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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: NickSE who wrote (97762)	5/9/2003 5:41:42 PM
From: NickSE	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Iraqi Documents on Israel Surface on a Cultural Hunt nytimes.com By JUDITH MILLER BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 6 — What began today as a hunt for an ancient Jewish text at secret police headquarters here wound up unearthing a trove of Iraqi intelligence documents and maps relating to Israel as well as offers of sales of uranium and other nuclear material to Iraq. In one huge room in the flooded basement of the building, American soldiers from MET Alpha, the "mobile exploitation team" that has been searching for nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in Iraq for the past three months, found maps featuring terrorist strikes against Israel dating to 1991. Another map of Israel highlighted what the Iraqis thought were the locations at which their Scud missiles had struck in the Persian Gulf war of 1991. The strikes were designated by yellow-and-red paper flowers placed atop the pinpointed Israeli neighborhoods. Team members floated out of the room a perfect mock-up of the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, as well as mock-ups of downtown Jerusalem and official Israeli buildings in very fine detail. They also collected a satellite picture of Dimona, Israel's nuclear complex, and a female mannequin dressed in an Israeli Air Force uniform, standing in front of a list of Israeli officers' ranks and insignia. Of even greater interest to MET Alpha was a "top secret" intelligence memo found in a room on another floor. Written in Arabic and dated May 20, 2001, the memo from the Iraqi intelligence station chief in an African country described an offer by a "holy warrior" to sell uranium and other nuclear material. The bid was rejected, the memo states, because of the United Nations "sanctions situation." But the station chief wrote that the source was eager to provide similar help at a more convenient time. The discoveries, which American military officers called significant but which did not by themselves offer documentary evidence of direct Iraqi links to terror attacks on Israel, were the serendipitous byproduct of one of the strangest missions ever conducted by MET Alpha. The search began this morning when 16 soldiers from MET Alpha teamed up with members of the Iraqi National Congress, a leading opposition group headed by Ahmad Chalabi, to search for what an intelligence source had described as one of the most ancient copies of the Talmud in existence, dating from the seventh century. The Talmud is a book of oral law, with rabbinical commentaries and interpretations. A former senior official of the Mukhabarat, Saddam Hussein's secret police, had told the opposition group a few days earlier that he had hidden the ancient Jewish book in the basement of his headquarters. The building had been badly damaged by coalition bombing, said the man, who is now working for the Iraqi National Congress, but he was still willing to take a group there to recover it. MET Alpha hesitated. Its mission was hunting for proof of unconventional weapons in Iraq, not saving cultural and religious treasures. But Col. Richard R. McPhee, its commander, decided that the historic Talmud was too valuable to leave behind. Early this morning, a seven-vehicle convoy pulled out of the Iraqi Hunting Club, a former Baathist retreat that is now the headquarters for the Iraqi National Congress. Accompanied by members of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, MET Alpha's chaplain, who has a strong interest in religious texts, and a reporter, the group arrived at Mukhabarat headquarters only to find the section of the building in which the precious document was said to be stored under four feet of murky, fetid water. Dead animals floated on the surface. The stairwell down to the muck was littered with shards of glass, pieces of smashed walls and other bombing debris. Temporarily daunted by the overpowering stench, MET Alpha's leader, Chief Warrant Officer Richard L. Gonzales, and two other MET Alpha soldiers eventually collected themselves and plunged into the mire in search of the holy text as the team chaplain shook his head in disbelief. What they found instead of the precious book was what the former Iraqi intelligence official said was the operations center of the Mukhabarat's Israel-Palestine department. Two Iraqi National Congress members joined the soldiers in the water as they inched their way by flashlight through the 50-foot hallway to the rooms where they happened upon the intelligence documents. Slogging down the dank hallway, the soldiers reached a room where they found hundreds of books floating in the foul water. There they rescued three bundles of older Jewish books, including a Babylonian Talmud from Vilna, accounting books of the Jewish community of Baghdad between 1949 and 1953 and dozens of more modern scholarly books mostly in Arabic and Hebrew — "Generals of Israel," by Moshe Ben-Shaul; David Ben-Gurion's "Memoirs"; and "Semites and Anti-Semites," by the Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis. But no seventh-century Talmud. In the end, MET Alpha collected and turned over one large truckload of intelligence documents to the Defense Intelligence Agency for analysis. As for the missing Talmud, Mr. Gonzales said his team believed that it might still be at the bottom of the Mukhabarat's flooded basement. That view was reinforced by the recovery of a wooden box with Hebrew writing, which the former Iraqi intelligence officer said might have contained the priceless artifact.

To: NickSE who wrote (97762)	5/9/2003 6:07:44 PM
From: Ish	Respond to of 281500

<<BAGHDAD – US Army officials in the eastern part of the Iraqi capital are taking a novel approach to stop looters - offering some of them a job that pays better than stealing government property.>> Amazing, the army thinking out of the box and coming up with a better solution. Not the army I was in.

To: NickSE who wrote (97762)	5/10/2003 12:00:06 AM
From: Dayuhan	Respond to of 281500

US Army officials in the eastern part of the Iraqi capital are taking a novel approach to stop looters - offering some of them a job that pays better than stealing government property. What a wonderful example... don't you wonder how the people who refrained from looting - and didn't get jobs - are going to feel about that? What do you usually get from rewarding bad behaviour?

To: NickSE who wrote (97762)	5/10/2003 10:43:24 AM
From: NickSE	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Heartbreaking Report from North Korea Joe Katzman windsofchange.net Loyal reader and frequent guest blogger M. Simon sends this along. As bad as you think things are in North Korea, the real situation may be worse. Try to imagine you and your loved ones living somewhere like this: From: NKP Sent: Monday, April 14, 2003 2:10 PM Subject: Message from North Korea Friends, I received an e-mail from Mr. Moon Kook-Han this morning. He sent two Korean-Chinese to North Korea last week to deliver some food urgently needed. He could not do it for a while because he ran out of money. What those two Korean-Chinese reported back to Mr. Moon after they came back from North Korea is much much worse than we feared. It is worse than 1996 or 1997. I translate his message written on April 14th at 10 P.M.(Korean time): Dear Mr. Nam: I just talked to the sister helper who visited North Korea recently. She has been going back and forth to North Korea since 1996, and she knows the North Korean situation very well. She is a very strong person, and she cries very seldom. I got to know her in 1997, and worked with her to deliver food to North Korea in 1997 and 1998. She told me the following: CONTINUED... "No food dispensation even on Kim Il-Sung birthday (April 15th): We heard that the food situation in North Korea has been very bad. However, North Korean government used to give out some food every year on around April 15th to the people to celebrate the father dictator Kim Il-Sung birthday. There has been no food dispensation this year, not even 1 kg of food. This must be the worst ever even in North Korea. Mass suicide in many villages: Starving near to death for the past several years and with no hope for the future, many families kill themselves now by taking rat poison. There had been incidents of this kind before, but mass suicide has become more frequent and wide spread now. The City of B where the aid worker visited this time was rather better off than the other areas because it is located near the border. Even the City of B experiences the worst food shortage these days. The Army is looting the civilian residences: The Army, if they know that there are some valuables or food in a residence, break into the house and rob anything of value. The supporter eyewitnessed a robbery by the Army when she was in the village. They came and took the only bicycle from a house. They were all armed, and the residents could not even protest. There is no law in North Korea now. The Army can rob civilians in broad daylight and when people are watching them. The Army must be starving too. Recently, a soldier was starving in the Army. His family paid off some officers and got him discharged. He had nothing to eat at home either. He ran away. The situation is worse than 1997 which was considered the worst year ever: The aid worker went to a railroad station. There was a pile of burnt ashes left over from the train. People fought to get a place in the ashes to keep themselves warm. Their faces looked all black and bloodless from starvation. They could not walk straight. They all said that half the [City of B] residents would perish this year if they did not get help. Farmers cannot work on their farm even in this spring: They do not have any seeds to spread in the farm. Nobody is working. No people in the market: It used to be crowded in the market with people. Nobody has money to buy anything. She did not see any people in the market. The aid worker saw an old lady peddling a bowl of mountain grass roots. Things are much worse now than 1996-1998 which everybody thought was the worst. It defies description. Nobody can predict what may happen this spring in North Korea. The aid worker in China who reported these stories used to be so strong, but she could not complete her story and hang up the phone, crying. What can I do? Heaven help them, and us! "