Russian Ire at U.S. Missile Plan Seems to Ease After Talks

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY

MOSCOW — In the wake of high-level talks between the United States and Russia, the Kremlin appears to be expressing somewhat less hostility toward the Bush administration’s plan for a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic.

In an interview published Thursday in the newspaper Izvestia, the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said the American side had presented proposals that could assuage some Russian concerns. The proposals were offered during a visit this week to Moscow by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

The exact details of the proposals have not been disclosed by either side. President Vladimir V. Putin said at the talks that a letter from President Bush containing the proposals was “a very serious document.” Mr. Putin seemed to adopt a more conciliatory tone than he had at earlier such meetings.

Still, the two countries are not close to an agreement on the missile defense system, and the White House has made clear that it will press ahead no matter what.

In the Izvestia interview, Mr. Lavrov said the Americans had promised that the Russians could monitor the system in Eastern Europe.

“The American side is prepared to offer us a whole series of confidence-building measures so we can be convinced that the system does not work against us,” Mr. Lavrov said. “The idea of these measures boils down to the following: we will have an opportunity to watch what the radar is doing and what the real condition is of the base for interceptor missiles, using both human and technical means.”

The Bush administration wants to put tracking radar in the Czech Republic and 10 missile interceptors in Poland, both intended to counter missile attacks from Iran. Mr. Putin has opposed the plan, saying that it could threaten Russia. The Kremlin also appears to be angry because the system would be in former Soviet satellites that are now part of NATO.

The White House has repeatedly emphasized that the system was not intended to be used against Russia, but the Kremlin has not relented.

On Thursday, Ms. Rice and Mr. Gates told Mr. Bush that their meetings in Moscow had been “good and constructive,” said Dana M. Perino, a White House spokeswoman.

In an interview on Wednesday with Radio Farda, an American-financed Persian-language station, Mr. Bush said he was “cautiously optimistic” about the negotiations.

“I don’t know whether we can find common ground,” he said. “But we are trying to find common ground, and that’s what’s — that’s the first step, is to make the attempt.”

After a Decade at War With West, Al-Qaeda Still Impervious to Spies

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, March 20, 2008; A01

BARCELONA -- A decade after al-Qaeda issued a global declaration of war against America, U.S. spy agencies have had little luck recruiting well-placed informants and are finding the upper reaches of the network tougher to penetrate than the Kremlin during the Cold War, according to U.S. and European intelligence officials.

Some counterterrorism officials say their agencies missed early opportunities to attack the network from within. Relying on Cold War tactics such as cash rewards for tips failed to take into account the religious motivations of Islamist radicals and produced few results.

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, officials said, al-Qaeda has tightened its internal security at the top, placing an even greater emphasis on personal and tribal loyalties to determine who can gain access to its leaders.

Alain Chouet, former chief of the security intelligence service of the DGSE, France's foreign spy agency, said it can take years for informants to burrow their way into radical Islamist networks. Even if they're successful at first, he said, new al-Qaeda members are often "highly disposable" -- prime candidates for suicide missions.

He said it might be too late for Western intelligence agencies, having missed earlier chances, to redouble efforts to infiltrate the network. "I think you cannot penetrate such a movement now," he said.

At the same time, those agencies have made their task harder by blowing the cover of some promising informants and mishandling others.

In January, Spanish police arrested 14 men in Barcelona who they suspected were preparing to bomb subways in cities across Europe. Investigators disclosed in court documents that the arrests had been prompted by a Pakistani informant working for French intelligence.

The revelation infuriated French officials, who were forced to withdraw the informant -- a rare example of an agent who had successfully infiltrated training camps in Pakistan. Spanish authorities expressed regret but said they had no choice; after they failed to find bombs or much other evidence during the arrests, the case rested largely on the informant's word.

"Suicide attacks don't allow for a lot of margin to make a decision," said Vicente Gonzales Mota, the lead prosecutor. "Acting after an attack would be a tragedy."

Ten years ago, on Feb. 23, 1998, Osama bin Laden issued a fatwa declaring it "the individual duty of every Muslim" to kill Americans and their allies around the world. Looking back, some U.S. and European intelligence officials said their governments had underestimated the enemy and thought they could rely on old methods to destabilize al-Qaeda.

During the Cold War, for example, the CIA had enjoyed some success in recruiting KGB moles and persuading Soviet officials to defect. The agency was also able to buy off Afghan warlords with suitcases of cash, persuading them to fight Soviet forces in the 1980s and to turn on the Taliban in 2001. A similar approach has worked, to a limited extent, against insurgents in Iraq: An informant's tip led directly to the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of the group al-Qaeda in Iraq, in 2006.

But al-Qaeda's core organization in Pakistan and Afghanistan has so far proved impervious to damaging leaks.

Part of the problem is that the CIA and FBI had very few Arabic-speaking officers who could handle or recruit informants. Instead of making it a priority to develop human sources, the agencies assumed they could rely on spy satellites and other high-tech tools.

Arab and Pakistani spy agencies, preoccupied with domestic politics and other threats, weren't much help either, officials said.

From 1992 until November 2004, "we worked side by side with the Egyptians, the Jordanians -- the very best Arab intelligence services -- and they didn't recruit a single person who could report on al-Qaeda," said Michael Scheuer, who in the 1990s led the CIA unit dedicated to finding bin Laden. He left agency in November 2004.

After Sept. 11, U.S. officials tried another tried-and-true tactic: offering huge rewards for information leading to the capture or death of al-Qaeda leaders, including $25 million apiece for bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

That lure, however, has proved largely ineffective in Pakistan and Afghanistan. No rewards have been publicly announced under the program in either country since Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the organizer of the Sept. 11 attacks, was captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in March 2003.

Scheuer said money and other traditional inducements are unlikely to persuade Islamist radicals to betray a religious cause to which they are fervently committed. While people operating on the fringes of al-Qaeda -- arms suppliers, narcotics dealers and rival extremists -- might be tempted, he said, the chances are remote with people higher up the chain of command.

"We're still kind of stuck in the Cold War approach to this," Scheuer said. "This is a much more difficult target than the Soviets were. These people are true believers. They're living according to their beliefs, not in the lap of luxury."

Walled Off Against Spies

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the FBI and European law enforcement agencies have had some luck recruiting informants in their own countries, enabling them to break up alleged terrorist cells in Miami, New York, London and Copenhagen.

But al-Qaeda's central leadership in Pakistan has remained immune, in part by further tightening its already sophisticated internal security apparatus, current and former intelligence officials said.

Its recruiters cautiously seek out new operatives at training camps run by other radical groups, such as the Taliban. Those chosen are given specific assignments and rarely come into contact with high-ranking al-Qaeda figures. They must also pass extensive background checks, which usually require personal references from movement sympathizers, officials said.

Tribal or family connections are paramount, and certain categories of people automatically come under suspicion, officials said. For years, al-Qaeda avoided Algerian recruits, they added, because it was assumed that Algerian terrorist groups had been infiltrated by that country's security services.

"We're facing a very disciplined organization," said Louis Caprioli, former chief of international counterterrorism for France's domestic security service and now a consultant for GEOS, a global security firm. "These people have well understood they are the target of informants, so it makes it all the more difficult to penetrate them."

U.S. and European spy agencies have avoided sending their own undercover officers to training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan, officials said.

Few operatives, they said, have the language skills, personal backgrounds and knowledge of radical Islam that would enable them to talk their way into the camps. Plus, the political consequences of having a spy unmasked by al-Qaeda would be enormous, they added.

Beyond that, undercover officers usually require an extensive support network that would be hard to sustain for the several years it might take to worm into the al-Qaeda hierarchy, said a former senior British intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Undercover operatives might also find themselves ordered by al-Qaeda to organize a suicide attack or kill someone. "Which you can't let them do," the former British official said. "You have an obligation to prevent it from happening."

Attempting to wiggle out of such an assignment would only raise suspicions. Al-Qaeda people are "very canny about this sort of thing," the former official said. "They have this preemptive and fairly brutal approach. If you're suspected of being an informant or agent, you're dead."

Recruiting outsiders to serve as spies has its own challenges. The United States and European countries have restrictions on hiring informants with shady pasts. In 1995, for instance, the CIA adopted guidelines that require special approval to recruit paid sources who have been accused of human rights abuses or serious crimes.

Partnering with such people, moreover, can backfire.

Last month, authorities in Casablanca arrested a Belgian-Moroccan citizen, Abdelkader Belliraj, and charged him with plotting terrorist acts. Investigators said he worked closely with al-Qaeda and had met in Afghanistan with Zawahiri, the network's deputy leader, in 2001. During his interrogation, according to Moroccan officials, Belliraj confessed to involvement in six unsolved murders in Belgium in the late 1980s.

The case exploded into a scandal a few days later when newspapers in Brussels reported that Belliraj had served as a paid informant for Belgium's domestic intelligence service, even as his network plotted assassinations and robbed armored cars in Europe.

'Inside the Jihad'

But counterterrorism officials maintain the hope that one day they will succeed in placing someone inside al-Qaeda. The network does have a vulnerability, they note: It remains dependent on a fresh flow of outsiders to replenish its ranks, and agents could be introduced into that flow.

On March 6, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, an al-Qaeda commander, posted an audio recording on the Internet in which he advertised for recruits to fight NATO and U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The network has a particular need for engineers and doctors, he said, adding, "Your brothers in Afghanistan are waiting for you."

Al-Qaeda has also shown that it will accept newcomers from unusual backgrounds.

Adam Gadahn, a 29-year-old Californian with Jewish roots, moved to Pakistan after he converted to Islam a decade ago. He joined al-Qaeda a few years later and now serves as a propaganda adviser, in direct contact with Zawahiri and other top leaders. In 2006, he was indicted for treason by a U.S. grand jury.

In the mid-1990s, a Moroccan-born informant working for France's foreign intelligence service infiltrated two training camps in Afghanistan and forged a personal relationship with several high-ranking al-Qaeda figures.

The informant -- a wine-loving, tobacco-smoking Muslim with the gift of the gab -- found his way to the camps simply by showing up in Pakistan and asking around, according to a book he published in 2006 titled "Inside the Jihad."

Writing under the pseudonym Omar Nasiri, the informant said his French handlers had discouraged him from undertaking the mission because they doubted he could succeed.

"I was a gift that walked in the door, but they always underestimated me," Nasiri said in a recent interview. "I told them, 'You know, guys, I'm not doing even 10 percent of what I can do.' And it made them mad when I said that. But they knew I was right."

He was placed in a witness protection program in 2000. European intelligence officials confirmed that he had worked as an informant but would not discuss details.

In the interview, Nasiri said it would be very difficult, but not impossible, for paid informants to infiltrate al-Qaeda in South Asia today. "Every moment of my existence was a test, every little answer, every little movement," he recalled of his time in the camps. "You had to show complete devotion to the cause. If someone does all this to blend in, even if it is deception, the risk is that sooner or later he will believe it."

Special correspondent Cristina Mateo-Yanguas in Madrid contributed to this report.

Bin Laden Threatens Europe Over Muhammad Cartoons

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, March 20, 2008; A11

BERLIN, March 19 -- In a new audiotape released Wednesday, Osama bin Laden warned Europeans that they will face a "severe reckoning" for repeatedly publishing cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in newspapers and magazines.

The five-minute speech was the second time in four months that bin Laden has delivered threats to European countries. He made only one oblique reference to President Bush -- calling him "your aggressive ally . . . who is about to depart the White House" -- and instead addressed his remarks to "the intelligent ones in the European Union."

The al-Qaeda leader criticized European countries for joining in military campaigns in Muslim lands. Although he lamented those actions, he suggested that the Muhammad cartoons were even more immoral and that retaliation was coming.

"It paled when you went overboard in your unbelief . . . and went to the extent of publishing those insulting drawings," he said. "If there is no check on your freedom of words, then let your hearts be open to the freedom of our actions."

The audio recording was accompanied by a still photograph of bin Laden holding an automatic rifle and was released by As-Sahab, the media arm of al-Qaeda.

In 2006, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons depicting Muhammad, prompting protests throughout the Muslim world. Followers of the faith generally consider depictions of the prophet blasphemous. Other European publications reprinted the cartoons, citing the right to free speech.

Last month, a cartoon showing Muhammad with a bomb for a turban was reprinted in Danish newspapers after police in Copenhagen said they had disrupted an assassination plot against the illustrator.

Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.

In Blow to Serbia, 3 Neighbors Say They’ll Recognize Kosovo

By REUTERS

BELGRADE, Serbia (Reuters) — Croatia, Hungary and Bulgaria announced Wednesday that they would recognize Kosovo, a blow to Serbia’s efforts to overturn Kosovo’s month-old declaration of independence.

In a joint statement issued in their capitals, the three countries in the region said the decision was based on “thorough consideration.” They also underlined the importance of protecting the Serbian minority in Kosovo, where more than 90 percent of the residents are ethnic Albanians.

“The government has made a decision to recognize Kosovo,” said the Croatian prime minister, Ivo Sanader. “I do understand this is a difficult one for Serbia to swallow. That’s one of the reasons we have waited until now. But I don’t expect a worsening of political and economic relations because there is no alternative to good neighborly relations.”

The Croatia Mission in Belgrade, near the United States Embassy, which was attacked and burned by Serbian protesters last month, was closed for the day behind new steel shutters.

Some Bulgarian families who were worried about security left Serbia, diplomatic officials said.

A Hungarian diplomatic official said there was concern in Budapest about potential attacks on the ethnic Hungarian minority — about 300,000 people — in the northern province of Vojvodina.

But, he said, “independent Kosovo is a reality, and recognition cannot be avoided.”

Serbia’s pro-Western foreign minister, Vuk Jeremic, acknowledged the neighbors’ decision “with sadness.”

“Countries that make this decision cannot have good ties with Serbia,” he said in Greece, a traditional ally that has not recognized Kosovo.

More than 30 countries have now recognized Kosovo. Canada announced its recognition on Tuesday, reiterating the Western case that forcing its two million Albanians to rejoin Serbia after nine years under United Nations rule was not a viable option.

In Washington, President Bush authorized the sale of weapons and other defense matériel to the government of Kosovo, a step that will almost certainly inflame Serbian and Russian officials who oppose Kosovo’s independence. In a formal notice to the secretary of state required under the Foreign Assistance Act, Mr. Bush said the sales, along with defense training and military exchanges, would “strengthen the security of the United States and promote world peace.”

Serbia’s pro-Western president, Boris Tadic, said this week that ties with Croatia would suffer further. Serbs and Croats fought a war from 1991 to 1995 over the breakup of Yugoslavia.

“We want to have the best possible relations with this country,” Mr. Tadic said. “But recognition of Kosovo is certainly not an act of good will between neighbors.”

In the Kosovo Serbian stronghold of Mitrovica, United Nations police officers returned to the base they were forced to abandon Monday in the worst riots yet over Kosovo’s independence.

NATO says the violence was orchestrated by one faction in the Serbian government. The Belgrade daily Blic on Wednesday cited officials as saying that Slobodan Samardzic, who is the minister for Kosovo and among those who advocate a tough stance, had advocated keeping tensions high.

Expansion Issues Divide NATO; Rice Urges More Troops

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 7, 2008; A12

BRUSSELS, March 6 -- Foreign ministers of the NATO alliance failed Thursday to narrow differences over whether to make interim membership overtures to Georgia and Ukraine, with some ministers pressing for the step and others arguing that it would antagonize Russia.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also urged allies to make firm commitments to add troops in Afghanistan, saying that alliance members cannot focus just on development work in the fragile country.

There was also no apparent movement in a dispute that has lasted more than 15 years between Greece and Macedonia over Macedonia's name. The issue threatens to block plans to bring the tiny Balkan republic into the alliance at a summit next month in Bucharest, Romania.

The 26-nation alliance, which has expanded rapidly in the past decade into Eastern Europe, faces two critical decisions on further enlargement.

One concerns Georgia and Ukraine, two former Soviet republics seeking membership, in part to escape Russian influence. In the meetings here, the diplomats were split over whether to grant the two countries an interim step, known as the "Membership Action Plan," with France and Germany among the leading skeptics.

Russia has warned that pursuit of membership by the two would antagonize their pro-Russia populations and possibly lead to civil war.

"In Russia we have a new president and I think the European Union wants to put its ties with Russia on another footing," said Luxembourg's foreign minister, Jean Asselborn. "We have to take the interests of others, not only the members of NATO, into account."

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner suggested that Russia's place in the world system was not given enough consideration. "France is not the only nation wanting to maintain a relationship with Russia as a great nation," he said.

U.S. officials have expressed cautious support for granting Ukraine and Georgia the interim status, but have made no official statement.

The second decision concerns full membership for three Balkan countries -- Macedonia, Albania and Croatia -- a step that alliance members hope will help bring stability to the volatile region. But Greece on Thursday once again threatened to veto a seat for Macedonia.

Greek Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyannis reiterated Thursday that Athens believes the name "Republic of Macedonia" is a backdoor attempt to claim sovereignty over a Greek province named Macedonia.

Greece stands alone in NATO in its campaign against Macedonia. One U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was describing diplomatic conversations, said there was "considerable pressure in the room that this now be settled."

The ministers spent considerable time discussing a mission statement about Afghanistan that would help explain to their publics why NATO is fighting there.

There are 43,000 NATO-led troops in Afghanistan, but some operate only in relatively peaceful parts of the country. U.S. officials argue that NATO countries must contribute more troops, saying the alliance cannot be divided between those who fight and those who focus on development.

European powers drop bid to push resolution against Iran

The Associated Press
Tuesday, March 4, 2008

VIENNA: Facing objections by Russia, China and developing nations, European powers abandoned on Tuesday an attempt to introduce a resolution on Iran's nuclear defiance at a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Western diplomats said.

Opponents felt a resolution against Iran would be superfluous a day after the UN Security Council toughened sanctions on Iran and could provoke a Tehran to reduce, not increase, cooperation with UN inspectors, they said.

"The board doesn't need to compete with the Security Council," said an Asian diplomat on the 35-nation governing board of the IAEA. Almost half the governors are from developing nations.

Britain, France and Germany scrapped the resolution after concluding that their goals had been achieved by the Security Council and there was no point risking a schism among UN nuclear policy makers that Iran might exploit, Western diplomats added.

"Iran thought it could manipulate the IAEA to avoid a Security Council resolution while moving forward to develop its uranium enrichment capability," Gregory Schulte, U.S. ambassador to the IAEA, told reporters.

"As the resolution adopted yesterday in New York shows, Iran clearly failed. In fact what the resolution does from a Vienna perspective is to underscore that Iran's file remains open and to fully support the IAEA in its continuing investigation of outstanding issues, particularly with respect to weaponization."

In Tehran, the government rejected the resolution imposing new sanctions as "worthless" and vowed to move ahead with its uranium enrichment program.

"This resolution is contrary to the spirit and articles of the International Atomic Energy Agency," said a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Muhammad Ali Hosseini, according to the official press agency IRNA.

"It has been issued based on political motivations and a biased approach. It is worthless and unacceptable."

He said the sanctions would "have no impact on the resolve and determination of the Iranian nation and government to fulfill its legitimate rights in continuing its peaceful nuclear activities within the framework of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty."

Iran has pursued a uranium-enrichment program it says is meant only to generate electricity. But its history of nuclear secrecy and continued curbs on IAEA inspections stoke fears it could turn enrichment technology to yielding nuclear arms.

In imposing more far-reaching sanctions by a 14-to-0 vote, the Security Council cited Iran's defiance of demands to suspend enrichment, failure to fully explain past nuclear activity and continued restrictions on IAEA inspections.

The third round of sanctions approved Monday orders a freeze on assets of more Iranian officials and companies with links to the country's nuclear and missile program, and for the first time bans trade with Iran in some goods with both civilian and military uses.

Last week the IAEA's chief of nonproliferation safeguards presented to board diplomats detailed intelligence suggesting Iran had tried to "weaponize" nuclear materials.

He revealed diagrams, slides and video, much of them from a laptop removed from Iran by a defector, indicating administrative links between projects to process uranium, test high explosives and modify a missile cone for a nuclear payload.

The IAEA director, Mohamed ElBaradei, opening the weeklong governors session Monday, pressed Iran to cooperate with the agency inquiry into the allegations, signaling the IAEA would not take Tehran's flat denials for a final answer.

Iran's ambassador to the IAEA repeated on Tuesday that Tehran would have nothing more to do with the inquiry and would never suspend its nuclear program, but would keep its declared enrichment sites under IAEA monitoring despite the new sanctions.

Ali Asghar Soltanieh noted that ElBaradei had certified Iran had resolved six outstanding questions about its past nuclear activity and said arms studies did not count because they were "fabrications" of Iran's chief foe, the United States.

"The alleged studies were thoroughly reviewed in two rounds of talks, and we gave our final assessment," he told reporters invited to a slide presentation held to counter the IAEA one last week.

"The issue is over."

He offered no substance in the presentation, entitled "A Short Glance at Iran's Peaceful Nuclear Activities," to refute the intelligence material.

U.S. pulls the plug on Europeans who want to visit Cuba

By Adam Liptak
Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Steve Marshall is a British travel agent. He lives in Spain, and he sells trips to Europeans who want to go to sunny places, including Cuba. In October, about 80 of his Web sites stopped working because of the U.S. government.

The sites, in English, French and Spanish, had been online since 1998. Some, like Cuba-Hemingway.com, were literary. Others discussed Cuban history and culture, like Cuba-HavanaCity.com. Still others - CiaoCuba.com and BonjourCuba.com - were purely commercial sites aimed at Italian and French tourists.

"I came to work in the morning, and we had no reservations at all," Marshall said on the phone from the Canary Islands. "We thought it was a technical problem."

It turned out, though, that Marshall's Web sites had been put on a U.S. Treasury Department blacklist and, as a consequence, his domain name registrar, eNom, which is based in the United States, had disabled them. Marshall said eNom told him it did so after a call from the Treasury Department; the company says it learned that the sites were on the blacklist through a blog.

Either way, there is no dispute that eNom shut down Marshall's sites without notifying him and has refused to release the domain names to him. In effect, Marshall said, eNom has taken his property and interfered with his business. He has slowly rebuilt his Web business over the past several months, and now many of the same sites operate with the suffix .net rather than .com, through a European registrar. His servers, he said, have been in the Bahamas all along.

Marshall said he did not understand "how Web sites owned by a British national operating via a Spanish travel agency can be affected by U.S. law." Worse, he said, "these days not even a judge is required for the U.S. government to censor online materials."

A Treasury spokesman, John Rankin, referred a caller to a press release issued in December 2004, almost three years before eNom acted. It said Marshall's company had helped Americans evade restrictions on travel to Cuba and was "a generator of resources that the Cuban regime uses to oppress its people." It added that U.S. companies must not only stop doing business with the company but also freeze its assets, meaning that eNom did exactly what it was required to do under U.S. law.

Marshall said he was uninterested in tourists who are U.S. citizens. "They can't go anyway," he said.

Peter Fitzgerald, a law professor at Stetson University in Florida who has studied the blacklist, said its operation was quite mysterious. "There really is no explanation or standard," he said, "for why someone gets on the list."

Susan Crawford, a visiting law professor at Yale and a leading authority on Internet law, said the fact that many large domain name registrars are based in the United States gives the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, control "over a great deal of speech - none of which may be actually hosted in the U.S., about the U.S. or conflicting with any U.S. rights."

"OFAC apparently has the power to order that this speech disappear," Crawford said.

The law under which the Treasury Department is acting has an exemption that seeks to protect "information or informational materials." Marshall's Web sites, though ultimately commercial, would seem to qualify, and it is not clear why they appear on the blacklist.

Unlike Americans, who face significant restrictions on travel to Cuba, Europeans are free to go there, and many do. Charles Sims, a lawyer with the firm Proskauer Rose in New York, said the Treasury Department might have gone too far in Marshall's case.

"The U.S can certainly criminalize the expenditure of money by U.S. citizens in Cuba," Sims said, "but it doesn't properly have any jurisdiction over foreign sites that are not targeted at the U.S. and which are lawful under foreign law."

Rankin, the Treasury spokesman, said Marshall was free to ask for a review of his case. "If they want to be taken off the list," Rankin said, "they should contact us to make their case."

That is a problematic system, Fitzgerald said. "The way to get off the list," he said, "is to go back to the same bureaucrat who put you on."

Last March, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights issued a disturbing report on the blacklist. Its subtitle: "How a Treasury Department Terrorist Watch List Ensnares Everyday Consumers."

The report, by Shirin Sinnar, said there were 6,400 names on the list and that, like no-fly lists at airports, it gave rise to endless and serious problems of mistaken identity.

"Financial institutions, credit bureaus, charities, car dealerships, health insurers, landlords and employers," the report said, "are now checking names against the list before they open an account, close a sale, rent an apartment or offer a job."

But Marshall's case does not appear to be one of mistaken identity. The government quite specifically intended to interfere with his business.

That, Crawford said, is a scandal. "The way we communicate these days is through domain names, and the Treasury Department should not be interfering with domain names just as it does not interfere with telecommunications lines," he said.

EU begins crackdown against 'tax paradises'

By Stephen Castle
Tuesday, March 4, 2008

BRUSSELS: In the shadow of the Lichtenstein scandal and under pressure from Germany, the European Commission will issue new proposals this year that are likely to widen the scope of tax evasion laws.

Jolted by the Lichtenstein tax scandal, European countries on Tuesday took the first steps toward enacting a fresh clamp down on tax havens on their doorstep.

Under pressure from Germany, the European Commission will draw up new proposals this year that are likely to widen the scope of legislation on tax evasion - and close a loophole under which trusts and some other savings escape the same controls as cash.

European Union countries say they lose billions of euros in revenue because of tax evasion, with Germany alone claiming it loses up to €30 billion, or $45 billion, a year.

However the newest initiative seems destined to re-ignite the long-running and bitter EU battle over banking secrecy. On Tuesday, Luxembourg, Belgium and Austria hinted that they would resist any moves to force them to provide information to other tax authorities on the savings of nonresident investors.

EU nations took 14 years to agree on the current law on the taxation of savings, one of the bloc's most tortuous and fractious policy negotiations. Although billions of euros leaked across European frontiers, countries which provide banking secrecy - and whose banking sectors profit from it - refused to compromise the principle.

Any revision of the legislation is likely to be difficult, but the scale of the new scandal in Liechtenstein, with German prosecutors pursuing hundreds of suspected tax dodgers, has given new impetus to efforts to clamp down on tax fraud.

The current law, which came into force in 2005, was due to be reviewed this year and the European Commission said Tuesday that it would accelerate the process.

The law operates in 42 jurisdictions: the 27 EU nations plus Switzerland, Liechtenstein, San Marino, Monaco and Andorra as well as 10 former British and Dutch colonies.

Most countries exchange information on non-resident deposits with the owners' home country. But Luxembourg, Belgium and Austria are allowed to levy a withholding tax themselves, which is then shared with the depositors' home country.

Germany and Britain want Luxembourg, Belgium and Austria to agree to exchange information so that the EU can apply pressure to the non-European jurisdictions to do the same.

Broadly speaking, the tax also is only applied on interest earned on cash deposits, not dividends or the type of trusts that were being used in Liechtenstein.

During a meeting Tuesday, the German finance minister, Peer Steinbrück referred specifically to the "spectacular case of tax fraud" emanating from Liechtenstein, according to one official who attended the closed-door discussion. The scandal has reverberated through Germany and around the world, and prompted the resignation of the Deutsche Post chief executive, Klaus Zumwinkel.

"German tax payers have effectively been made fools of by high earners using the system to avoid paying tax," said Steinbrück, who described evasion as a "social and moral issue," the official added.

The German stance was backed by Britain, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Finland and Italy, diplomats said.

"Tax paradises in practice become tax parasites," argued Anders Borg, the Swedish finance minister.

Laszlo Kovacs, the European Commissioner responsible for taxation, will produce a verbal report in May and a formal review of the operation of the EU savings tax law in June. He said he expected to produce new proposals in the autumn, which could include extending the provisions of the directive to "bonds, shares, funds and some other instruments."

However the EU is likely to be much more divided about banking secrecy.

Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg's premier and finance minister, made a veiled threat at the Tuesday meeting to stall any potential changes. "I look forward to many years of fascinating, fundamental, discussion," Juncker said, according to the official.

Under pressure from Luxembourg, Belgium and Austria, the European Commission agreed to present its report in June, before drafting proposed changes, rather than presenting the report and the proposals as a package.

Kovacs made his position clear, describing the withholding tax as a "transitional arrangement."

"I am very much in favor of a final arrangement and a uniform arrangement," Kovacs said. In the medium term, "all parties to the savings tax directive will exchange information rather than a withholding tax," he said.

Kovacs also said that he would escalate efforts to persuade other jurisdictions to abide by the terms of the deal, including Hong Kong, Macao and Singapore. EU officials are negotiating with all three on a double-taxation agreement, giving the Europeans some leverage.
Withdrawals were 'peanuts'

Banks in Liechtenstein said Tuesday that they were victims, not perpetrators, of a global tax evasion scandal and the bank at the heart of the turmoil said clients had withdrawn nothing more than "peanuts," Reuters reported in Vaduz.

LGT Group, a bank for rich clients, said the impact of the tax spat had been limited, although it would dent the business in the short term.

Clients had taken out 100 million Swiss francs, or $96.15 million, of funds in the last two weeks of February, the group chief executive, Prince Max von und zu Liechtenstein, said.

"That is less than one tenth of one percent - actually it's peanuts," he said.

Serbia reclaims stretch of rail line in Kosovo

The Associated Press
Monday, March 3, 2008

MITROVICA, Kosovo: Serbia reclaimed control of a 50-kilometer stretch of rail line in northern Kosovo on Monday, a senior official said, in defiance of the government in Pristina.

The official, Branislav Ristivojevic, chairman of Serbia's state-owned railroad company and a senior adviser to Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, said that Serbia was restoring control over the 30-mile line "after a period of nine years."

Earlier, a few dozen Serbian railroad workers blocked passage of a freight train on the line, saying they would not work for Kosovo's rail company and demanding to be transferred to Serbia's state-owned railroad.

The surprise move is likely to increase tensions between the Serbs and Kosovo's authorities and NATO peacekeepers. It is in line with the Belgrade government's instructions to the Serbian minority to shun any contact with Kosovo's government after it declared independence two weeks ago, and to work directly with Serbia instead.

Hundreds of Serbian policemen have handed over their badges and weapons rather than submit to the authorities in Kosovo. Serbian protesters have set fire to border crossing points with Serbia and have blocked ethnic Albanians from working in courts in the northern area.

Serbia's Orthodox Church joined in the boycott Monday. Archbishop Artemije, who heads the church in Kosovo, ordered his clergy to cease all contacts with the Kosovo authorities and with the coming EU mission.

In another sign of underlying tension, a sniper attack Monday targeted an office gathering of different ethnic groups in the northern, Serb-controlled part of the ethnically divided town of Mitrovica.

Two bullets were fired at the offices, which operate on a grant from the Belgian government. No one was hurt. Wim Peeters, Belgium's top diplomat in Kosovo, condemned the attack as "a cowardly and shameful act."

It was not clear how the takeover of the rail line by Serbia's railroads would be carried out in defiance of the government in Pristina. Serbia's government has long claimed ownership of much of Kosovo's infrastructure, including power plants and rail lines.

United Nations officials, who are in charge of Kosovo's railroads, said they would discuss whether to continue running train services.

Deputy Prime Minister Hajredin Kuqi of Kosovo dismissed Serbia's move as a ploy aimed against Kosovo's independence and pledged that the authorities would protect the country's borders.

Serbia has rejected Kosovo's declaration of independence last month. Belgrade has ruled out military action to reclaim Kosovo, but has said it has a secret "action plan" to deal with the breakaway province. Officials have said Serbia will seek to retain control of Serb-dominated areas in northern Kosovo.

Serbia and its ally Russia maintain that the UN Security Council has not authorized the EU mission, which is meant to replace the UN administration that has ruled Kosovo since 1999.

The Russian Foreign Ministry protested on Monday the creation of an international group to help guide Kosovo, saying it violated UN decisions and could lead to "unpredictable consequences."

"We think the creation of the group goes against UN Security Council Resolution 1244 and internationally agreed principles" for handling Kosovo's future, a ministry spokesman said in a statement.

Serbia lodged a complaint with the United Nations against the establishment last week of the 15-nation International Steering Group for Kosovo, whose mission is to help guide Kosovo's democratic development.

The group includes the United States, Turkey and 13 other European countries - all of which have recognized Kosovo's Feb. 17 declaration of independence from Serbia.

The group appointed Pieter Feith to be its international civilian representative for Kosovo. He is also the European Union's representative in Kosovo who will oversee the authorities' compliance with a UN-sponsored deal providing broad rights for minorities.

The EU will also deploy an 1,800-strong police and justice mission to be led by a retired French general, Yves de Kermabon.

While ethnic Albanians account for nearly 90 percent of Kosovo's two million people, Serbs dominate a number of enclaves and a large part of northern Kosovo.

Serbian leaders have vowed to ignore both the EU mission and Kosovo's new government, and work only with the UN administration.

Feith has accused Belgrade of striving for a de facto division of Kosovo, leaving the northern region under Belgrade's control. Serbian officials, calling Feith's presence in Kosovo illegal, have refused to deal with him.

Declaring Something a Lot Like Dependence

By GRAHAM BOWLEY

IN the Balkans, many things did not change when Kosovo declared independence from Serbia on Feb. 17. It remains a small, poor, landlocked territory of two million people, riven by ethnic hatreds and memories of atrocities. And “independence,” despite its heroic ring, is an exaggeration. Kosovo still depends, for its very existence, on the presence of 16,000 NATO troops, both to keep order and to discourage any thoughts of reprisal by the kind of Serbian nationalists who rioted in Belgrade to protest the secession. In the background, meanwhile, there stands a resentful Russia, Serbia’s ally, whose presumptive new president, Dmitry A. Medvedev, declared to the world that Serbia and Kosovo are still “a single state.”

But from the point of view of Europe, a lot did change. A thousand miles to the north, foreign ministers from 27 European countries met in Brussels and agreed that at least some of them would go ahead and recognize Kosovo. In that action was a hint that one day the tiny, insecure and economically strapped statelet just born might one day join the European Union itself — perhaps, in the best of all possible worlds, together with its implacable enemies in Belgrade.

“I don’t know at what date, in which year,” said Bernard Kouchner, France’s relentlessly hopeful foreign minister, “but Kosovo and Serbia will be together in the European Union.”

Thus began Kosovo’s journey — no doubt long and probably full of wrong turns — toward the potential embrace of a European idea that itself was born after the horrors of World War II. Then, the logic was to bind the chief Western European powers together so inextricably that another European conflagration would be inconceivable. The idea has endured and evolved — fitfully, to be sure, in the last couple of years — and over the last decade it was extended to Central and Eastern Europe, in hopes of anchoring the struggling former satellites of the defunct Soviet Union stably within its embrace.

The ability to participate in one of the world’s two largest trading blocs has since made economic stars of at least some small states that live in the shadow of ethnic rivals and might have failed alone. Estonia, Slovenia and Slovakia come to mind. So does Ireland.

These successes showed that if its members relinquished some sovereignty to a continent-wide authority that could nurture and shield even small nations, Europe might finally have a way to extract the poison of regional conflict and allow the small to coexist confidently alongside the large.

Now comes Kosovo, even more frail, and so the idea goes a step further: that Europe’s identification as a continent has become strong enough to rewrite the definition of nationhood itself. Now, perhaps, the continent as a whole can protect at least the self-governance of national groups too small and weak to form self-sufficient states of their own.

The agony of such national groups, when contained within larger states that oppress them, has, after all, been a historic source of genocidal mayhem on the Continent. The Yugoslav breakup showed that the century-old formula for self-determination — forcing together tribes who hate each other just to make them viable states — has failed. Now, rather than let the ministates that are breaking off founder, they may have a chance to make it anyway — as wards of the whole continent.

THAT is the real meaning of Kosovo’s limited sovereignty. And with it comes the implicit promise that a shrunken but homogeneous Serbia, too, could one day get the same protection and nurturing if it agrees to play by Europe’s rules.

“The European Union has already demonstrated that it can serve as a vehicle for turning former enemies into partners,” said Charles Kupchan, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “A lot of countries cleaned up their acts because they needed to get into Europe. I think that will happen in the Balkans. It is just going to take a much longer time because the disputes run much deeper and the ethnic divide is very much alive and well.”

That is the optimistic view, at least. There are also many reasons why Kosovo’s journey to Europe may be a long one. Richard C. Holbrooke, a former United States ambassador to the United Nations and the man who brokered the Dayton peace agreement in 1995 to end the war in Bosnia, points out that one of the most troubling aspects of the aftermath of Kosovo’s declaration has been Russia’s support for ultranationalist forces in Serbia and for the Serbian government’s argument that the declaration of independence is a breach of international law.

Russia, in other words, represents an alternative future for Serbia, in opposition to Europe and the West, as it clings (at least in Serbia’s case) to the notion that territorial sovereignty and indivisibility are sacrosanct.

“This is a challenge to NATO and this is also a serious problem in U.S.-Russian relations,” Mr. Holbrooke said. “If the Russians used their influence for moderation, it would not be such a problem. The Serb body politic is deeply divided, and these are the same ‘ultras’ that caused the wars in the 1990s.” He added: “Economically, Kosovo is not viable unless it is part of a regional economic zone that embraces Southeast Europe and the Balkans.”

There are also questions about whether all of Europe is ready to embrace Kosovo. After Kosovo’s declaration, not all of the foreign ministers gathered in Brussels were willing to recognize it. Spain, Greece, Romania, Slovakia, Cyprus and Bulgaria refused, fearing it would encourage ethnic minorities to secede.

“They said, ‘There but for the grace God go we. If we acknowledge Kosovo then how do you say no to Catalonia, or the Basques?’ ” said Tony Judt, a professor of European history at New York University.

In other words, Mr. Kouchner’s dream may, in the end, be just that. Europe is still digesting the last round of enlargement, with some lingering doubts about its place in a globalizing world and questions about where its true borders lie. Not least, any further expansion to include Kosovo would carry the extra complication that the territory, like Bosnia, is a mainly Muslim state.

Still, many in Brussels are haunted by Europe’s failure to act in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, which ended only after the United States intervened militarily. So whatever Kosovo’s ultimate prospects for joining the union, Europe is already pouring money into the territory — 1.8 billion euros between 1999 and 2006, with an expected additional 1.1 billion euros through 2010, including payments for police officers and judges to build Kosovo’s chronically corrupt judicial system.

“It is the most ambitious peacekeeping operation in Europe’s history,” said Ben Ward, who supervises the work of Human Rights Watch in the Balkans. “The E.U. has an enormous amount riding on it. There are people in Brussels who are saying again that this is Europe’s hour, who remember the last time and are very much aware of the potential risk.”

Practically speaking, according to Mr. Judt, before Kosovo could join the union, other Balkan countries would have to join first — Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia — and provide Kosovo a land connection with the rest of Europe that wasn’t through Serbia. Others even hold out hope that one day Serbia would take up Europe on its implicit promise that it, too, would be welcome in the community if it turned away from nationalism toward the mores and values of the continent.

If all of that could happen, there might then be a parallel to the successful examples of the past decade, when the European idea marked a path toward the peaceful coexistence of former enemies: Slovakia exists alongside Hungary despite the claims of Hungarian minorities in Slovakia; and the Czech Republic and Germany get along despite memories of Hitler’s torment of Czechoslovakia before and during World War II, and of the Czechs’ expulsion of Germans afterward.

“It is not a ‘happy land’ where everyone loves each other,” said Mr. Judt. “People tell you how they hate each other.” But, he adds, the hatred “has no political purchase because Europe transcends it. You can’t get much money from Brussels if you build your politics around ethnic hatred.”

U.S. warns Europe of Iran missiles

Tehran is close to building arms capable of reaching major capitals, says an official promoting a defense system.
By Kim Murphy
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

February 29, 2008

LONDON — With American officials working to close a deal on a missile defense system in Europe, the head of the U.S. program warned Thursday that Iran was within two or three years of producing a missile that could reach most European capitals.

"They're already flying missiles that exceed what they would need in a fight with Israel. Why? Why do they continue this progression in terms of range of missiles? It's something we need to think about," Air Force Lt. Gen. Henry Obering III, director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, told a conference here on missile defense.

The message was aimed at staving off skepticism in Europe and clinching a deal for radar and interceptor sites in the Czech Republic and Poland. It underscored increasing concern among defense experts that while attention has focused on nuclear proliferation, nations such as China, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan and India have made significant strides in developing missiles that can reach far beyond their immediate neighbors.

"Our short-range defenses could protect Rome and Athens," Obering said, but he warned that London, Paris and Brussels would remain vulnerable "against an Iranian [intermediate-range missile] threat."

Many in Europe have expressed doubts that Iran would target European cities. But Obering said it was possible to imagine as little as seven years from now a nuclear-armed Iran shutting off oil shipments in the Persian Gulf, or Al Qaeda militants seizing freighters off Europe and arming them with nuclear-tipped Scud missiles "to punish the West for invasion of Muslim holy lands."

The timing of the warning was hardly coincidental, as Bush administration officials this week were attempting through talks in Washington to clear the last hurdles for agreements with Poland and the Czech Republic on the U.S.-run system of interceptor missiles and radar in Europe.

The Czech Foreign Ministry official in charge of security policy, Veronika Kuchynova Smigolova, predicted that the deal could be signed as early as next month's NATO summit in Bucharest, the Romanian capital, and ratified by the Czech Parliament by summer.

But Russia remains vigorously opposed to what it sees as a permanent new U.S. military infrastructure near its borders in Central Europe, and there are concerns on the continent about further alienating Iran and Russia. Some critics have questioned the wisdom of allowing the U.S., rather than the European Union or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, to take the lead in defending Europe against such missiles.

Malcolm Chalmers, a onetime foreign policy advisor to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, said the decision to locate the system in former Warsaw Pact nations may have sparked opposition in Moscow that otherwise "would be much less vociferous."

"Did we only deploy it there because that's the only place available?" said Chalmers, who is now a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, which sponsored Thursday's conference.

Some Europeans have questioned whether Iran represents a genuine threat to Europe, and have accused the Bush administration of undermining existing arms control agreements by proceeding unilaterally on missile defense.

"This is firstly and foremostly an American choice and should be taken as such," said Yves Boyer, deputy director of the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris. "It has not been requested by any European state and . . . it does not answer the critical need for Europeans to process their own assessment of strategic capabilities."

Jane Sharp, senior research fellow in defense studies at King's College London, said the Bush administration had cost the West a once-cooperative relationship with Russia.

"Even if ballistic missile defense did look credible to a potential adversary, they're still destabilizing, because the logical response for any adversary for a credible defense is to acquire more offensive capability -- this is what the Russians are telling us every day," she said.

But reflecting the wariness of Russia long present among the European Union's newest members -- Poland has made it clear that it fears attack from Russia much more than from Iran -- Smigolova said the proposed defense program would restore equality of security on both sides of the Atlantic.

"Russia knows very well that one radar and 10 interceptors won't change the strategic balance and doesn't present any real military problem for them," she said. "But for them, a U.S. presence in Central Europe is the final confirmation of the loss of their influence over this part of Europe."

Smigolova said the Czech government was "well aware" of widespread public opposition to the system in that country and in Europe, but would be pushing to ratify the agreement after remaining concerns over environmental protections were worked out.

Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek met Wednesday at the White House with President Bush but withheld his approval for the system, citing remaining differences on environmental standards for the radar equipment. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk is scheduled to visit Bush on March 10.

U.S. negotiators are due in Poland today to discuss modernizing that country's military, a key Polish request in the missile defense talks.

Bush said in a news conference Thursday that he still hoped to persuade the Russian government to drop its opposition. "I believe it's in our interests to try to figure out a way for the Russians to understand the system is not aimed at them, but aimed at the real threats of the 21st century," Bush said.

U.S. officials and many European security experts have said the rate at which new nations are obtaining the capability to build longer-range missiles, with increasingly sophisticated maneuvering ability, is greatly expanding.

kim.murphy@latimes.com

Times staff writers Paul Richter in Washington and Janet Stobart in London contributed to this report.

U.S. Struggles to Find Envoy, Hindering Effort to Stabilize Afghanistan

By Michael Abramowitz and Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, February 26, 2008; A13

The White House has been pushing since early fall to install a powerful new foreign envoy to oversee international reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. Last month it looked as though it had finally found its man: After a meeting in Kuwait, Hamid Karzai indicated he was ready to accept prominent British politician Paddy Ashdown for the assignment.

Less than two weeks later, the appointment collapsed after Karzai changed his mind -- the latest sign of tensions between the courtly Afghan president and the Western powers that have been seeking for nearly seven years to stabilize a country that was the breeding ground for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

U.S. officials have done little to disguise their displeasure with the recent turn of events, which has not only left them without a candidate but also imperiled their strategy of giving a single international envoy a robust mandate for Afghanistan. Over weeks of negotiations, the job has been whittled down from a statesman of stature who would influence decisions by NATO, the European Union and the United Nations to a more traditional role as envoy of the U.N. secretary general, according to officials familiar with the discussions.

"There's no ready, obvious replacement," said one senior U.S. official who is not authorized to speak publicly. "We thought [Ashdown] was best qualified, given his credentials and his experience and his ability to command attention, especially in European capitals."

Talking with reporters last week, Richard Boucher, assistant secretary of state for South Asia, disputed the suggestion that the rejection of Ashdown meant that Karzai was obstructing progress.

"That is our partner and that's who we will work with, because that's who the people of Afghanistan chose," he said. "I think it's very clear that from our discussions with the Afghan government, even since Paddy Ashdown felt he had to withdraw his candidacy, that they, too, want to see better coordination, want to see strong international coordination."

U.S. and U.N. officials said they are still looking for an envoy. Among those said to be under consideration are Kai Eide, a senior Norwegian official with experience in the U.N. bureaucracy; Jan Kubis, the Slovak foreign minister; Hikmat Chetin, a senior Turkish diplomat with experience in Afghanistan; and Joschka Fischer, a former German foreign minister. President Bush discussed the search recently with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who will make the final appointment.

Still, Bush administration officials acknowledge that the episode has highlighted the inability of the United States and its allies to organize civilian reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, the focus of recent criticism by diplomats and a flurry of new reports.

Since the Taliban fell in 2001, the international community has provided about $15 billion to rebuild Afghanistan. But U.S. officials and outside experts say that there has been little coordination among the dozens of countries and international organizations helping to build roads and bridges, create a new police and justice system, and deal with narcotics production.

"There is a very clear need for a joining of the international military strategy with the international civilian strategy," said Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas Burns, who helped recruit Ashdown. "Countries that are extending assistance to Afghanistan are not extending assistance in a central, organized way right now."

The troubles with reconstruction are a companion to the more publicized military difficulties NATO is having in Afghanistan, where U.S. officials -- most prominently Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates -- have complained that some allies are unwilling to participate in the most violent fight against the Taliban. But many officials regard the civilian effort as perhaps even more critical to controlling Afghanistan's insurgency.

Asked recently to assess U.S. progress, a top U.S. official handling Afghanistan said: "Tactically on the security front, I would say we are winning."

"The challenge with Afghanistan is that's not good enough," added the official, who insisted on anonymity to speak more freely. "And it is on some of the other dimensions of the mission where we are not doing as well as we need to be. And mostly those have to do with the non-military . . . having to do with governance, economic development, reconstruction."

Norway first suggested a super-envoy in the fall of 2006, but it was not until last summer, as reports mounted of problems in Afghanistan, that U.S. officials began warming to the idea.

U.S. officials focused on Ashdown, a former leader of the Liberal Democrats in Britain who impressed them with his service as the U.N. high representative in Bosnia from 2002 to 2006. The British quickly agreed.

But early on, U.N., U.S. and Afghan officials argued about how powerful the job should be. Sources said Zalmay Khalilzad, who is the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and is close to Karzai, detected reservations among Afghan senior officials -- but those reservations appeared to dissipate after the Afghan president met with Ashdown in Kuwait in January.

Ban then met with Ashdown in Madrid to seal the deal. But when Karzai returned to Kabul, he received criticism from members of his cabinet, while the media portrayed Ashdown as a potential pro-consul, akin to past British colonial rulers. Karzai, meanwhile, believed that Ashdown had planted newspaper stories in Britain suggesting that Karzai was a weak Pashtun leader atop a Tajik government, a remark Karzai viewed as "fanning ethnic tensions," said a senior U.S. official.

Said T. Jawad, Afghanistan's ambassador to the United States, suggested that there were worries about the powerful role Ashdown had played in the Balkans. "Based on his past experience in the Balkans, the Afghan cabinet and other officials raised some concerns," Jawad said. "President Karzai decided his role wouldn't be constructive."

By the time Karzai met with Ban and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in late January, the Afghan leader had soured on the choice. Ban had gone into the meeting expecting to announce Ashdown's appointment; instead, Ashdown soon issued a statement withdrawing from consideration.

It was not the first time in recent months that Karzai has clashed with his Western patrons. He has battled the United States over opium-reduction strategies, and in December he expelled two senior European officials for holding unauthorized talks with the Taliban.

Some analysts saw the Bush administration's inability to secure Ashdown's appointment as a serious setback. "The rejection of Ashdown by Karzai undermines the ability of the Afghan government to be moving more forcefully in the right direction," said Mark Schneider, senior vice president of the International Crisis Group, which has been critical of the reconstruction efforts. "When Karzai said he didn't want it, the U.S. didn't stick to its guns."

Senior administration officials say that there is no major rift and that Karzai, who has a monthly videoconference with Bush, is entitled to veto power over a position that could vastly influence his country.

Seth Jones, an Afghanistan expert with the Rand Corp., said Karzai, who is up for reelection next year, is reluctant to be identified too closely with the United States. "I don't think over the long term it's a significant blow," he said. But the failure to install Ashdown, he added, shows Karzai's sensitivity "to not be seen as being pushed around by the international community."

European Company Close to Reaching Libyan Arms Deal

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

PARIS, Aug. 3 — European Aeronautic Defense and Space, Europe’s largest aerospace company, confirmed Friday that it was close to signing two weapons contracts with the government of Libya. It would be the first arms deal with the North African country since the European Union lifted military sanctions on it nearly three years ago.

The progress on contracts with the company, which is under French and German management, worth $405 million by some accounts, comes just a week after President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and his wife, Cécilia, helped secure the release of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who had spent more than eight years in prison after being accused of infecting hundreds of Libyan children with H.I.V.

The case had long strained Libya’s relations with the European Union. But the French government denied Friday that any direct bargain for weapons contracts had been made with Libya for the medical workers’ freedom.

The French defense minister, Hervé Morin, said on RTL radio that the deals had been cleared by a French ministerial commission on weapons sales in February, well before Mr. Sarkozy succeeded Jacques Chirac as president in May.

But undercutting French officials, Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, the son of the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, disclosed the contracts in an interview in Le Monde. He said that during a recent visit by Mr. Sarkozy, the Libyans asked him to “accelerate things.”

Kosovo Leaders Say Patience Running Out On UN Talks

BRUSSELS, July 11, 2007 (RFE/RL) -- Kosovo leaders have warned the European Union they are losing patience with attempts at the UN Security Council to reach a consensus on the future status of the breakaway Serbian province.

President Fatmir Sejdiu and Prime Minister Agim Ceku told EU foreign-policy chief Javier Solana today in Brussels that Kosovo was ready to declare independence and ruled out further status talks with Serbia.

"It seems to us that we will not have [an] acceptable solution [at the] UN Security Council, and for us, it is not enough for countries and the international community to say that we are all waiting for [a] UN Security Council solution," Ceku told a news conference.


"So, we have to stop pretending that the UN Security Council has an answer to every question. And, we are calling for a new approach, for a more brave approach to Kosovo['s] status," he added.


Solana said the EU wanted the UN Security Council to decide the matter.

Kosovo's majority ethnic Albanians back a UN plan to give them a form of supervised independence from Serbia. The plan is backed by the EU and the United States, but opposed by Serbia and Russia.

On July 10, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the impasse between the West and Russia over Kosovo was jeopardizing security in the region.

Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic said Belgrade was open to fresh talks provided the outcome was not already decided.

But Ceku said Russia had blocked the UN route, and new talks would change nothing.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried said the United States would back another 120 days of talks on the fate of Kosovo, but said independence for the breakaway province was "inevitable."

Veterans of Kosovo's guerilla war have threatened to take up arms again if Kosovo is not granted independence.

(with material from Reuters)

The Iranian Nuclear Challenge

Gareth Evans
Address by Gareth Evans, President, International Crisis Group, to The Greens/European Free Alliance Conference on Iran: Alternatives to Escalation, European Parliament, Brussels, 4 July 2007 ______________________________________________________________________________

The Urgent Need to Meet the Nuclear Challenge

Over the last decade, there has been a serious, and dangerous, loss of momentum and direction in disarmament and non-proliferation efforts. Stocks of nuclear weapons held by the nuclear weapons states remain extraordinarily and alarmingly high - some 30,000 in all, of which around 12,000 are still actively deployed - with no serious moves in sight to diminish them significantly, and Britain’s apparent determination to replace the Trident system indicating that it is no more serious than any of the other weapons states about moving to meet their own side of the grand NPT bargain, to move steadily toward absolute nuclear disarmament.

India and Pakistan have joined the ranks of nuclear weapons states, and like Israel doing so outside the framework of the NPT; North Korea, after building its capability while in the NPT and subject to its constraints, has withdrawn from the treaty, and now has the fissile material to manufacture perhaps a dozen nuclear weapons. Treaty making and implementation has stalled and there is fear of a new wave of proliferation, with Iran widely seen (accurately or otherwise) as being in the vanguard: determined to acquire full fuel cycle capability, as it is technically able to do while remaining a member in good standing of the NPT, and clearly wanting, at the very least, to keep open the option of stepping across the line out of the NPT and into weaponisation when it has the capacity to do so, precipitating in the process a rush by others in the region to follow suit.

2005 saw two loud wake-up calls in the failure of the NPT Review Conference, and the inability of the World Summit in September to agree on a single line about any WMD issue – despite the recommendations coming to it from the High Level Panel (of which I was a member) and many others to commit to a raft of measures designed to give the NPT and associated measures new life and teeth ( including, e.g., attaching some penalties to withdrawal from the Treaty, having stronger verification measures, developing international means for guaranteeing the external supply of fissile material to civilian users; and putting some real heat on the nuclear weapons states to get serious about disarmament).

We know what needs to be done. The Blix Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction, which reported last year (and of which I was also a member) has set out the agenda as clearly as it has ever been done, grouping its recommendations into four sets:

o First, agree on general principles of action – in particular that disarmament and non-proliferation are best pursued through a cooperative rules-based international order, applied and enforced not unilaterally but through effective multilateral institutions; and that states, individually and collectively, should consistently pursue policies designed to ensure that no state feels a need to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

o Second, work toward outlawing all weapons of mass destruction once and for all – including through the progressive extension of nuclear weapons free zones (most urgently in the Middle East). The general objective here is not as impossibly romantic as it seems to a lot of people (as even extreme realists like Henry Kissinger now seem prepared to acknowledge). As the Blix Commission put it in two of the most important passages in the whole report,

- Weapons of mass destruction cannot be uninvented. But they can be outlawed, as biological and chemical weapons already have been, and their use made unthinkable. Compliance, verification and enforcement rules can, with the requisite will, be effectively applied.

and, repeating the mantra first spelt out in the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons a decade earlier:

- So long as any state has nuclear weapons others will want them. So long as any such weapons remain, there is a high risk that they will one day be used, by design or accident. And any such use would be catastrophic.

o Third, reduce the danger of present arsenals – in particular through better security of stockpiles; diminishing the role of nuclear weapons by no-first-use pledges, assurances not to use them against non-nuclear weapons states, and by not developing nuclear weapons for new tasks; and prohibiting the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons, and phasing out the production of highly-enriched uranium.

o Fourth, prevent a new wave of proliferation - above all by reviving the fundamental commitments of all NPT parties: the five nuclear weapon states parties to negotiate towards nuclear disarmament and the non-nuclear weapon states, while retaining the right to peaceful uses of nuclear energy, to refrain from developing nuclear weapons, and in particular to explore international arrangements for an assurance of supply of enriched uranium fuel, and for the disposal of spent fuel, to reduce incentives for national facilities and diminish proliferation risks.

Of course the Blix Commission was not unconscious of the argument – very familiar to a Greens audience - that the ‘atoms for peace’ principle is unsustainable, and that civil nuclear energy production (whatever its superficial attractions in an age of anxiety about the contribution of fossil fuels to global warming) inevitably will reinforce and make ever harder to control the move toward wider nuclear weapons possession.

But we felt that recognizing and accommodating the demand for civilian nuclear capability was the only possible way the NPT could be held together – and, as it must be, strengthened – in the present environment , and that it would be Quixotic in the extreme to tilt at this windmill while trying to hold together a broad based international consensus in favour of drawing an absolute red line against anything in the nature of weaponisation.

Alternatives to Domestic Fissile Material Production within the NPT System

Leaving aside for present purposes the position of those who are not prepared to support any role for any kind of civil nuclear energy, the optimal non-proliferation solution would be for all fissile material production, and all spent fuel disposal, to be internationalized and fully controlled so as to make impossible any diversion for weapons production purposes.

This remains a dream for many of us, and innumerable efforts have been made over the years, in the IAEA and elsewhere, to get a serious debate started and serious steps put in train, to achieve just that - and other speakers on this panel will no doubt be referring to that effort. Let me refer briefly to just two of the proposals which have been floated.

o International Fuel Bank
Under one of them there would be a moratorium on the construction of new facilities for the enrichment of uranium or reprocessing to allow time for a scheme to be worked out for the multinational control of all such facilities, wherever located.
States complying with non-proliferation commitments would be then able to turn to an international fuel bank, assured that they could buy low-enriched nuclear fuel at market prices. There would be an international framework of agreed rules in which both producers and consumers would have a say on rights of purchase.

Many problems still have to be overcome, however, before this could be workable, for example:

- the unresolved question (certainly asked by Iran and others) as to who exactly would decide whether a country is fulfilling its non-proliferation commitments and thus be entitled to purchase enriched uranium); and

- the fact that there has been no sign of US buy in, not least because it has plans for additional capacity and doesn’t like moratorium, and because it is not happy to even contemplate the internationalisation of its own production. (See WMDC Report, pp 74-5)

o Global Nuclear Energy Partnership
Another proposal – ‘GNEP’ - has been advanced by the US itself last year and discussed with governments in London, Paris, Moscow, Beijing New Delhi and Tokyo. Under it a small number of states would produce enriched uranium and ‘lease’ it to states, and then take back the spent fuel – which would then be reprocessed by a new process which would recover uranium and plutonium in a form that would be unusable in weapons, and could be used in special reactors that would be built only in these fuel-producing states, with a drastically smaller remaining volume of waste. The general idea is to encourage rather than oblige other states to use this system – though if they joined in they would have to undertake to do no enrichment or reprocessing of their own.

There are technical doubts as to whether the proposed new recovery process will work, and political doubts as to whether the return of spent fuel to the ‘leasing’ states will prove acceptable, but the basic problem with this approach is that it adds a visible new inequality – between fuel cycle and user states – to the existing NPT inequality between nuclear-weapon and non-nuclear-weapon states. The deeper the cooperation between the fuel cycle states the more it would look like a cartel of the powerful. (See WMDC Report pp 75-6).

The Iran Impasse and How to Get Out of It

It is obvious that neither the international fuel bank nor GNEP solutions are going to be available within any kind of time frame that could possibly help resolve the current Iran problem – and that neither of them, even a fully internationalised fuel bank, is likely to be particularly attractive to Tehran anyway.

Nor does it appear that Iran is in any kind of mood to accept a ‘guaranteed’ supply from some other particular offshore source, along the lines proposed by Russia, in return for foregoing its fuel-cycle ambitions and agreeing to indefinitely relinquish whatever right as it has under the NPT to enrich uranium – even in the context of all the sanctions and threatened sanctions that are now on the table, and incentives (including restored relations with the US) that could be put back on the table.

Some are confident that sanctions – particularly the backdoor variety that the US, and Europeans under American pressure, are capable of applying through the banking system, to choke off both trade and investment finance - will ultimately force the Iranians to cave in, but that is not a confidence that we in the International Crisis Group share. Our reading is that, while the potential impact of these kind of measures can never be understated (and were probably decisive, e.g., in South Africa against the apartheid regime) in Iran just too many factors are pulling the other way, including,

- Iran’s sense of national pride, consciousness of its history, and deeply rooted ideology of independence, which cuts across other internal political and cultural divisions, and makes it deeply reluctant to be seen to be pushed around

- Associated with this the sense that Iran is a major, not minor, league player, not least in its own region, and entitled to have the kind of capability that goes with that

- The widespread sense that the West is trying to prevent Iran from having access to scientific progress, patronising it, to keep it in dependence and tutelage

- The sense that the international community’s heart is not really in a full-scale sanctions squeeze – that Russia (although it has gone along with the UNSC so far), China and the great majority of NPT countries don’t really believe that they are at present acting outside the letter or even spirit of the NPT in rushing to acquire full fuel-cycle capability.

Add to all that the Iranians’ current perception that military strike action is a non-starter in the present environment - with, except for a few fringe dwellers, the clear thinking in both the US and Israel that the negatives would far outweigh the positives - and you have all the makings of a full-scale impasse.

Crisis Group has long been arguing that a new approach is needed which goes back to basics – which focuses on strategy rather than immediate tactics - by redrawing the red line.

What matters, from a non-proliferation perspective, is not whether Iran has full enrichment capability, but nuclear weapons. What should ultimately concern Israel, Iran’s neighbours, and a world deeply anxious to avoid further nuclear breakout, is not whether Iran has the capacity to make weapons-grade uranium, but whether it actually makes it and puts it into deliverable bombs. While it may well be too late to stop Iran acquiring its own fissile material, and the technological capacity to enrich it to weapons grade, it is certainly not too late to halt it acquiring nuclear weapons.

To achieve this will require a different diplomatic strategy from that presently favoured by the EU and US. It means abandoning the ‘zero enrichment’ goal in favour of a ‘delayed limited enrichment’ plan. Under this:

o the wider international community would explicitly accept that Iran can enrich domestically for peaceful nuclear energy purposes;

o in return Iran would agree to phasing in over an extended period of years that enrichment program, with major limitations on its initial size and scope, and a very highly intrusive inspections regime – not just the Additional Protocol to which it has already signed up, which is significantly more intrusive than the basic safeguards regime, but (because of the doubts which have arisen – and are in fact widely shared by other NPT parties - about its reporting lapses and general lack of transparency in the past) specially negotiated ‘Additional Protocol Plus’ measures which would enable inspectors to have a rather more exact knowledge of what Iran was doing across a broader range of areas relevant to weapons capability; and

o there would be both incentives – in the form of security guarantees, progressive lifting of existing sanctions, moves toward diplomatic normalisation and the like – and strong disincentives to ensure that the agreement stuck. In particular, Iran would be disciplined by knowing that if at any stage it made any move at all toward weaponisation – through the production of weapons-grade fissile material, or any hardware in which to put it – all hell would break loose. A full range of economic sanctions would take immediate effect (including finance and investment sanctions fully supported by the Europeans as well as the US), and military options would not be off the table.

There are three advantages to this strategic approach, if the U.S. and EU could swallow their reservations:

o It is not inconsistent with what we know about Iran’s actual nuclear intentions. While there is every reason to believe that right across the political and social spectrum there is as an absolute determination to acquire full fuel cycle capability – and as such to be seen as being in the league of those countries capable of becoming nuclear weapons states if they so chose - there is also every reason to believe that no decision has been made to acquire weapons, and there is a very clear understanding of the huge risks that Iran would be running by so doing: not only the possibility of the balance of calculation changing toward a military strike in the US and Israel, but the real prospect of the Sunni neighbourhood reacting in kind.

o The approach proposed would spread the process out over time. If made clear to the Iranians, it would make much more achievable what has so far been unachievable, viz a suspension right now of enrichment-related activity right now to enable detailed negotiations to take place. And not only would those negotiations themselves take time, they would involve the phasing in over time of the various levels of capacity involved. And this in turn would allow time and space for a more moderate political dynamic to take hold in Iran. The internal political scene is multi-textured, multi-layered and always hard to read and predict, but if a new environment can be created of engagement and cooperation with the West, rather than demonisation and isolation by it, there are many analysts inside and outside the country who believe that a completely different mood than that now represented by Ahmadi-nejad is there for the taking, with all that flows from that in terms of security cooperation.

o But the greatest benefit is that it would command genuinely universal buy-in, first from all those NPT signatories who are wedded to the basic NPT bargain and presently totally reluctant to acknowledge any limitation on full ‘peaceful use’ capability, and, secondly, and very importantly, from Russia and China, who are likely to go on being extremely reluctant Security Council enforcers of the present ‘zero enrichment’ strategy, but who are totally willing to be very tough indeed when it comes to Iran actually weaponising, with all that that implies for destabilising the neighbourhood and changing global power balances.

Crisis Group published an early version of this plan 18 months ago, and we know from many consultations since that it has extremely wide appeal as a fallback if the present diplomatic strategy runs into the sand, as now seems very likely.

The obvious downside from the West’s point of view – which will be repeated over and over as this debate continues - is that, although stretching out the process, ‘delayed limited enrichment’ would permit Tehran to eventually achieve full fuel cycle capability, with the risk in turn of weapons acquisition when that happens. But the reality of Iran having that choice, sooner rather than later, and with minimal inspection and supervision along the way, now stares us in the face.

Nobody wants to see the present diplomatic impasse slide into the kind of situation where the West’s unwillingness to compromise strengthens its opponent’s extremists to the point that their country walks away from the NPT, shrugs off any kind of international monitoring, produces a large stock of weapons-grade material and ultimately takes the risk of building its own bomb. We have been there and done that with North Korea. Although there has at last been a major breakthrough in the six party talks, it is still going to be nightmarishly difficult to wholly recover the ground which has been lost to Pyongyang through earlier Western obduracy.

If the present diplomatic strategy is going nowhere but downhill, the only rational response is a new one which may be ideal for no-one but has attractions for everyone. If all diplomacy fails, the alternative course of military action is simply too horrible to contemplate.

Homemade, Cheap and Dangerous

Terror Cells Favor Simple Ingredients In Building Bombs

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, July 5, 2007; A01

LONDON, July 4 -- The 39-page memo recovered from an al-Qaeda laptop computer in Pakistan three years ago read like an Idiot's Guide to Bombmaking. Forget military explosives or fancy detonators, it lectured. Instead, the manual advised a shopping trip to a hardware store or pharmacy, where all the necessary ingredients for a terrorist attack are stocked on the shelves.

"Make use of that which is available at your disposal and . . . bend it to suit your needs, (improvise) rather than waste valuable time becoming despondent over that which is not within your reach," counseled the author of the memo, Dhiren Barot, a British citizen who said he developed his keep-it-simple philosophy by "observing senior planners" at al-Qaeda training camps.

Barot, who was later captured near London and is serving a 30-year sentence, had envisioned an attack with multiple car bombs that would detonate liquid-gas cylinders encased in rusty nails -- a strategy with striking similarities to an attempt last week by a suspected terrorist cell to blow up three vehicles in London and Glasgow, Scotland.

Counterterrorism officials have warned for years that Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants have tried to obtain weapons of mass destruction, such as a nuclear device or chemical or biological weapons. In response, U.S. military and intelligence agencies have invested vast amounts of money to block their acquisition.

So far, however, al-Qaeda and its affiliates have relied almost solely on simple, homemade bombs crafted from everyday ingredients -- such as nail-polish remover and fertilizer -- when plotting attacks in Europe and the United States.

The makeshift bombs lack the destructive potential of the conventional explosives that rake Iraq on a daily basis. They are also less reliable, as demonstrated by the car bombs that failed to go off in London last week after the culprits tried to ignite them with detonators wired to cellphones.

But other attempts have generated plenty of mayhem and damage, including the kitchen-built backpack bombs that killed 52 people in the London public transit system on July 7, 2005.

"It makes no difference to your average person if somebody puts a car bomb out there that is crude or one that is sophisticated," said Chris Driver-Williams, a retired British major and military intelligence officer who studies explosive devices used by terrorist groups. "If it detonates, all of a sudden you've got a very serious device and one that has achieved exactly what the terrorists wanted."

The advantages of homemade explosives are that they are easy and cheap to manufacture, as well as difficult for law enforcement agencies to detect. According to one expert, the peroxide-based liquid explosives that an al-Qaeda cell allegedly intended to use to blow up nine transatlantic airliners last summer would have cost as little as $15 a bomb.

It is technically simple to make such explosives. Instructions are widely available on the Internet. Experts added, however, that it takes skill and sophistication to construct a viable bomb by adding timing devices, detonators or secondary charges.

Investigations have found evidence that most al-Qaeda cells involved in bombing plots in Europe have received training in camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan, or were tutored by graduates of those camps.

Among them: cell members involved in the July 7, 2005, bombings in Britain and a separate plot two weeks later that also targeted the London subway. The suspected ringleaders of the May 16, 2003, bombings in Casablanca were also al-Qaeda camp veterans who had experimented in explosives. Richard Reid, who tried to blow up an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami in 2001, was taught how to build his shoe bomb in Afghanistan.

Stephen Swain, former head of the international counterterrorism unit at Scotland Yard in London, said the culprits in each case had been trained by seasoned al-Qaeda operatives "without a shadow of a doubt."

"It's a common thread throughout the entire theater of al-Qaeda-style operations," said Swain, who retired last year and is a senior consultant for Control Risks Group, an international security firm. "There's quite a lot of training going on in this regard."
Simple Recipes

Terrorist groups have been using homemade explosives for years. In February 1993, Islamic radicals drove a truck loaded with about 1,500 pounds of urea nitrate -- a fertilizer-based explosive -- and hydrogen-gas cylinders into a garage underneath the World Trade Center.

The bomb killed six people and injured more than 1,000. Investigators determined that the cell built the bomb in New Jersey by consulting manuals brought from Pakistan. Two years later, the ringleader of the plot, Ramzi Yousef, tried but failed to use homemade liquid explosives to down 11 airliners crossing the Pacific Ocean.

The same year, Timothy J. McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City with a truck bomb consisting of 5,000 pounds of fuel oil and fertilizer, killing 168 people.

Since then, it has become more difficult to purchase large quantities of fertilizer without attracting attention; sellers in the United States and many European countries are supposed to notify authorities of suspicious customers.

The last known attempt by al-Qaeda to construct a fertilizer-based bomb in Europe came in 2003, when a cell operative bought 1,200 pounds of bagged Kemira GrowHow fertilizer for about $200 from an agricultural supply store in Britain. The salesman, John Stone, later testified that he thought the transaction was strange because it was the wrong time of year to apply the substance and the buyer claimed to have only a small garden plot.

"I hope you're not going around bombing anything," Stone said he told the buyer half-jokingly, although the salesclerk did not notify police.

British authorities were tipped off soon after, however, by an employee at a rental-storage center where the cell was keeping the fertilizer. In April, five members of the group were convicted in the plot, known as Operation Crevice. Many European fertilizer manufacturers have since reduced the amount of ammonium nitrate, a key bomb ingredient, in their products.

Partly as a result, European and U.S. counterterrorism officials said terrorist cells are increasingly turning to peroxide-based explosives, which can be made in much smaller quantities from materials available at drugstores.

The most commonly used compound is triacetone triperoxide, or TATP. Primary ingredients for a homemade batch typically include acetone, which can be found in nail-polish remover, and hydrogen peroxide, a chemical used in hair-bleaching products.

TATP wields about 85 percent of the explosive power of TNT and can be made in a kitchen or bathroom. A dime-size amount of the explosive can ignite a fireball the size of a basketball.
'Nobody Ever Stops Me'

The risky side of TATP is that it is highly unstable. A spark or light friction can detonate the explosive, making it extraordinarily difficult to handle. Experts and police said there have been numerous cases in which suspected terrorists -- as well as foolhardy amateur chemists -- have set off accidental explosions, resulting in death or severe injuries.

"You need to concentrate the chemicals," said Hans J. Michels, a professor of chemical engineering at Imperial College in London. "It's a filthy job and it's dangerous, but it can be done."

Despite the dangers, al-Qaeda cells have used peroxide-based explosives in more than a dozen plots in the past decade, including the July 7 and 21, 2005, London incidents, as well as attacks in Casablanca, Istanbul and the Indonesian island of Bali, according to counterterrorism officials. Danish police also discovered TATP in September during the arrest of seven terrorism suspects in Odense.

In crystalline form, TATP looks like powdered sugar and is difficult to detect in airports; security officials need to examine an exposed surface with a swab kit or other tester to determine its presence.

"TATP and peroxide-based explosives are concern number one for the aviation industry," said Ehud Keinan, a chemistry professor at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and a leading researcher on the substance. "It will take some time before we are protected. Right now, we are not."

Reached by telephone in Paris, where he was scheduled to give a lecture about TATP on Wednesday at an international conference, Keinan said he often carries a small sample of the volatile compound in his carry-on luggage when he flies -- just to test airport security. "Nobody ever stops me," he said.

When asked if it might be dangerous to sit next to him on a plane, he said, "If you know how to take care of it, it's okay. If you don't know what you're doing, you're in trouble."

U.S. Homeland Security officials have said terrorism suspects arrested last August in Britain on charges that they were plotting to blow up several transatlantic airliners might have been planning to smuggle on board TATP or a related compound, HMTD, hexamethylene triperoxide diamine. Experts said it would take as little as one or two quarts of those explosives to down a large plane.

TATP was discovered in the late 19th century but was deemed to have no industrial or commercial applications because it was so unstable. Researchers generally ignored the substance until 1980, when Palestinian fighters used it for the first time in a bomb in Israel.

Palestinian bombers have used it ever since. TATP was used for the first time in an attack in Europe in July 1994, when Palestinians exploded a car bomb outside the Israeli Embassy in London.

U.S. and European counterterrorism investigators paid limited attention to the explosive until the July 2005 bombings in London. Afterward, the New York City Police Department built an exact replica of the apartment in Leeds, England, that the July 7 conspirators allegedly used to manufacture their backpack bombs.

Hugh O'Rourke, deputy inspector of the NYPD counterterrorism division, said the police department wanted to show beat officers what a kitchen-counter TATP production line would look like. He said it is easy to mistake the white powder and its cooking tools -- such as pool cleaners, large tubs or commercial-size fans -- for a common drug lab.

"Patrol cops see a lot of white powder, think it's crack, and want to touch it and package it," which could easily result in an explosion, he said. "We don't want them doing that."