to a number of party posts. Yet, it was not until August 7, 1984, that Pyongyang publicly confirmed Kim Jong-il as successor. Even then, it would be another 10 years before his father died, after which Kim would have to wait three years before being appointed to his father's position as general secretary of the KWP. In September 1998, Kim Jong-il formally took power, but he never assumed the state presidency, instead ruling in his existing position as chairman of the National Defense Commission.
Certainly, the signs are that either Kim Jong-chol or Kim Jong-un is being maneuvered into the succession. The latter is even being referred to as the "Morning Star King", according to South Korean Pyongyang watchers. However, the saga is still in its early stages, and Kim Jong-nam cannot be totally ruled out. His status as first-born son carries considerable weight, and the regime has a habit of re-instating disgraced figures after a suitable period of atonement.
In the meantime, there appears to be very little active opposition to the regime. Unlike Iraq under Saddam Hussein, which spawned dozens of opposition groups in exile, North Korean defectors have created only one such group, the National Salvation Front For Democratic Unification of Chosun, led by former KWP propaganda official Pak Kap-dong. However, the organization has proved as ineffective as it is low profile. The nearest thing North Korea has to an exiled opposition leader is Hwang Jang-yop, a former central committee secretary, who defected in February 1997. Hwang was initially welcomed in South Korea under the presidency of Kim Young-sam, but once Kim Dae-jung's "Sunshine Policy" took effect, Hwang was ignored. Hwang still travels to the US, where he addresses neo-conservative groups that welcome his calls for regime change in Pyongyang. But Hwang is 81 years old, and has limited time left to achieve his goals.
As far back as the 1980s, Korean historian Bruce Cumings, when questioning a Soviet diplomat in Pyongyang on the chances of Kim Jong-il succeeding Kim Il-sung, was told "come back in 2020 and see Kim Jong-il's son succeed him".
As of early 2004, that prediction, seemingly unrealistic only a few years ago, no longer sounds so implausible. Check the omens, the stars, the entrails and the tea leaves.
Yoel Sano has worked for publishing houses in London, providing political and economic analysis, and has been following North Korea, as well as other Northeast Asian developments, for more than 10 years.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Libya Nuke Drawings Likely From Pakistan
By GEORGE JAHN
ASSOCIATED PRESS
VIENNA, Austria (AP) - Drawings of a nuclear warhead that Libya surrendered as part of its decision to renounce weapons of mass destruction are of 1960s Chinese design, but likely came from Pakistan, diplomats and experts told The Associated Press on Sunday.
China is widely assumed to have been Pakistan's key supplier of much of the clandestine nuclear technology used to establish Islamabad as a nuclear power in 1998 and resold to rogue regimes through the black market network headed by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.
The drawings appeared to be of a design never used by Pakistan, which went on to develop more modern nuclear weapons, said the diplomats and experts, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Still, they said, they were likely supplied by China as part of the decades-long transfer of technology that Khan used to develop Pakistan's nuclear weapons.
One of them called the drawings "dramatic evidence" of the Chinese-Pakistani nuclear link.
Libya surrendered the drawings in December after volunteering to scrap all research into developing weapons of mass destruction. The blueprints and accompanying documents are now in the United States under the seal of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
One of the experts said the drawing detailed how to build a warhead for a large ballistic missile, using technology developed by the Chinese in the 1960s that triggers a nuclear blast by a small conventional explosion.
While the instructions on the drawing were in English, some other documents surrendered by Libya along with the blueprints were in Chinese, he said.
He said that if built, the warhead would have weighed more than 1,000 pounds. That's too bulky for any delivery system the Libyans possessed but not for the ballistic missiles developed by North Korea and Iran, the other nations said to have been supplied by Khan's network.
While there is no evidence either of those countries were supplied with the same or a similar drawing, "it would be a very nice warhead for those countries," said the expert.
North Korea runs a nuclear weapons program using plutonium. But U.S. officials also believe it has a separate program based on enriched uranium, possibly using technology imported from Pakistan. North Korea has denied the allegation.
Iran denies trying to develop nuclear weapons but suspicions persist because it kept secret attempts to enrich uranium for nearly two decades. Although it agreed to open all aspects of its nuclear activities to IAEA perusal late last year, IAEA inspectors recently found designs of advanced enriching equipment it had kept from them.
As well, critics say that Iran is not fully honoring an agreement to suspend uranium enrichment, something denied by Tehran, which says it is interested in the process not to make weapons-grade uranium but to generate nuclear power.
Pakistan - and Khan - became the focus of international investigation on the basis of information Libya and Iran gave the Vienna-based IAEA about where they covertly bought nuclear technology that can be used to make weapons.
In the nuclear procurement chain that Khan has confessed to heading, hundreds of millions of dollars are thought to have changed hands over the past 15 years with key middlemen positioned in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
Former nuclear weapons inspector David Albright said it was his understanding that the drawings found in Libya were "way beyond anything in the public domain" as far as building a warhead were concerned.
President Bush called the leaders of Russia and Italy on the weekend to discuss how to check the spread of dangerous weapons and keep them away from terrorists.
Bush, who last week proposed new ways to halt the illicit nuclear trade, also devoted his radio address to the issue of weapons of mass destruction, telling the American people that "the possibility of secret and sudden attack" with such arms "is the greatest threat before humanity today."
-----------------------------------------------------------------
>> 9/11 WATCH...
Stewardess ID'd Hijackers Early, Transcripts Show
by Gail Sheehy
Hearing the taped voice of a courageous flight attendant as she calmly narrated the doomed course of American Airlines Flight 11 brought it all back. The frozen horror of that September morning two and a half years ago. The unanswered questions. Betty Ong narrated that first hijacking right up to the moment that Mohamed Atta drove the Boeing 767 into the north tower of the World Trade Center.
Twenty-three minutes into her blow-by-blow account, Ong's voice abruptly ceased. "What's going on, Betty?" asked her ground contact, Nydia Gonzalez. "Betty, talk to me. I think we might have lost her."
Emotional catharsis, yes. There was scarcely a dry eye in the Senate hearing room where 10 commissioners are probing the myriad failures of our nation's defenses and response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. But answers? Not many. The most shocking evidence remains hidden in plain sight.
The politically divided 9/11 commission was able to agree on a public airing of four and a half minutes from the Betty Ong tape, which the American public and most of the victims' families heard for the first time on the evening news of Jan. 27. But commissioners were unaware of the crucial information given in an even more revealing phone call, made by another heroic flight attendant on the same plane, Madeline (Amy) Sweeney. They were unaware because their chief of staff, Philip Zelikow, chooses which evidence and witnesses to bring to their attention. Mr. Zelikow, as a former adviser to the pre-9/11 Bush administration, has a blatant conflict.
"My wife's call was the first specific information the airline and the government got that day," said Mike Sweeney, the widowed husband of Amy Sweeney, who went face to face with the hijackers on Flight 11. She gave seat locations and physical descriptions of the hijackers, which allowed officials to identify them as Middle Eastern men--by name--even before the first crash. She gave officials key clues to the fact that this was not a traditional hijacking. And she gave the first and only eyewitness account of a bomb on board.
"How do you know it's a bomb?" asked her phone contact.
"Because the hijackers showed me a bomb," Sweeney said, describing its yellow and red wires.
Sweeney's first call from the plane was at 7:11 a.m. on Sept. 11--the only call in which she displayed emotional upset. Flight 11 was delayed, and she seized the few moments to call home in hopes of talking to her 5-year-old daughter, Anna, to say how sorry she was not to be there to put her on the bus to kindergarten. Ms. Sweeney's son Jack had been born several months premature, and she had taken the maximum time off over the previous summer to be with her children. "But she had to go back that fall, to hold the Boston-to-L.A. trip," explained her husband.
American's Flight 11 took off from Logan Airport in Boston at 7:59 a.m. By 8:14 a.m., the F.A.A. controller following that flight from a facility in Nashua, N.H., already knew it was missing; its transponder had been turned off, and the controller couldn't get a response from the pilots. The air-traffic controller contacted the pilot of United Airlines Flight 175, which at 8:14 also left Boston's Logan bound for California, and asked for his help in locating Flight 11.
Sweeney slid into a passenger seat in the next-to-last row of coach and used an Airfone to call American Airlines Flight Service at Boston's Logan airport. "This is Amy Sweeney," she reported. "I'm on Flight 11--this plane has been hijacked." She was disconnected. She called back: "Listen to me, and listen to me very carefully." Within seconds, her befuddled respondent was replaced by a voice she knew.
"Amy, this is Michael Woodward." The American Airlines flight service manager had been friends with Sweeney for a decade, so he didn't have to waste any time verifying that this wasn't a hoax. "Michael, this plane has been hijacked," Ms. Sweeney repeated. Calmly, she gave him the seat locations of three of the hijackers: 9D, 9G and 10B. She said they were all of Middle Eastern descent, and one spoke English very well.
Mr. Woodward ordered a colleague to punch up those seat locations on the computer. At least 20 minutes before the plane crashed, the airline had the names, addresses, phone numbers and credit cards of three of the five hijackers. They knew that 9G was Abdulaziz al-Omari, 10B was Satam al-Suqami, and 9D was Mohamed Atta--the ringleader of the 9/11 terrorists.
"The nightmare began before the first plane crashed," said Mike Sweeney, "because once my wife gave the seat numbers of the hijackers and Michael Woodward pulled up the passenger information, Mohamed Atta's name was out there. They had to know what they were up against."
Mr. Woodward was simultaneously passing on Sweeney's information to American's headquarters in Dallas-Fort Worth. There was no taping facility in his office, because the most acute emergency normally fielded by a flight service manager would be a call from a crew member faced with 12 passengers in first class and only eight meals. So Mr. Woodward was furiously taking notes.
Amy Sweeney's account alerted the airline that something extraordinary was occurring. She told Mr. Woodward she didn't believe the pilots were flying the plane any longer. She couldn't contact the cockpit. Sweeney may have ventured forward to business class, because she relayed the alarming news to Betty Ong, who was sitting in the rear jump-seat. In professional lingo, she said: "Our No. 1 has been stabbed," referring to a violent attack on the plane's purser, "also No. 5," another flight attendant. She also reported that the passenger in 9B had had his throat slit by the hijacker sitting behind him and appeared to be dead. Betty Ong relayed this information to Nydia Gonzalez, a reservations manager in North Carolina, who simultaneously held another phone to her ear with an open line to American Airlines official Craig Marquis at the company's Dallas headquarters.
The fact that the hijackers initiated their takeover by killing a passenger and stabbing two crew members had to be the first tip-off that this was anything but a standard hijacking. "I don't recall any flight crew or passenger being harmed during a hijacking in the course of my career," said Peg Ogonowski, a senior flight attendant who has flown with American for 28 years.
Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney also reported that the hijackers had used mace or pepper spray and that passengers in business class were unable to breathe. Another dazzling clue to the hijackers' having a unique and violent intent came in Betty Ong's earliest report: "The cockpit is not answering their phone. We can't get into the cockpit. We don't know who's up there."
A male colleague of Ms. Gonzalez then comes on the line and makes the infuriating observation: "Well, if they were shrewd, they'd keep the door closed. Would they not maintain a sterile cockpit?"
To which Ong replied: "I think the guys are up there."
Ms. Sweeney told her ground contact that the plane had radically changed direction; it was flying erratically and was in rapid descent. Mr. Woodward asked her to look out the window--what did she see?
"I see water. I see buildings. We're flying low, we're flying way too low," Sweeney replied, according to the notes taken by Mr. Woodward. Sweeney then took a deep breath and gasped, "Oh, my God."
At 8:46 a.m., Mr. Woodward lost contact with Amy Sweeney--the moment of metamorphosis, when her plane became a missile guided into the tower holding thousands of unsuspecting civilians. "So sometime between 8:30 and 8:46, American must have known that the hijacking was connected to Al Qaeda," said Mike Sweeney. That would be 16 to 32 minutes before the second plane perforated the south tower.
Would American Airlines officials monitoring the Sweeney and Woodward dialogue have known right away that Mohamed Atta was connected to Al Qaeda?
"The answer is probably yes," said 9/11 commission member Bob Kerrey, "but it seems to me that the weakness here, in running up to pre-9/11, is an unwillingness to believe that the United States of America could be attacked. Then you're not putting defensive mechanisms in place. You're not trying to screen out people with connections to Islamic extremist groups."
Peg Ogonowski, the widow of Flight 11's captain, John Ogonowski, knew both Betty and Amy very well. "They had to know they were dealing with zealots," she said. "The words `Middle Eastern hijackers' would put a chill in any flight-crew member's heart. They were unpredictable; you couldn't reason with them."
Ms. Ogonowski knew this from her nearly three decades of experience as a flight attendant for American. She and her husband had dreamt of the time in the not-so-distant future when their teenage children would be old enough that the couple could work the same flight to Europe and enjoy layovers in London and Paris together. She had been scheduled to fly Flight 11 on Sept. 13. After Sept. 11, she imagined herself in Sweeney's shoes: "When Amy picked up the phone--she was mother of two very young children--she had to know that, at that point, she might be being observed by another hijacker sitting in a passenger seat who would put a bullet through her head. What she did was incredibly brave."
How, then, could the commission have missed--or ignored--crucial facts that this very first of the first responders communicated to officials on that fateful day?
"It seems amazing to me that they didn't know," said Mrs. Ogonowski. "The state of Massachusetts has an award in Amy Sweeney's name for civilian bravery." The first recipients were John Ogonowski and Betty Ong. A full-court ceremony was held on Sept. 11, 2002, in Faneuil Hall in Boston, with Senators Kennedy and Kerrey and the state's whole political establishment in attendance.
Even the F.B.I. has recognized Amy Sweeney by bestowing on her its highest civilian honor, the Director's Award for Exceptional Public Service. "Mrs. Sweeney is immeasurably deserving of recognition for her heroic, unselfish and professional manner in which she lived the last moments of her life," according to the F.B.I.
What her husband wants to know is this: "When and how was this information about the hijackers used? Were Amy's last moments put to the best use to protect and save others?"
"We know what she said from notes, and the government has them," said Mary Schiavo, the formidable former Inspector General of the Department of Transportation, whose nickname among aviation officials was "Scary Mary." Ms. Schiavo sat in on the commission's hearing on aviation security on 9/11 and was disgusted by what it left out. "In any other situation, it would be unthinkable to withhold investigative material from an independent commission," she told this writer. "There are usually grave consequences. But the commission is clearly not talking to everybody or not telling us everything."
This is hardly the only evidence hiding in plain sight.
The captain of American's Flight 11 stayed at the controls much of the diverted way from Boston to New York, sending surreptitious radio transmissions to authorities on the ground. Captain John Ogonowski was a strong and burly man with the instincts of a fighter pilot who had survived Vietnam. He gave extraordinary access to the drama inside his cockpit by triggering a "push-to-talk button" on the aircraft's yoke (or wheel). "The button was being pushed intermittently most of the way to New York," an F.A.A. air-traffic controller told The Christian Science Monitor the day after the catastrophe. "He wanted us to know something was wrong. When he pushed the button and the terrorist spoke, we knew there was this voice that was threatening the pilot, and it was clearly threatening."
According to a timeline later adjusted by the F.A.A., Flight 11's transponder was turned off at 8:20 a.m., only 21 minutes after takeoff. (Even before that, by probably a minute or so, Amy Sweeney began her report to American's operations center at Logan.) The plane turned south toward New York, and more than one F.A.A. controller heard a transmission with an ominous statement by a terrorist in the background, saying, "We have more planes. We have other planes." During these transmissions, the pilot's voice and the heavily accented voice of a hijacker were clearly audible, according to two controllers. All of it was recorded by a F.A.A. traffic-control center in Nashua, N.H. According to the reporter, Mark Clayton, the federal law-enforcement officers arrived at the F.A.A. facility shortly after the World Trade Center attack and took the tape.
To this writer's knowledge, there has been no public mention of the pilot's narrative since the news report on Sept. 12, 2001. Families of the flight crew have only heard about it, but when Peg Ogonowski asked American Airlines to let her hear it, she never heard back. Their F.A.A. superiors forbade the controllers to talk to anyone else.
Has the F.B.I. turned this critical tape over to the commission?
At the commission's January panel on aviation security, two rows of gray suits filled the back of the hearing room. They were not inspectors general of any of the government agencies called to testify. In fact, said Mary Schiavo, there is no entity within the administration pushing any consequences. The gray suits were all attorneys for the airlines, hovering around while the big bosses from American and United gave their utterly unrevealing testimonies.
Robert Bonner, the head of Customs and Border Protection, finally shot back at the panel with a startling boast.
"We ran passenger manifests through the system used by Customs--two were hits on our watch list of August 2001," Mr. Bonner testified. "And by looking at the Arab names and their seat locations, ticket purchases and other passenger information, it didn't take a lot to do a rudimentary link analysis. Customs officers were able to ID 19 probable hijackers within 45 minutes."
He meant 45 minutes after four planes had been hijacked and turned into missiles. "I saw the sheet by 11 a.m.," he said, adding proudly, "And that analysis did indeed correctly identify the terrorists."
How has American Airlines responded? According to the widower Mike Sweeney, "Ever since Sept. 11, AMR [the parent company of American Airlines] just wants to forget this whole thing happened. They wouldn't allow me to talk to Michael Woodward, and five months or so: they let him go." The Families Steering Committee urged the commission to interview Michael Woodward about the Sweeney information, as did Ms. Ong's brother, Harry Ong. A couple of days before the hearing on aviation security, a staffer did call Mr. Woodward and ask a few questions. But the explosive narrative offered by Amy Sweeney in her last 23 minutes of life was not included in the 9/11 commission's hearing on aviation security.
The timeline that is most disturbing belongs to the last of the four suicide missions--United Airlines Flight 93, later presumed destined for the U.S. Capitol, if not the White House. Huge discrepancies persist in basic facts, such as when it crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside near Shanksville. The official impact time according to NORAD, the North American Air Defense Command, is 10:03 a.m. Later, U.S. Army seismograph data gave the impact time as 10:06:05. The F.A.A. gives a crash time of 10:07 a.m. And The New York Times, drawing on flight controllers in more than one F.A.A. facility, put the time at 10:10 a.m.
Up to a seven-minute discrepancy? In terms of an air disaster, seven minutes is close to an eternity. The way our nation has historically treated any airline tragedy is to pair up recordings from the cockpit and air-traffic control and parse the timeline down to the hundredths of a second. But as Mary Schiavo points out, "We don't have an NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) investigation here, and they ordinarily dissect the timeline to the thousandth of a second."
Even more curious: The F.A.A. states that it established an open phone line with NORAD to discuss both American Airlines Flight 77 (headed for the Pentagon) and United's Flight 93. If true, NORAD had as many as 50 minutes to order fighter jets to intercept Flight 93 in its path toward Washington, D.C. But NORAD's official timeline claims that F.A.A. notification to NORAD on United Airlines Flight 93 is "not available." Why isn't it available?
Asked when NORAD gave an order for fighter planes to scramble in response to United's Flight 93, the air-defense agency notes only that F-16's were already airborne from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia to intercept American's Flight 77. The latter jet heaved into the Pentagon at either 9:40 a.m. (according to the F.A.A.) or at 9:38 a.m. (according to NORAD). Although the F-16's weren't in the skies over Washington until 9:49, the question is: Did they continue flying north in an attempt to deter the last of the four hijacked jets? The distance was only 129 miles.
The independent commission is in a position to demand such answers, and many more. Have any weapons been recovered from any of the four downed planes? If not, why should the panel assume they were "less-than-four-inch knives," the description repeatedly used in the commission's hearing on aviation security? Remember the airlines' first reports, that the whole job was pulled off with box cutters? In fact, investigators for the commission found that box cutters were reported on only one plane. In any case, box cutters were considered straight razors and were always illegal. Thus the airlines switched their story and produced a snap-open knife of less than four inches at the hearing. This weapon falls conveniently within the aviation-security guidelines pre-9/11.
But bombs? Mace or pepper spray? Gas masks? The F.B.I. dropped the clue that the hijackers had "masks" in a meeting with the Four Moms from New Jersey, the 9/11 widows who rallied for this independent commission.
The Moms want to know if investigators have looked into how the pilots were actually disabled. To think that eight pilots--four of whom were formerly in the military, some with combat experience in Vietnam, and all of whom were in superb physical shape--could have been subdued without a fight or so much as a sound stretches the imagination. Even giving the terrorists credit for a militarily disciplined act of war, it is rare for everything to go right in four separate battles.
Shouldn't the families and the American people know whether or not our government took action to prevent the second attack planned for the command-and-control center in Washington?
Melody Homer is another young widow of a 9/11 pilot. Her husband, LeRoy Homer, a muscular former Air Force pilot, was the first officer of United's Flight 93. The story put out by United--of heroic passengers invading the cockpit and struggling with the terrorists--is not believable to Melody Homer or to Sandy Dahl, widow of the plane's captain, Jason Dahl. Mrs. Dahl was a working flight attendant with United and knew the configuration of that 757 like the back of her hand.
"We can't imagine that passengers were able to get a cart out of its locked berth and push it down the single aisle and jam it into the cockpit with four strong, violent men behind the door," said Ms. Homer. She believes that the victims' family members who broke a confidentiality agreement and gave their interpretation of sounds they'd heard on the cockpit tape misinterpreted the shattering of china. "When a plane goes erratic, china falls."
Now, the most disturbing disconnect of all: The F.A.A. and NORAD had at least 42 minutes to decide what to do about Flight 93. What really happened?
At 9:30 a.m., six minutes after receiving orders from NORAD, three F-16's were airborne, according to NORAD's timeline. At first, the planes were directed toward New York and probably reached 600 miles per hour within two minutes, said Maj. Gen. Mike J. Haugen, adjutant general of the North Dakota National Guard. Once it was apparent that the New York suicide missions were accomplished, the Virginia-based fighters were given a new flight target: Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. The pilots heard an ominous squawk over the plane's transponder, a code that indicates almost an emergency wartime footing. General Haugen says the F-16's were asked to confirm that the Pentagon was on fire. The lead flier looked down and verified the worst.
Then the pilots received the most surreal order of the morning, from a voice identifying itself as a representative of the Secret Service. According to General Haugen, the voice said: "I want you to protect the White House at all costs."
During that time, Vice President Richard Cheney called President George W. Bush to urge him to give the order that any other commercial airliners controlled by hijackers be shot down. In Bob Woodward's book, Bush at War, the time of Mr. Cheney's call was placed before 10 a.m. The Vice President explained to the President that a hijacked airliner was a weapon; even if the airliner was full of civilians, Mr. Cheney insisted, giving American fighter pilots the authority to fire on it was "the only practical answer."
The President responded, according to Mr. Woodward, "You bet."
Defense officials told CNN on Sept. 16, 2001, that Mr. Bush had not given authorization to the Defense Department to shoot down a passenger airliner "until after the Pentagon had been struck."
So what happened in the period between just before 10:00 a.m. and 10:03 (or 10:06, or 10:07)--when, at some point, the United jet crashed in a field in Pennsylvania? Did the President act on Mr. Cheney's advice and order the last and potentially most devastating of airborne missiles brought down before it reached the Capitol? Did Mr. Cheney act on the President's O.K.? Did a U.S. fighter shoot down Flight 93? And why all the secrecy surrounding that last flight?
Melody Homer, the wife of Flight 93's first officer, was at home in Marlton, N.J., the morning of Sept. 11 with their 10-month-old child. Within minutes of seeing the second plane turn into a fireball, Ms. Homer called the Flight Operations Center at John F. Kennedy International Airport, which keeps track of all New York-based pilots. She was told that her husband's flight was fine.
"Whether or not my husband's plane was shot down," the widowed Mrs. Homer said, "the most angering part is reading about how the President handled this."
Mr. Bush was notified 14 minutes after the first attack, at 9 a.m., when he arrived at an elementary school in Sarasota, Fla. He went into a private room and spoke by phone with his national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, and glanced at a TV in the room. Mrs. Homer's soft voice curdles when she describes his reaction: "I can't get over what Bush said when he was called about the first plane hitting the tower: `That's some bad pilot.' Why did people on the street assume right away it was a terrorist hijacking, but our President didn't know? Why did it take so long to ground all civilian aircraft? In the time between when my husband's plane took off [at 8:41 a.m.] and when the second plane hit in New York [9:02 a.m.], they could have turned back to airfield."
In fact, the pilots of Flight 93 are seldom mentioned in news reports--only the 40 passengers. And Mrs. Homer says that hurts. "My husband fought for his country in the Persian Gulf War, and he would have seen his role that day as the same thing--fighting for his country. It's my belief, based on what I've been told by people affiliated with the Air Force, that at least one of the pilots was very instrumental in the outcome of that flight. I do believe the hijackers may have taken it down. But stalling the impetus of the plane so it didn't make it to the Capitol or the White House--that was one of the pilots."
Melody LeRoy later learned from a member of the Air Force who worked with her husband that "a couple of weeks before the incident, they were all sitting around and talking about the intelligence that was filtering through the military that something big was going to happen. For all of this to get ignored," she said as she swallowed a sob, "it's difficult to excuse that."
John Lehman, former Secretary of the Navy and one of the most active interrogators among the commissioners, was told of some of the issues raised in this article. "These are exactly the right questions," he said. "We have to put all these details together and then figure out what went wrong. Who didn't do their job? Not just what was wrong with the existing system, but human beings."
After 14 months of watching while commissioners politely negotiated with a White House that has used every known ruse and invented some new ones to evade, withhold and play peekaboo with the commissioners, the Four Moms and their Families Steering Committee feel frustrated almost to the boiling point.
Who is going to take a long, hard look at the policy failures and the failures of leadership? This seems to be where some members of the 9/11 commission are heading. Commission member Jamie Gorelick, winding up after the two-day hearings in January, said she was "amazed and shocked at how every agency defines its responsibility by leaving out the hard part." She blasted the F.A.A. for ducking any responsibility for the prevention of terrorism. "We saw the same attitude in the F.B.I. and C.I.A.--not to use common sense to evaluate a mission and say what works and what doesn't."
Finally, Ms. Gorelick addressed a pointed question to James Loy, the deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, the vast, Brobdingnagian bureaucracy which now lashes together 22 federal agencies that didn't talk to one another before the terrorist attacks.
"Who is responsible for driving the strategy to defeat Al Qaeda and holding people accountable for carrying it out?" Ms. Gorelick demanded.
"The President is the guy," said Mr. Loy. "And the person next to the President, who is the national security advisor."
The widows are furious that Dr. Rice was allowed to be interviewed in private and has not agreed--nor been subpoenaed--to give her testimony, under oath, before the American people.
When 9/11 commission chairman Tom Kean gave his sobering assessment last December that the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented, the Bush White House saw the bipartisan panel spinning out of its control. In the President's damage-control interview with NBC's Tim Russert last weekend, Mr. Bush was clearly still unwilling to submit to questioning by the 9/11 commission. "Perhaps, perhaps," was his negotiating stance.
Asked why he was appointing yet another commission--this one to quell the uproar over why we attacked Iraq to save ourselves from Saddam's mythical W.M.D.--the President said, "This is a strategic look, kind of a big-picture look about the intelligence-gathering capacities of the United States of America .... Congress has got the capacity to look at the intelligence-gathering without giving away state secrets, and I look forward to all the investigations and looks."
Congress has already given him a big-picture look--in a scathing 900-page report by the joint House and Senate inquiry into the intelligence failures pre-9/11. But the Bush administration doesn't look at what it doesn't want to see.
"It is incomprehensible why this administration has refused to aggressively pursue the leads that our inquiry developed," fumes Senator Bob Graham, the former co-chairman of the inquiry, which ended in 2003. The Bush White House has ignored all but one or two of the joint inquiry's 19 urgent recommendations to make the nation safer against the next attempted terrorist attack. The White House also allowed large portions of the inquiry's final report to be censored (redacted), claiming national security, so that even some members of the current 9/11 commission--whose mandate was to build on the work of the congressional panel--cannot read the evidence.
Senator Graham snorted, "It's absurd."
You may reach Gail Sheehy via email at: gsheehy@observer.com.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Health Care Spending Said $1.7 Trillion
By MARK SHERMAN
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Health Care Spending Said $1.7 Trillion
WASHINGTON (AP) - Health care spending in the United States grew to an estimated $1.7 trillion in 2003 - more than $5,800 for every American - but the pace of growth was slower than in recent years.
Health care also for the first time was projected to make up more than 15 percent of the national economy last year, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said Wednesday.
Government spending on Medicaid and Medicare increased last year, but more slowly than in 2002, helping contain the estimated overall increase in spending, CMS said.
The CMS report, released on the Web site of the journal Health Affairs, said that health care spending grew a projected 7.8 percent in 2003, down from 9.3 percent in 2002.
Health care spending, however, is projected to outpace growth in the rest of the economy for the next 10 years, CMS said. By 2013, annual spending on health is expected to reach $3.4 trillion and be more than 18 percent of gross domestic product.
The projections did not include the anticipated effects of the new Medicare prescription drug law, which will offer seniors prescription drug coverage beginning in 2006. CMS officials said they expect a shift in who pays prescription drug bills rather than a significant increase in spending on drugs.
"Our story, with or without the legislation, doesn't change much," said Stephen Heffler, CMS' deputy chief actuary and lead author of the report.
Prescription drug spending, however, will continue to outpace the rest of health care for the next 10 years, Heffler said at a conference about the report.
Dan Crippen, the former director of the Congressional Budget Office, said that huge changes in health care spending lie just beyond 2013, the end of the period covered in the report, when Baby Boomers start reaching retirement age.
"It will be the beginning of something we haven't seen before," Crippen said.
On the Net:
Health care spending projections: http://www.cms.hhs.gov/statistics/nhe
Health Affairs: http://www.healthaffairs.org
-----------------------------------------------------
Universe's Most Distant Known Object Seen
By ANDREW BRIDGES
ASSOCIATED PRESS
PASADENA, Calif. (AP) -
In a discovery that offers a rare glimpse back to when the universe was just 750 million years old, a team of astrophysicists said Sunday they have detected a tiny galaxy that is the farthest known object from Earth.
"We are confident it is the most distant known object," California Institute of Technology astronomer Richard Ellis said of the galaxy, which lies roughly 13 billion light-years from Earth.
The team uncovered the faint galaxy using two of the most powerful telescopes - one in space, the other in Hawaii - aided by the natural magnification provided by a massive cluster of galaxies. The gravitational tug of the cluster, called Abell 2218, deflects the light of the distant galaxy and magnifies it many times over.
The magnification process, first proposed by Albert Einstein and known as "gravitational lensing," produces double images of the galaxy.
"Without the magnification of 25 afforded by the foreground cluster, this early object could simply not have been identified or studied in any detail with presently available telescopes," said astronomer Jean-Paul Kneib, of Caltech and the Observatoire Midi-Pyrenees in France.
The discovery gives a rare glimpse of the time when the first stars and galaxies began to blink on, ending a period that cosmologists call the Dark Ages, said Robert Kirshner, an astronomer with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
"The possibility is here we really are beginning to peek into that time," said Kirshner, who was not connected with the discovery. "People have gone there in their imagination - they've thought about it. Now we are getting the facts."
The Hubble Space Telescope revealed the first glimpse of the galaxy, backed up by observations made with the Keck Observatory's 10-meter telescopes atop Mauna Kea.
The galaxy is just 2,000 light-years across. That's far smaller than the Milky Way, which is roughly 100,000 light-years in diameter.
Cosmologists have predicted that early galaxies contained stars that were different from the ones that came into being much later in the history of the universe. But the astrophysicists' analysis suggests that the type of massive stars the galaxy contains were common after the end of the Dark Ages, Ellis said.
"That's very interesting if it's true," Kirshner said.
No one knows how long the Dark Ages lasted in the wake of the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.
Word of the discovery came during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Seattle. Further details appear in a forthcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal.
On the Net:
http://www.caltech.edu
http://www2.keck.hawaii.edu/
http://hubblesite.org/
-----------------------------------------------------------
Posted by maximpost
at 8:58 PM EST
