Water and Jordon

Amman's JORDAN TIMES 3/15/99: "Jordan on Sunday "strongly" rejected an Israeli request to cut 60 per cent of this year's water supplies to the Kingdom promised under the 1994 peace treaty in order to fend off a drought in the Jewish state, a senior official said.

The official added that during a meeting in Jerusalem, the Jordanian delegation dismissed the Israeli argument and demanded full implementation of the peace deal "to secure the Kingdom's rightful water share." "Jordan wants to make it clear that the peace accord has set up our legitimate water shares, and it has nothing to do with a drought in Israel," the official, who asked not to be named, told the Jordan Times.

The Cabinet will hold a meeting today at the Water Ministry to discuss the general water situation in Jordan and plans to deal with a possible shortage this summer and was expected to issue a statement on Israel's request..."

Golan: ZOA criticizes Pentagon

ARUTZ7 3/18/99: "The Zionist Organization of America has criticized the Pentagon for forbidding a delegation of U.S. military officials from visiting the Golan Heights. The ZOA, quoting Ha'aretz, learned that "the Pentagon told the delegation that such visits would violate U.S. policy against touring Israeli-occupied territory."

A study prepared in 1967 by the Pentagon itself, however, recommended that Israel keep the entire Golan Heights in order to defend itself against future Syrian aggression. "Israel must hold the commanding terrain east of the boundary of 4 June 1967 which overlooks the Galilee area.

To provide an in-depth defense, Israel would need a strip about 15 miles wide," i.e., the entire Golan Heights, according to a report by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after the Six-Day War.

ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said, "The Pentagon is banning visits to the Golan Heights while it is under Israeli rule, yet the Pentagon never had such a ban when the Golan was occupied by Syria during 1948-1967.

By employing this double standard, the Pentagon is in effect accepting the false Arab propaganda claim that the Golan belongs to the Arabs. The fact that this action contradicts the Pentagon's own 1967 recommendation that Israel keep the Golan makes the ban all the more troubling."

Iraq bomb could soon be functional

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL 3/18/99 via IMRA--Op-Ed by Kenneth Timerman: "Just west of Baghdad sits al-Ubur, a complex of buildings surrounded by barbed wire and antiaircraft guns. The Iraqi government says it's a tractor factory.

The facility, which opened to official fanfare in July 1994, was likely designed to build key elements of Iraq's secret nuclear program: huge particle accelerators known as calutrons, which Iraq used before the Gulf War to enrich uranium for bombs.

With the end of United Nations inspections in December, the skeleton 1,500-man work force - mostly drawn from Iraq's earlier uranium enrichment program - could already have begun building new enrichment systems.

And there is mounting evidence that Iraq may be assembling a secret nuclear reactor to generate plutonium, an alternate nuclear weapons material.

Information about both programs was delivered to U.S. government officials more than four years ago, but was never passed on to the U.N. Special Commission for the Disarmament of Iraq (known as Unscom) or to U.S. decision makers. It is revealed publicly for the first time here.

Both the calutron-enrichment system and the reactor are of great concern because each could provide Saddam Hussein with the fissile material-- weapons-grade uranium and plutonium--he needs to build a nuclear weapon.

'If Iraq had access to nuclear material, [it] could produce a workable nuclear weapon within one year,' a top official at the International Atomic Energy Agency told me recently in Vienna.

Western governments have known for years that Saddam has pursued weapons of mass destruction, including a nuclear bomb. In fact, after the Gulf War, U.N. arms inspectors uncovered thousands of documents revealing a vast nuclear-weapons program.

But although U.N. inspectors found clear signs of chemical and biological weapons, they were not able to uncover conclusive evidence that Iraq was on the verge of joining the nuclear club. This fed Western complacency, or at least a feeling that the West had breathing space.

The Clinton administration insisted that Iraq's nuclear research was essentially capped, because U.N. weapons inspectors were on the ground, preventing Iraq from restarting weapons programs that were destroyed or damaged during the war.

But during an investigation for Reader's Digest, I discovered evidence indicating that Saddam's nuclear research-and- development program is probably much further along than the administration believes. Al-Ubur is one example. U.N. weapons inspectors who visited al-Ubur as recently as last year noted the factory was equipped with a high-voltage power source and its own water-purification plant--two telltale signs of calutrons.

This technology, while obsolete in the West, is nevertheless a functional and proven uranium-enrichment system. 'We are worried what the Iraqis can do in this facility in the future,' one U.N. weapons inspector says.

Another disturbing piece of evidence about Saddam's nuclear program was provided to me by officials of the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group. In early 1994 an Iraqi nuclear technician who had worked on uranium-enrichment programs defected to the congress in northern Iraq, carrying an extensive collection of documents, including rough, hand-drawn diagrams for a nuclear reactor Iraq planned to build with components probably purchased from China.

He also provided detailed reports on ostensibly civilian manufacturing facilities where he worked on secret nuclear-weapons projects for more than a decade.

This man, whose identity cannot be revealed because of family in Iraq, was debriefed by analysts from the CIA's Middle East Operations Directorate for two months at a U.S. embassy.

Inexplicably, details from the debriefing were never passed on to such presumably interested parties as the International Atomic Energy Agency or Unscom.

Even the head of the CIA's nonproliferation center, Gordon Oehler, doesn't recall receiving detailed reports on the defector's information. When asked to comment for this story, the CIA declined.

Of course, defectors are not always reliable. I showed the defector's information to nuclear experts at the IAEA in Vienna and to U.N. weapons inspectors in New York. They expressed surprise that so much of the information was new to them. But items they were familiar with, such as details of Iraq's little-known laser uranium-enrichment program, and the names of scientists working at various nuclear establishments, added to the credibility of the defector's information.

The IAEA had long monitored Iraq for evidence of a nuclear reactor, using sophisticated environmental sampling gear that could pick up heat signatures and other telltale signs from an operating nuclear plant.

They never detected such activity. The defector's report gave a coherent explanation why: Iraqi technicians stripped it down, hiding the various components at sites throughout the country...

And now Iraq is free to pursue its nuclear ambitions without restraint. It has blocked Unscom and IAEA investigators from carrying out their work since last August. Those inspectors left Iraq altogether on Dec. 16, just hours before the Desert Fox bombing campaign.

IAEA officials confirm that Iraq maintains a vast nuclear production capability, only small portions of which were subject to U.N. monitoring. With the end of the U.N. inspections, they say, Saddam is free to bring his nuclear gear out of hiding and resume a crash program to build the bomb.

'The threat is in the present and the future,' a top IAEA official said. Despite American knowledge of these Iraqi capabilities - and the almost daily bombing runs by U.S. and British pilots - most of the facilities where Iraq is storing or operating this equipment are still standing.

In fact, a U.S. intelligence source said that several key weapons facilities were removed from the target list for the Desert Fox bombing campaign last December, due to 'environmental' concerns.

'The fear was that nuclear or biological material could leak into the atmosphere and cause a widespread disaster,' the source said.

Such considerations may have shaped U.S. bombing policies, but those who have worked with Saddam on his weapons projects say that fear of a disaster does not register with him.

In the end, says Khidhir Hamza, former head of Iraq's nuclear weapons program, Saddam's logic is frightening and simple: 'He is hated by his neighbors, and has become an international pariah. Saddam without the bomb is dead.'"

No Tzomet

ARUTZ7 3/19/99: "Tzomet party leader Rafael Eitan has secured the consent of Prime Minister Netanyahu to be placed in the fifth spot on the Likud Knesset list for the upcoming election.

Eitan did not secure a second spot for his loyalist MK Chaim Dayan, but he was promised that he would be appointed to a ministerial position should the Likud form the next government - unless it is a national-unity government.

Three Tzomet members will also be appointed to governmental positions, according to the agreement, while the Likud has gained Tzomet's valuable broadcast time and campaign funds."

Swiss reluctant to hold Geneva Convention against Israel's Jerusalem

THE JERUSALM POST 3/19/99: "Switzerland, revealing the extent to which the international community is unprepared for a Geneva Convention conference against Israel, is asking 188 nations for advice and instructions on the mechanics and aims of such an event, now that it has been called for July 15.

At an emergency session in February, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution that recommended that the contracting parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention convene a conference on a specific date "on measures to enforce the convention in the occupied Palestinian territory, including Jerusalem."

This would be the first Geneva Convention conference in the protocols' 50-year history, and Switzerland is apparently trying to determine the rules only months before the event.

The Swiss government, as the depository of the Geneva protocols, recently sent a letter to all the nations that signed the convention, implying that it does not recognize the UN vote as sufficient for convening the event. In essence, it asked these nations to vote again, in their capacity as signatories, and then asked: