My Life and Times

Soap Dish Thursday December 16, 2004 4:00AM PT
Susan Lucci The city of Pine Valley celebrates its 35th birthday this January with barely a wrinkle or worry line to show for it, despite the many scandals and headaches its inhabitants have endured over the years. Of course, when your fair town is inhabited by the likes of Erica Kane, life is a soap opera, and you don't worry too much about stepping on toes. All My Children joined the daytime lineup in 1970, and Pine Valley residents have been shocking (and entertaining) audiences ever since. Of course, they face stiff competition from folks living in other fictitious locales with equally tranquil names and tumultuous storylines. Soap operas (+133%) have a widespread following sparking a great deal of interest in search as eager fans ferret out Days of Our Lives spoilers (+93%) and other juicy tidbits that web sites like www.soapcity.com (+144%) and Soap Opera Central (+109%) provide. After four decades of soaps, you'd think a few crow's feet might start appearing, but betrayal, revenge, and seduction in idyllic settings never grow old for soap fans, some of whom have literally grown up with their favorite shows. See how these daytime shows stack up in search this week:
Days of Our Lives
General Hospital
All My Children
Passions
As the World Turns
The Bold and the Beautiful
The Young and the Restless
One Life to Live
Guiding Light
Another World

My New Hedge Fund
I’ve decided to start a new hedge fund. However, this hedge fund won’t invest in stocks or bonds, or any type of business. It’s going to be a fund that only places bets. A gambling hedge fund.
It won’t be me figuring out what bets to place, or what games to play. This is a fund. I will find the best and the brightest, with a confirmable track record and hire them.
It’s an idea whose time has come.
I have bet on stocks long and short for about 15 years now. I’ve done very well. There has already been one hedge fund started based on my trading results. In those 15 years, I have learned that despite all the claims and books written about efficient markets, the trading of individual stocks are not efficient. There are always people trading on better or worse information. There are always people trading on emotion rather than logic. There are always people trading on hopes of the big hit. What Peter Lynch would call the “10 Bagger”. They were gambling. Nothing more. Nothing less.
It’s not unusual to hear people refer to trading stocks as no different than going to Vegas. They are right. Gambling is gambling.
The question really is, which gives the opportunity for a better outcome?
If you play the slots in vegas, you can read what the payout ratios are for each casino. 97 pct. 98 pct. If you play long enough, the casino will end up with 2 or 3 pct of your money. Unless of course you go up to the winning side while you play, and quit while your ahead.
The stockmarket equivalent would be to buy an At The Money Long Term (LEAP) Put for 2 or 3 pct of the stock price. The put would protect your downside for several years, and the stock would only have breakeven or upside potential over that period. It’s a nice thing, except that it’s much, much, much more expensive than 3 pct. As a point of reference, IBM which is trading at about 94 today, has a price of $5.90 for Jan 2006 95 puts. It’s $7.90 for Jan 2007 puts. Just to protect yourself on the downside for less than 2 months, till the 3rd week of Jan 05, will cost you $2.40, or about the same percentage as the hold the house puts on you in playing slots in Vegas.
Of course tha’ts for slots. If you play blackjack. The odds are better and every now and then in your favor. If you play poker, you are playing against the other players, and the house only takes its commission. Just like your broker takes its commission.
Unlike the stockmarket, you know the rules exactly. You know without question, the house is going to play by the rules. The gaming commission appears to actually enforce rules of play, unlike the SEC.
And then there are sports bets. Like any other investment or bet, the question always come down to whether there is good information available, who knows how to use it better, and who is the competition and are they smart or not.
Honestly, I don’t know if the best and brightest go to Wall Street or Vegas. I don’t know the number of gamblers via sports books in vegas vs the the number of gamblers, I mean investors, in the stockmarket.
I do know this. Most casual gamblers, who are the majority of the money spent, go to vegas expecting to lose money. It’s part of the entertainment experience. People put money in mutual funds and in their brokerage accounts and pick stocks expecting to make money. They don’t find any value in losing money on a stock, fund or other traditional investment. That changes the opportunity completely.
How efficient can a market be when the majority of investor expect to lose money? The sportsbooks know this. They know the difference between smart and stupid money. They set odds in order to attract as much emotional, stupid money as it possibly can. It also knows that this emotional money will skew the odds and bring in the “smart money”. As a result, they have learned to lay off their investments so that they are just taking their cut off the dollars invested rather than trying to outsmart the smart.
To me, this suggests the smart money is better than just good. It’s very good.
Which raises the question of “How did the smart money get smart ”, and do they get better returns on their bets than investors can buying the S&P500? Can it significantly outperform the S&P as this new fund would be expected to do?
The smart money doesn’t brag about their results, but in the minimal reading and conversations I have had, it’s the same people coming back over and over again. The smart money people are doing something right on a repetitive basis.
When you think about betting on sports, there really is far better information about your local sports team than there is about any local business in your market. The local papers cover the team every day. The local TV station gives a report about every game. There are radio stations who cover them for hours at a time. That’s far more information than you get about Tyco or Computer Associates or NFI.
In sports, when someone does something wrong, they pretty much tell you the next day or two. Someone suspended — You know it. Someone hurt — They report it, and do a better job of policing that than any industry watchgroup.
And stats? my goodness. There is no comparison. You can tape everything and create your own stats, which I’m sure every “smart money” gambler does. There are public play-by-plays of every game. There are websites that analyze every which way from sunday every action and inaction of every player in the game.
There also is no such thing as insider information either. Player and team reps can’t talk to known gamblers, but do they really need to?
Reporters are there after every practice to interview the players and coaches. They ask the same questions that every gambler wants to know, if only so they know who to pick for their fantasy teams. They also get to see and report on who is there and who isn’t and who is limping and who isn’t.
That’s far better than we get from public companies. Not only can they not disclose material information on a daily basis, they try their very best to hide their actual performance when they are required to supposedly disclose all information.
Public companies play so many games with their numbers it’s ridiculous. Should they expense options or not? Per forma vs GAAP? One time write offs? Buying company after company? Writing down inventories then reselling them?
My favorite is beating the estimates by a penny quarter after quarter. Could you imagine a team that beat its competition by 1 point every game? Business, like sports, is not that predictable.
That’s not to say that the information is so good that this is a slamdunk investment. Sales don’t get closed, product cycles get pushed back, drugs don’t work as expected and players drop passes, miss shots and get hurt.
The argument can be made that this is much riskier than a bond, where unless the company goes out of business, you get paid the interest rate. Pick a strong company or the government and you are relatively safe. All true. That’s why i love bonds .
You could also make the argument that when you buy a stock, you own part of a company. Legally it’s true. In practice it’s not. For non-dividend paying companies, you have nothing but a piece of paper. The only hope you have if that company starts to decline is to find someone who will buy it from you.
A sports or blackjack or poker bet doesn’t have value beyond that game or hand. In that respect it’s just like the hundreds of millions, if not billions ,of options that are traded, but never converted, on stocks, commodities and other assets around the world every day.
Just what hedge funds do on a daily basis, and just what I plan on doing.
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December 17, 2004
Guard Reports Serious Decline in New RecruitsBy ERIC SCHMITT
ASHINGTON, Dec. 16 -In the latest signs of strains on the military from the war in Iraq, the Army National Guard announced on Thursday that it had fallen 30 percent below its recruiting goals in the last two months and would offer new incentives, including enlistment bonuses of up to $15,000.
In addition, the head of the National Guard Bureau, Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, said on Thursday that he needed $20 billion to replace arms and equipment destroyed in Iraq and Afghanistan or left there for other Army and Air Guard units to use, so that returning reservists will have enough equipment to deal with emergencies at home.
The sharp decline in recruiting is significant because National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers now make up nearly 40 percent of the 148,000 troops in Iraq, and are a vital source for filling the ranks, particularly those who perform essential support tasks, like truck drivers and military police.
General Blum said the main reason for the Army National Guard's recruiting shortfall was a sharp reduction in the number of recruits joining the Guard and Reserve when they leave active duty. In peacetime the commitment means maintaining their ties to the military with a weekend of service a month and two weeks in the summer.
Over the last 30 years, General Blum said, the Guard has counted on these soldiers with prior military service for about half of its recruits. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, however, many of these soldiers have been hesitant to join the Guard because of the increasing likelihood that America's citizen-soldiers will be activated and sent to Iraq or Afghanistan for up to 12 months. Indeed, many of the active-duty soldiers the Army would like to enlist in the Reserves have recently fought in Afghanistan or Iraq, and some have no inclination to do so again.
In an effort to halt the slide, the Army National Guard this week approved recruiting incentives that triple the enlistment bonuses to $15,000 for soldiers with prior military experience who sign up for six years (tax-free if soldiers enlist overseas), Guard officials said. Bonuses for new enlistees will increased to $10,000 from $6,000.
The Guard has already said it intends to increase the number of recruiters to 4,100 from 2,700 over the next three months, the first large increase since 1989.
"We're in a more difficult recruiting environment, period," General Blum told reporters in disclosing the new figures and the new incentives. "There's no question that when you have a sustained ground combat operation going that the Guard's participating in, that makes recruiting more difficult."
There are 42,000 Army National Guard soldiers serving in Iraq and Kuwait, and 8,200 serving in Afghanistan. Since Sept. 11, General Blum said, there have been about 100,000 Army National Guard troops activated for duty at home or abroad at any given time.
General Blum's remarks come just a few days after the chief of the Army Reserve, Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, told The Dallas Morning News that the Army Reserve recruiting was in a "precipitous decline" that, if unchecked, could inspire renewed debate over the draft. General Helmly told the newspaper that he personally opposed reviving the draft.
For the first two months of the fiscal year 2005, which started Oct. 1, the Army Reserve has also stumbled, falling 315 recruits short of its goal of 3,170 soldiers - a drop of 10 percent.
In November, the Guard recruited 2,902 enlistees, about 26 percent below its target of 3,925 recruits. In October and November combined, the Guard recruited 5,448 enlistees, nearly 30 percent below its goal of 7,600. At full strength, the Guard has 350,000 soldiers.
In the 2004 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, the Guard missed its overall recruiting target of 56,000 soldiers by more than 5,000, the first time it had missed its yearly goal since 1994. The active-duty branches of the armed services all met their recruiting goals last year.
As a result, General Blum said, the Guard has lowered its reliance on recruits with military experience to just 35 percent of its overall total, and will seek a much larger pool of recruits with no military experience.
"We are correcting, frankly, some of our recruiting themes and slogans to reflect a reality of today," he said. "We're not talking about one weekend a month and two weeks a year and college tuition. We're talking about service to the nation."
General Blum expressed confidence that the nearly $300 million in recruiting bonuses in this year's budget and the increase in the number of recruiters would propel the Guard to meet its yearly goal, but said that probably would not happen until August or so. "I think we'll recover," he said.
Some military personnel specialists offered a much more pessimistic forecast, and said the lower recruiting numbers are the harbingers of tougher times to come.
"I don't think this is an aberration," said David R. Segal, a military sociologist who directs the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland. "I think we're going to see significant shortfalls in recruitment, and I think we're to begin to see retention problems. We're also going to see increasing concerns at the state level about how the Guard will man itself and perform its state missions."
The Guard's woes do not end with recruiting. General Blum said the Army National Guard needs $20 billion over the next three years to buy additional radios, trucks, aircraft, engineering equipment and other materiel that have been wrecked or left behind in Iraq or Afghanistan..
"Otherwise, the Guard will be broken and not ready for the next time it's needed, either here at home or for war," General Blum said.
A spokesman for the Florida National Guard, Lt. Col. Ron Tittle, said Guard units there, which mobilized some 5,000 troops to deal with the state's three hurricanes in August and September, were already experiencing some shortages.
"It could hinder us to some degree," Colonel Tittle said. "But we adapt and make do. We'll accomplish the mission."
Soldier Accused of Asking to Be Shot
PHILADELPHIA, Dec. 16 (AP) - A soldier on leave has been accused of having his cousin shoot him so he would not have to return to Iraq, the police say.
The soldier, Specialist Marquise J. Roberts, 23, of Hinesville, Ga., suffered a minor wound to his left leg from a .22-caliber pistol on Tuesday, the police said. Specialist Roberts was treated at a hospital, then arrested after he and his cousin admitted having made up a story about the shooting, the authorities said.
After giving differing accounts of the incident, "they just broke down and confessed that they concocted the whole story so he didn't have to go back to the war," Lt. James Clark of the Philadelphia police department said on Thursday.
Specialist Roberts, who was visiting family members in Philadelphia, was charged with filing a false report. His cousin, Ronald Fuller, was charged with aggravated assault and other charges.
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Font Size: Viktory Over Alarmism
By Michael Fumento
Published
12/16/2004

It's perhaps fitting that dioxin was used in the attempted political murder of Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko. That's because dioxin is the most politicized chemical in history. It's notorious for its role at New York's Love Canal and Missouri's Times Beach, but primarily as an ingredient in the defoliant Agent Orange. Yet Yushchenko is alive because what's been called "the most deadly chemical known" is essentially a myth.
Dioxin is an unwanted by-product of incineration, uncontrolled burning and certain industrial processes such as bleaching. It was also formerly in trace amounts in herbicides and liquid soaps. We all carry dioxin in our fat and blood. But Dutch researchers said Yushchenko's exposure, probably from poisoned food, was about 6,000 times higher than average. So why, as the Munchkin coroner said of the Wicked Witch of the East, isn't Yushchenko "not only merely dead" but "really most sincerely dead"?

The "deadly dioxin" legend began with, of all things, guinea pigs. When fed to them in studies, they did fall over like furry tenpins. Yet hamsters could absorb 1,000 times as much dioxin before emitting their last squeals and other animals seemed impervious to the stuff.

Further, the animal deaths were from acute poisoning. Yet as a matter of convenience for activists, it not only became accepted that guinea pigs are the best animal model for humans but also that dioxin is a powerful carcinogen.

The original promoters of the humans-are-like-guinea-pigs legend were Vietnam activists. Agent Orange, which contained a trace of dioxin, effectively stripped away the jungle canopy that hid communist forces. So the enemy and its U.S. sympathizers claimed it was poisoning not just trees but humans. Pressured by these "humanitarians" the military quit spraying in 1971, giving back the enemy his sanctuary from which to kill our troops.

From there, the myth snowballed. After it was found in the goop on which homeowners in Love Canal, New York had built their houses, every illness in the area was blamed not just on the contamination generally but often specifically on dioxin. Likewise for when some yahoo knowingly sprayed dioxin-containing oil near Times Beach to keep down road dust and a flood then swept it into the town. Both areas were ordered evacuated.

But "Numerous studies found no excess illness in either area and today children again play in the dirt at Love Canal," notes Michael Gough, a biologist who was chairman of a federal advisory panel concerning Agent Orange from 1990 to 1995. Nevertheless, the cleanup of dioxin-contaminated areas continues to cost U.S. industry a fortune.

As to Vietnam vets, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that despite the earnest beliefs of many vets, "The blood [dioxin] levels of the Vietnam veterans were nearly identical to the levels found among the non-Vietnam veterans." Further, "levels were not related to the estimate of Agent Orange exposure based on either military records or self-reported exposure. Only those who did the actual spraying, members of Operation Ranch Hand, actually got significant doses.

Some did develop the same awful skin disease Yushchenko suffers, called chloracne. But that was only from direct contact with their skin, and they developed no other symptoms at the time. Since then the Air Force has continually monitored them, finding no unusual rates of any illness save for an alleged slight excess of diabetes. Yet a government study of American chemical workers with higher dioxin exposure found no excess diabetes. The Ranch Hands also have only half the normal rate of stomach cancers.

Chloracne was also the only serious symptom in the highest exposures of dioxin ever recorded, in which one young Austrian woman had about 16,000 times the normal body level, while another had 2,900 times the normal level. (Interestingly, the women were given the snack chip fat substitute olestra to help her excrete the dioxin faster. Not exactly a selling point for selling potato chips but . . .)

"We don't know of a single person who has ever died of acute dioxin poisoning," says Robert Golden, president of the Maryland-based consulting firm ToxLogic.

It's also terribly rude to say dioxin is not a human carcinogen. The International Agency for Research on Cancer insists it is, and the EPA desperately wants to call it one but its own review panels keep getting in the way.

Yet in addition to the Ranch Hands, we have cancer data from throughout the world concerning workers or townsfolk exposed to dioxin through accidental releases. No type of cancer shows up consistently. As a paper in last December's Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology concluded, "The long-term accumulation of negative, weak, and inconsistent findings suggests that [dioxin] eventually will be recognized as not carcinogenic for humans."

The massive dioxin disinformation campaign has caused tremendous harm. But for Yushchenko it was a godsend. He'll look terrible for some time; but he's alive. Had the would-be assassin instead used a few drops of old-fashioned strychnine or even a teaspoon of the vital nutrient iron, Yushchenko wouldn't be running for president; he'd be pushing up Ukrainian daisies. Fortunately, the culprit bought into the myth that began with a guinea pig.

Michael Fumento (Fumento[at]pobox.com) is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute, syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service, and author of Science Under Siege.

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Jailed Saddam Hussein Meets Lawyer for First Time
Thu Dec 16, 2:01 PM ET
By Lin Noueihed
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) saw a lawyer on Thursday for the first time since his arrest a year ago, days after his attorneys protested at a lack of access to him or other detained former Iraqi officials, the defense team said.
AFP/Pool/File Photo
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Slideshow: Iraq

Militants Praised In New 'Bin Laden' Tape(Reuters Video)

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"The interview lasted for more than four hours. The president seems in good health, much better compared to his first appearance before the court," the Jordan-based legal team hired by Saddam's exiled family said in a statement.
"The president appreciated his defense committee efforts."
An Iraqi lawyer on the team said one of its 20 members had visited Saddam and his jailed secretary Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti, but declined to identify the attorney by name.
Another lawyer visited General Sultan Hashim Ahmed, defense minister under Saddam, while former deputy prime minister Tareq Aziz was due to meet his defense counsel in the coming days.
Saddam, 67, has been behind bars since U.S. forces caught him hiding in a hole in the ground near his home town of Tikrit on Dec. 13 last year. He is due to be tried for war crimes, as are 11 top aides, although no date has been set for any trial.
Saddam's lawyers said this week they did not recognize the interim government's efforts to try him or his deputies because they had been denied access to counsel. Lawyers had also not been able to see documents on which to prepare their defenses.
Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said on Tuesday that war crimes trials of some of Saddam's lieutenants would begin next week.
The Iraqi Special Tribunal said that its "investigative hearings" would start soon. An official at the British embassy, which works closely with the Iraqi government, said on Thursday two or three hearings should be held next week.
Iraq (news - web sites)'s defense minister said Saddam's cousin Ali Hassan al- Majid, known as "Chemical Ali" for his alleged use of poison gas, would be the first to appear before a judge.
Western diplomats stress the hearings are preliminary and not a full-scale commencement of war crimes trials. Some Iraqi officials see the timing as part of efforts by Allawi to raise his U.S.-backed government's profile for an election on Jan. 30.
Saddam himself is expected to be among the last to be tried.
COUNTLESS MISSING
The lawyer who speaks for the defense team in the Jordanian capital Amman, Ziyad Khasawneh, said he did not know when its most high-profile client would next appear in court.
Twelve leaders of the toppled Baathist government, including Saddam, are being guarded by U.S. troops at the military base of Camp Cropper near Baghdad, awaiting trial by Iraqi judges.
They appeared briefly in court in July to be told of the charges against them, including war crimes and crimes against humanity. Some briefly shunned food this week as part of a short-lived protest against their detentions.
Khasawneh, appointed by Saddam's wife Sajida Khairallah, had threatened legal action against the U.S. administration unless members of the team were allowed to see their client.
But proceedings appeared to be moving forward this week, with an Iraq-based member of the legal team saying some of the defense lawyers expected to meet Justice Ministry officials as early as Saturday. The Justice Ministry declined to comment.
Much of the evidence against those facing trial is expected to come from 283 mass graves discovered around Iraq in the 21 months since U.S.-led forces overthrew the former government.
The latest, containing possibly 500 bodies, was uncovered near the city of Sulaimaniya, in the autonomous Kurdish region of northeastern Iraq where other graves have also been found.
Saddam launched military offensives against the Kurds in the late 1980s and forces under "Chemical Ali" used poison gas against the village of Halabja in 1988, killing some 5,000.
One of the reasons given by U.S. and Iraqi authorities for the delay in bringing Saddam and his lieutenants to trial has been the difficulty of gathering evidence from graves and sifting through the tons of documents left by the Baathists.
Iraqi Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar Amin said on Wednesday it would take over 25 years to uncover the fate of what he said were hundreds of thousands who disappeared under Saddam.
(Additional reporting by Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman and Zaid Fahmy in Baghdad)
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Shark attacks claim 2 AustraliansLast Updated Thu, 16 Dec 2004 11:02:29 EST
ADELAIDE, AUSTRALIA - An Australian teenager was killed Thursday in the country's second fatal shark attack within a week.
The 18-year-old male was being towed on his surfboard by three other teenagers in a small boat off the shores of West Beach, in the southern city of Adelaide.
The teenager fell from the surfboard when two great white sharks – both as long as five metres – attacked about 300 metres from the crowded beach.
Witnesses say one shark tore the victim in half while the other shark took his remains.

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Alleged Bin Laden Tape Praises Attack
Email this StoryDec 16, 4:25 PM (ET)By MAGGIE MICHAEL

(AP) Osama bin Laden is shown in this image made from an undated video broadcast on Oct. 29 by Arab...Full Image
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CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - A man identified as Osama bin Laden, speaking on an audiotape posted on an Islamic Web site Thursday, praised an attack earlier this month on a U.S. consulate in Saudi Arabia and criticized the Saudi regime as weak and controlled by the United States.
The voice sounded like the al-Qaida terror chief's, and the tape, which was more than an hour, was posted on a site known as a clearinghouse for militant Islamic comment. The identity of the voice, however, could not be independently confirmed.
The tape appeared the same day another dissident had called for anti-monarchy protests in the kingdom.
In Washington, Secretary of State Colin Powell said U.S. intelligence officials were analyzing the tape, and "it appears to be" the voice of bin Laden. An intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said colleagues had "high confidence" that it was bin Laden's voice.
When asked whether he thought bin Laden was trying to taunt the United States and Saudi Arabia, Powell replied, "He's a terrorist. That's what terrorists do. He's a criminal, he's a terrorist, he's a murderer and we're going to continue to hunt for him. ... He will be brought to justice."
The tape's reference to the Dec. 6 attack - in which five militants shot their way into the compound of the U.S. Consulate in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, killing five non-American employees - showed that it was made recently. Four of the attackers were killed and one was wounded in the consulate attack.
"God bless our brothers who stormed the American Consulate in Jiddah," the speaker said. "Those who were killed of our brothers, we ask God to accept them as martyrs." The attack was claimed at the time by al-Qaida's branch in the kingdom.
Also Thursday on the same Web site, an audiotape surfaced that was purportedly a recording of the sounds of the consulate attack transmitted via the attackers' mobile phones. Sirens, machine gun fire and shouts of "God is great!" can be heard. At the end, a man recites Quranic verses and then says: "Humiliation for America the infidel and its allies!"
The speaker in the purported bin Laden tape, speaking in calm and even tones, accused Saudi rulers of "violating God's rules," a common theme of bin Laden, who accuses Saudi rulers of being insufficiently Islamic and too close to the "infidel" United States.
"The sins the regime committed are great ... it practiced injustices against the people, violating their rights, humiliating their pride," the speaker said. He accused the Saudi royal family of misspending public money while "millions of people are suffering from poverty and deprivation."
While calling for change, the speaker scoffed at overtures such as promised municipal elections and a national dialogue Saudi rulers recently initiated to open public debate on democratization and other issues.
"This hasn't changed anything ... the best they can do is that they will go into the elections game as happened before in Yemen and Jordan or Egypt and move in a vicious circle for dozens of years, this is regardless of the fact that it is prohibited to enter the infidel legislative councils," the speaker said.
The main statement was preceded by Quranic verses, a rhetorical device typical of bin Laden.
Saudi Arabia cracked down on Muslim extremists after the May 2003 bombings of three residential compounds in Riyadh brought terrorism home to the kingdom, but has not been able to contain the violence.
Addressing Saudi rulers, the taped statement attributed to bin Laden said: "You must know that people are fed up ... security will not be able to stop them."
Bin Laden, believed hiding in the mountains along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, last reached out to his followers in October, with a videotape aired on the Arabic TV station Al-Jazeera just before the U.S. presidential elections. In that statement, he for the first time clearly took responsibility for the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States and said America could avoid another such strike if it stopped threatening the security of Muslims.

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December 16, 2004
In New York, Old-School Officers Swear By the Vanishing .38By MICHAEL WILSON
oughly 19 out of 20 officers in the New York City Police Department carry the semiautomatic pistols that have been standard issue for 11 years, a boxy handful of steel and polymer as clean and smooth as many of their young faces.
This story is not about them. It's about the 1 in 20, and the old, heavy piece parked on that officer's hip like a jalopy at the top of the driveway. Wow, people say - look at that thing. Does it work?
An older model of sidearm was grandfathered in with officers who are, in some cases, grandfathers. It is thick, but elegant in its way, its grip curling lazily out of the holster, the grooves in the hammer like those around aging eyes.
It goes by many names - thirty-eight, six-shooter, pea-shooter, wheel gun - but the .38-caliber revolver is a dying breed on the belts of New York, soon to go the way of the rosewood nightstick.
Today, a few more than 2,000 service weapons are revolvers, down from more than 30,000 in 1993. Never again, the police said, will new revolvers be issued, and so the number shrinks with every retirement. Many officers own two guns, and some officers continue to carry revolvers off-duty, but again, that choice is no longer available to new recruits.
More than anything else, it is carrying a gun - the daily familiarity of it, the expectation that it must be used on a second's notice - that most sets apart the police from the policed.
And yet, choosing the gun was unceremonial, rushed and uninformed: pick up a revolver off a table, see how it feels, try the next one, then a third, then pick your favorite. Then, during training, the recruits learned to respect this piece of equipment that can take a human life. Now it feels strange to leave the house without it. They have come a long way together, these 2,000 officers and their revolvers. Uniforms have come and gone, and the belly under the belt has grown, but the gun hanging there is not to be messed with.
"Eventually, they'll all be gone," said Inspector Steven J. Silks, commanding officer of the firearms and tactics section of the Police Academy. "It's like people who like to have a stick shift. You take it away from them, they feel like they can never drive in the snow again."
In the early years of the Police Department, officers carried any weapon they chose, until Theodore Roosevelt, as president of the Board of Police Commissioners, ordered the 4-inch, .32-caliber Colt revolver to be the standard sidearm. Training with the guns began on Dec. 30, 1895.
Ninety-eight years later, in 1993, after much debate among the department and the unions and legislators in Albany, the department switched from revolvers to semiautomatics, primarily to meet the advanced weaponry carried by criminals and dispel the perception that the officers were outgunned.
The newer guns were easier to reload and held 15 rounds in the magazine and one on the chamber, almost three times as many as the revolver. Officers with revolvers were allowed to keep them if they chose, while rookies received the new guns.
So, the model of an officer's gun dates him or her like rings on a tree. The outer bands are the semiautomatic, 9-millimeter pistols. The next ring is much thinner, the brief period of the so-called spurless revolver, a gun with an internal hammer that for safety cannot be cocked. Finally, in the center, there is the classic revolver, such as the Smith & Wesson Model 10 or the Ruger Police Service Six, more commonly seen on "T. J. Hooker" reruns or film noir than on the streets of New York.
The grips still echo the earliest revolvers, designed in the 19th century to feel like the handle of a plow in a man's hand. Lt. Eugene Whyte, 45, with 22 years on the job, remembers arriving at a meeting for the Republican National Convention this summer, and men in suits quickly calling him aside, agog at his snub-nosed sidearm. "I had Secret Service guys asking me if they could see it," he said. "It was as if I was carrying a flintlock pistol."
It is not only fellow law officers who notice. Officer Andrew Cruz, 41, was posted in Times Square recently when a tourist did a double take at his revolver. "He said, 'Old school,' " the officer recalled. They get that a lot: "You're a real cop," or, "You must have seen a lot," or, "You must be getting ready to retire."
"They say, 'What are you, an old-timer?' " said Officer Mark Steinhauer, 41, who joined the department in 1991. "My answer to them is, 'It worked for John Wayne.' "
The guys with revolvers, they say, are the same guys who married their high school girlfriends. Dependable. No surprises.
"It's put me through 20 years, and I'm still alive," said Officer Gregg Melita, 41, who not only carries a Ruger Police Service revolver, but the old "dump pouches," two leather carriers that hold loose cartridges. "This is when guns were guns, and cops were cops," he said. "The new guys don't even know what dump pouches are. They go, 'Hey, what's that hold?' " He chuckled. "'Bullets, kid.'"
The design of a 9-millimeter magazine, with a spring pushing cartridges in single file into the chamber, makes it susceptible to malfunction, to jamming. With a revolver, there is always another round ready to fire, no matter whether the one before it did.
"These aren't Ferraris," Inspector Silks said. "These are Chevrolets."
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly ordered the switch to 9-millimeter pistols 11 years ago, and learned to shoot one himself. But it is his revolver, a Colt Detective Special, that he carries today, under the slight break in his trouser leg at the left ankle.
"It's easier to carry, for me, anyway, the revolver. I've carried it for a long time," he said. "I actually won it in the Police Academy, many years ago," graduating first in his class. It is inscribed: "Bloomingdale Trophy won by Probationary Patrolman Raymond W. Kelly. May 15, 1967."
As for the decline of the revolver, he said, "I don't think it means very much, tactically. I don't see that much difference in shooting a semiautomatic handgun or a revolver. The difference, people will tell you, is dependability. You take a revolver that's been in a drawer for 100 years, take it out, pull the trigger, and it's going to go off. Automatics have the potential, probably more so than revolvers, for jamming. At least, that's what people think."
Officers with revolvers say that yes, they feel more comfortable with a gun that is virtually malfunction-proof, and that six shots at a time, along with their extra six-shot speed-loaders, ought to be enough. "After 18 rounds, if I can't hit him, I'm in big trouble," said Officer Sean Murtha, 40, who carries two speed-loaders. (And he would be a statistical aberration. To date in 2004, the average number of rounds fired by a single officer in a police shooting is 2.8, down from 4.6 in 2000 and 5.0 in 1995.)
But there is something else about the gun. It makes a statement.
"It has to do with identity," said Officer Cruz, from the 88th Precinct in Fort Greene in Brooklyn. "You see someone with a .38, you know they've got some time on them."
Officer Melita, with his dump pouch, joined in 1986 and patrolled in Harlem for 18 years. He believes his gun shows younger officers that he was at work when times were different in New York. "That's how you can tell who's been on the job awhile," he said. "Back when it was, you know, wild."
Officers must appear twice a year at the firing range in Rodman's Neck in the Bronx. Detective Tomasa Rodriguez, with the Midtown South precinct, remembered the announcement for everyone with revolvers to step aside to a separate range. "It was embarrassing. All the young kids were looking at us like, 'Oh my God, these people, they're emotionally disturbed, they still have a .38,'" she said. "Before you know it, you're out of there. There's, like, two or three people. I told my partner, 'I was embarrassed at the range.' But I don't care. I like my weapon, I know how to use it."
The department had 2,367 revolvers in service in 2003. At last count this fall, that number had dropped to 2,019. Wait, make that 2,018 - Marty Paolino, 42, retired from the 88th Precinct a few weeks ago. ("I never wanted to go for the special training," he said on his last day of work. "They don't pay you enough.") Next year, with the expected retirements of officers who joined in 1985, a relatively large class of recruits, hundreds of revolvers will disappear from service.
It is too soon for eulogies, but not much. For an epitaph on the revolver's tombstone, consider two statements from two officers, six little words for why they kept their six-shooters.
"I hate change."
"It looks cool."
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December 16, 2004
A Flood of Troubled Soldiers Is in the Offing, Experts PredictBy SCOTT SHANE
ASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - The nation's hard-pressed health care system for veterans is facing a potential deluge of tens of thousands of soldiers returning from Iraq with serious mental health problems brought on by the stress and carnage of war, veterans' advocates and military doctors say.
An Army study shows that about one in six soldiers in Iraq report symptoms of major depression, serious anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder, a proportion that some experts believe could eventually climb to one in three, the rate ultimately found in Vietnam veterans. Because about one million American troops have served so far in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Pentagon figures, some experts predict that the number eventually requiring mental health treatment could exceed 100,000.
"There's a train coming that's packed with people who are going to need help for the next 35 years," said Stephen L. Robinson, a 20-year Army veteran who is now the executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, an advocacy group. Mr. Robinson wrote a report in September on the psychological toll of the war for the Center for American Progress, a Washington research group.
"I have a very strong sense that the mental health consequences are going to be the medical story of this war," said Dr. Stephen C. Joseph, who served as the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs from 1994 to 1997.
What was planned as a short and decisive intervention in Iraq has become a grueling counterinsurgency that has put American troops into sustained close-quarters combat on a scale not seen since the Vietnam War. Psychiatrists say the kind of fighting seen in the recent retaking of Falluja - spooky urban settings with unlimited hiding places; the impossibility of telling Iraqi friend from Iraqi foe; the knowledge that every stretch of road may conceal an explosive device - is tailored to produce the adrenaline-gone-haywire reactions that leave lasting emotional scars.
And in no recent conflict have so many soldiers faced such uncertainty about how long they will be deployed. Veterans say the repeated extensions of duty in Iraq are emotionally battering, even for the most stoical of warriors.
Military and Department of Veterans Affairs officials say most military personnel will survive the war without serious mental issues and note that the one million troops include many who have not participated in ground combat, including sailors on ships. By comparison with troops in Vietnam, the officials said, soldiers in Iraq get far more mental health support and are likely to return to a more understanding public.
But the duration and intensity of the war have doctors at veterans hospitals across the country worried about the coming caseload.
"We're seeing an increasing number of guys with classic post-traumatic stress symptoms," said Dr. Evan Kanter, a psychiatrist at the Puget Sound veterans hospital in Seattle. "We're all anxiously waiting for a flood that we expect is coming. And I feel stretched right now."
A September report by the Government Accountability Office found that officials at six of seven Veterans Affairs medical facilities surveyed said they "may not be able to meet" increased demand for treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. Officers who served in Iraq say the unrelenting tension of the counterinsurgency will produce that demand.
"In the urban terrain, the enemy is everywhere, across the street, in that window, up that alley," said Paul Rieckhoff, who served as a platoon leader with the Florida Army National Guard for 10 months, going on hundreds of combat patrols around Baghdad. "It's a fishbowl. You never feel safe. You never relax."
In his platoon of 38 people, 8 were divorced while in Iraq or since they returned in February, Mr. Rieckhoff said. One man in his 120-person company killed himself after coming home.
"Too many guys are drinking," said Mr. Rieckhoff, who started the group Operation Truth to support the troops. "A lot have a hard time finding a job. I think the system is vastly under-prepared for the flood of mental health problems."
Capt. Tim Wilson, an Army chaplain serving outside Mosul, said he counseled 8 to 10 soldiers a week for combat stress. Captain Wilson said he was impressed with the resilience of his 700-strong battalion but added that fierce battles have produced turbulent emotions.
"There are usually two things they are dealing with," said Captain Wilson, a Southern Baptist from South Carolina. "Either being shot at and not wanting to get shot at again, or after shooting someone, asking, 'Did I commit murder?' or 'Is God going to forgive me?' or 'How am I going to be when I get home?' "
When all goes as it should, the life-saving medical services available to combat units like Captain Wilson's may actually swell the ranks of psychological casualties. Of wounded soldiers who are alive when medics arrive, 98 percent now survive, said Dr. Michael E. Kilpatrick, the Pentagon's deputy director of deployment health support. But they must come to terms not only with emotional scars but the literal scars of amputated limbs and disfiguring injuries.
Through the end of September, the Army had evacuated 885 troops from Iraq for psychiatric reasons, including some who had threatened or tried suicide. But those are only the most extreme cases. Often, the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder do not emerge until months after discharge.
"During the war, they don't have the leisure to focus on how they're feeling," said Sonja Batten, a psychologist at the Baltimore veterans hospital. "It's when they get back and find that their relationships are suffering and they can't hold down a job that they realize they have a problem."
Robert E. Brown was proud to be in the first wave of Marines invading Iraq last year. But Mr. Brown has also found himself in the first ranks of returning soldiers to be unhinged by what they experienced.
He served for six months as a Marine chaplain's assistant, counseling wounded soldiers, organizing makeshift memorial services and filling in on raids. He knew he was in trouble by the time he was on a ship home, when the sound of a hatch slamming would send him diving to the floor.
After he came home, he began drinking heavily and saw his marriage fall apart, Mr. Brown said. He was discharged and returned to his hometown, Peru, Ind., where he slept for two weeks in his Ford Explorer, surrounded by mementos of the war.
"I just couldn't stand to be with anybody," said Mr. Brown, 35, sitting at his father's kitchen table.
Dr. Batten started him on the road to recovery by giving his torment a name, an explanation and a treatment plan. But 18 months after leaving Iraq, he takes medication for depression and anxiety and returns in dreams to the horrors of his war nearly every night.
The scenes repeat in ghastly alternation, he says: the Iraqi girl, 3 or 4 years old, her skull torn open by a stray round; the Kuwaiti man imprisoned for 13 years by Saddam Hussein, cowering in madness and covered in waste; the young American soldier, desperate to escape the fighting, who sat in the latrine and fired his M-16 through his arm; the Iraqi missile speeding in as troops scramble in the dark for cover.
"That's the one that just stops my heart," said Mr. Brown. "I'm in my rack sleeping and there's a school bus full of explosives coming down at me and there's nowhere to go."
Such costs of war, personal and financial, are not revealed by official casualty counts. "People see the figure of 1,200 dead," said Dr. Kanter, of Seattle, referring to the number of Americans killed in Iraq. "Much more rarely do they see the number of seriously wounded. And almost never do they hear anything at all about the psychiatric casualties."
As of Wednesday 5,229 Americans have been seriously wounded in Iraq. Through July, nearly 31,000 veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom had applied for disability benefits for injuries or psychological ailments, according to the Department Veterans Affairs.
Every war produces its medical signature, said Dr. Kenneth Craig Hyams, a former Navy physician now at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Soldiers came back from the Civil War with "irritable heart." In World War I there was "shell shock." World War II vets had "battle fatigue." The troubles of Vietnam veterans led to the codification of post-traumatic stress disorder.
In combat, the fight-or-flight reflex floods the body with adrenaline, permitting impressive feats of speed and endurance. But after spending weeks or months in this altered state, some soldiers cannot adjust to a peaceful setting. Like Mr. Brown, for whom a visit to a crowded bank at lunch became an ordeal, they display what doctors call "hypervigilance." They sit in restaurants with their backs to a wall; a car's backfire can transport them back to Baghdad.
To prevent such damage, the Army has deployed "combat stress control units" in Iraq to provide treatment quickly to soldiers suffering from emotional overload, keeping them close to the healing camaraderie of their unit.
"We've found through long experience that this is best treated with sleep, rest, food, showers and a clean uniform, if that is possible," said Dr. Thomas J. Burke, an Army psychiatrist who oversees mental health policy at the Department of Defense. "If they get counseling to tell them they are not crazy, they will often get better rapidly."
To detect signs of trouble, the Department of Defense gives soldiers pre-deployment and post-deployment health questionnaires. Seven of 17 questions to soldiers leaving Iraq seek signs of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.
But some reports suggest that such well-intentioned policies falter in the field. During his time as a platoon leader in Iraq, Mr. Rieckhoff said, he never saw a combat stress control unit. "I never heard of them until I came back," he said.
And the health screens have run up against an old enemy of military medicine: soldiers who cover up their symptoms. In July 2003, as Jeffrey Lucey, a Marine reservist from Belchertown, Mass., prepared to leave Iraq after six months as a truck driver, he at first intended to report traumatic memories of seeing corpses, his parents, Kevin and Joyce Lucey, said. But when a supervisor suggested that such candor might delay his return home, Mr. Lucey played down his problems.
At home, he spiraled downhill, haunted by what he had seen and began to have delusions about having killed unarmed Iraqis. In June, at 23, he hanged himself with a hose in the basement of the family home.
"Other marines have verified to us that it is a subtle understanding which exists that if you want to go home you do not report any problems," Mr. Lucey's parents wrote in an e-mail message. "Jeff's perception, which is shared by others, is that to seek help is to admit that you are weak."
Dr. Kilpatrick, of the Pentagon, acknowledges the problem, saying that National Guardsmen and Reservists in particular have shown an "abysmal" level of candor in the screenings. "We still have a long ways to go," he said. "The warrior ethos is that there are no imperfections."
Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article.
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'Did North Korea Cheat?By Selig S. Harrison
From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2005
Summary: Two years ago, Washington accused Pyongyang of running a secret nuclear weapons program. But how much evidence was there to back up the charge? A review of the facts shows that the Bush administration misrepresented and distorted the data--while ignoring the one real threat North Korea actually poses.
Selig S. Harrison is Director of the Asia Program and Chairman of the Task Force on U.S. Korea Policy at the Center for International Policy. He is also a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the author of Korean Endgame.
WEAPONS OF MASS DISTRACTION
On October 4, 2002, the United States suddenly confronted North Korea with a damning accusation: that it was secretly developing a program to enrich uranium to weapons grade, in violation of the 1994 agreement that Pyongyang had signed with Washington to freeze its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Since North Korea had cheated, the Bush administration declared, the United States was no longer bound by its side of the deal. Accordingly, on November 14, 2002, the United States and its allies suspended the oil shipments they had been providing North Korea under the 1994 agreement. Pyongyang retaliated by expelling international inspectors and resuming the reprocessing of plutonium, which it had stopped under the 1994 accord (known as the Agreed Framework). The confrontation between North Korea and the United States once more reached a crisis level.
Much has been written about the North Korean nuclear danger, but one crucial issue has been ignored: just how much credible evidence is there to back up Washington's uranium accusation? Although it is now widely recognized that the Bush administration misrepresented and distorted the intelligence data it used to justify the invasion of Iraq, most observers have accepted at face value the assessments the administration has used to reverse the previously established U.S. policy toward North Korea.
But what if those assessments were exaggerated and blurred the important distinction between weapons-grade uranium enrichment (which would clearly violate the 1994 Agreed Framework) and lower levels of enrichment (which were technically forbidden by the 1994 accord but are permitted by the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty [NPT] and do not produce uranium suitable for nuclear weapons)?
A review of the available evidence suggests that this is just what happened. Relying on sketchy data, the Bush administration presented a worst-case scenario as an incontrovertible truth and distorted its intelligence on North Korea (much as it did on Iraq), seriously exaggerating the danger that Pyongyang is secretly making uranium-based nuclear weapons. This failure to distinguish between civilian and military uranium-enrichment capabilities has greatly complicated what would, in any case, have been difficult negotiations to end all existing North Korean nuclear weapons programs and to prevent any future efforts through rigorous inspection. On June 24, 2004, the United States proposed a new, detailed denuclearization agreement with North Korea at six-party negotiations (including the United States, China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and North Korea) in Beijing. Before discussions could even start, however, the Bush administration insisted that North Korea first admit to the existence of the alleged uranium-enrichment facilities and specify where they are located. Pyongyang has so far refused to confirm or deny whether it has such facilities; predictably, the U.S. precondition has precluded any new talks.
If it turns out that North Korea did not cheat after all, the prospects for a new denuclearization agreement would improve, because the Bush administration could no longer argue that Pyongyang is an inherently untrustworthy negotiating partner. At any rate, to break the diplomatic deadlock, the United States urgently needs a new strategy. Washington should deal first with the very real and immediate threat posed by the extant stockpile of weapons-usable plutonium that Pyongyang has reprocessed since the breakdown of the Agreed Framework. Measures to locate and eliminate any enrichment facilities that can produce weapons-grade uranium are essential but should come in the final stages of a step-by-step denuclearization process. Above all, Washington must not once more become embroiled in a military conflict on the basis of a worst-case assessment built on limited, inconclusive intelligence. There is a real danger that military and other pressures on North Korea, designed to bolster a failing diplomatic process, could escalate into a full-scale war that none of North Korea's neighbors would support.
INCONVENIENT FACTS
Washington's accusation of Pyongyang was delivered during a visit to the North Korean capital by James Kelly, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. Kelly told a key North Korean official that he had evidence of a uranium-enrichment project. According to Kelly, the North Korean official, First Deputy Foreign Minister Kang Sok Ju, acknowledged the existence of such a program at the time. But Kang has subsequently denied this; what he actually told Kelly, according to Foreign Minister Paek Nam Sun, was deliberately ambiguous: that North Korea is "entitled" to have such a program or "an even more powerful one" to deter a pre-emptive U.S. attack. According to Paek, Kang also stated that North Korea is entitled to pursue an "ncnd" (neither confirm nor deny) policy concerning the specifics of its nuclear capabilities, just as the United States does--especially since the two countries remain belligerents in the technically unfinished Korean War.
Kelly's confrontation with Kang seems to have been inspired by the growing alarm felt in Washington in the preceding five months over the ever more conciliatory approach that Seoul and Tokyo had been taking toward Pyongyang; by raising the uranium issue, the Bush administration hoped to scare Japan and South Korea into reversing their policies. The chain of events leading to the confrontation began in April 2002, when the two Koreas decided to move ahead with plans for North-South railroad links and for the development of a new industrial zone at Kaesong in North Korea, where some 1,000 South Korean firms were expected to establish factories. These steps required U.S. approval to de-mine the demilitarized zone. The United States strongly resisted the thaw, refused to approve the de-mining, and threatened to block the Kaesong project by restricting the use of U.S.-licensed and other sensitive technology by companies investing in the zone. (U.S.-South Korean tensions over the technology issue have since intensified.) But in August 2002, South Korea's then president, Kim Dae Jung, personally appealed to President George W. Bush to drop his objections, and on September 12, after an intense diplomatic struggle, the Pentagon reluctantly gave the go-ahead for de-mining.
American anxieties only grew, however, when, on September 17, 2002, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited Pyongyang to discuss the normalization of relations--a visit that Japan had been quietly exploring for more than nine months without telling the United States. Washington, in fact, found out about the trip only three weeks before it occurred, when Koizumi presented the upcoming visit as a fait accompli to Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Koizumi did not ask for U.S. permission to go to North Korea, and he refused to call off the trip even after Armitage revealed Washington's suspicions about a secret North Korean uranium program.
Faced with the prospect that the North Korea policies of South Korea and Japan had slipped out of its control, the Bush administration "saw a real possibility that its options on the [Korean] peninsula would increasingly be driven by the policy agendas of others," wrote Jonathan Pollack, chairman of the Strategic Research Department at the U.S. Naval War College in the summer of 2003. Plans for Kelly's visit to Pyongyang were accelerated, and his showdown with North Korean leaders came less than three weeks after Koizumi's meeting with Kim Jong Il.
Pollack suggests that Kelly's charges were not justified by U.S. intelligence. Pointing to a CIA report submitted to Congress in November 2002, Pollack wrote that "the imprecision in the CIA analysis underscored the difficulties of estimating the extant capabilities and ultimate purposes of the North's enrichment program" and left it unclear "how complete and compelling the intelligence data may have been." According to Pollack, the CIA report indicated that North Korea had no operational enrichment facility to declare. ... The intelligence community believed that North Korea still [would have] confronted daunting obstacles had it decided to build an enriched uranium weapon, or even to acquire the production capabilities that might ultimately permit such an option. Most officials recognized that the path to a meaningful enrichment capability remained a distant and very uncertain possibility.
Despite its limited knowledge about the uranium program, the U.S. government "opted to exploit the intelligence for political purposes." The uranium issue "furnished powerful ammunition to render the Agreed Framework a dead letter"--something enormously appealing to hawks in the administration, who had opposed Clinton-era diplomacy toward North Korea as much too soft. As Pollack described it to a New York Times columnist, the Bush administration used "whatever [intelligence] was there on North Korea to step away from a set of obligations, to shine a shaming light on North Korea and perhaps to get others to put the heat on North Korea."
An examination of the November 2002 CIA report that set forth the basis for Kelly's confrontation confirms these charges of imprecision. Although the document alludes to "clear evidence" that North Korea had "recently" begun constructing a centrifuge facility (centrifuges are machines used to enrich uranium), the CIA did not explain the nature of this evidence beyond mentioning, in general terms, that Pyongyang had acquired "centrifuge-related materials in large quantities." No specific evidence was presented to support the report's conclusion that North Korea was "constructing a plant that could produce enough weapons-grade uranium for two or more weapons per year when fully operational, which could be as soon as mid-decade."
The CIA says that it cannot reveal all that it knows without exposing "methods and sources." This argument would be more persuasive if the agency had at least made a credible case to congressional committees in executive session or to U.S. Asian allies. But since the report came out, no evidence to support it has been supplied to South Korea or Japan--or to China and Russia, the other countries participating in the ongoing six-party negotiations. (This assessment is based on off-the-record conversations with past and present government officials in these countries, including officials in South Korea and Japan who participated in the intelligence exchanges with the CIA that preceded the Kelly visit.) China alone has gone public on the issue. Deputy Foreign Minister Zhou Wenzhong told a New York Times reporter on June 7, 2004, "So far, the United States has not presented convincing evidence of the uranium program. We don't know whether it exists."
The limited evidence that has, in fact, been provided to South Korea and Japan does confirm that North Korea has made efforts to buy equipment that could be used to make and operate centrifuges. This equipment includes electrical-frequency converters, high-purity cobalt powder for magnetic-top bearing assemblies, and high-strength aluminum tubes.
In most of these cases, however, it is not clear whether the purchases were ever made and, if so, how much North Korea bought. For example, in April 2003, French, German, and Egyptian authorities blocked a 22-ton shipment of high-strength aluminum tubes to North Korea, the first installment of an order for 200 tons. But no evidence has been presented to establish that any of the order was delivered. Similarly, a U.S. Department of Energy intelligence study reported a North Korean "attempt" to buy two electrical-frequency converters from a Japanese firm in 1999. But the report concluded that "with only two converters, [North Korea] was probably only establishing a pilot-scale uranium enrichment capability."
Again in 2003, Japan blocked a renewed North Korean effort to buy frequency converters, this time three. But as a careful study by the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) observed, "hundreds" of such converters would be required for a production-scale enrichment facility equipped with enough centrifuges to make weapons-grade enriched uranium. The IISS study concluded that such "failures in Pyongyang's procurement efforts suggest that North Korea may still lack key components," especially a special grade of steel for rotors and caps and rotor bearings.
TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES
It is much easier to make low-enriched uranium (LEU)-the fuel needed to power light-water plutonium reactors-than it is to make weapons-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU), as Washington has accused Pyongyang of doing. A relatively small number of centrifuges is needed to make LEU, but the production of HEU in quantities sufficient for nuclear weapons requires the continuous operation of hundreds-or thousands-of centrifuges over a long period. Richard Garwin, a respected nuclear scientist, has estimated that 1,300 high-performance centrifuges would have to operate full time for three years to make the 60 kilograms of fissile material needed for a basic ("gun-type") nuclear weapon. Accomplishing that would require an enormous sustained input of electricity, without fluctuation or interruption. Moreover, the operation of a multi-centrifuge "cascade" requires a high-powered motor with a speed twice that of a MiG-21 jet engine. North Korea cannot produce engines even for its Russian-supplied MiGs, and it has only limited, highly unreliable electricity capabilities. It is therefore unlikely that the country is able at present to build or operate the equipment needed, over a long period, to produce weapons-grade uranium.
Apart from the electricity problem, when producing HEU, corrosion of the centrifuge rotors leads to their frequent breakdown. To operate an enrichment plant with 1,300 centrifuges, North Korea-according to Robert Alvarez, who served as senior policy adviser to the U.S. secretary of energy from 1993 to 1999 and conducted inspection visits to North Korea under the 1994 freeze accord-would need hundreds of replacement centrifuges. Says Alvarez, "I was very impressed with the primitive character of many aspects of their plutonium program, and I'm skeptical about their ability to deal with the complexities of a big uranium program. To make and operate thousands of centrifuges successfully, they would have to rely on so many outside sources. They would need ready access to the most sophisticated machine tools. They don't have the money that the Iranians do to buy this fancy technology. Remember, we found that the Libyans couldn't pull it off, even with Pakistani help."
Given the nature and scope of its attempts to buy various component parts, it seems clear that North Korea did explore the option of developing weapons-grade enrichment technology. Faced as it has been with technical constraints, however, Pyongyang may well have been forced to scale down its ambitions, limiting its efforts to LEU production, or a pilot HEU program, or no coherent program at all. The North Korean ambassador to the United Kingdom, Ri Yong Ho, hinted that this is the case during two seminars held in London during 2004, saying, in the same words each time, "We do not have an enrichment program, as such."
LEU facilities, furthermore, would not violate international nonproliferation norms. Signatories of the NPT are permitted to possess LEU facilities to make fuel for their civilian nuclear reactors if these facilities are open to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections. North Korea's status as an NPT signatory is currently suspended, but it did accept IAEA inspections under the Agreed Framework. Pyongyang may have viewed its LEU facilities in this context-not necessarily as a first step toward a possible weapons program, but as a means of avoiding permanent reliance on foreign-supplied fuel for the two light-water reactors being built to provide electricity under the 1994 freeze agreement. North Korea and a multinational consortium set up to build the reactors agreed that they would "initially" be powered with fuel supplied by the consortium, known as the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO). After that, KEDO and North Korea agreed, in ambiguous language, that North Korea would be free to choose its source of supply. KEDO no doubt envisaged foreign suppliers, but Pyongyang may well have hoped to provide the fuel itself, drawing on its extensive deposits of uranium ore for an LEU program.
Moreover, under the freeze accord, the IAEA did not have the right to search for or monitor undeclared nuclear facilities until after a "significant portion" of the first light-water reactor had been completed. North Korea may well have reasoned that it did not have to declare any LEU facilities until KEDO fulfilled its own obligations to complete the construction of the reactors (which has not happened yet, since KEDO suspended the construction after the breakdown of the Agreed Framework).
When asked whether Pyongyang possessed civilian enrichment facilities on April 22, 2004, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan quickly denied that it had any type of enrichment program. On August 12, however, his Foreign Ministry colleague, Li Gun, edged toward acknowledgment of such a program when he was asked a similar question at a New York seminar. "We are entitled to have it for peaceful purposes," Li said.
THE LETTER OF THE LAW
Did North Korea, then, cheat on the 1994 agreement with the United States, as the Bush administration has insisted? All of the operative provisions of the accord relate to freezing the North's plutonium program and make no reference to uranium enrichment. Pyongyang scrupulously observed these provisions until the Bush administration stopped the oil shipments in December 2002. The agreement does, however, reaffirm a 1991 agreement between North and South Korea that banned "uranium enrichment facilities," making no distinction between HEU and LEU. Pyongyang clearly did violate that accord by pursuing uranium-enrichment efforts (however limited they may turn out to have been) and thus, technically, violated the 1994 Agreed Framework as well.
The Bush administration, however, has made a much more serious charge: that North Korea has been secretly making nuclear weapons that might be deployed by "mid-decade" and thus cannot be trusted to honor a new denuclearization agreement. If it turns out that Pyongyang has developed no operational enrichment facilities at all-or only LEU, not HEU, facilities-Washington's claim will be discredited.
The CIA assessment rests, at bottom, on the assumption that North Korea has received extensive help and equipment from Pakistan. Some intelligence suggesting this possibility did surface during the Clinton presidency. "We raised fairly generalized concerns with Pakistan about nuclear cooperation with North Korea," recalls Robert Einhorn, Clinton's assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation. "But we didn't cite chapter and verse because we didn't have chapter and verse to cite." Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, moreover, has flatly denied that Islamabad gave North Korea nuclear technology in exchange for North Korean missiles, saying that "whatever we bought from them was with money."
Recent revelations that Abdul Qadeer Khan, the ousted director of Islamabad's nuclear program, ran a black-market supply ring for nuclear materials have strengthened suspicions of a Pakistan-North Korea connection. Here again, however, the facts remain murky. Khan has not discussed the specifics of his misdeeds publicly, and conflicting statements about North Korea have been attributed to him. A June 2002 CIA assessment that was leaked after the Kelly visit said that Pakistan had provided North Korea with centrifuge prototypes and blueprints, but that it was uncertain how many, if any, centrifuges North Korea had made from them. The possibility that such prototypes were supplied to Pyongyang is supported by the fact that the aluminum tubes intercepted by France in 2003 matched the type used by Pakistan. But there is no basis for assuming that Pakistani help went beyond the supply of an uncertain number of demonstration centrifuges and associated replacement parts. When the Khan nuclear smuggling network was exposed, it turned out that a factory in Malaysia had supplied Libya with centrifuges. But the detailed Malaysian police report on the factory's exports makes no reference to North Korea, and U.S. officials acknowledge that there is no evidence that it supplied anything to North Korea. Moreover, the detailed review of British intelligence on nuclear and missile proliferation conducted by the Butler Committee linked Khan solely to Libya and made no mention of any help by his network to North Korea.
FIRST THINGS FIRST
If North Korea's enrichment program never in fact progressed beyond some degree of LEU experimentation or production, there may yet be a face-saving way for Pyongyang to acknowledge the existence of enrichment facilities in the early stages of the denuclearization negotiations. So far, however, the United States has demanded the removal of all enrichment facilities in North Korea, despite the fact that the NPT permits LEU operations for civilian programs if adequate inspection is permitted. Since the United States has made similar demands of Brazil and Iran, an LEU compromise with North Korea would have to be part of a larger policy shift in Washington.
Such a compromise would be further complicated by the fact that the uranium issue has become a political football in the internal North Korean policy struggle between pragmatists, who favor a nuclear settlement, and hard-liners, mainly in the armed forces, who resist one. On a visit to Pyongyang in April 2004, a ranking general told me that Pyongyang wanted to keep the world guessing about North Korea's HEU capabilities since it "strengthens our deterrent posture."
To find out definitively how far the North Korean enrichment program has gone, the United States and the other powers in the six-party talks should insist on stringent inspection terms in a denuclearization process. Eventually, the IAEA "Additional Protocol," which provides for intrusive inspections, should be extended from South Korea to North Korea. Pyongyang is not likely to permit such intrusive access, however, until the final stages of a step-by-step denuclearization process in which concessions by the United States and North Korea's neighbors build trust by reducing Pyongyang's economic and military insecurity.
North Korea can hide uranium-enrichment facilities from aerial surveillance more easily than plutonium facilities. North Korean cooperation in intrusive, on-the-ground inspections would therefore be necessary to determine whether Pyongyang is developing a weapons-grade enrichment capability, and if so, how close it has come to producing significant amounts of weapons-grade fissile material.
Unless conclusive new evidence comes to light, the entire uranium issue should be deferred so that the parties can focus on the more immediate threat: North Korea's known plutonium-reprocessing capabilities. Since the 1994 agreement collapsed, there is clear evidence that Pyongyang has reprocessed some or all of the 8,000 plutonium fuel rods at the Yongbyon reactor that had been safeguarded under the accord. By scuttling the 1994 agreement on the basis of uncertain data that it presented with absolute certitude, and by insisting that North Korea "confess" to the existence of a uranium program before new negotiations on denuclearization can begin, the Bush administration has blocked action on the one present threat that North Korea is known to pose: the threat represented by its reprocessed plutonium, which could be used for nuclear weapons or transferred to third parties.
The administration's underlying mistake-in the case of the North Korean uranium mystery, as in Iraq-has been treating a worst-case scenario as revealed truth. In October 2004, when Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's national security adviser, was challenged to justify her government's mistaken assessment about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, she explained that "a policymaker cannot afford to be wrong on the short side, underestimating the ability of a tyrant like Saddam Hussein." Similarly, General James Clapper, who was director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) during the 1994 North Korean nuclear crisis, has said that "personally as opposed to institutionally, I was skeptical that they ever had a bomb. We didn't have smoking gun evidence either way. But you build a case for a range of possibilities. In a case like North Korea, you have to apply the most conservative approach, the worst-case scenario." The 1994 U.S. estimate (by the CIA and the DIA) that North Korea had "one or two" nuclear weapons at that time remains unchanged-although it has yet to be proved or disproved.
Clearly, worst-case scenarios must be taken into account, and policies should not be made on the basis of wishful thinking. For that reason, the uranium mystery must be resolved in any North Korean denuclearization process, and the biggest and best U.S. incentives, such as the full normalization of economic and diplomatic relations, should be withheld from North Korea until it provides adequate access for inspections. Right now, however, the United States confronts the disturbing immediate reality that the breakdown of the 1994 freeze agreement has made the United States less secure. The danger posed by North Korea's extant plutonium program has grown since the United States announced it was no longer bound by the Agreed Framework, and it is much greater than the hypothetical threat posed by a suspected uranium-enrichment program about which little is known. It is high time for the United States to switch course and deal with North Korea's plutonium first. Only after a relaxation of tensions with Pyongyang, through step-by-step mutual concessions, is the full truth about its uranium capabilities likely to be known, and only then can definitive action be taken to put the North Korean nuclear genie back in the bottle.
www.foreignaffairs.org is copyright 2002--2004 by the Council on Foreign Relations. All rights reserved.

Posted on Thu, Dec. 16, 2004
SPEECHLott: Replace defense chiefBy MELISSA M. SCALLAN
BILOXI - U.S. Sen. Trent Lott doesn't believe Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should resign immediately, but he does think Rumsfeld should be replaced sometime in the next year.
"I'm not a fan of Secretary Rumsfeld," Lott, R-Mississippi, told the Biloxi Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday morning. "I don't think he listens enough to his uniformed officers."
Rumsfeld has been criticized since a soldier asked him last week why the combat vehicles used in the war in Iraq don't have the proper armor. Both Rumsfeld and President Bush have said more vehicle armor will be shipped to Iraq.
Lott said the United States needs more troops to help with the war. The country also needs a plan to leave Iraq once elections are over at the end of January.
Lott doesn't think Rumsfeld is necessarily the person to carry out that plan.
"I would like to see a change in that slot in the next year or so," Lott said. "I'm not calling for his resignation, but I think we do need a change at some point."
On another military issue, Lott said he hopes the Base Realignment and Closure Commission will consider closing bases overseas rather than in the United States.
"I think we're looking at closures at home before looking at other parts of the world," he said.
Keesler Air Force Base and the Seabee Base in Gulfport most likely will be spared, Lott said, but Naval Station Pascagoula could be affected.
Melissa Scallan can be reached at 896-0541 or at mmscallan@sunherald.com.
© 2004 The Sun Herald and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.http://www.sunherald.com