Saturday, May 10, 2003
UNLIMITED OCCUPATION
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday pledged to keep as many U.S. troops in Iraq as necessary to stabilize the country and said it could take longer than a year to create the conditions necessary for a new Iraqi government to assume control of the nation.
Rumsfeld spoke shortly after the United States, Britain and Spain formally presented a draft resolution on Iraq's interim governance to the United Nations Security Council. The draft calls for the United States and Britain to assume the responsibilities of "occupying powers" under international law. It would grant the two countries broad authority for managing Iraq's political and economic life, including control over its oil revenue, for an initial period of a year and longer, if necessary.
Rumsfeld, briefing reporters at the Pentagon, said the resolution's reference to "an initial" occupation of a year "is probably just a review period, because anyone who thinks they know how long it's going to take is fooling themselves."
"The United States is prepared to keep any number of troops that are appropriate and necessary in Iraq for as long as it takes to create a secure and permissive environment so that [the Iraqis] can go about their business of reconstructing their country," Rumsfeld said.
Amid complaints from U.S. officials and military personnel in Iraq about continuing instability and lagging reconstruction efforts, Rumsfeld and his top military commander, Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, conceded problems existed. But they said considerable progress has been made since the war to topple the government of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein began 53 days ago.
Insisting that conditions are improving "in almost every corner of that country," Rumsfeld urged patience. "It's going to take some time," he said at a news conference at the Pentagon. "And we accept that, and we're there to create an environment where that process can take place. And we have patience and we accept the fact that it's untidy. And I hope that others can recognize that and accept it, and put it into some historical context."
With about 135,000 U.S. forces and another 40,000 British troops now in Iraq, Rumsfeld has avoided estimating how many will be necessary over what time period to stabilize the country and ensure its return to self-governance, other than to say that U.S. troop levels could ultimately be reduced.
He has said this would depend in part upon the number of peacekeeping forces contributed by other countries.
But Rumsfeld has in recent weeks left the impression that he was interested in committing as few troops as possible for as short a time as necessary for stabilizing Iraq, given his long-standing assertion that U.S. combat forces in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan should return home as other countries assume peacekeeping obligations.
Yesterday, however, both Rumsfeld and Franks emphasized the open-ended nature of the Pentagon's troop deployments in Iraq.
"I think right now what the future will hold a year, two, three . . .ahead of us is not exactly knowable," Franks said.
Franks, head of the U.S. Central Command, which ran the war, acknowledged that basic services such as health care, electricity and water are improving but are "not where they need to be, and certainly not where they will be."
"Iraq's best days are yet to come," Franks said, "and the Iraqi people are already taking steps to build a new government that will, in fact, be of their choice."
Rumsfeld and Franks commented one day after Army Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, the commander of allied ground forces in Iraq, said in Baghdad that his forces could not guarantee total security in a country the size of California that has 25 million people.
Now that the 1st Armored Division, based in Germany, is heading into Iraq, the total number of U.S. forces on the ground could increase, with Pentagon officials saying that the 3rd Infantry Division -- the main force that invaded Baghdad -- could delay its departure until June.
"Security in that country is absolutely critical to everything else that's going to be done there," Franks said. "A condition has to be established so that the people of Iraq can feel free to unshutter the windows of their shops and go to work and so forth."
He said change in the composition of U.S. forces is likely to take place as heavy combat units are withdrawn and replaced with military police, engineers and less heavily armed forces more suitable to stability operations. But Franks declined to estimate how many troops would be needed over time. "I'm not sure at this point we know exactly what the force structure or size is going to look [like] -- or what the international content is going to look like as we move forward," Franks said.
Last week, senior Bush administration officials revealed a plan for creating three separate commands for managing postwar Iraq to be headed by the United States, Britain and Poland. While the U.S. command would involve primarily U.S. forces, they said, the British and Polish would command multinational forces, with Italy, Spain, Denmark, Bulgaria, Netherlands and Ukraine all agreeing to provide troops.
But by and large, these countries do not seem to be offering large numbers of troops. Earlier this week, Jerzy Szmajdzinski, Poland's defense minister, met with Rumsfeld and said that his country would need $50 million in financial assistance to provide headquarters elements and about 1,500 troops in Iraq for six months. A full year's stay would run about $90 million.
Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar pledged during his visit to Washington this week that Spain would send as many as 1,500 troops but said they would be forbidden from engaging in combat.
Britain, which has already reduced the number of its forces in Iraq from 45,000 to 40,000, held a meeting this week in London with representatives of nations interested in committing peacekeeping forces to the British command in Iraq. But a British official in Washington said it is "too early to [talk] about force commitments, force rotations and length of stay."
Rumsfeld said that "a large number of countries are stepping forward," adding that only a minority of them have said that their commitment of troops would be contingent upon successful passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution.
But questions remain about how many forces NATO allies would be willing to commit, particularly now that NATO is preparing to assume control of a 5,500-troop international force in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Rumsfeld has complained that the peacekeeping force in Afghanistan has been confined to the Kabul area and not deployed across the entire country because so few countries have been willing to commit forces.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday pledged to keep as many U.S. troops in Iraq as necessary to stabilize the country and said it could take longer than a year to create the conditions necessary for a new Iraqi government to assume control of the nation.
Rumsfeld spoke shortly after the United States, Britain and Spain formally presented a draft resolution on Iraq's interim governance to the United Nations Security Council. The draft calls for the United States and Britain to assume the responsibilities of "occupying powers" under international law. It would grant the two countries broad authority for managing Iraq's political and economic life, including control over its oil revenue, for an initial period of a year and longer, if necessary.
Rumsfeld, briefing reporters at the Pentagon, said the resolution's reference to "an initial" occupation of a year "is probably just a review period, because anyone who thinks they know how long it's going to take is fooling themselves."
"The United States is prepared to keep any number of troops that are appropriate and necessary in Iraq for as long as it takes to create a secure and permissive environment so that [the Iraqis] can go about their business of reconstructing their country," Rumsfeld said.
Amid complaints from U.S. officials and military personnel in Iraq about continuing instability and lagging reconstruction efforts, Rumsfeld and his top military commander, Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, conceded problems existed. But they said considerable progress has been made since the war to topple the government of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein began 53 days ago.
Insisting that conditions are improving "in almost every corner of that country," Rumsfeld urged patience. "It's going to take some time," he said at a news conference at the Pentagon. "And we accept that, and we're there to create an environment where that process can take place. And we have patience and we accept the fact that it's untidy. And I hope that others can recognize that and accept it, and put it into some historical context."
With about 135,000 U.S. forces and another 40,000 British troops now in Iraq, Rumsfeld has avoided estimating how many will be necessary over what time period to stabilize the country and ensure its return to self-governance, other than to say that U.S. troop levels could ultimately be reduced.
He has said this would depend in part upon the number of peacekeeping forces contributed by other countries.
But Rumsfeld has in recent weeks left the impression that he was interested in committing as few troops as possible for as short a time as necessary for stabilizing Iraq, given his long-standing assertion that U.S. combat forces in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan should return home as other countries assume peacekeeping obligations.
Yesterday, however, both Rumsfeld and Franks emphasized the open-ended nature of the Pentagon's troop deployments in Iraq.
"I think right now what the future will hold a year, two, three . . .ahead of us is not exactly knowable," Franks said.
Franks, head of the U.S. Central Command, which ran the war, acknowledged that basic services such as health care, electricity and water are improving but are "not where they need to be, and certainly not where they will be."
"Iraq's best days are yet to come," Franks said, "and the Iraqi people are already taking steps to build a new government that will, in fact, be of their choice."
Rumsfeld and Franks commented one day after Army Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, the commander of allied ground forces in Iraq, said in Baghdad that his forces could not guarantee total security in a country the size of California that has 25 million people.
Now that the 1st Armored Division, based in Germany, is heading into Iraq, the total number of U.S. forces on the ground could increase, with Pentagon officials saying that the 3rd Infantry Division -- the main force that invaded Baghdad -- could delay its departure until June.
"Security in that country is absolutely critical to everything else that's going to be done there," Franks said. "A condition has to be established so that the people of Iraq can feel free to unshutter the windows of their shops and go to work and so forth."
He said change in the composition of U.S. forces is likely to take place as heavy combat units are withdrawn and replaced with military police, engineers and less heavily armed forces more suitable to stability operations. But Franks declined to estimate how many troops would be needed over time. "I'm not sure at this point we know exactly what the force structure or size is going to look [like] -- or what the international content is going to look like as we move forward," Franks said.
Last week, senior Bush administration officials revealed a plan for creating three separate commands for managing postwar Iraq to be headed by the United States, Britain and Poland. While the U.S. command would involve primarily U.S. forces, they said, the British and Polish would command multinational forces, with Italy, Spain, Denmark, Bulgaria, Netherlands and Ukraine all agreeing to provide troops.
But by and large, these countries do not seem to be offering large numbers of troops. Earlier this week, Jerzy Szmajdzinski, Poland's defense minister, met with Rumsfeld and said that his country would need $50 million in financial assistance to provide headquarters elements and about 1,500 troops in Iraq for six months. A full year's stay would run about $90 million.
Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar pledged during his visit to Washington this week that Spain would send as many as 1,500 troops but said they would be forbidden from engaging in combat.
Britain, which has already reduced the number of its forces in Iraq from 45,000 to 40,000, held a meeting this week in London with representatives of nations interested in committing peacekeeping forces to the British command in Iraq. But a British official in Washington said it is "too early to [talk] about force commitments, force rotations and length of stay."
Rumsfeld said that "a large number of countries are stepping forward," adding that only a minority of them have said that their commitment of troops would be contingent upon successful passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution.
But questions remain about how many forces NATO allies would be willing to commit, particularly now that NATO is preparing to assume control of a 5,500-troop international force in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Rumsfeld has complained that the peacekeeping force in Afghanistan has been confined to the Kabul area and not deployed across the entire country because so few countries have been willing to commit forces.
SHOCKER: RECYCLED CREDIT CARD NUMBERS
When a credit card user cuts up their card or sees it expire, they will expect that is the last they will see of it. But yesterday a bank revealed that it has recycled old credit card numbers to new customers, opening up the potential for fraud, particularly over the internet.
Clydesdale Bank yesterday admitted that its Mastercard customers might have a credit card number that was previously used by a former card holder. The expiry date is different, but the bank also confessed that when used over the internet, multiple attempts to guess the date could be made without it registering as a potentially illegal transaction.
The bank said it no longer recycles credit card numbers and has ended links with an outsourcing company that was reusing numbers. But it added that this company is used by "a number of high street banks".
Clydesdale customer Stuart Robertson contacted the Guardian's money website after finding he could access another customer's credit card. Mr Robertson cancelled his Mastercard a few years ago but on the bank's internet service he found the card was still "live". After 23 attempts he guessed the expiry date and transferred a small sum into his own account, to illustrate the breach of security.
Clydesdale spokesman Alexander Wright insisted the number of card holders affected is small: "The company we now use doesn't reissue card numbers. We will have to investigate this further."
The expiry date was not an effective barrier because the bank allows standing orders to be taken off a credit card even if the card has expired. "When someone's got a standing order set up over a long period and their credit card expires, they don't then have that payment refused by that company and thereby get a negative mark on their credit record," said Mr Wright.
When a credit card user cuts up their card or sees it expire, they will expect that is the last they will see of it. But yesterday a bank revealed that it has recycled old credit card numbers to new customers, opening up the potential for fraud, particularly over the internet.
Clydesdale Bank yesterday admitted that its Mastercard customers might have a credit card number that was previously used by a former card holder. The expiry date is different, but the bank also confessed that when used over the internet, multiple attempts to guess the date could be made without it registering as a potentially illegal transaction.
The bank said it no longer recycles credit card numbers and has ended links with an outsourcing company that was reusing numbers. But it added that this company is used by "a number of high street banks".
Clydesdale customer Stuart Robertson contacted the Guardian's money website after finding he could access another customer's credit card. Mr Robertson cancelled his Mastercard a few years ago but on the bank's internet service he found the card was still "live". After 23 attempts he guessed the expiry date and transferred a small sum into his own account, to illustrate the breach of security.
Clydesdale spokesman Alexander Wright insisted the number of card holders affected is small: "The company we now use doesn't reissue card numbers. We will have to investigate this further."
The expiry date was not an effective barrier because the bank allows standing orders to be taken off a credit card even if the card has expired. "When someone's got a standing order set up over a long period and their credit card expires, they don't then have that payment refused by that company and thereby get a negative mark on their credit record," said Mr Wright.
COALITION FINGERS THE OIL
America and Britain yesterday laid out their blueprint for postwar Iraq in a draft resolution to the United Nations security council, naming themselves as "occupying powers" and giving them control of the country's oil revenues.
The proposal, which would relegate the UN to an advisory role, alongside the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, while lifting economic sanctions, was expected to pass despite serious concerns from some permanent members.
The resolution will probably face amendments from France and Russia, who have favoured suspending the sanctions but advocate some control being vested in the UN until an Iraqi government is established.
The French president, Jacques Chirac, yesterday intimated that there was room for negotiation: "I can confirm to you that France's will [is] to undertake discussions on the future of this country in an open and constructive spirit."
Russia, which has considerable economic interests at stake, was less emollient. Before yesterday's meeting, Russian ambassador Sergei Lavrov warned that he would pose "lots of questions" to US ambassador John Negroponte.
In a further sign of the confusion over the US role in Iraq, the defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday that a one-year timeline attached to the presence of US and British forces in Iraq was probably "just a review period" in the overall postwar plan. "Anyone who thinks they know how long it's going to take is fooling themselves," Mr Rumsfeld said. "It's not knowable."
Outside the UN, the proposals provoked a vociferous response from the European Union's commissioner for aid and development, Poul Nielsen, who accused America of seeking to seize control of Iraq's vast oil wealth.
Mr Nielson, a Dane who has just returned from a three-day fact-finding mission to Iraq said the US was "on its way to becoming a member of Opec", the Middle Eastern oil cartel.
"They will appropriate the oil," he told the Danish public service DR radio station. "It is very difficult to see how this would make sense in any other way.
"The unwillingness to give the UN a genuine, legal well-defined role, also in the broader context of rebuilding Iraq after Saddam ... speaks a language that is quite clear."
Eager to avoid another bitter transatlantic diplomatic row, the commission headquarters issued a swift rebuttal, saying Mr Nielson's views did not "reflect the opinion of the commission as a whole".
Iraqis also responded frostily to the plans, praising the lifting of sanctions but calling for the UN or an Iraqi interim government to take charge of the nation's oil wealth.
"It is a good initiative that should have taken place a long time ago," said Ragheb Naaman, 43, who works for Iraq's military industrialisation commission in charge of developing weapons. "But we don't accept that the revenues be controlled by the United States and Britain."
The text, which two senior council diplomats called "hard" and "in your face", defines the US and Britain as "occupying powers" - a legal designation apparently aimed at reassuring council members that America will adhere to its obligations under international law. A former state and defence department official told the Wall Street Journal that occupying power status meant the US cannot give all reconstruction contracts to American companies and "it can't choose the political leadership of the country".
America and Britain yesterday laid out their blueprint for postwar Iraq in a draft resolution to the United Nations security council, naming themselves as "occupying powers" and giving them control of the country's oil revenues.
The proposal, which would relegate the UN to an advisory role, alongside the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, while lifting economic sanctions, was expected to pass despite serious concerns from some permanent members.
The resolution will probably face amendments from France and Russia, who have favoured suspending the sanctions but advocate some control being vested in the UN until an Iraqi government is established.
The French president, Jacques Chirac, yesterday intimated that there was room for negotiation: "I can confirm to you that France's will [is] to undertake discussions on the future of this country in an open and constructive spirit."
Russia, which has considerable economic interests at stake, was less emollient. Before yesterday's meeting, Russian ambassador Sergei Lavrov warned that he would pose "lots of questions" to US ambassador John Negroponte.
In a further sign of the confusion over the US role in Iraq, the defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday that a one-year timeline attached to the presence of US and British forces in Iraq was probably "just a review period" in the overall postwar plan. "Anyone who thinks they know how long it's going to take is fooling themselves," Mr Rumsfeld said. "It's not knowable."
Outside the UN, the proposals provoked a vociferous response from the European Union's commissioner for aid and development, Poul Nielsen, who accused America of seeking to seize control of Iraq's vast oil wealth.
Mr Nielson, a Dane who has just returned from a three-day fact-finding mission to Iraq said the US was "on its way to becoming a member of Opec", the Middle Eastern oil cartel.
"They will appropriate the oil," he told the Danish public service DR radio station. "It is very difficult to see how this would make sense in any other way.
"The unwillingness to give the UN a genuine, legal well-defined role, also in the broader context of rebuilding Iraq after Saddam ... speaks a language that is quite clear."
Eager to avoid another bitter transatlantic diplomatic row, the commission headquarters issued a swift rebuttal, saying Mr Nielson's views did not "reflect the opinion of the commission as a whole".
Iraqis also responded frostily to the plans, praising the lifting of sanctions but calling for the UN or an Iraqi interim government to take charge of the nation's oil wealth.
"It is a good initiative that should have taken place a long time ago," said Ragheb Naaman, 43, who works for Iraq's military industrialisation commission in charge of developing weapons. "But we don't accept that the revenues be controlled by the United States and Britain."
The text, which two senior council diplomats called "hard" and "in your face", defines the US and Britain as "occupying powers" - a legal designation apparently aimed at reassuring council members that America will adhere to its obligations under international law. A former state and defence department official told the Wall Street Journal that occupying power status meant the US cannot give all reconstruction contracts to American companies and "it can't choose the political leadership of the country".
SARS QUACKERY; A LOT OF BULL
BEIJING, May 9 ? With hotels empty and foreign businesses fleeing China in fear of SARS, it goes without saying that the new pneumonia has decimated Beijing's economy. But you would not know it here at the White Pagoda Pharmacy.
Packets of an herbal SARS prevention brew are selling like lemonade on the Fourth of July, and bottles of Long An 84 disinfectant bleach ? limit one to a customer ? seem to grow legs and race out the door.
"When we get a new product, we run out in a day, because people are crazy the way they are buying," said a plump, bored, masked cashier near the entrance, who gave her name only as Ms. Qin. "But you know ? they know ? there is no treatment for SARS."
Here in Beijing, SARS has spawned a booming industry, a macabre world of potions, creams, disinfectants, shots, gloves, masks and more, many of dubious utility. For weeks now, binge buying of the latest "must have" personal weapon against the coronavirus has left store shelves empty as neighbor fights neighbor in a perceived battle for survival. To make matters worse, every few days a newspaper, a Chinese expert or a government agency recommends a new product as particularly effective, brand name often included.
The endorsement is a bonanza for companies with products so anointed, as millions of customers rush to the stores.
Today, as newly reported SARS cases dropped to 48, only about half the recent daily average, a health official said there was growing evidence that the city's epidemic had plateaued and might soon start to decline.
Nevertheless, the lively market in SARS nostrums rolled along, with hot items like Xiong Xian Tai, an extract of newborn bull thymus that is given by injection and costs more than $100, and Zhuan Yi Yin Zi, a drink made from the spleens of healthy animals.
SARS prevention strategies range from the common, like vitamin C, to the mysterious. Doctors at several hospitals in Beijing have taken to sniffing a pungent rust-colored oil extracted from a weed as they report for work each day.
Indeed, the SARS outbreak in Beijing has created a medical marketing dream: 14 million worried but healthy people, filled with anxiety about an untreatable and often deadly virus.
Add to that a growing middle class with disposable income and a long Chinese belief in health tonics, and you have a prescription for panic buying of any product that develops the slightest buzz.
"Before SARS we sent 200 crates to Beijing a month," said Zhu Qingwen, 68, an inventor from Fujian Province who in 1993 came up with a gel that is rubbed on the hands, supposedly to fortify the immune system. "Now we are sending 300 a day. It can be used for treatment and also prevention, since it helps enhance your immunity."
There were developments outside Beijing today as well. The World Health Organization, which has been deeply concerned about the SARS epidemic spreading from Beijing to the hinterland, received permission to send a team to Hebei Province, which borders on Beijing and has a large transient population.
The team will study existing surveillance and treatment policies, to see if the outlying areas have the knowledge and resources to contain the disease should it spread there.
In the meantime, many provinces and cities in China have already given their seal of approval to medicinal teas made from herbal ingredients to be drunk by healthy people in an effort to prevent the disease.
Recipes vary widely from place to place, though, and pharmacies often run out of the ingredients to make the locally sanctioned brews, which often include things like the root of membranous milk vetch to the capsule of weeping forsythia.
Although China's acting health minister, Wu Yi, proclaimed this week that "Chinese medicine is an important force in the fight against SARS," there are no scientific studies to show that such products are effective.
"It's part of the Chinese tradition to drink these medicines, and at the very least it gives you peace of mind," said Peng Baoyu, a policeman with two masks tied over a double chin, who was buying a three-day supply of anti-SARS tea for himself at a local pharmacy.
With sales restricted in recent weeks, he had used his first allotment of 15 packages to treat his wife, child and in-laws, he said.
Since last month, prices have skyrocketed for the precious anti-SARS ingredients at China's largest wholesale herbal medicine market, in Anguo, two hours south of Beijing.
BEIJING, May 9 ? With hotels empty and foreign businesses fleeing China in fear of SARS, it goes without saying that the new pneumonia has decimated Beijing's economy. But you would not know it here at the White Pagoda Pharmacy.
Packets of an herbal SARS prevention brew are selling like lemonade on the Fourth of July, and bottles of Long An 84 disinfectant bleach ? limit one to a customer ? seem to grow legs and race out the door.
"When we get a new product, we run out in a day, because people are crazy the way they are buying," said a plump, bored, masked cashier near the entrance, who gave her name only as Ms. Qin. "But you know ? they know ? there is no treatment for SARS."
Here in Beijing, SARS has spawned a booming industry, a macabre world of potions, creams, disinfectants, shots, gloves, masks and more, many of dubious utility. For weeks now, binge buying of the latest "must have" personal weapon against the coronavirus has left store shelves empty as neighbor fights neighbor in a perceived battle for survival. To make matters worse, every few days a newspaper, a Chinese expert or a government agency recommends a new product as particularly effective, brand name often included.
The endorsement is a bonanza for companies with products so anointed, as millions of customers rush to the stores.
Today, as newly reported SARS cases dropped to 48, only about half the recent daily average, a health official said there was growing evidence that the city's epidemic had plateaued and might soon start to decline.
Nevertheless, the lively market in SARS nostrums rolled along, with hot items like Xiong Xian Tai, an extract of newborn bull thymus that is given by injection and costs more than $100, and Zhuan Yi Yin Zi, a drink made from the spleens of healthy animals.
SARS prevention strategies range from the common, like vitamin C, to the mysterious. Doctors at several hospitals in Beijing have taken to sniffing a pungent rust-colored oil extracted from a weed as they report for work each day.
Indeed, the SARS outbreak in Beijing has created a medical marketing dream: 14 million worried but healthy people, filled with anxiety about an untreatable and often deadly virus.
Add to that a growing middle class with disposable income and a long Chinese belief in health tonics, and you have a prescription for panic buying of any product that develops the slightest buzz.
"Before SARS we sent 200 crates to Beijing a month," said Zhu Qingwen, 68, an inventor from Fujian Province who in 1993 came up with a gel that is rubbed on the hands, supposedly to fortify the immune system. "Now we are sending 300 a day. It can be used for treatment and also prevention, since it helps enhance your immunity."
There were developments outside Beijing today as well. The World Health Organization, which has been deeply concerned about the SARS epidemic spreading from Beijing to the hinterland, received permission to send a team to Hebei Province, which borders on Beijing and has a large transient population.
The team will study existing surveillance and treatment policies, to see if the outlying areas have the knowledge and resources to contain the disease should it spread there.
In the meantime, many provinces and cities in China have already given their seal of approval to medicinal teas made from herbal ingredients to be drunk by healthy people in an effort to prevent the disease.
Recipes vary widely from place to place, though, and pharmacies often run out of the ingredients to make the locally sanctioned brews, which often include things like the root of membranous milk vetch to the capsule of weeping forsythia.
Although China's acting health minister, Wu Yi, proclaimed this week that "Chinese medicine is an important force in the fight against SARS," there are no scientific studies to show that such products are effective.
"It's part of the Chinese tradition to drink these medicines, and at the very least it gives you peace of mind," said Peng Baoyu, a policeman with two masks tied over a double chin, who was buying a three-day supply of anti-SARS tea for himself at a local pharmacy.
With sales restricted in recent weeks, he had used his first allotment of 15 packages to treat his wife, child and in-laws, he said.
Since last month, prices have skyrocketed for the precious anti-SARS ingredients at China's largest wholesale herbal medicine market, in Anguo, two hours south of Beijing.
Friday, May 09, 2003
UNSETTLED BY PEACE
EL CAJON, Calif. -- Ahlam Almissouri got the summons she had been waiting 12 years for last month.
Her husband, Tariq, a former colonel in the Iraqi army who had returned to the Middle East to help the U.S. oust Saddam Hussein, telephoned their home in this San Diego suburb and told her to start packing.
"Get ready to come back," he said. Hussein was finished. The Kurdish family's long exile was finally over.
Hope and joy light Almissouri's eyes at the thought of going back ? living again near her mother at her old home in Dohuk, in northern Iraq, near Turkey. Then she looks at her children, chattering across the room in the argot of the Southern California suburbs, and her face falls.
All six of them, now teenagers and young adults, were born in Iraq. They burn with hatred for Hussein. And seared into their memories is the family's terrible flight from his army in 1991, through the rugged mountains to Turkey. During those bleak, snowy days, the youngest daughter was left behind (they were later reunited) and the oldest daughter ? 8 at the time ? was plagued by a bullet wound to the wrist that needed medical attention.
But as they recount those frightening times, these kids could be any of their El Cajon peers, except for the details: "Oh, yeah, HEL-LO," says Beri, now 20, referring to the terror she felt in the mountains. She doesn't dwell on the topic, though, and the children's conversation slips easily from the long-ago journey to school, to music and to war.
How could these American children pack up and move back to Dohuk? their mother wonders. How could she feel at home in a place where her children don't feel comfortable?
"I am in the middle," she says in the family's living room a few days after receiving her husband's news. Watching her children eat ice cream and fight over the remote control, her genial expression crinkles into a worried frown. "I am so confused," she says. "It is so hard."
As the family gathers in front of the TV, switching from the satellite transmissions of the Arabic channel Al Jazeera to CNN, the situation weighs on everyone.
"My dad could come back," says Beri, who has bleached blond hair and perfectly painted toenails and wants to be a dental assistant. "I was not looking forward to the war," she adds matter-of-factly, "because I knew this time would come, and it's something we all don't want to have to deal with right now.... It's tough, dude."
_______
The family lives in a rented house with plush carpet and bright picture windows overlooking Granite Hills High School's sports fields and the hills beyond. In the yard, Ahlam has planted herbs with seeds that her mother sent from Iraq.
She loves to sip her evening tea as the sun sets, clucking over her plants and listening to her children's jokes. Twenty yards away is a new trampoline, where the children like to bounce their 45-year-old mother in her traditional Kurdish robes as she shrieks and giggles. It's comfortable, but it's a far cry from the sprawling pink house with the gardener and the maid in Dohuk.
Ahlam was brought up in that city, raised to revere the men in her family who fought the Iraqi regime and dreamed of a Kurdish state. At 18, she became a primary school teacher. One day Tariq Almissouri, an engineering graduate, strode onto campus to visit his sister, a teacher there also.
He was immediately smitten with Ahlam, but she refused to talk to him ? it wasn't appropriate for young women to speak to strange men. He dropped by again. She sent him a message: "Don't come. It's bad for my reputation."
But he persisted, eventually winning permission from Ahlam's father to marry her. In 1979 they wed. The next eight years brought them their six children.
Tariq was drafted into the army. Eventually, family members say, he rose to the rank of colonel.
It was difficult to be a Kurd in Hussein's army. For hundreds of years, Kurds, who number about 25 million and describe themselves as the largest nationality on the planet without its own state, have been dominated by powerful empires and nations: Turkey, Iran, Iraq. In the late 1980s, Hussein turned his army on the Kurds in an "ethnic cleansing" campaign, killing an estimated 180,000, including 5,000 who died in chemical attacks in Halabja, a northern city near the border with Iran.
Ahlam Almissouri lost nearly half a dozen relatives there. Meanwhile, she said, her husband had managed to walk a fine line, rising in the army while maintaining secret contacts with relatives who were Kurdish guerrillas. But he tossed his lot in with the rebels in 1991 and rose with them against the Iraqi regime after that year's Persian Gulf War, according to their oldest son, Peter, 22.
The decision upended life for Ahlam and the children, who fled Dohuk to stay with relatives elsewhere. The Iraqi army was advancing, crushing the Kurdish rebellion.
At 1 a.m. on a spring morning in 1991, Ahlam awoke with a start when a bomb crashed down a block away, shaking the house where she slept and stirring up huge clouds of dust. Peter and his brother Shivan were with her husband in another town.
The younger children were with her, except for Delene, then 3, who was at her mother-in-law's house. Terrified, Ahlam grabbed Beri, 8; Zeen, 5; and Ayad, 4, snatched up a few provisions and ran out into the frigid night.
Beri was in no shape for the journey that would follow. She had caught a bullet in the wrist when someone fired a gun at a recent gathering. Though she was not seriously hurt, she was in pain. But a visit to the doctor would have to wait.
For three days, the four, accompanied by dozens of members of their extended family, trudged over snowy mountain passes toward Turkey, their hunger growing. At night, they slept huddled together in vain attempts to stay warm.
"It was snowing, and it was so cold. So cold I cannot describe it," Ahlam says, drawing her arms around herself at the memory. "And we walk and walk and walk. It was so hard to walk in the snow."
On the third afternoon, she heard a shout and recognized her husband's voice calling her name. She turned and there he was, with Peter and Shivan each clutching one of his hands.
"I have been looking all over for you," her husband said.
Ahlam cried for joy. "I was so happy," she recalls.
Finally, the family reached a refugee camp on the Turkish border. Ahlam, tormented by thoughts of Delene, the daughter left behind with relatives, sent her husband back home to find her.
He discovered she was still in Dohuk, and when the fighting stopped, the child was delivered to the camp by relatives and reunited with her family. Now a long-haired teenager with dimples, Delene laughs at the story of her separation from the family, though her mother still cannot.
_______
In the refugee camp, the family was granted U.S. residency. Officials sent them to Phoenix, but they moved to El Cajon within a few months, drawn by its large population of Iraqi exiles.
That community now includes about 8,000 Kurds, many of whom arrived in the mid-1990s. There are also large numbers of Iraqi Catholics and Shiite Muslims from southern Iraq.
"First, when we came, oh my God, it was so hard," Ahlam says. The children felt ostracized. They didn't speak English, and they had no idea how to dress. Peter, now a hipster in jeans who has recorded his own rap song, still cringes at the memory of wearing tuxedo pants ? his nicest item ? to school.
At home, their mother felt equally out of place. Knowing that her heavy Kurdish dress and cotton head scarf would draw stares, she would change into clothes bought in the United States to run to the store.
She volunteered every day in Delene's preschool classroom and eventually was hired as a teacher's aide. And each evening, Ahlam, who spoke little English but had studied it, would sit her children on the floor and drill new words into their heads.
"She taught us the alphabet," says Peter, who was dropped into fourth grade at age 11.
"We got into fights," he says. Other students would make fun of him and his siblings. "Oh, you don't know how to speak English," they would tell him. "Go back to Iraq."
"That's how I learned English," he recalls with a laugh.
Slowly, the family began to fit in. They acquired a taste for pizza. The girls, who keep a pile of fashion magazines in the bathroom, learned to paint their toenails. The boys threw themselves into school sports. Varsity letters, prom pictures and other symbols of American high school life dot their home. And Ahlam Almissouri has a prize of her own: She proudly shows off a certificate in early childhood education from nearby Cuyamaca Community College.
It was more difficult for Tariq to find his place, family members say. Accustomed to commanding troops, he now drove a taxi, ferrying tourists around San Diego. "He thinks it's kind of like a slave job, because he picks up luggage," Delene says.
But he saw no other option. Until recently.
_______
Last fall, as the buildup to war began, Tariq, 47, was approached, like many others in El Cajon, by organizers of the Free Iraqi Forces, a U.S.-funded group that hopes to become the nucleus of Iraq's new army. Would he go to Hungary to train, then lend his language skills and knowledge of the Iraqi military and terrain to U.S. forces in Iraq?
Government agents came to the Almissouri home, members of the family said. Ahlam put out cookies and tea, and listened as they asked her husband what kind of government he wished for Iraq and whether he would like to see Hussein removed.
Tariq answered the call ? talking, as he prepared for departure ? of holding a position of responsibility again and of being reunited with friends and family.
Ahlam understood. But then her husband did something that nearly broke her heart: He signed up her beloved second son, Shivan, 21, to go with him. "She went crazy when she found out," says Beri.
Since graduating from high school a few years before, Shivan had drifted a bit, his siblings say. Some of his friends drank, and the family was worried that his life was not headed in the right direction.
Tariq felt that a stint helping the U.S. Army would do wonders for Shivan. Peter, who attends community college and wants to become a doctor, could stay in California, watch over the family and take over his father's cab business.
In February, father and son left. The house felt empty.
Ahlam was sick with worry about what might happen to her son; she knew her husband could take care of himself. And with the family breadwinner gone, making ends meet was even more difficult than it had already been on a taxi driver's earnings. Peter started driving his father's cab on weekends. Beri chipped in some earnings from her job in a coffee shop.
Whenever the telephone rang, the whole family ran for it. Shivan called, saying he had left Hungary but couldn't tell them where he was. He called again a few weeks later to say he was fine, and happy; his mother should not worry.
A letter arrived from Tariq, posted from Hungary, full of dreams for the future. Then, when the major fighting stopped, came his call with the news that he would not return. Ten days later, he called again. He had been to Baghdad. He hoped for an important role in Iraq's reconstruction.
In El Cajon, the TV flickers constantly with scenes from the foreign land that the Almissouris still, reflexively, refer to as home. Although they live for the times the phone rings with news from afar, the calls present an unexpected quandary: What happens to a family when they can't agree where home is?
"We are all confused right now," says Peter, who is nevertheless proud that his father wants to help rebuild Iraq.
Tariq, Peter says, "was a military man. He wants to have that back. He wants to have us follow him. He thinks it might be something we have been waiting for all this time. But really, he's been waiting all this time."
Beri doesn't want to go back. "That's not where I belong," she says.
Delene, who has almost no memory of Iraq, says she would like to go for a long visit. Zeen, 17, and Ayad, 16, echo that.
Their mother listens, her anxiety rising. She wishes that her children wanted to move back. She wishes that Iraq could offer them the opportunities they have here. She wishes Shivan would come home.
"I feel confused and trapped," she says.
"If I didn't have my kids, I would go back. But if I'm not with my children, I don't have a home."
EL CAJON, Calif. -- Ahlam Almissouri got the summons she had been waiting 12 years for last month.
Her husband, Tariq, a former colonel in the Iraqi army who had returned to the Middle East to help the U.S. oust Saddam Hussein, telephoned their home in this San Diego suburb and told her to start packing.
"Get ready to come back," he said. Hussein was finished. The Kurdish family's long exile was finally over.
Hope and joy light Almissouri's eyes at the thought of going back ? living again near her mother at her old home in Dohuk, in northern Iraq, near Turkey. Then she looks at her children, chattering across the room in the argot of the Southern California suburbs, and her face falls.
All six of them, now teenagers and young adults, were born in Iraq. They burn with hatred for Hussein. And seared into their memories is the family's terrible flight from his army in 1991, through the rugged mountains to Turkey. During those bleak, snowy days, the youngest daughter was left behind (they were later reunited) and the oldest daughter ? 8 at the time ? was plagued by a bullet wound to the wrist that needed medical attention.
But as they recount those frightening times, these kids could be any of their El Cajon peers, except for the details: "Oh, yeah, HEL-LO," says Beri, now 20, referring to the terror she felt in the mountains. She doesn't dwell on the topic, though, and the children's conversation slips easily from the long-ago journey to school, to music and to war.
How could these American children pack up and move back to Dohuk? their mother wonders. How could she feel at home in a place where her children don't feel comfortable?
"I am in the middle," she says in the family's living room a few days after receiving her husband's news. Watching her children eat ice cream and fight over the remote control, her genial expression crinkles into a worried frown. "I am so confused," she says. "It is so hard."
As the family gathers in front of the TV, switching from the satellite transmissions of the Arabic channel Al Jazeera to CNN, the situation weighs on everyone.
"My dad could come back," says Beri, who has bleached blond hair and perfectly painted toenails and wants to be a dental assistant. "I was not looking forward to the war," she adds matter-of-factly, "because I knew this time would come, and it's something we all don't want to have to deal with right now.... It's tough, dude."
_______
The family lives in a rented house with plush carpet and bright picture windows overlooking Granite Hills High School's sports fields and the hills beyond. In the yard, Ahlam has planted herbs with seeds that her mother sent from Iraq.
She loves to sip her evening tea as the sun sets, clucking over her plants and listening to her children's jokes. Twenty yards away is a new trampoline, where the children like to bounce their 45-year-old mother in her traditional Kurdish robes as she shrieks and giggles. It's comfortable, but it's a far cry from the sprawling pink house with the gardener and the maid in Dohuk.
Ahlam was brought up in that city, raised to revere the men in her family who fought the Iraqi regime and dreamed of a Kurdish state. At 18, she became a primary school teacher. One day Tariq Almissouri, an engineering graduate, strode onto campus to visit his sister, a teacher there also.
He was immediately smitten with Ahlam, but she refused to talk to him ? it wasn't appropriate for young women to speak to strange men. He dropped by again. She sent him a message: "Don't come. It's bad for my reputation."
But he persisted, eventually winning permission from Ahlam's father to marry her. In 1979 they wed. The next eight years brought them their six children.
Tariq was drafted into the army. Eventually, family members say, he rose to the rank of colonel.
It was difficult to be a Kurd in Hussein's army. For hundreds of years, Kurds, who number about 25 million and describe themselves as the largest nationality on the planet without its own state, have been dominated by powerful empires and nations: Turkey, Iran, Iraq. In the late 1980s, Hussein turned his army on the Kurds in an "ethnic cleansing" campaign, killing an estimated 180,000, including 5,000 who died in chemical attacks in Halabja, a northern city near the border with Iran.
Ahlam Almissouri lost nearly half a dozen relatives there. Meanwhile, she said, her husband had managed to walk a fine line, rising in the army while maintaining secret contacts with relatives who were Kurdish guerrillas. But he tossed his lot in with the rebels in 1991 and rose with them against the Iraqi regime after that year's Persian Gulf War, according to their oldest son, Peter, 22.
The decision upended life for Ahlam and the children, who fled Dohuk to stay with relatives elsewhere. The Iraqi army was advancing, crushing the Kurdish rebellion.
At 1 a.m. on a spring morning in 1991, Ahlam awoke with a start when a bomb crashed down a block away, shaking the house where she slept and stirring up huge clouds of dust. Peter and his brother Shivan were with her husband in another town.
The younger children were with her, except for Delene, then 3, who was at her mother-in-law's house. Terrified, Ahlam grabbed Beri, 8; Zeen, 5; and Ayad, 4, snatched up a few provisions and ran out into the frigid night.
Beri was in no shape for the journey that would follow. She had caught a bullet in the wrist when someone fired a gun at a recent gathering. Though she was not seriously hurt, she was in pain. But a visit to the doctor would have to wait.
For three days, the four, accompanied by dozens of members of their extended family, trudged over snowy mountain passes toward Turkey, their hunger growing. At night, they slept huddled together in vain attempts to stay warm.
"It was snowing, and it was so cold. So cold I cannot describe it," Ahlam says, drawing her arms around herself at the memory. "And we walk and walk and walk. It was so hard to walk in the snow."
On the third afternoon, she heard a shout and recognized her husband's voice calling her name. She turned and there he was, with Peter and Shivan each clutching one of his hands.
"I have been looking all over for you," her husband said.
Ahlam cried for joy. "I was so happy," she recalls.
Finally, the family reached a refugee camp on the Turkish border. Ahlam, tormented by thoughts of Delene, the daughter left behind with relatives, sent her husband back home to find her.
He discovered she was still in Dohuk, and when the fighting stopped, the child was delivered to the camp by relatives and reunited with her family. Now a long-haired teenager with dimples, Delene laughs at the story of her separation from the family, though her mother still cannot.
_______
In the refugee camp, the family was granted U.S. residency. Officials sent them to Phoenix, but they moved to El Cajon within a few months, drawn by its large population of Iraqi exiles.
That community now includes about 8,000 Kurds, many of whom arrived in the mid-1990s. There are also large numbers of Iraqi Catholics and Shiite Muslims from southern Iraq.
"First, when we came, oh my God, it was so hard," Ahlam says. The children felt ostracized. They didn't speak English, and they had no idea how to dress. Peter, now a hipster in jeans who has recorded his own rap song, still cringes at the memory of wearing tuxedo pants ? his nicest item ? to school.
At home, their mother felt equally out of place. Knowing that her heavy Kurdish dress and cotton head scarf would draw stares, she would change into clothes bought in the United States to run to the store.
She volunteered every day in Delene's preschool classroom and eventually was hired as a teacher's aide. And each evening, Ahlam, who spoke little English but had studied it, would sit her children on the floor and drill new words into their heads.
"She taught us the alphabet," says Peter, who was dropped into fourth grade at age 11.
"We got into fights," he says. Other students would make fun of him and his siblings. "Oh, you don't know how to speak English," they would tell him. "Go back to Iraq."
"That's how I learned English," he recalls with a laugh.
Slowly, the family began to fit in. They acquired a taste for pizza. The girls, who keep a pile of fashion magazines in the bathroom, learned to paint their toenails. The boys threw themselves into school sports. Varsity letters, prom pictures and other symbols of American high school life dot their home. And Ahlam Almissouri has a prize of her own: She proudly shows off a certificate in early childhood education from nearby Cuyamaca Community College.
It was more difficult for Tariq to find his place, family members say. Accustomed to commanding troops, he now drove a taxi, ferrying tourists around San Diego. "He thinks it's kind of like a slave job, because he picks up luggage," Delene says.
But he saw no other option. Until recently.
_______
Last fall, as the buildup to war began, Tariq, 47, was approached, like many others in El Cajon, by organizers of the Free Iraqi Forces, a U.S.-funded group that hopes to become the nucleus of Iraq's new army. Would he go to Hungary to train, then lend his language skills and knowledge of the Iraqi military and terrain to U.S. forces in Iraq?
Government agents came to the Almissouri home, members of the family said. Ahlam put out cookies and tea, and listened as they asked her husband what kind of government he wished for Iraq and whether he would like to see Hussein removed.
Tariq answered the call ? talking, as he prepared for departure ? of holding a position of responsibility again and of being reunited with friends and family.
Ahlam understood. But then her husband did something that nearly broke her heart: He signed up her beloved second son, Shivan, 21, to go with him. "She went crazy when she found out," says Beri.
Since graduating from high school a few years before, Shivan had drifted a bit, his siblings say. Some of his friends drank, and the family was worried that his life was not headed in the right direction.
Tariq felt that a stint helping the U.S. Army would do wonders for Shivan. Peter, who attends community college and wants to become a doctor, could stay in California, watch over the family and take over his father's cab business.
In February, father and son left. The house felt empty.
Ahlam was sick with worry about what might happen to her son; she knew her husband could take care of himself. And with the family breadwinner gone, making ends meet was even more difficult than it had already been on a taxi driver's earnings. Peter started driving his father's cab on weekends. Beri chipped in some earnings from her job in a coffee shop.
Whenever the telephone rang, the whole family ran for it. Shivan called, saying he had left Hungary but couldn't tell them where he was. He called again a few weeks later to say he was fine, and happy; his mother should not worry.
A letter arrived from Tariq, posted from Hungary, full of dreams for the future. Then, when the major fighting stopped, came his call with the news that he would not return. Ten days later, he called again. He had been to Baghdad. He hoped for an important role in Iraq's reconstruction.
In El Cajon, the TV flickers constantly with scenes from the foreign land that the Almissouris still, reflexively, refer to as home. Although they live for the times the phone rings with news from afar, the calls present an unexpected quandary: What happens to a family when they can't agree where home is?
"We are all confused right now," says Peter, who is nevertheless proud that his father wants to help rebuild Iraq.
Tariq, Peter says, "was a military man. He wants to have that back. He wants to have us follow him. He thinks it might be something we have been waiting for all this time. But really, he's been waiting all this time."
Beri doesn't want to go back. "That's not where I belong," she says.
Delene, who has almost no memory of Iraq, says she would like to go for a long visit. Zeen, 17, and Ayad, 16, echo that.
Their mother listens, her anxiety rising. She wishes that her children wanted to move back. She wishes that Iraq could offer them the opportunities they have here. She wishes Shivan would come home.
"I feel confused and trapped," she says.
"If I didn't have my kids, I would go back. But if I'm not with my children, I don't have a home."
JACKASS AND HYDE
2000: director of a company which wins $200m contract to sell nuclear reactors to North Korea
2002: declares North Korea a terrorist state, part of the axis of evil and a target for regime change (Guardian)
Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, sat on the board of a company which three years ago sold two light water nuclear reactors to North Korea - a country he now regards as part of the "axis of evil" and which has been targeted for regime change by Washington because of its efforts to build nuclear weapons.
Mr Rumsfeld was a non-executive director of ABB, a European engineering giant based in Zurich, when it won a $200m (£125m) contract to provide the design and key components for the reactors. The current defence secretary sat on the board from 1990 to 2001, earning $190,000 a year. He left to join the Bush administration.
The reactor deal was part of President Bill Clinton's policy of persuading the North Korean regime of positively engaging with the west.
The sale of the nuclear technology was a high-profile contract. ABB's then chief executive, Goran Lindahl, visited North Korea in November 1999 to announce ABB's "wide-ranging, long-term cooperation agreement" with the communist government.
The company also opened an office in the country's capital, Pyongyang, and the deal was signed a year later in 2000. Despite this, Mr Rumsfeld's office said that the defence secretary did not "recall it being brought before the board at any time".
In a statement to the American magazine Newsweek, his spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said that there "was no vote on this". A spokesman for ABB told the Guardian yesterday that "board members were informed about the project which would deliver systems and equipment for light water reactors".
Just months after Mr Rumsfeld took office, President George Bush ended the policy of engagement and negotiation pursued by Mr Clinton - saying he did not trust North Korea and pulled the plug on diplomacy. Pyongyang warned that it would respond by building nuclear missiles. A review of American policy was announced and the bilateral confidence-building steps, key to Mr Clinton's policy of detente, halted.
By January 2002, the Bush administration had placed North Korea in the "axis of evil" alongside Iraq and Iran. If there was any doubt about how the White House felt about North Korea this was dispelled by Mr Bush, who told the Washington Post last year: "I loathe [North Korea's leader] Kim Jong-il"
The success of campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have enhanced the status of Mr Rumsfeld in Washington. Two years after leaving ABB, Mr Rumsfeld now considers North Korea a "terrorist regime ... teetering on the verge of collapse" and which was on the verge of becoming a proliferator of nuclear weapons. During a bout of diplomatic activity over Christmas he warned that the US could fight two wars at once - a reference to the forthcoming conflict with Iraq. After Baghdad fell, Mr Rumsfeld said Pyongyang should draw the "appropriate lesson".
Critics of the administration's bellicose language on North Korea say that the problem was not that Mr Rumsfeld supported the Clinton-inspired diplomacy and the ABB deal but that he did not "speak up against it". "One could draw the conclusion that economic and personal interests took precedent over non-proliferation," said Steve LaMontagne, an analyst with the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington.
Many members of the Bush administration are on record as opposing Mr Clinton's plans - saying that weapons-grade nuclear material could be extracted from the type of light water reactors that ABB sold. Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and the state department's number two diplomat, Richard Armitage, both opposed the deal as did the Republican presidential candidate, Bob Dole, whose campaign Mr Rumsfeld ran and where he also acted as defence adviser. One unnamed ABB board director told Fortune magazine that Mr Rumsfeld was involved in lobbying his hawkish friends on behalf of ABB.
The Clinton package sought to defuse tensions on the Ko rean peninsula by offering supplies of oil and new light water nuclear reactors in return for access by inspectors to Pyongyang's atomic facilities and a dismantling of its heavy water reactors which produce weapons-grade plutonium. Light water reactors are known as "proliferation-resistant" but, in the words of one expert, they are not "proliferation-proof".
The type of reactors involved in the ABB deal produce plutonium which needs refining before it can be weaponised. One US congressman and critic of the North Korean regime described the reactors as "nuclear bomb factories". North Korea expelled the inspectors last year and withdrew from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty in January at about the same time that the Bush administration authorised $3.5m to keep ABB's reactor project going.
North Korea is thought to have offered to scrap its nuclear facilities and missile pro gramme and to allow international nuclear inspectors into the country. But Pyongyang demanded that security guarantees and aid from the US must come first.
Mr Bush now insists that he will only negotiate a new deal with Pyongyang after the nuclear programme is scrapped. Washington believes that offering inducements would reward Pyongyang's "blackmail" and encourage other "rogue" states to develop weapons of mass destruction.
2000: director of a company which wins $200m contract to sell nuclear reactors to North Korea
2002: declares North Korea a terrorist state, part of the axis of evil and a target for regime change (Guardian)
Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, sat on the board of a company which three years ago sold two light water nuclear reactors to North Korea - a country he now regards as part of the "axis of evil" and which has been targeted for regime change by Washington because of its efforts to build nuclear weapons.
Mr Rumsfeld was a non-executive director of ABB, a European engineering giant based in Zurich, when it won a $200m (£125m) contract to provide the design and key components for the reactors. The current defence secretary sat on the board from 1990 to 2001, earning $190,000 a year. He left to join the Bush administration.
The reactor deal was part of President Bill Clinton's policy of persuading the North Korean regime of positively engaging with the west.
The sale of the nuclear technology was a high-profile contract. ABB's then chief executive, Goran Lindahl, visited North Korea in November 1999 to announce ABB's "wide-ranging, long-term cooperation agreement" with the communist government.
The company also opened an office in the country's capital, Pyongyang, and the deal was signed a year later in 2000. Despite this, Mr Rumsfeld's office said that the defence secretary did not "recall it being brought before the board at any time".
In a statement to the American magazine Newsweek, his spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said that there "was no vote on this". A spokesman for ABB told the Guardian yesterday that "board members were informed about the project which would deliver systems and equipment for light water reactors".
Just months after Mr Rumsfeld took office, President George Bush ended the policy of engagement and negotiation pursued by Mr Clinton - saying he did not trust North Korea and pulled the plug on diplomacy. Pyongyang warned that it would respond by building nuclear missiles. A review of American policy was announced and the bilateral confidence-building steps, key to Mr Clinton's policy of detente, halted.
By January 2002, the Bush administration had placed North Korea in the "axis of evil" alongside Iraq and Iran. If there was any doubt about how the White House felt about North Korea this was dispelled by Mr Bush, who told the Washington Post last year: "I loathe [North Korea's leader] Kim Jong-il"
The success of campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have enhanced the status of Mr Rumsfeld in Washington. Two years after leaving ABB, Mr Rumsfeld now considers North Korea a "terrorist regime ... teetering on the verge of collapse" and which was on the verge of becoming a proliferator of nuclear weapons. During a bout of diplomatic activity over Christmas he warned that the US could fight two wars at once - a reference to the forthcoming conflict with Iraq. After Baghdad fell, Mr Rumsfeld said Pyongyang should draw the "appropriate lesson".
Critics of the administration's bellicose language on North Korea say that the problem was not that Mr Rumsfeld supported the Clinton-inspired diplomacy and the ABB deal but that he did not "speak up against it". "One could draw the conclusion that economic and personal interests took precedent over non-proliferation," said Steve LaMontagne, an analyst with the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington.
Many members of the Bush administration are on record as opposing Mr Clinton's plans - saying that weapons-grade nuclear material could be extracted from the type of light water reactors that ABB sold. Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and the state department's number two diplomat, Richard Armitage, both opposed the deal as did the Republican presidential candidate, Bob Dole, whose campaign Mr Rumsfeld ran and where he also acted as defence adviser. One unnamed ABB board director told Fortune magazine that Mr Rumsfeld was involved in lobbying his hawkish friends on behalf of ABB.
The Clinton package sought to defuse tensions on the Ko rean peninsula by offering supplies of oil and new light water nuclear reactors in return for access by inspectors to Pyongyang's atomic facilities and a dismantling of its heavy water reactors which produce weapons-grade plutonium. Light water reactors are known as "proliferation-resistant" but, in the words of one expert, they are not "proliferation-proof".
The type of reactors involved in the ABB deal produce plutonium which needs refining before it can be weaponised. One US congressman and critic of the North Korean regime described the reactors as "nuclear bomb factories". North Korea expelled the inspectors last year and withdrew from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty in January at about the same time that the Bush administration authorised $3.5m to keep ABB's reactor project going.
North Korea is thought to have offered to scrap its nuclear facilities and missile pro gramme and to allow international nuclear inspectors into the country. But Pyongyang demanded that security guarantees and aid from the US must come first.
Mr Bush now insists that he will only negotiate a new deal with Pyongyang after the nuclear programme is scrapped. Washington believes that offering inducements would reward Pyongyang's "blackmail" and encourage other "rogue" states to develop weapons of mass destruction.
FREEDOM FOR 7,000 POWs
U.S. military forces have released 7,000 Iraqi prisoners captured in the three-week war, including more than 3,700 men who were let go after signing a "parole" document in which they swore not to engage in hostile actions against American soldiers, defense officials said yesterday.
U.S. military police still hold about 2,000 Iraqi prisoners whose backgrounds they are investigating. Among them are 200 foreign fighters who had come to attack U.S. soldiers, 178 common criminals, a number of mid-ranking Iraqi military officers and some members of the Saddam's Fedayeen paramilitary forces, the U.S. officials said at a briefing in Kuwait.
These large groups of detainees, most of them held in a temporary jail in the southern Iraq city of Umm Qasr, are separate from the 20 highly placed aides to former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein who have been captured. The aides, who are among the 55 senior officials wanted by the United States, are being housed and interrogated in solitary confinement at a prison in Baghdad, officials said.
"They're being well cared for," Army Col. John Della Jacono, a top commander of coalition forces in Iraq, said of the top-level prisoners. "They're being treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention, with dignity and respect."
The 200 foreigners in custody include men from Jordan, Iran, Syria, Kuwait and a number of other nations, Della Jacono said.
Asked what the American plans are both for the group of 20 as well as the 2,000 lower-level prisoners, U.S. military officials declined to be specific, except to say interrogators are asking them questions to determine their legal status.
"We're going through a vetting process," Della Jacono said. "We have gone through a deliberate screening of the over 7,000 that we held at one time." Of those still being held, he said, "no determination has been made as towards the disposition of these individuals." Besides being released, other possibilities for them include facing U.S. military tribunals, trials by international legal panels or prosecution in an Iraqi court, officials said.
Special hearings called for under the Geneva Conventions that govern treatment of prisoners of war have been held for as many as 100 of the Iraqi prisoners when there were questions about whether they were regular military combatants and, therefore, deserve prisoner of war status. POW status limits the extent that a detainee can be interrogated and confers some privileges in detention.
A substantial number of the 7,000 Iraqis released were civilians. They were "just at the wrong place at the wrong time," Della Jacono said.
In the agreement signed by the 3,700 or so Iraqi soldiers allowing their release, they said they understood they could return home or to their military units, but could only perform administrative or medical duties. They risk being rearrested if found without the agreement on their person.
U.S. forces transported the released soldiers to their home towns or central drop-off points, and gave them $5 as well as clothing and food.
Meanwhile, Adm. Edmund P. Giambastiani Jr., head of the U.S. Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, said yesterday that he hopes to brief Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld by mid-June on war lessons learned.
The Joint Forces Command's primary missions are to train, develop and experiment with "joint" war-fighting techniques and doctrine using more than one service, and to provide troops to other regional commanders.
Rumsfeld made Giambastiani, his former chief military assistant, head of Joint Forces Command with an eye toward turning the unit into his primary engine for transforming the U.S. military from a Cold War force to one capable of fighting 21st-century wars.
Before the war in Iraq began, Giambastiani said at a breakfast with defense writers, he "embedded" 30 officers at all levels inside U.S. Central Command, which was responsible for prosecuting the campaign. Retired Army Gen. Gary Luck, he said, served as a "senior mentor" to those officers and accompanied Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the Central Command chief, throughout the conflict, even during meetings with President Bush.
Calling the war in Iraq "a gigantic battle lab," Giambastiani said his review would focus on systems and tactics that enabled the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines to effectively fight together, what the Pentagon calls "jointness."
The particular lessons his officers have been pursuing, Giambastiani said, involve how to "drive jointness down to the lowest level," so that Army soldiers in a foxhole, for instance, can call in Air Force, Navy or Marine fighter jets for close air support.
In building joint fighting capability, he said, the premium comes in figuring how to build networks across the services that allow for the rapid movement of data across the battlefield. "It allows us to change the pace and the tempo of operations" to stay ahead of the enemy, as happened in Iraq, he said.
U.S. military forces have released 7,000 Iraqi prisoners captured in the three-week war, including more than 3,700 men who were let go after signing a "parole" document in which they swore not to engage in hostile actions against American soldiers, defense officials said yesterday.
U.S. military police still hold about 2,000 Iraqi prisoners whose backgrounds they are investigating. Among them are 200 foreign fighters who had come to attack U.S. soldiers, 178 common criminals, a number of mid-ranking Iraqi military officers and some members of the Saddam's Fedayeen paramilitary forces, the U.S. officials said at a briefing in Kuwait.
These large groups of detainees, most of them held in a temporary jail in the southern Iraq city of Umm Qasr, are separate from the 20 highly placed aides to former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein who have been captured. The aides, who are among the 55 senior officials wanted by the United States, are being housed and interrogated in solitary confinement at a prison in Baghdad, officials said.
"They're being well cared for," Army Col. John Della Jacono, a top commander of coalition forces in Iraq, said of the top-level prisoners. "They're being treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention, with dignity and respect."
The 200 foreigners in custody include men from Jordan, Iran, Syria, Kuwait and a number of other nations, Della Jacono said.
Asked what the American plans are both for the group of 20 as well as the 2,000 lower-level prisoners, U.S. military officials declined to be specific, except to say interrogators are asking them questions to determine their legal status.
"We're going through a vetting process," Della Jacono said. "We have gone through a deliberate screening of the over 7,000 that we held at one time." Of those still being held, he said, "no determination has been made as towards the disposition of these individuals." Besides being released, other possibilities for them include facing U.S. military tribunals, trials by international legal panels or prosecution in an Iraqi court, officials said.
Special hearings called for under the Geneva Conventions that govern treatment of prisoners of war have been held for as many as 100 of the Iraqi prisoners when there were questions about whether they were regular military combatants and, therefore, deserve prisoner of war status. POW status limits the extent that a detainee can be interrogated and confers some privileges in detention.
A substantial number of the 7,000 Iraqis released were civilians. They were "just at the wrong place at the wrong time," Della Jacono said.
In the agreement signed by the 3,700 or so Iraqi soldiers allowing their release, they said they understood they could return home or to their military units, but could only perform administrative or medical duties. They risk being rearrested if found without the agreement on their person.
U.S. forces transported the released soldiers to their home towns or central drop-off points, and gave them $5 as well as clothing and food.
Meanwhile, Adm. Edmund P. Giambastiani Jr., head of the U.S. Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, said yesterday that he hopes to brief Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld by mid-June on war lessons learned.
The Joint Forces Command's primary missions are to train, develop and experiment with "joint" war-fighting techniques and doctrine using more than one service, and to provide troops to other regional commanders.
Rumsfeld made Giambastiani, his former chief military assistant, head of Joint Forces Command with an eye toward turning the unit into his primary engine for transforming the U.S. military from a Cold War force to one capable of fighting 21st-century wars.
Before the war in Iraq began, Giambastiani said at a breakfast with defense writers, he "embedded" 30 officers at all levels inside U.S. Central Command, which was responsible for prosecuting the campaign. Retired Army Gen. Gary Luck, he said, served as a "senior mentor" to those officers and accompanied Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the Central Command chief, throughout the conflict, even during meetings with President Bush.
Calling the war in Iraq "a gigantic battle lab," Giambastiani said his review would focus on systems and tactics that enabled the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines to effectively fight together, what the Pentagon calls "jointness."
The particular lessons his officers have been pursuing, Giambastiani said, involve how to "drive jointness down to the lowest level," so that Army soldiers in a foxhole, for instance, can call in Air Force, Navy or Marine fighter jets for close air support.
In building joint fighting capability, he said, the premium comes in figuring how to build networks across the services that allow for the rapid movement of data across the battlefield. "It allows us to change the pace and the tempo of operations" to stay ahead of the enemy, as happened in Iraq, he said.
SHE MUST HAVE BEEN CRAZY
Ferry Biedermann IPS
Lahib Kishmesh had seemed headed for the good life. Her wealthy parents sent her to Paris in the seventies to train as a lawyer. Her success was to prove her undoing.
BAGHDAD, May 8 (IPS) - Lahib Kishmesh had seemed headed for the good life. Her wealthy parents sent her to Paris in the seventies to train as a lawyer. Her success was to prove her undoing.
"My dear Iraq, my dear Iraq, what has become of you," she reads from the scribbling on the walls of her run-down house in Baghdad's once gracious Ghadeer district. Neighbours crowd the entrance, curious to see what "crazy Lahib" is up to this time.
"Get out of here," she shouts at them. "Where were you when I needed you? Why are you not looking after me, how can I live here without water, with you people all the time staring at me?" She looks dishevelled and much older than her 48 years. Deep lines mark her face.
Kishmesh admits she is "confused". But that, she told IPS, is to be expected "after all they did to me, the way they hurt me, and the medication they gave me."
She has written her memoirs on the walls of her partially burnt house because she was worried the regime would steal her writings. "They have taken everything else away from me," she says. The house has no water supply, and she sleeps on a foam mattress on the floor.
People have different stories to tell about Kishmesh. The local lawyers association denies she was ever a lawyer. The mental hospital where she was kept says she made up the story scribbled on the walls. But several of her fellow lawyers, and an old family friend speak of the persecution she suffered.
In the mid-eighties Kishmesh is said to have defended an Egyptian employee at Babel hotel in Baghdad who got into a fight with a girlfriend of Saddam Hussein's son Uday. The man was arrested on a trumped up charge of theft. Kishmesh represented him before a panel of judges and secured his release, says a lawyer who worked closely with her.
Kishmesh says that following that she was picked up and jailed time and again. "When I realised that it didn't matter what I said, that they would pick me up anyway, I stopped caring and I said whatever I thought."
That, more than anything else, may have earned her the reputation of being crazy. Nobody in their right mind would challenge Saddam Hussein and his family the way she did.
On one occasion she was arrested after she refused to accept new paper money that bore a portrait of Saddam Hussein. Another time she got into trouble after she wrote "Saddam is a cockroach" on a wall in her neighbourhood. That was payback, she says, because while she studied in Paris she would remove graffiti that insulted the Iraqi leader.
Everyone agrees that the height of her confrontation with the regime came in 1988.
Kamal Hanna Jajjou, a trusted aide of Saddam Hussein was said to have been arranging a divorce for Saddam Hussein from Uday's mother, and his marriage with another woman. Uday beat Jajjou to death at a party in the presence of several witnesses.
Uday was arrested on his father's orders and made to stand trial. He was sentenced to a year's imprisonment, later commuted to a brief exile in Geneva.
A lawyer who knows Kishmesh well says she was asked to represent Uday at the trial. Her victory over Uday in the trial of the Egyptian may have made her perfect for his defence in the regime's eyes because it made the defence more credible.
At the trial, though, she shocked the court by pleading guilty on behalf of Uday instead of making the agreed plea that he had acted in self-defence. "She said that yes, he did this and yes, he committed a crime but would the court please have mercy on him," says the lawyer, who still wants to remain anonymous. Then on her fate was sealed.
Saadiyeh Salman, a lawyer who knows Kishmesh says leaders of lawyers associations were the Baath party faithful, and colluded with the regime. Salman herself was suspended by a lawyers association because she won a case against friends of Saddam Hussein's family.
Kishmesh spent most of the last ten years in and out of the Al-Rashad mental hospital where patients spend their days in squalid drug-induced stupor.
Her doctor at the hospital, Saad Mehdi, insists that she really is "psychotic", and that she made up the whole story of Uday. "She fixated her psychosis on a powerful person, as is often the case."
Staff at the hospital says they frequently got 'patients' who had insulted the President or his family. A psychological evaluation was a part of the procedures for this 'crime'.
Ali Al-Khattab, a medical assistant says Kishmesh was brought in regularly. "When she came in she was usually clear-headed," he told IPS. "They would treat her with electric shocks and then release her."
She was in the hospital until the very end of the regime when it was looted after the fall of Baghdad. According to the Red Cross, some of the female patients were raped.
"Iraq has to be cleansed of all the people whose hands are dirty," Kishmesh says. "And there are many." (END)
Ferry Biedermann IPS
Lahib Kishmesh had seemed headed for the good life. Her wealthy parents sent her to Paris in the seventies to train as a lawyer. Her success was to prove her undoing.
BAGHDAD, May 8 (IPS) - Lahib Kishmesh had seemed headed for the good life. Her wealthy parents sent her to Paris in the seventies to train as a lawyer. Her success was to prove her undoing.
"My dear Iraq, my dear Iraq, what has become of you," she reads from the scribbling on the walls of her run-down house in Baghdad's once gracious Ghadeer district. Neighbours crowd the entrance, curious to see what "crazy Lahib" is up to this time.
"Get out of here," she shouts at them. "Where were you when I needed you? Why are you not looking after me, how can I live here without water, with you people all the time staring at me?" She looks dishevelled and much older than her 48 years. Deep lines mark her face.
Kishmesh admits she is "confused". But that, she told IPS, is to be expected "after all they did to me, the way they hurt me, and the medication they gave me."
She has written her memoirs on the walls of her partially burnt house because she was worried the regime would steal her writings. "They have taken everything else away from me," she says. The house has no water supply, and she sleeps on a foam mattress on the floor.
People have different stories to tell about Kishmesh. The local lawyers association denies she was ever a lawyer. The mental hospital where she was kept says she made up the story scribbled on the walls. But several of her fellow lawyers, and an old family friend speak of the persecution she suffered.
In the mid-eighties Kishmesh is said to have defended an Egyptian employee at Babel hotel in Baghdad who got into a fight with a girlfriend of Saddam Hussein's son Uday. The man was arrested on a trumped up charge of theft. Kishmesh represented him before a panel of judges and secured his release, says a lawyer who worked closely with her.
Kishmesh says that following that she was picked up and jailed time and again. "When I realised that it didn't matter what I said, that they would pick me up anyway, I stopped caring and I said whatever I thought."
That, more than anything else, may have earned her the reputation of being crazy. Nobody in their right mind would challenge Saddam Hussein and his family the way she did.
On one occasion she was arrested after she refused to accept new paper money that bore a portrait of Saddam Hussein. Another time she got into trouble after she wrote "Saddam is a cockroach" on a wall in her neighbourhood. That was payback, she says, because while she studied in Paris she would remove graffiti that insulted the Iraqi leader.
Everyone agrees that the height of her confrontation with the regime came in 1988.
Kamal Hanna Jajjou, a trusted aide of Saddam Hussein was said to have been arranging a divorce for Saddam Hussein from Uday's mother, and his marriage with another woman. Uday beat Jajjou to death at a party in the presence of several witnesses.
Uday was arrested on his father's orders and made to stand trial. He was sentenced to a year's imprisonment, later commuted to a brief exile in Geneva.
A lawyer who knows Kishmesh well says she was asked to represent Uday at the trial. Her victory over Uday in the trial of the Egyptian may have made her perfect for his defence in the regime's eyes because it made the defence more credible.
At the trial, though, she shocked the court by pleading guilty on behalf of Uday instead of making the agreed plea that he had acted in self-defence. "She said that yes, he did this and yes, he committed a crime but would the court please have mercy on him," says the lawyer, who still wants to remain anonymous. Then on her fate was sealed.
Saadiyeh Salman, a lawyer who knows Kishmesh says leaders of lawyers associations were the Baath party faithful, and colluded with the regime. Salman herself was suspended by a lawyers association because she won a case against friends of Saddam Hussein's family.
Kishmesh spent most of the last ten years in and out of the Al-Rashad mental hospital where patients spend their days in squalid drug-induced stupor.
Her doctor at the hospital, Saad Mehdi, insists that she really is "psychotic", and that she made up the whole story of Uday. "She fixated her psychosis on a powerful person, as is often the case."
Staff at the hospital says they frequently got 'patients' who had insulted the President or his family. A psychological evaluation was a part of the procedures for this 'crime'.
Ali Al-Khattab, a medical assistant says Kishmesh was brought in regularly. "When she came in she was usually clear-headed," he told IPS. "They would treat her with electric shocks and then release her."
She was in the hospital until the very end of the regime when it was looted after the fall of Baghdad. According to the Red Cross, some of the female patients were raped.
"Iraq has to be cleansed of all the people whose hands are dirty," Kishmesh says. "And there are many." (END)
LT GENERAL UPBEAT ON IRAQ
Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, 52, is the American ground forces commander in Iraq. A Gulf War vet who has commanded the Army's First Cavalry Division, McKiernan now shuttles between his rear headquarters in Kuwait's Camp Doha, and Saddam?s Abu Ghurayb North palace, near Baghdad?s international airport. Recently he met there with NEWSWEEK's Rod Nordland and Kevin Peraino to discuss how the mission is going now that major combat operations have been declared over. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: Are you where you expected to be at this point?
David McKiernan: I haven't gone through an after-action review process yet. But I think at this point in the campaign, if you were to stand back from it six weeks ago and say at D plus 43 we're here in Baghdad, we?re turning the lights back on, we're getting power generation back on line, we're working with water treatment, hiring local police and on and on and on?I think it's a pretty remarkable achievement.
Was there a low point in the war for you?
No. Despite the decisiveness of the campaign, there was nothing easy about this. There?s a lot of hard work that goes into everything. But I was never uncomfortable with where we were at. I was never uncomfortable with what the tactical commanders were doing to fight the fight. I knew our logistics would sustain us. We had a couple of days of terrible sandstorms, where we had logistics support out there, but getting it [to the troops] was a challenge because of the weather. But it was all up there. So this business about an operational pause that was printed for a couple of days?that was all garbage.
Profile: Commander David McKiernan
Do you think Saddam Hussein is alive or dead?
I tell you the truth, honestly, I don?t know. I?ve heard everything from he?s under the rubble somewhere to he?s out of the country somewhere else. I don?t know. Saddam, [his sons] Uday and Qusay have not been found. But they will [be], eventually.
What?s the biggest clue you?ve got so far confirming the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction?
We?ve found lots of evidence so far of laboratory equipment, of documents that we?re still going through to try to exploit for evidence of that material, but I think we haven?t found yet the big, hard evidence. But I think that will come, over time.
Let?s put it in perspective. He had at least the last 10 years experience in moving stuff around so he could avoid inspections, so he has a pretty high degree of proficiency at that. As Iraqis continue to come forward to provide information on the program, that will be a long term [process.] This whole country is a series of ammo and weapons storage [facilities,] so it?ll take a while.
IMG: condolences link
How do you see things going now that President George W. Bush has declared major combat over?
I?ve always said the success of the campaign resides in what we?re doing right now. We have to provide a level of stability and security inside of Iraq so that future government can assure that businesses, culture and education rejuvenates and Iraq becomes a stable country in this region. Right now there?s a period of power vacuum where there?s not an Iraqi government right yet. We?re trying to get the civil administration back on its feet. We?re trying to ensure stability and security across Iraq. But there are still pockets, there are still regime loyalists, there still are foreign forces, there?s crime. But every day is a step in the right direction. The vast majority of the Iraqi people are delighted they no longer have Saddam Hussein in charge in this country. Over the next couple of months, [as] the right conditions are set, this will transition from military primacy to civil administration.
How long will the transition take?
I hope to see over the next couple of months that the right conditions are met for the economy and civil administration and governance.
How do you decide when local groups step over the line and you have to intervene?
That?s easy. The authority in Iraq right now is the Coalition. Those who try to make moves that are not authorized by the Coalition, are in violation. Until there is an interim government [we will intervene.] Institutions or groups that try to take matters into their own hands are in trouble. You have to have quite a presence in the country to make sure that doesn?t happen, there will be instances where people do try to move into that power vacuum and we will have to react to that. Nobody can say that ?this Iraqi doesn?t go to work and I want that Iraqi to go in his place.? Nobody can say that ?I authorize these 100 followers of mine to carry automatic weapons.? Nobody can say that ?the money in that bank is mine and I?ll do with it whatever I want.? That?s crossing the line, and won?t be tolerated.
IMG: Honoring the Fallen
Are there other groups that you?re worried about now that the self-proclaimed mayor of Baghdad, Mohammed Zubeidi, is out of the way?
We?re worried about what are still pockets of Baathists. There hasn?t been a prison yet that had any prisoners in it, so we?re worried about that. We?re worried about black marketing. We worry about foreign influences that come in. We?re worried about certain local influences [that have to be controlled.] This is the first couple weeks of democracy and all sorts of people want to put their views forth.
Soldiers have asked us to ask you when they?re going home.
They ask me that too and I tell them when the mission is done, and as soon as we can. But we?re going to be here a while. I would expect over the next months forces [will be drawing down] but it?s conditions-based. The key to the whole thing is Iraqis stepping forward and taking control of their country. You get institutions like a police force, ministries, local and national governments up and running, then Iraqis are in control of their own country and their destiny and we can go home.
There?s a rumor that the former Minister of Information, Mohammad Saeed al-Sahaf?the one who on April 8 said ?I triple guarantee you there are no Americans in Baghdad,??tried to surrender, but was crushed to find out he wasn?t on the list of 55 Most Wanted.
Troops driving around tell me if they capture him they?re going to put him on Saturday Night Live. They?ll call him Comical Ali.
Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, 52, is the American ground forces commander in Iraq. A Gulf War vet who has commanded the Army's First Cavalry Division, McKiernan now shuttles between his rear headquarters in Kuwait's Camp Doha, and Saddam?s Abu Ghurayb North palace, near Baghdad?s international airport. Recently he met there with NEWSWEEK's Rod Nordland and Kevin Peraino to discuss how the mission is going now that major combat operations have been declared over. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: Are you where you expected to be at this point?
David McKiernan: I haven't gone through an after-action review process yet. But I think at this point in the campaign, if you were to stand back from it six weeks ago and say at D plus 43 we're here in Baghdad, we?re turning the lights back on, we're getting power generation back on line, we're working with water treatment, hiring local police and on and on and on?I think it's a pretty remarkable achievement.
Was there a low point in the war for you?
No. Despite the decisiveness of the campaign, there was nothing easy about this. There?s a lot of hard work that goes into everything. But I was never uncomfortable with where we were at. I was never uncomfortable with what the tactical commanders were doing to fight the fight. I knew our logistics would sustain us. We had a couple of days of terrible sandstorms, where we had logistics support out there, but getting it [to the troops] was a challenge because of the weather. But it was all up there. So this business about an operational pause that was printed for a couple of days?that was all garbage.
Profile: Commander David McKiernan
Do you think Saddam Hussein is alive or dead?
I tell you the truth, honestly, I don?t know. I?ve heard everything from he?s under the rubble somewhere to he?s out of the country somewhere else. I don?t know. Saddam, [his sons] Uday and Qusay have not been found. But they will [be], eventually.
What?s the biggest clue you?ve got so far confirming the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction?
We?ve found lots of evidence so far of laboratory equipment, of documents that we?re still going through to try to exploit for evidence of that material, but I think we haven?t found yet the big, hard evidence. But I think that will come, over time.
Let?s put it in perspective. He had at least the last 10 years experience in moving stuff around so he could avoid inspections, so he has a pretty high degree of proficiency at that. As Iraqis continue to come forward to provide information on the program, that will be a long term [process.] This whole country is a series of ammo and weapons storage [facilities,] so it?ll take a while.
IMG: condolences link
How do you see things going now that President George W. Bush has declared major combat over?
I?ve always said the success of the campaign resides in what we?re doing right now. We have to provide a level of stability and security inside of Iraq so that future government can assure that businesses, culture and education rejuvenates and Iraq becomes a stable country in this region. Right now there?s a period of power vacuum where there?s not an Iraqi government right yet. We?re trying to get the civil administration back on its feet. We?re trying to ensure stability and security across Iraq. But there are still pockets, there are still regime loyalists, there still are foreign forces, there?s crime. But every day is a step in the right direction. The vast majority of the Iraqi people are delighted they no longer have Saddam Hussein in charge in this country. Over the next couple of months, [as] the right conditions are set, this will transition from military primacy to civil administration.
How long will the transition take?
I hope to see over the next couple of months that the right conditions are met for the economy and civil administration and governance.
How do you decide when local groups step over the line and you have to intervene?
That?s easy. The authority in Iraq right now is the Coalition. Those who try to make moves that are not authorized by the Coalition, are in violation. Until there is an interim government [we will intervene.] Institutions or groups that try to take matters into their own hands are in trouble. You have to have quite a presence in the country to make sure that doesn?t happen, there will be instances where people do try to move into that power vacuum and we will have to react to that. Nobody can say that ?this Iraqi doesn?t go to work and I want that Iraqi to go in his place.? Nobody can say that ?I authorize these 100 followers of mine to carry automatic weapons.? Nobody can say that ?the money in that bank is mine and I?ll do with it whatever I want.? That?s crossing the line, and won?t be tolerated.
IMG: Honoring the Fallen
Are there other groups that you?re worried about now that the self-proclaimed mayor of Baghdad, Mohammed Zubeidi, is out of the way?
We?re worried about what are still pockets of Baathists. There hasn?t been a prison yet that had any prisoners in it, so we?re worried about that. We?re worried about black marketing. We worry about foreign influences that come in. We?re worried about certain local influences [that have to be controlled.] This is the first couple weeks of democracy and all sorts of people want to put their views forth.
Soldiers have asked us to ask you when they?re going home.
They ask me that too and I tell them when the mission is done, and as soon as we can. But we?re going to be here a while. I would expect over the next months forces [will be drawing down] but it?s conditions-based. The key to the whole thing is Iraqis stepping forward and taking control of their country. You get institutions like a police force, ministries, local and national governments up and running, then Iraqis are in control of their own country and their destiny and we can go home.
There?s a rumor that the former Minister of Information, Mohammad Saeed al-Sahaf?the one who on April 8 said ?I triple guarantee you there are no Americans in Baghdad,??tried to surrender, but was crushed to find out he wasn?t on the list of 55 Most Wanted.
Troops driving around tell me if they capture him they?re going to put him on Saturday Night Live. They?ll call him Comical Ali.
BEEPING UP THE DRIVER
System tracks driver's face, and sounds alarm when he nods off or is distracted; 30-40% of global road fatalities are caused by fatigue
By Natalie Soh ST
A NEW technology promises to keep drivers awake and alert, and reduce the chances of their meeting an accident from inattention. Called faceLAB, it will sound an alarm whenever it senses that a driver is nodding off or distracted.
Information is captured through a camera mounted on the dashboard.
According to Seeing Machines, which is behind it, the system could be integrated into major makes of car in a few years.
Said the company's chief executive officer, Dr Alex Zelinsky: 'When we talk face to face, we nod our head and smile to communicate what we are thinking. In the same way, we're trying to get machines and humans to communicate effectively; this time, the machine can read your face and figure out what you are doing.'
More than 30 points on the driver's face are captured with an unobtrusive camera mounted on the dashboard. This tracks, measures and interprets the movement of his eyes and eyelids, and the position of his head.
The information is fed to a processor, which uses complex algorithms to figure out what you are doing. Normal behaviour has been factored into the programme, so the alarm will not sound when you blink or cough.
The system can also be customised to recognise personal idiosyncrasies.
But it will sound a reminder to keep your eyes on the road if too much time is spent yelling at your children fighting in the back seat, or peering at your cell phone.
About 30-40 per cent of road fatalities globally are caused by fatigue, when the driver nods off at the wheel, said Dr Zelinsky.
Dr Zelinsky, who is also a professor at the Australian National University, developed the software at the systems engineering department there.
Seeing Machines was set up three years ago to commercialise this. The company recently won the award for technology innovation handed out by the Australian Information Industry Association, and has also been held up as a technology pioneer by the World Economic Forum.
It is currently working closely with Volvo, which has a share in it, on a driver safety system, and has already sent sets out to car manufacturers and universities around the world.
The idea is for manufacturers to test the system and use it to record behavioural patterns among drivers, so they can improve vehicles' design for comfort and safety.
The innovative company, which employs 22 people, is also using elements of the technology to develop screens which can show 3-D visuals.
'The basic principle is to overlay two images on a screen, so that when you move your head, you can see the images pop up or change in 3-D,' explained Dr Zelinsky.
Other manufacturers have come up with such screens, but theirs require a viewer to keep his head perfectly straight while the images are combined, a very tiresome way to watch anything, he said.
'We want to use our head-tracking technology so that you can move, and we can track what you are watching and combine the images to suit wherever your head and gaze is.'
System tracks driver's face, and sounds alarm when he nods off or is distracted; 30-40% of global road fatalities are caused by fatigue
By Natalie Soh ST
A NEW technology promises to keep drivers awake and alert, and reduce the chances of their meeting an accident from inattention. Called faceLAB, it will sound an alarm whenever it senses that a driver is nodding off or distracted.
Information is captured through a camera mounted on the dashboard.
According to Seeing Machines, which is behind it, the system could be integrated into major makes of car in a few years.
Said the company's chief executive officer, Dr Alex Zelinsky: 'When we talk face to face, we nod our head and smile to communicate what we are thinking. In the same way, we're trying to get machines and humans to communicate effectively; this time, the machine can read your face and figure out what you are doing.'
More than 30 points on the driver's face are captured with an unobtrusive camera mounted on the dashboard. This tracks, measures and interprets the movement of his eyes and eyelids, and the position of his head.
The information is fed to a processor, which uses complex algorithms to figure out what you are doing. Normal behaviour has been factored into the programme, so the alarm will not sound when you blink or cough.
The system can also be customised to recognise personal idiosyncrasies.
But it will sound a reminder to keep your eyes on the road if too much time is spent yelling at your children fighting in the back seat, or peering at your cell phone.
About 30-40 per cent of road fatalities globally are caused by fatigue, when the driver nods off at the wheel, said Dr Zelinsky.
Dr Zelinsky, who is also a professor at the Australian National University, developed the software at the systems engineering department there.
Seeing Machines was set up three years ago to commercialise this. The company recently won the award for technology innovation handed out by the Australian Information Industry Association, and has also been held up as a technology pioneer by the World Economic Forum.
It is currently working closely with Volvo, which has a share in it, on a driver safety system, and has already sent sets out to car manufacturers and universities around the world.
The idea is for manufacturers to test the system and use it to record behavioural patterns among drivers, so they can improve vehicles' design for comfort and safety.
The innovative company, which employs 22 people, is also using elements of the technology to develop screens which can show 3-D visuals.
'The basic principle is to overlay two images on a screen, so that when you move your head, you can see the images pop up or change in 3-D,' explained Dr Zelinsky.
Other manufacturers have come up with such screens, but theirs require a viewer to keep his head perfectly straight while the images are combined, a very tiresome way to watch anything, he said.
'We want to use our head-tracking technology so that you can move, and we can track what you are watching and combine the images to suit wherever your head and gaze is.'
THE EX COLLECTOR
The guy who goes around collecting what others have discarded
HORRIFIC HONORIFICS
Long-winded salutations added on the names of the pompous and pretentious
The guy who goes around collecting what others have discarded
HORRIFIC HONORIFICS
Long-winded salutations added on the names of the pompous and pretentious
NAJAF FERVOUR AT FEVER PITCH
The security guard at the Al-Bader Palace Hotel in Najaf was a 300-pound behemoth who reeked of sweat, badly needed a shave and enjoyed pulling out his fully loaded silver revolver from underneath his flowing gray dishdasha gown and pointing it in my direction.
HE FLASHED IT AT me good-naturedly one afternoon on the hotel rooftop, where I had retreated to take in the view of the golden-domed shrine of Imam Ali while making calls on my Thuraya satellite phone in privacy. Safeer wanted to borrow the phone to contact far-flung relatives, and his pistol combined with his body mass made him difficult to turn down. Snatching the Thuraya out of my hands, he dialed a number in Dubai. ?Hussein!?!? he screamed, bellowing into the receiver in a voice that could have stirred Imam Ali from his mausoleum. ?Hussein?!?? When the 10-minute call was over, he planted a sloppy kiss on my cheek, scratching me with his sweaty beard stubble.
I had arrived in Najaf a day earlier, limping into the holy city of the Shiites in a Mitsubishi Pajero that I had rented in Kuwait and that had been acting strangely ever since I?d hit an abandoned military speed bump at 60mph on the highway north of Basra. We had taken the vehicle to a garage in An Nasiriya, a dismal town south of Baghdad where some of the worst fighting of the war had taken place, and after tightening a few nuts and bolts, the mechanic had sent us on our way. Two hundred miles later, the Pajero was stalling and bucking like a rodeo pony, drawing looks of astonishment as we navigated through crowds of Shiite pilgrims.
We found our way to the best hotel in town: the Al-Bader Palace, a gloomy dive frequented by Iranian pilgrims, located on a teeming roundabout a few minutes? walk from the shrine. The hotel clerk grabbed my bags and led me up a dingy stairwell to a narrow chamber overlooking an air shaft, with five skinny beds lined up side by side-each one covered with a half-inch thick mattress and a pillow that appeared to be filled with sand.
At the time of my arrival early last week, Najaf?like much of Iraq?was a city caught between euphoria and fear. Three weeks after the fall of the Saddam dictatorship, Shiites from across Iraq had just finished making a pilgrimage to the shrine of Imam Hussein in nearby Karbala, a journey banned during Saddam?s time. Now they were preparing for another major festival in Najaf, commemorating the death of the Prophet Mohammed. The pilgrims had begun trickling into town the day we arrived; soon the numbers would grow to more than 1 million, a massive human wave that blocked highways, tied up traffic for miles and filled the decrepit quarter around the shrine of Imam Ali with a mass of happy humanity. At the same time, Najaf was still in shock over the slaughter that had taken place on April 10 at the shrine?s eastern gate. An angry mob had surrounded a U.S.-backed moderate Shiite leader named Abdelmajid al-Khoie, along with the shrine?s custodian?a member of the Baath party?and hacked and shot them to death, then dumped their corpses in the street.
Moqtada al-Sadr leads the evening prayer outside the shrine of Imam Ali
IMG: Moqtada al-Sadr Some in Najaf believed that the man behind the murders may have been a zealous young cleric named Moqtada al-Sadr, who had taken over the huge following of his martyred father (murdered by Saddam?s henchmen in 1999) in the weeks since the fall of the government. He moved about town in a battered Toyota surrounded by black-bearded, black-turbaned bodyguards, denouncing the American presence. Other pro-U.S. Shiite clerics had sealed themselves indoors or gone into hiding, terrified that the mobs would turn their rage against them. Najaf in these days was an unpredictable place?teetering between freedom and anarchy, elation and despair?and the week I would spend there would offer a window onto the upheaval sweeping the country.
My primary vantage point was the Al-Bader Palace, a tumbledown four-story building at the edge of the souk, a meeting place for pilgrims, businessmen, gangsters and journalists. The Al-Bader had the only restaurant in town, and the sole offering on the menu was kebab?rolls of greasy mystery meat that I somehow ate for eight lunches and dinners without doing permanent damage to my digestive tract. Located at the busiest intersection in Najaf, the Al-Bader always seemed to be near the action.
Najaf residents run for cover during a shootout on May 2
IMG: Residents running in streets Across the street from the hotel stood a branch of one of Iraq?s largest banks, where agitated crowds formed each morning, attempting to exchange 10,000-dinar notes for 250-dinar bills: merchants had refuse to accept the larger denominations since a spate of bank robberies swept the country just after the regime?s collapse. The bank offered only 8,000 dinars for every 10,000-dinar note, infuriating people such as my translator, an English teacher from Basra whose entire salary had been paid with the larger bills. ?This is a nation of Ali Babas,? he told me, referring to the famous thief of Arab lore. Nearby sprawled the Shiite cemetery, the largest in Iraq; on my second night in town members of Najaf?s new police force chased four suspects in the Khoie killing into the graveyard, engaging them in an hour-long gunfight that echoed through the city. All the suspects, it turned out, were followers of the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
The hotel?s main attraction was the gargantuan Safeer, a relative of the owner, who guarded the hotel and its parking lot at night. Chain-smoking ?Pine? Iraqi cigarettes and hustling journalists for money and phone access, Safeer proudly displayed a laminated paper badge given to him by the newly formed Najaf city council. It identified him as a newly recruited member of the municipal police force?a measure of how desperate the situation had become in the holy city of the Shiites.
As the Prophet Mohammed?s death anniversary approached, moving around Najaf became nearly impossible. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims filled the town, flooding the muddy warrens around the shrine of Imam Ali. Boisterous youths carried green and black Shia flags?similar to those borne by the celebrated imam and his son Hussein into battle in seventh-century Iraq-through the streets, joining a throng of donkey carts, female pilgrims in black chadors and vendors of coconut cakes, incense, rosary beads, apples, prayer rugs and a thousand other items. On the day of the festival, Safeer had the idea, deeply unwise in retrospect, to visit the headquarters of Moqtada al-Sadr, one block from the shrine. We set out from the hotel at 9 a.m. in the crippled Pajero, and within a 100 yards we were engulfed by a sea of humanity. The mob surged around the vehicle, banging their fists against the windows in what first seemed an exuberant greeting, but quickly turned threatening. The driver hunched over the steering wheel, nervously inching forward; children darted in front of the Pajero, narrowly avoiding being crushed beneath the massive tires. I begged the driver to be careful; all it would take was one child to fall under the wheels to turn the mob against us. Finally we stopped dead in the center of an alley, surrounded by a solid mass of singing, dancing, screaming celebrants. Then Safeer came to the rescue. The 300-pound bodyguard climbed out of the Pajero, elbowed his way to the front of the car, and cleared a path through the sea of pilgrims. Inch by inch, foot by foot, we painstakingly made our way to the entrance of Moqtada al-Sadr?s alley. The holy man, it turned out, wasn?t home.
I caught up with the cleric two days later at the Mosque of Kufa, the site of the murder of Imam Ali, the Prophet Mohammed?s son-in-law and the spiritual forefather of the Shiites. The mosque was the same place from which Sadr?s father, Mohammed Sadeq al-Sadr, gave fiery speeches after Friday prayers in which he called for freedom of religion and demanded that the regime release political prisoners. In the spring of 1999, after defying warnings from Saddam?s security agents to stop the speechifying, the elder Sadr was gunned down along with two of his sons in his car in Najaf. Four years later his second-youngest son had emerged as one of the most visible new leaders in the country, with a built-in following of thousands of his father?s supporters. Sadr was making a bid to control the keys of the Shrine of Imam Ali, which would give him access to millions in donations left there by Shiite pilgrims. He was also criticizing the American presence in the country, causing worry to the U.S. nation builders in Iraq who hoped to empower pro-Western leaders.
Crossing the vast outdoor courtyard of the mosque, I hopscotched across a sea of worshipers and prayer mats and made my way to the marble-columned inner sanctum, from which Sadr would deliver his address. Sadr?s bodyguards escorted me to a vantage point beside the podium. Moments later the cleric arrived. A broad-faced man with a thick black beard and intense eyes, he wore, over his black dishdasha, a white burial shroud, a tribute to his murdered father. The crowd rose to its feet; individual worshipers sang out Sadr?s praises. The cleric?s speech was surprisingly humdrum?a call to ban alcohol in Iraq, a demand that women dress modestly and refrain from wearing jewelry?but the 30,000 followers seemed overjoyed simply to hear him speak. After prayers I followed Sadr down a corridor toward his waiting Toyota, only to be swept aside by a groping mob. The emotional catharsis, after 30 years of brutal repression by Saddam and his gang, was astonishing to observe. But the ripples of violence lurking just beneath the surface were impossible to miss.
Thursday, May 08, 2003
SADDAM'S KICKBACKS
BASRA, Iraq -- Khalan Nahi Asey needed a cement mixer. But when he settled on a reputable German supplier, his boss at South Oil Co. was furious. He demanded that the purchase be made from another firm, Al-Anqa'a, a trading company that Asey knew was controlled jointly by Saddam Hussein's fearsome intelligence agency and a local militia that helped snuff out an anti-Hussein uprising in southern Iraq in 1991.
"He would always say, 'Buy from this company, especially this company,' " said Asey, an engineer who helped put together many of South Oil's purchases of spare parts and new equipment under the United Nations-mandated oil-for-food program. "You knew that this company referred to Saddam's family and his friends. You had no choice."
Oil was at the center of the long and terrifying rule of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Through the direction of his Ministry of Oil in Baghdad and the local officials who oversaw the enterprise throughout the country, Hussein supervised the purchases of parts and equipment by Iraq's state oil companies under the U.N. program, exploiting them as opportunities to enrich his family, curry favor with foreign governments and sustain the security apparatus that kept him in power.
"They got all the oil money," said Mustafa A.S. Badar, chief engineer of the Iraqi Drilling Co., who supervises operations throughout the southern half of the country. "Saddam and his family and the people they knew got everything."
Hussein's government forced suppliers to kick back 10 percent of the value of their deals in cash to his Oil Ministry, according to interviews with current and former state oil executives in southern Iraq as well as trading companies that did business with those firms. Nominally, the payments covered "general repairs and service" on products purchased by the oil companies. In fact, the money was sometimes handed over in suitcases to senior oil executives, according to a former head of the foreign purchasing department at South Oil Co. and an engineer at the firm. Sometimes it was wired into secret bank accounts in Jordan controlled by Hussein and his family, said the head of the purchasing department, who added that he gave the wiring instructions to the suppliers.
"They would always talk about this 10 percent side deal in the meetings," said Saad Mohammed Ali Ashoor, chief geologist at South Oil, who supervises a laboratory of 30 research scientists and frequently orders new instruments. "Everyone knows it. It is not a secret. Without this side contract, the Ministry of Oil would never approve a purchase."
Trading companies and manufacturers from Russia, France and China -- nations more supportive of Iraq at the U.N. Security Council -- were accorded priority in their bids to meet orders for parts and machinery, according to the executives. Companies from Syria, which was a conduit for smuggling oil out of and banned goods into Iraq, have also benefited in that way.
Those supervising purchasing in the oil companies were pressured by superiors and Oil Ministry officials to direct contracts to trading companies controlled or owned partially by Hussein, his relatives and other high government officials.
"Any company that did not include a relative of the government or involve an important political interest could never get a contract from South Oil," said Jamil Mala, the Basra representative of Al-Ramla Chemical Trading Co., a firm based in the United Arab Emirates.
Oil for Cash
It has long been known that Hussein and his coterie harvested vast wealth from Iraq's oil. The country holds the second-largest known reserves in the world, behind Saudi Arabia. According to widespread reports confirmed by three senior engineers at South Oil as well as officials in Baghdad, Hussein's government secured millions of dollars in surcharges extracted from traders buying oil from Iraq under the oil-for-food program, which in the past six years has handled $64 billion in Iraqi oil receipts and fed most of the Iraqi population before the war. Iraq also netted billions more from sales of oil delivered by truck to Jordan, through a pipeline to Syria, and by tanker ships into the Persian Gulf and out to the global market. A study released last year by the U.S. General Accounting Office asserted that Iraq earned $6.6 billion from surcharges and smuggling in 1997 through 2001.
Hussein also took advantage of abundant opportunities to harness the purchasing power of his oil companies to increase his family's wealth and maintain alliances. South Oil Co. alone spent about $400 million a year on spare parts and equipment under the U.N. program, according to the former foreign purchase officer. North Oil Co., which controls the prodigious fields around Kirkuk, had a budget nearly as large. Iraq Drilling Co., the State Company for Oil Projects and the Oil Exploration Co. all had substantial budgets as well. Since the beginning of the program, the U.N. has allowed Iraq to spend $1.85 billion on spare parts and equipment to repair its oil fields.
Hussein's government frequently complained that such sums were inadequate. Starved of money, the oil companies were forced to make do with rusted parts and jury-rigged repairs. Production was slowing. But while officials said the budgets were indeed tight, they also blame the dilapidated state of Iraq's fields on Hussein's enforced system of selecting suppliers based not on quality but on the imperative to put money in friendly hands. Despite Iraq's prodigious oil wealth, cars are scarce.
"I would request turbines [originally] from General Electric and the boss would change it to Al-Anqa'a or another special company," a senior South Oil Co. engineer said. "We never wanted to buy from Al-Anqa'a or these Chinese companies or Russian companies because their quality is no good. Now, it's affecting production."
Despite the fact that they are running one of the most important oil companies in the world, South Oil's high-level managers live in crumbling houses built decades ago, with dysfunctional plumbing and holes in walls and roofs.
Meanwhile, those closest to Hussein thrived. South Oil's former director general, Abdul Bari, a member of Hussein's Baath Party ruling clique, was driving a late-model Nissan sport-utility vehicle between his three local homes in Basra -- one alongside the Shat al Arab waterway with a lawn the size of a football field -- before he went into hiding as the war unfolded.
BASRA, Iraq -- Khalan Nahi Asey needed a cement mixer. But when he settled on a reputable German supplier, his boss at South Oil Co. was furious. He demanded that the purchase be made from another firm, Al-Anqa'a, a trading company that Asey knew was controlled jointly by Saddam Hussein's fearsome intelligence agency and a local militia that helped snuff out an anti-Hussein uprising in southern Iraq in 1991.
"He would always say, 'Buy from this company, especially this company,' " said Asey, an engineer who helped put together many of South Oil's purchases of spare parts and new equipment under the United Nations-mandated oil-for-food program. "You knew that this company referred to Saddam's family and his friends. You had no choice."
Oil was at the center of the long and terrifying rule of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Through the direction of his Ministry of Oil in Baghdad and the local officials who oversaw the enterprise throughout the country, Hussein supervised the purchases of parts and equipment by Iraq's state oil companies under the U.N. program, exploiting them as opportunities to enrich his family, curry favor with foreign governments and sustain the security apparatus that kept him in power.
"They got all the oil money," said Mustafa A.S. Badar, chief engineer of the Iraqi Drilling Co., who supervises operations throughout the southern half of the country. "Saddam and his family and the people they knew got everything."
Hussein's government forced suppliers to kick back 10 percent of the value of their deals in cash to his Oil Ministry, according to interviews with current and former state oil executives in southern Iraq as well as trading companies that did business with those firms. Nominally, the payments covered "general repairs and service" on products purchased by the oil companies. In fact, the money was sometimes handed over in suitcases to senior oil executives, according to a former head of the foreign purchasing department at South Oil Co. and an engineer at the firm. Sometimes it was wired into secret bank accounts in Jordan controlled by Hussein and his family, said the head of the purchasing department, who added that he gave the wiring instructions to the suppliers.
"They would always talk about this 10 percent side deal in the meetings," said Saad Mohammed Ali Ashoor, chief geologist at South Oil, who supervises a laboratory of 30 research scientists and frequently orders new instruments. "Everyone knows it. It is not a secret. Without this side contract, the Ministry of Oil would never approve a purchase."
Trading companies and manufacturers from Russia, France and China -- nations more supportive of Iraq at the U.N. Security Council -- were accorded priority in their bids to meet orders for parts and machinery, according to the executives. Companies from Syria, which was a conduit for smuggling oil out of and banned goods into Iraq, have also benefited in that way.
Those supervising purchasing in the oil companies were pressured by superiors and Oil Ministry officials to direct contracts to trading companies controlled or owned partially by Hussein, his relatives and other high government officials.
"Any company that did not include a relative of the government or involve an important political interest could never get a contract from South Oil," said Jamil Mala, the Basra representative of Al-Ramla Chemical Trading Co., a firm based in the United Arab Emirates.
Oil for Cash
It has long been known that Hussein and his coterie harvested vast wealth from Iraq's oil. The country holds the second-largest known reserves in the world, behind Saudi Arabia. According to widespread reports confirmed by three senior engineers at South Oil as well as officials in Baghdad, Hussein's government secured millions of dollars in surcharges extracted from traders buying oil from Iraq under the oil-for-food program, which in the past six years has handled $64 billion in Iraqi oil receipts and fed most of the Iraqi population before the war. Iraq also netted billions more from sales of oil delivered by truck to Jordan, through a pipeline to Syria, and by tanker ships into the Persian Gulf and out to the global market. A study released last year by the U.S. General Accounting Office asserted that Iraq earned $6.6 billion from surcharges and smuggling in 1997 through 2001.
Hussein also took advantage of abundant opportunities to harness the purchasing power of his oil companies to increase his family's wealth and maintain alliances. South Oil Co. alone spent about $400 million a year on spare parts and equipment under the U.N. program, according to the former foreign purchase officer. North Oil Co., which controls the prodigious fields around Kirkuk, had a budget nearly as large. Iraq Drilling Co., the State Company for Oil Projects and the Oil Exploration Co. all had substantial budgets as well. Since the beginning of the program, the U.N. has allowed Iraq to spend $1.85 billion on spare parts and equipment to repair its oil fields.
Hussein's government frequently complained that such sums were inadequate. Starved of money, the oil companies were forced to make do with rusted parts and jury-rigged repairs. Production was slowing. But while officials said the budgets were indeed tight, they also blame the dilapidated state of Iraq's fields on Hussein's enforced system of selecting suppliers based not on quality but on the imperative to put money in friendly hands. Despite Iraq's prodigious oil wealth, cars are scarce.
"I would request turbines [originally] from General Electric and the boss would change it to Al-Anqa'a or another special company," a senior South Oil Co. engineer said. "We never wanted to buy from Al-Anqa'a or these Chinese companies or Russian companies because their quality is no good. Now, it's affecting production."
Despite the fact that they are running one of the most important oil companies in the world, South Oil's high-level managers live in crumbling houses built decades ago, with dysfunctional plumbing and holes in walls and roofs.
Meanwhile, those closest to Hussein thrived. South Oil's former director general, Abdul Bari, a member of Hussein's Baath Party ruling clique, was driving a late-model Nissan sport-utility vehicle between his three local homes in Basra -- one alongside the Shat al Arab waterway with a lawn the size of a football field -- before he went into hiding as the war unfolded.
HAMAS, HEZBOLLAH TARGETED
Wielding new powers granted by a six-month-old federal court decision, the FBI has greatly intensified decade-old investigations of alleged U.S. supporters of the Islamic Resistance Movement and Hezbollah terrorist groups, according to government officials.
Confident that its efforts to track the al Qaeda terrorist network in this country are beginning to pay off, the FBI is devoting more resources to the two Middle Eastern groups, which command more widespread support in Arab and Muslim communities here. Officials say that there are active Hezbollah cells in this country but that most of their renewed efforts are aimed at alleged financial supporters of both groups -- including Islamic centers, charities and criminal rings from Washington to Detroit to Los Angeles.
The stepped-up investigations in at least two dozen U.S. cities were triggered by a November 2002 ruling from a secretive three-judge appeals panel. The renewed efforts are another example of the more aggressive tactics the FBI has been freed to use in the war on terror since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The court ruling authorized federal agents who pursue criminal prosecution of terrorism suspects to use decades worth of classified wiretaps and intelligence reports from foreign security agencies that previously had been off-limits.
"It's a trove of information that's created enormous possibilities, a whole new world for us," said a senior U.S. counterterrorism official who works on criminal cases. "Before, we were playing with one hand tied behind our backs."
Before the ruling, wiretap and search information from intelligence probes was not usable in criminal cases because the standards for securing an intelligence warrant are lower. Traditionally, intelligence agents kept track of people believed to be engaged in terrorism and espionage, but did not develop criminal cases.
Because of the ruling, federal prosecutors and FBI counterterrorism agents who work on criminal cases are now getting their first chance to examine tens of thousands of pages of wiretap transcripts and reports compiled over many years by fellow FBI agents who pursued intelligence cases. The ruling was issued by an appellate panel that adjudicates investigations begun under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Stanley Cohen, a New York attorney who represents several men in this country who the U.S. government contends are officials of the Islamic Resistance Movement, also known as Hamas, said he has detected reinvigorated investigations of his clients after the ruling.
Prosecutors "haven't figured out how many pieces of candy they can eat," he said. "It's been quite a topic of discussion [among defense lawyers] on how and when the next shoe will drop."
The first shoe to drop was the indictment in February of Florida college professor Sami Al-Arian on charges of conspiracy to commit murder via suicide attacks in Israel and the Palestinian territories. For years, Al-Arian had denied that he was an operative of Palestinian Islamic Jihad -- which the U.S. government has designated a terrorist group because of its suicide bombings of Israelis.
No charges were filed against Al-Arian until the 50-count indictment, the first to exploit FISA information. It contains scores of transcribed pages from secretly intercepted telephone conversations, e-mails and faxes made available to FBI criminal investigators only months ago. Authorities said they prove that Al-Arian helped direct Palestinian Islamic Jihad's worldwide operations. Al-Arian's lawyers deny the charges, saying he is a victim of anti-Muslim conspiracies.
U.S. officials said the investigation into alleged supporters of Hamas focuses in part on the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, the nation's largest Muslim charity until agents shut it down in 2001. Last year, a federal judge in Washington ruled that the charity supports the families of Hamas suicide bombers, paid for many trips by Hamas officials to this country, and "has had financial connections to Hamas since its creation in 1989." Holy Land officials deny terrorist ties.
Hamas is a militant group, founded in 1987 and based in the Palestinian territories, that seeks the establishment of an Islamic state there and in Israel, and works to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It runs an extensive network of social service agencies in the territories and has not targeted U.S. interests.
The probe of suspected backers of Hezbollah largely focuses on networks of Islamic centers that allegedly raise money for the group, officials said. In addition, investigators are looking into rings that commit crimes such as credit card fraud and send the profits to Hezbollah in Lebanon, the officials said.
A radical Lebanese political party that was formed in 1982 to represent Shiite Muslims, Hezbollah, or Party of God, is funded by Iran and is dedicated to destroying Israel and establishing Islamic rule in the area. Its militias forced Israel from southern Lebanon in 2000.
Prosecutors' goal is to shut down Hamas and Hezbollah support networks through a variety of tactics, from filing criminal charges or lawsuits to deporting individuals. One likely tactic is the filing of racketeering charges, which would allow agents to investigate activities that go back decades. By contrast, a criminal charge of providing material support to terrorists could encompass only activities since 1995, when U.S. officials deemed Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist groups.
Many Arab and Muslim activists denounce the probes, saying they admire Hamas and Hezbollah for their armed resistance to Israel.
"Mr. Bush believes Hezbollah, Hamas and other Palestinian factions are terrorists, but we believe they are freedom fighters," said Osama Siblani, publisher of the Arab American News, a newspaper in Dearborn, Mich. "Hezbollah liberated south Lebanon from Israel after 22 years. Why wouldn't the Lebanese be appreciative to the people who liberated them" by sending them money?
"By criminalizing attempts to send money to Hezbollah or to support it, the FBI is confusing and alienating people here who could be allies in the war on terrorism," said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, a Washington nonprofit group.
U.S. officials believe Hamas and Hezbollah are unlikely to mount an attack on U.S. soil, but say attacks are more conceivable overseas. If Iran decides it is the next target of U.S. military action, "then we've got a real problem," a senior FBI official said.
Hezbollah has "a worldwide presence, and we see them actively casing and surveilling American facilities," CIA Director George J. Tenet told Congress in February.
In recent weeks, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge has said that the government is concerned about attacks by "regional extremist organizations" against U.S. interests -- a reference, sources said, to Hamas and Hezbollah.
Some officials from both terrorist groups have said the U.S. assault in Iraq obligates Muslims to attack Americans, even as others indicated they would not attack U.S. targets. "The [U.S.] strike on Iraq would be the continuation of the Crusaders' war, so Muslims should threaten and strike Western interests, and hit them everywhere," Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin said in February.
Knowledgeable sources said one person under investigation is Howard University professor Abdelhaleem Ashqar, who U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler ruled in 2002 was "a senior Hamas activist."
Ashqar was jailed for six months in 1998 for refusing to testify before a New York grand jury looking into Hamas finances. Now agents are using hundreds of pages of formerly unexploitable documents -- including bugs of his Mississippi apartment in the mid-1990s -- in a possible attempt to bring immigration charges against him, sources said. Cohen, his attorney, said that while Ashqar once may have associated with Hamas, "there's no allegation [he] did anything with Hamas after it was declared a terrorist group" in 1995.
A Howard University spokesman declined to comment on the case.
U.S. officials say they similarly have tracked Hezbollah in this country since the early 1980s. That is when the group kidnapped a number of Americans in Beirut, and was involved in bombings of U.S. embassy buildings and a Marine barracks there. U.S. officials say Hezbollah helped train al Qaeda members in explosives before they bombed U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998.
"Hezbollah may be the A-team of terrorists," Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said last year. "They have a blood debt to us. . . . We're not going to forget it."
Abu Nahidian, the director of the Manassas Mosque in Virginia, said recently that area Muslims who dispatch money to clerics close to Hezbollah in Lebanon have come under scrutiny by the FBI. He added that agents don't understand it is a religious obligation to give alms to religious charities requesting help.
"They're listening and asking questions," Nahidian said, and "people have been badly harassed" by the FBI.
He also said U.S. agents should have understood that a man named Mohamad Hammoud was acting on religious impulses when he sent money to Hezbollah-linked charities in the 1990s. But a federal jury in Charlotte disagreed, and last June it convicted Hammoud of funneling profits to Hezbollah from a huge cigarette smuggling operation he ran. U.S. officials say compatriots also arranged delivery of military equipment, such as stun guns and night-vision goggles, to Hezbollah.
Agents are also looking into the possible Hezbollah ties of Detroit resident Ali Nasrallah, who was convicted in 1999 of helping to run one of the nation's biggest credit card scams.
After Sept. 11, 2001, federal agents reopened the case. It could not be learned whether officials are relying on FISA files in the new probe, but Tom Matuszak, the local prosecutor who put Nasrallah in prison four years ago, said, "This is no longer a credit card case; it's a terrorism case."
Wielding new powers granted by a six-month-old federal court decision, the FBI has greatly intensified decade-old investigations of alleged U.S. supporters of the Islamic Resistance Movement and Hezbollah terrorist groups, according to government officials.
Confident that its efforts to track the al Qaeda terrorist network in this country are beginning to pay off, the FBI is devoting more resources to the two Middle Eastern groups, which command more widespread support in Arab and Muslim communities here. Officials say that there are active Hezbollah cells in this country but that most of their renewed efforts are aimed at alleged financial supporters of both groups -- including Islamic centers, charities and criminal rings from Washington to Detroit to Los Angeles.
The stepped-up investigations in at least two dozen U.S. cities were triggered by a November 2002 ruling from a secretive three-judge appeals panel. The renewed efforts are another example of the more aggressive tactics the FBI has been freed to use in the war on terror since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The court ruling authorized federal agents who pursue criminal prosecution of terrorism suspects to use decades worth of classified wiretaps and intelligence reports from foreign security agencies that previously had been off-limits.
"It's a trove of information that's created enormous possibilities, a whole new world for us," said a senior U.S. counterterrorism official who works on criminal cases. "Before, we were playing with one hand tied behind our backs."
Before the ruling, wiretap and search information from intelligence probes was not usable in criminal cases because the standards for securing an intelligence warrant are lower. Traditionally, intelligence agents kept track of people believed to be engaged in terrorism and espionage, but did not develop criminal cases.
Because of the ruling, federal prosecutors and FBI counterterrorism agents who work on criminal cases are now getting their first chance to examine tens of thousands of pages of wiretap transcripts and reports compiled over many years by fellow FBI agents who pursued intelligence cases. The ruling was issued by an appellate panel that adjudicates investigations begun under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Stanley Cohen, a New York attorney who represents several men in this country who the U.S. government contends are officials of the Islamic Resistance Movement, also known as Hamas, said he has detected reinvigorated investigations of his clients after the ruling.
Prosecutors "haven't figured out how many pieces of candy they can eat," he said. "It's been quite a topic of discussion [among defense lawyers] on how and when the next shoe will drop."
The first shoe to drop was the indictment in February of Florida college professor Sami Al-Arian on charges of conspiracy to commit murder via suicide attacks in Israel and the Palestinian territories. For years, Al-Arian had denied that he was an operative of Palestinian Islamic Jihad -- which the U.S. government has designated a terrorist group because of its suicide bombings of Israelis.
No charges were filed against Al-Arian until the 50-count indictment, the first to exploit FISA information. It contains scores of transcribed pages from secretly intercepted telephone conversations, e-mails and faxes made available to FBI criminal investigators only months ago. Authorities said they prove that Al-Arian helped direct Palestinian Islamic Jihad's worldwide operations. Al-Arian's lawyers deny the charges, saying he is a victim of anti-Muslim conspiracies.
U.S. officials said the investigation into alleged supporters of Hamas focuses in part on the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, the nation's largest Muslim charity until agents shut it down in 2001. Last year, a federal judge in Washington ruled that the charity supports the families of Hamas suicide bombers, paid for many trips by Hamas officials to this country, and "has had financial connections to Hamas since its creation in 1989." Holy Land officials deny terrorist ties.
Hamas is a militant group, founded in 1987 and based in the Palestinian territories, that seeks the establishment of an Islamic state there and in Israel, and works to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It runs an extensive network of social service agencies in the territories and has not targeted U.S. interests.
The probe of suspected backers of Hezbollah largely focuses on networks of Islamic centers that allegedly raise money for the group, officials said. In addition, investigators are looking into rings that commit crimes such as credit card fraud and send the profits to Hezbollah in Lebanon, the officials said.
A radical Lebanese political party that was formed in 1982 to represent Shiite Muslims, Hezbollah, or Party of God, is funded by Iran and is dedicated to destroying Israel and establishing Islamic rule in the area. Its militias forced Israel from southern Lebanon in 2000.
Prosecutors' goal is to shut down Hamas and Hezbollah support networks through a variety of tactics, from filing criminal charges or lawsuits to deporting individuals. One likely tactic is the filing of racketeering charges, which would allow agents to investigate activities that go back decades. By contrast, a criminal charge of providing material support to terrorists could encompass only activities since 1995, when U.S. officials deemed Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist groups.
Many Arab and Muslim activists denounce the probes, saying they admire Hamas and Hezbollah for their armed resistance to Israel.
"Mr. Bush believes Hezbollah, Hamas and other Palestinian factions are terrorists, but we believe they are freedom fighters," said Osama Siblani, publisher of the Arab American News, a newspaper in Dearborn, Mich. "Hezbollah liberated south Lebanon from Israel after 22 years. Why wouldn't the Lebanese be appreciative to the people who liberated them" by sending them money?
"By criminalizing attempts to send money to Hezbollah or to support it, the FBI is confusing and alienating people here who could be allies in the war on terrorism," said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, a Washington nonprofit group.
U.S. officials believe Hamas and Hezbollah are unlikely to mount an attack on U.S. soil, but say attacks are more conceivable overseas. If Iran decides it is the next target of U.S. military action, "then we've got a real problem," a senior FBI official said.
Hezbollah has "a worldwide presence, and we see them actively casing and surveilling American facilities," CIA Director George J. Tenet told Congress in February.
In recent weeks, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge has said that the government is concerned about attacks by "regional extremist organizations" against U.S. interests -- a reference, sources said, to Hamas and Hezbollah.
Some officials from both terrorist groups have said the U.S. assault in Iraq obligates Muslims to attack Americans, even as others indicated they would not attack U.S. targets. "The [U.S.] strike on Iraq would be the continuation of the Crusaders' war, so Muslims should threaten and strike Western interests, and hit them everywhere," Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin said in February.
Knowledgeable sources said one person under investigation is Howard University professor Abdelhaleem Ashqar, who U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler ruled in 2002 was "a senior Hamas activist."
Ashqar was jailed for six months in 1998 for refusing to testify before a New York grand jury looking into Hamas finances. Now agents are using hundreds of pages of formerly unexploitable documents -- including bugs of his Mississippi apartment in the mid-1990s -- in a possible attempt to bring immigration charges against him, sources said. Cohen, his attorney, said that while Ashqar once may have associated with Hamas, "there's no allegation [he] did anything with Hamas after it was declared a terrorist group" in 1995.
A Howard University spokesman declined to comment on the case.
U.S. officials say they similarly have tracked Hezbollah in this country since the early 1980s. That is when the group kidnapped a number of Americans in Beirut, and was involved in bombings of U.S. embassy buildings and a Marine barracks there. U.S. officials say Hezbollah helped train al Qaeda members in explosives before they bombed U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998.
"Hezbollah may be the A-team of terrorists," Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said last year. "They have a blood debt to us. . . . We're not going to forget it."
Abu Nahidian, the director of the Manassas Mosque in Virginia, said recently that area Muslims who dispatch money to clerics close to Hezbollah in Lebanon have come under scrutiny by the FBI. He added that agents don't understand it is a religious obligation to give alms to religious charities requesting help.
"They're listening and asking questions," Nahidian said, and "people have been badly harassed" by the FBI.
He also said U.S. agents should have understood that a man named Mohamad Hammoud was acting on religious impulses when he sent money to Hezbollah-linked charities in the 1990s. But a federal jury in Charlotte disagreed, and last June it convicted Hammoud of funneling profits to Hezbollah from a huge cigarette smuggling operation he ran. U.S. officials say compatriots also arranged delivery of military equipment, such as stun guns and night-vision goggles, to Hezbollah.
Agents are also looking into the possible Hezbollah ties of Detroit resident Ali Nasrallah, who was convicted in 1999 of helping to run one of the nation's biggest credit card scams.
After Sept. 11, 2001, federal agents reopened the case. It could not be learned whether officials are relying on FISA files in the new probe, but Tom Matuszak, the local prosecutor who put Nasrallah in prison four years ago, said, "This is no longer a credit card case; it's a terrorism case."
REBUILDING ROMANCE IN BASRA
BASRA, Iraq -- Ahmed Mahood's is a fairy-tale love story. After fleeing Iraq 11 years ago, the 32-year-old returned to his homeland in March with the U.S. military and helped depose the hated Saddam Hussein. On Wednesday, he married the beautiful young woman he had last seen when she was 9.
"I just remember she was very cute," he said of his bride, Rana, during the wedding celebrations. In the year he and his cousin were engaged, he only had Rana's picture, her voice on the telephone and her e-mails to treasure.
In the predominantly Shiite south, the past two months were a holy time when people do not marry, celebrate or listen to music. The war, too, intervened. Now, couples who could not marry for months -- or in some cases for years because grooms were in hiding from Saddam's regime -- are getting married.
The celebrations are raucous but bittersweet, as the couples face the future full of hope for a happier life without Saddam -- yet uncertain about their prospects in this shattered country. Indeed, at rites where men normally carry guns to fire off in wild salutes of happiness, today's grooms are carrying them for protection.
Alaa Abass' wedding was not gilded with happily-ever-after optimism. After the ceremony Tuesday, the 30-year-old took his bride back to his home in one of Basra's poor neighborhoods, speeding through an apocalyptic landscape in this once beautiful city. Whirls of silver lining that looters had stripped from telecommunications cables lay in ribbons all over the road like a present for the bride. Barefoot children ran screaming happily beside the wedding convoy.
Mahood, a handsome, energetic man who came back to his country as a member of the Pentagon-trained Free Iraqi Forces, plans to bring his wife home to Portland, Ore. But the best hope the thoughtful, restrained Abass has is to get out of the Hayaneya neighborhood, known in Basra as the main den of the Ali Babas -- the popular nickname here for looters and thieves.
Iraqi weddings are loud, exuberant affairs, Flower-decked wedding cars, trailed by convoys of buses and vans, race through the streets tooting their horns. Musicians, squashed with their instruments into taxis, blast out sounds. Dancers pulsate wildly on flatbed trucks.
But compared to the usual Iraqi wedding tradition, this week's celebrations were considered tame. Families are avoiding large ostentatious celebrations because of poor security and the losses of the war.
"A lot of people were killed or hurt in the war. We've got to respect their feelings," said Mahood, who proudly wore his camouflage uniform, with the U.S. flag on his shoulder, for the first part of Wednesday's celebrations.
As he and his family members danced ecstatically in his family home, his mother, dying of lung cancer, lay on her back on a mat in the corner watching a dreamed-of event unfold before her eyes.
When Mahood became engaged to his cousin last May, he never imagined that within a year he would be getting married in an Iraq free of Saddam.
In 1991, when Shiites in the south rose up against the regime in the wake of the Persian Gulf War, Mahood fought with the rebels for two days before Saddam's army regained control of Basra. The regime arrested his brother, who had not been a part of the rebellion, in order to pressure him to surrender to them.
"My father said, `If you turn yourself in, you'll be shot for sure.' " Mahood fled, seeking help from the U.S. Army, and was eventually granted asylum.
After he went to the Americans, another brother was detained. But eventually, both brothers were freed by the regime.
When Mahood wanted to marry, he consulted his family, who recommended the match to him. But he made the decision that Rana was the one for him. And with his connections to America and good looks, he was clearly a catch for Rana, who has carried his picture with her since she was 17.
His wedding plan had to be secret. In January, he knew he was coming to Iraq but could say nothing to his fiancee because of military secrecy.
"I said, `What do you think if some day I'm going to be there at your door? How will you feel?' She said, `It's not going to happen.' I said, `Wait and see.' "
Soon after he entered the southern city of Umm al Qasr as part of the Army's 354th Civil Affairs Brigade, his family in Iraq saw him interviewed on CNN. The whole family, including Rana, turned up at his unit to see him. It was the first time he had seen his fiancee since she was 9. Now he's stationed in Baghdad and asked for 10 days off to get married.
Abass also married a cousin, to whom he became engaged to seven months ago. He was reluctant to marry because of the poor security situation, but when a brother visited from the north of Iraq, the family decided to go ahead with the celebration.
"Can you imagine that I go to my wedding and I have to carry a gun with me because I'm afraid of thieves? And when I sleep in the hotel, it's under my pillow," Abass said. He and his bride went to a Basra hotel for their wedding night but were confronted with no water and electricity blackouts.
Abass works as a fisherman on a commercial vessel. The family house in Hayaneya is small and crowded, and he hopes that life in Iraq will improve so that he can move somewhere better.
"The area is a lower-class area, a very lower-class area. You can see with your own eyes how many Ali Babas there are in the area," he said, referring to the dozens of people, including children and women, industriously stripping rubber from stolen copper telecommunications cable in the streets all around his family house.
"It makes us afraid for the future. There are no educated people around here, and people are not logical in how they deal with one another. If I have the chance and enough money, I'll leave the area as soon as I can."
Mahood used to be an engineer working on flat panel displays for fighter planes in the United States but is now unemployed. He is not a U.S. citizen yet but believes his work with the Free Iraqi Forces will speed up his acceptance as a citizen.
"I'm going to take her back home. Here, I don't see a future. It will take at least 10 years now," he said.
After more than a decade in the United States, he said it would be unbearable to live in Iraq, with its problems and deprivations.
"I live in the U.S. and I have a beautiful life," he said. "I want everyone here to have the same life. I hope my country will be another U.S.: freedom, a safe place to live and a future for the children here."
BASRA, Iraq -- Ahmed Mahood's is a fairy-tale love story. After fleeing Iraq 11 years ago, the 32-year-old returned to his homeland in March with the U.S. military and helped depose the hated Saddam Hussein. On Wednesday, he married the beautiful young woman he had last seen when she was 9.
"I just remember she was very cute," he said of his bride, Rana, during the wedding celebrations. In the year he and his cousin were engaged, he only had Rana's picture, her voice on the telephone and her e-mails to treasure.
In the predominantly Shiite south, the past two months were a holy time when people do not marry, celebrate or listen to music. The war, too, intervened. Now, couples who could not marry for months -- or in some cases for years because grooms were in hiding from Saddam's regime -- are getting married.
The celebrations are raucous but bittersweet, as the couples face the future full of hope for a happier life without Saddam -- yet uncertain about their prospects in this shattered country. Indeed, at rites where men normally carry guns to fire off in wild salutes of happiness, today's grooms are carrying them for protection.
Alaa Abass' wedding was not gilded with happily-ever-after optimism. After the ceremony Tuesday, the 30-year-old took his bride back to his home in one of Basra's poor neighborhoods, speeding through an apocalyptic landscape in this once beautiful city. Whirls of silver lining that looters had stripped from telecommunications cables lay in ribbons all over the road like a present for the bride. Barefoot children ran screaming happily beside the wedding convoy.
Mahood, a handsome, energetic man who came back to his country as a member of the Pentagon-trained Free Iraqi Forces, plans to bring his wife home to Portland, Ore. But the best hope the thoughtful, restrained Abass has is to get out of the Hayaneya neighborhood, known in Basra as the main den of the Ali Babas -- the popular nickname here for looters and thieves.
Iraqi weddings are loud, exuberant affairs, Flower-decked wedding cars, trailed by convoys of buses and vans, race through the streets tooting their horns. Musicians, squashed with their instruments into taxis, blast out sounds. Dancers pulsate wildly on flatbed trucks.
But compared to the usual Iraqi wedding tradition, this week's celebrations were considered tame. Families are avoiding large ostentatious celebrations because of poor security and the losses of the war.
"A lot of people were killed or hurt in the war. We've got to respect their feelings," said Mahood, who proudly wore his camouflage uniform, with the U.S. flag on his shoulder, for the first part of Wednesday's celebrations.
As he and his family members danced ecstatically in his family home, his mother, dying of lung cancer, lay on her back on a mat in the corner watching a dreamed-of event unfold before her eyes.
When Mahood became engaged to his cousin last May, he never imagined that within a year he would be getting married in an Iraq free of Saddam.
In 1991, when Shiites in the south rose up against the regime in the wake of the Persian Gulf War, Mahood fought with the rebels for two days before Saddam's army regained control of Basra. The regime arrested his brother, who had not been a part of the rebellion, in order to pressure him to surrender to them.
"My father said, `If you turn yourself in, you'll be shot for sure.' " Mahood fled, seeking help from the U.S. Army, and was eventually granted asylum.
After he went to the Americans, another brother was detained. But eventually, both brothers were freed by the regime.
When Mahood wanted to marry, he consulted his family, who recommended the match to him. But he made the decision that Rana was the one for him. And with his connections to America and good looks, he was clearly a catch for Rana, who has carried his picture with her since she was 17.
His wedding plan had to be secret. In January, he knew he was coming to Iraq but could say nothing to his fiancee because of military secrecy.
"I said, `What do you think if some day I'm going to be there at your door? How will you feel?' She said, `It's not going to happen.' I said, `Wait and see.' "
Soon after he entered the southern city of Umm al Qasr as part of the Army's 354th Civil Affairs Brigade, his family in Iraq saw him interviewed on CNN. The whole family, including Rana, turned up at his unit to see him. It was the first time he had seen his fiancee since she was 9. Now he's stationed in Baghdad and asked for 10 days off to get married.
Abass also married a cousin, to whom he became engaged to seven months ago. He was reluctant to marry because of the poor security situation, but when a brother visited from the north of Iraq, the family decided to go ahead with the celebration.
"Can you imagine that I go to my wedding and I have to carry a gun with me because I'm afraid of thieves? And when I sleep in the hotel, it's under my pillow," Abass said. He and his bride went to a Basra hotel for their wedding night but were confronted with no water and electricity blackouts.
Abass works as a fisherman on a commercial vessel. The family house in Hayaneya is small and crowded, and he hopes that life in Iraq will improve so that he can move somewhere better.
"The area is a lower-class area, a very lower-class area. You can see with your own eyes how many Ali Babas there are in the area," he said, referring to the dozens of people, including children and women, industriously stripping rubber from stolen copper telecommunications cable in the streets all around his family house.
"It makes us afraid for the future. There are no educated people around here, and people are not logical in how they deal with one another. If I have the chance and enough money, I'll leave the area as soon as I can."
Mahood used to be an engineer working on flat panel displays for fighter planes in the United States but is now unemployed. He is not a U.S. citizen yet but believes his work with the Free Iraqi Forces will speed up his acceptance as a citizen.
"I'm going to take her back home. Here, I don't see a future. It will take at least 10 years now," he said.
After more than a decade in the United States, he said it would be unbearable to live in Iraq, with its problems and deprivations.
"I live in the U.S. and I have a beautiful life," he said. "I want everyone here to have the same life. I hope my country will be another U.S.: freedom, a safe place to live and a future for the children here."
GETTING ZAPPED AT CHANGI
SINGAPORE -- At Singapore Changi Airport, passengers walk past a thermal-imaging scanner that instantly shows whether any of them has a fever.
All over the city, taxi drivers, government workers, waitresses, students, bank tellers and bellboys take their temperatures at least once a day. So do visitors to government buildings, reporters going to news conferences and women arriving at the beauty parlor.
Many residents proudly wear the country's new badge of honor: a sticker showing they are fever-free.
It is a brave new world here in Singapore, where government-ordered mass temperature testing has become one of the most important measures in preventing the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome.
The autocratic city-state, which has suffered 27 deaths and huge economic losses from the disease, has moved aggressively to contain the pneumonia-like virus and restore public confidence. So far, the effort appears to be working.
"The government in Singapore can control anything," said cabdriver Tan Boon Hoe, displaying a pile of company-issued stickers that show his temperature has been normal for 10 days.
Checking for fevers is one of the least intrusive measures. The government has quarantined more than 3,100 Singaporeans in their homes for 10-day periods, installing Web cams ? cameras connected to the Internet ? in those residences to monitor people once or twice a day. Those caught flouting the quarantine must wear electronic bracelets that signal their movements. Soldiers and police detectives help track down people who may have come in contact with SARS patients.
Doctors have concluded that fever is the most obvious sign of SARS' onset. To detect cases early, the government is setting up high-tech temperature scanners at all entry points to the country, and it aims to distribute digital thermometers to every schoolchild and household. Officials hope that nearly everyone's temperature in the country of 4 million will be monitored daily by midmonth. The fever checks could continue indefinitely.
"Our social behavior will change in the sense that we will all take our temperature twice a day," said Dr. Balaji Sadasivan, minister of state for health and the environment, "and instead of talking about the weather we will ask, 'What's your temperature today?' "
If SARS persists in pockets around the world, Singapore officials predict that temperature screening at airports will become as commonplace as X-raying baggage for bombs.
The disease has created one of Singapore's worst crises in its nearly 38 years of independence. The wealthy city-state has reported 204 probable SARS cases ? third in number behind China, where the disease originated, and Hong Kong.
Singapore is one of Southeast Asia's most important financial centers and a transportation hub. About 1,300 U.S. companies operate here, and the economy depends on business travelers and tourists.
The government estimates that SARS could cost Singapore $860 million and cut its economic growth by half this year. The number of visitors in late April was 71% less than a year earlier. Singapore Airlines has slashed a fifth of its flights. In many hotels, occupancy has plummeted to 20%. Unemployment went up slightly in March and is expected to rise further. The government has pledged $135 million to help hotels and airlines and is paying some quarantined workers a daily stipend of $40.
Far beyond most cities, Singapore is noted for its cleanliness and order. It is also known for an overbearing form of government that some call "the nanny state." Singapore is famous for banning chewing gum and ordering its citizens to flush public toilets. Individual liberty is second to the greater good. The government has the power to lock up opponents without trial.
In combating SARS, Singapore did not hesitate to impose draconian measures.
"It's a time when a benevolent dictatorship can take action more quickly than a Western democracy," Singapore resident Lawrence Harding said after passing through the airport temperature scanner. "People listen to what the government says and do what they're told."
Some Singaporeans have complained about the strict quarantine measures, but most are reassured by the government's tough response. During the worst weeks, many people stopped going to restaurants and shopping malls, but the temperature checks are helping to bring back confidence and customers.
Singapore's problems began when Esther Mok, a 23-year-old former airline flight attendant, went on a shopping trip to Hong Kong in February.
In Hong Kong, she stayed at the Metropole Hotel on the same floor as a doctor who had recently arrived from southern China. The doctor was highly contagious and apparently spread SARS by coughing or sneezing. He gave it to Mok and at least five other guests, including travelers who carried the bug to Toronto and Hanoi, causing outbreaks there.
On her return to Singapore, Mok became a modern-day Typhoid Mary.
Soon after her return, she was hospitalized with a fever and respiratory problems. SARS had ravaged southern China since November, but at that point, the Chinese government had revealed little about the virus. For a week, Singapore doctors were in the dark and Mok spread the disease to 20 other people.
Among them were her parents, her 73-year-old grandmother, her uncle and her pastor, health officials say. All of them died, except her grandmother. Mok also gave the virus to a nurse who had helped care for her. The nurse passed it on to others, including a woman who was in the intensive-care unit with a heart ailment. Before the heart patient died, she gave the virus to 25 more people, including a man who had been admitted for an ulcer. He was transferred to another hospital before doctors realized he had SARS.
At the second hospital, the ulcer patient gave the disease to 35 others, including his brother, officials say. The brother then spread it to the city's wholesale vegetable market.
Doctors say that all but six of the island's probable SARS cases can be traced to Mok. The other carriers arrived from abroad with the illness but apparently have not passed it on. Mok has recovered but remains in the hospital, trying to cope with her grief and avoid the hostility of Singaporeans initially angry with her for spreading the virus.
"People are finally realizing there is no one to blame, least of all Esther," said Dr. Lim Suet Wun, chief executive of Tan Tock Seng Hospital, which is handling all
the city-state's SARS cases. "She did what every Singaporean does, travel and shop. That's no crime. She came to a hospital. That's no crime. It's really a misfortune she happened to be the person."
In the early stages of the disease, nearly all of Singapore's victims contracted the virus in hospitals. Like the New York firefighters who entered the World Trade Center's twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, Singapore's health care workers who treated the first SARS patients have become local heroes.
"The people in the early days who went into wards were extremely courageous," said Lim, who received master's degrees in public health and business administration from UCLA in 1990. "The risk and the lack of knowledge at that point were astounding."
Unlike some places where SARS has struck, Singapore was quick to act once doctors understood the nature of the disease.
Tan Tock Seng was designated to care for SARS patients. Special ambulances were assigned to pick up suspected cases. After the ulcer patient's transfer, moving any patients or doctors between hospitals was prohibited, except to bring SARS cases to Tan Tock Seng. Finally, visitors were banned from all hospitals.
The government closed schools and the Pasir Panjang vegetable market for weeks. Health workers, police detectives and soldiers have attempted to trace every person who had come in contact with a SARS patient and ordered into quarantine anyone who might have been exposed to the virus.
Officials say they call quarantined homes at random intervals ? sometimes in the middle of the night ? asking residents to turn on government-installed Web cameras and show themselves. Those who aren't home ? or who don't answer the phone ? are ordered to wear electronic bracelets so authorities can track their movements. One repeat offender went out drinking in bars and boasted to coffee shop customers that he had broken quarantine. He was arrested and faces six months in jail.
At the same time, the government has flooded the public with information about SARS. Top officials have held news conferences almost daily. The Straits Times, the country's main newspaper, runs dozens of SARS stories daily.
Singapore's strict measures seem to have satisfied the World Health Organization. The agency has warned travelers to avoid Beijing, southern China, Hong Kong and, for a time, Toronto, but it never advised against travel to Singapore. On Tuesday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention removed Singapore from its list of countries that travelers should avoid.
Today, this island nation appears to be bringing the disease under control. Five new probable cases have been reported since April 28, and no new infections of health-care workers have been reported since April 17. A total of 1,015 people remain quarantined. If no new cases arise by the end of next week, officials will declare the virus contained.
To detect any remaining cases and guard against the arrival of new ones, the government is placing a high priority on the temperature screening effort. Nurses armed with ear thermometers are stationed at the entrances of hospitals, government ministries and other public buildings to check for fevers among workers and visitors. Those found to have high temperatures are examined and, in some cases, sent to the hospital.
The thermal scanners, which were developed by Singapore's defense industry, are in short supply. Currently, only passengers arriving at Singapore's airport from SARS-affected areas and all departing passengers are scanned. Monitors will soon be in place to check every passenger who arrives, departs or changes planes. Scanners also are being set up to check those arriving in Singapore by car or boat.
The scanner is an infrared camera that senses a subject's temperature and displays his or her image on a monitor. If the person's temperature is below 99.5 degrees, the face on the monitor will appear green. If it is at or above 99.5, the face will appear red. Since the scanners went into service on April 11, 964 people have been stopped for running a fever. Thirty were sent to the hospital, but only one has been identified as a suspected SARS case and is being held for observation.
After weeks of anxiety over SARS, passengers seem to welcome the scanners.
"I think it's a very good idea," said Veronica Diermayr, an Austrian research scientist and Singapore resident who was traveling to Indonesia. "I think they ought to set it up everywhere. It brings back confidence. Everyone can be sure that this area is fever-free."
SINGAPORE -- At Singapore Changi Airport, passengers walk past a thermal-imaging scanner that instantly shows whether any of them has a fever.
All over the city, taxi drivers, government workers, waitresses, students, bank tellers and bellboys take their temperatures at least once a day. So do visitors to government buildings, reporters going to news conferences and women arriving at the beauty parlor.
Many residents proudly wear the country's new badge of honor: a sticker showing they are fever-free.
It is a brave new world here in Singapore, where government-ordered mass temperature testing has become one of the most important measures in preventing the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome.
The autocratic city-state, which has suffered 27 deaths and huge economic losses from the disease, has moved aggressively to contain the pneumonia-like virus and restore public confidence. So far, the effort appears to be working.
"The government in Singapore can control anything," said cabdriver Tan Boon Hoe, displaying a pile of company-issued stickers that show his temperature has been normal for 10 days.
Checking for fevers is one of the least intrusive measures. The government has quarantined more than 3,100 Singaporeans in their homes for 10-day periods, installing Web cams ? cameras connected to the Internet ? in those residences to monitor people once or twice a day. Those caught flouting the quarantine must wear electronic bracelets that signal their movements. Soldiers and police detectives help track down people who may have come in contact with SARS patients.
Doctors have concluded that fever is the most obvious sign of SARS' onset. To detect cases early, the government is setting up high-tech temperature scanners at all entry points to the country, and it aims to distribute digital thermometers to every schoolchild and household. Officials hope that nearly everyone's temperature in the country of 4 million will be monitored daily by midmonth. The fever checks could continue indefinitely.
"Our social behavior will change in the sense that we will all take our temperature twice a day," said Dr. Balaji Sadasivan, minister of state for health and the environment, "and instead of talking about the weather we will ask, 'What's your temperature today?' "
If SARS persists in pockets around the world, Singapore officials predict that temperature screening at airports will become as commonplace as X-raying baggage for bombs.
The disease has created one of Singapore's worst crises in its nearly 38 years of independence. The wealthy city-state has reported 204 probable SARS cases ? third in number behind China, where the disease originated, and Hong Kong.
Singapore is one of Southeast Asia's most important financial centers and a transportation hub. About 1,300 U.S. companies operate here, and the economy depends on business travelers and tourists.
The government estimates that SARS could cost Singapore $860 million and cut its economic growth by half this year. The number of visitors in late April was 71% less than a year earlier. Singapore Airlines has slashed a fifth of its flights. In many hotels, occupancy has plummeted to 20%. Unemployment went up slightly in March and is expected to rise further. The government has pledged $135 million to help hotels and airlines and is paying some quarantined workers a daily stipend of $40.
Far beyond most cities, Singapore is noted for its cleanliness and order. It is also known for an overbearing form of government that some call "the nanny state." Singapore is famous for banning chewing gum and ordering its citizens to flush public toilets. Individual liberty is second to the greater good. The government has the power to lock up opponents without trial.
In combating SARS, Singapore did not hesitate to impose draconian measures.
"It's a time when a benevolent dictatorship can take action more quickly than a Western democracy," Singapore resident Lawrence Harding said after passing through the airport temperature scanner. "People listen to what the government says and do what they're told."
Some Singaporeans have complained about the strict quarantine measures, but most are reassured by the government's tough response. During the worst weeks, many people stopped going to restaurants and shopping malls, but the temperature checks are helping to bring back confidence and customers.
Singapore's problems began when Esther Mok, a 23-year-old former airline flight attendant, went on a shopping trip to Hong Kong in February.
In Hong Kong, she stayed at the Metropole Hotel on the same floor as a doctor who had recently arrived from southern China. The doctor was highly contagious and apparently spread SARS by coughing or sneezing. He gave it to Mok and at least five other guests, including travelers who carried the bug to Toronto and Hanoi, causing outbreaks there.
On her return to Singapore, Mok became a modern-day Typhoid Mary.
Soon after her return, she was hospitalized with a fever and respiratory problems. SARS had ravaged southern China since November, but at that point, the Chinese government had revealed little about the virus. For a week, Singapore doctors were in the dark and Mok spread the disease to 20 other people.
Among them were her parents, her 73-year-old grandmother, her uncle and her pastor, health officials say. All of them died, except her grandmother. Mok also gave the virus to a nurse who had helped care for her. The nurse passed it on to others, including a woman who was in the intensive-care unit with a heart ailment. Before the heart patient died, she gave the virus to 25 more people, including a man who had been admitted for an ulcer. He was transferred to another hospital before doctors realized he had SARS.
At the second hospital, the ulcer patient gave the disease to 35 others, including his brother, officials say. The brother then spread it to the city's wholesale vegetable market.
Doctors say that all but six of the island's probable SARS cases can be traced to Mok. The other carriers arrived from abroad with the illness but apparently have not passed it on. Mok has recovered but remains in the hospital, trying to cope with her grief and avoid the hostility of Singaporeans initially angry with her for spreading the virus.
"People are finally realizing there is no one to blame, least of all Esther," said Dr. Lim Suet Wun, chief executive of Tan Tock Seng Hospital, which is handling all
the city-state's SARS cases. "She did what every Singaporean does, travel and shop. That's no crime. She came to a hospital. That's no crime. It's really a misfortune she happened to be the person."
In the early stages of the disease, nearly all of Singapore's victims contracted the virus in hospitals. Like the New York firefighters who entered the World Trade Center's twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, Singapore's health care workers who treated the first SARS patients have become local heroes.
"The people in the early days who went into wards were extremely courageous," said Lim, who received master's degrees in public health and business administration from UCLA in 1990. "The risk and the lack of knowledge at that point were astounding."
Unlike some places where SARS has struck, Singapore was quick to act once doctors understood the nature of the disease.
Tan Tock Seng was designated to care for SARS patients. Special ambulances were assigned to pick up suspected cases. After the ulcer patient's transfer, moving any patients or doctors between hospitals was prohibited, except to bring SARS cases to Tan Tock Seng. Finally, visitors were banned from all hospitals.
The government closed schools and the Pasir Panjang vegetable market for weeks. Health workers, police detectives and soldiers have attempted to trace every person who had come in contact with a SARS patient and ordered into quarantine anyone who might have been exposed to the virus.
Officials say they call quarantined homes at random intervals ? sometimes in the middle of the night ? asking residents to turn on government-installed Web cameras and show themselves. Those who aren't home ? or who don't answer the phone ? are ordered to wear electronic bracelets so authorities can track their movements. One repeat offender went out drinking in bars and boasted to coffee shop customers that he had broken quarantine. He was arrested and faces six months in jail.
At the same time, the government has flooded the public with information about SARS. Top officials have held news conferences almost daily. The Straits Times, the country's main newspaper, runs dozens of SARS stories daily.
Singapore's strict measures seem to have satisfied the World Health Organization. The agency has warned travelers to avoid Beijing, southern China, Hong Kong and, for a time, Toronto, but it never advised against travel to Singapore. On Tuesday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention removed Singapore from its list of countries that travelers should avoid.
Today, this island nation appears to be bringing the disease under control. Five new probable cases have been reported since April 28, and no new infections of health-care workers have been reported since April 17. A total of 1,015 people remain quarantined. If no new cases arise by the end of next week, officials will declare the virus contained.
To detect any remaining cases and guard against the arrival of new ones, the government is placing a high priority on the temperature screening effort. Nurses armed with ear thermometers are stationed at the entrances of hospitals, government ministries and other public buildings to check for fevers among workers and visitors. Those found to have high temperatures are examined and, in some cases, sent to the hospital.
The thermal scanners, which were developed by Singapore's defense industry, are in short supply. Currently, only passengers arriving at Singapore's airport from SARS-affected areas and all departing passengers are scanned. Monitors will soon be in place to check every passenger who arrives, departs or changes planes. Scanners also are being set up to check those arriving in Singapore by car or boat.
The scanner is an infrared camera that senses a subject's temperature and displays his or her image on a monitor. If the person's temperature is below 99.5 degrees, the face on the monitor will appear green. If it is at or above 99.5, the face will appear red. Since the scanners went into service on April 11, 964 people have been stopped for running a fever. Thirty were sent to the hospital, but only one has been identified as a suspected SARS case and is being held for observation.
After weeks of anxiety over SARS, passengers seem to welcome the scanners.
"I think it's a very good idea," said Veronica Diermayr, an Austrian research scientist and Singapore resident who was traveling to Indonesia. "I think they ought to set it up everywhere. It brings back confidence. Everyone can be sure that this area is fever-free."
