SHANGHAI   U.S. & China on Saturday said they had reached consensus on issues holding up Beijing's entry to the World Trade Organization and would work toward bringing China into the global trade body by year-end. The announcement followed talks between China's Foreign Trade Minister Shi Guangsheng & U.S. trade rep Robt Zoellick on sidelines of Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC ¹ ² ³ ª) trade ministers meeting in Shanghai this week. "We are pleased to report that the U.S. & China have reached consensus on major issues that we discussed," the U.S. embassy in Beijing said in a statement. "China & U.S. agree that we should now work together in Geneva to complete China's WTO accession," it said. The statement did not detail the issues discussed, but talks on China's entry have stalled over the amount of subsidies Beijing can pay its farmers.
The 2 countries also discussed trading rights, distribution & insurance market access during bilateral talks on Tuesday, Zoellick told a news conference earlier this week. U.S. officials said earlier that the talks with China were positive, but neither side had indicated any consensus had been reached

DoD briefing
9.9.97

Nuclear Baby Tests Confirmed in Hong Kong
6.10.01   Reuters

No one could accuse The Chinese of being squeamish about the things they eat - monkeys' brains, owls' eyes, bears' paws and deep fried scorpions are all items on The menu. But most dishes revered as national favourites sound as harmless as boiled rice when compared to the latest pint de jour allegedly gaining favour in Shenzhen - human foetus. Rumours that dead embryos were being used as dietary supplements started to spread early last year with reports that some doctors in Shenzhen hospitals were eating dead foetuses after carrying out abortions. The doctors allegedly defended their actions by saying the embryos were good for their skin and general health. …

3 years ago, Dr. Thomas Diflo's moral nightmare walked into his examination room: a patient freshly implanted with a kidney bought from China's death row, where prisoners are killed, sometimes for minor offenses, and their organs harvested. Since then, Dr. Diflo, director of the renal transplant program at NY Univ. Medical Ctr\, has seen half a dozen such people, typically young Chinese American women. The surgeon says his patients weren't distressed about snatching organs from the condemned, but he was overwhelmed by the implications. Unable to shoulder the burden alone, on 1.11.01, Diflo took his "horror at a real ethical quagmire" to the medical center's Ethics Committee. Diflo is the first American doctor to talk publicly about this experience, and he did so only after being drawn out by the Voice. The gruesome practice has been documented among ethnic Chinese communities throughout Asia, but so far every attempt to prove that people were leaving U.S. soil to buy organs from China's massive death row has failed.
"To tell you the truth, the original rationale for bringing this situation to the Ethics Committee was my own discomfort in taking care of these patients. I was outraged at the way in which they obtained their organs, and I had a great deal of difficulty separating that fact from the care of the patient," Diflo told the Voice. "Several patients were very up-front and candid about it, that they bought an organ taken from an executed convict for about $10,000," Diflo recalls. "Most of the patients are ecstatic to be off of dialysis, and none has seemed particularly perturbed regarding the source of the organs." There's no telling how many kidney buyers returning to the U.S. have gone for follow-up care at a less elite institution or stayed within secretive medical channels recommended by their brokers. Diflo gets his patients on referral from recognized hospitals. "Patients sort of arrive on their doorstep and they don't know what to do. Not everybody who's had a transplant is cared for by a transplant specialist. I tend to see the more complicated ones," Diflo says.

… outright sale of organs is abhorrent to nearly all surgeons in the field. Selling organs is a felony under a 1984 federal law that was spearheaded by then senator Al Gore, and is punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $50,000. Live or executed prisoners in the U.S. are forbidden to donate an organ, even for free, except to family members under special circumstances. In China, human rights groups say, citizens have been executed for nonviolent offenses like taking bribes, credit card theft, small-scale tax evasion, and stealing truckloads of vegetables. Political dissidents have also been sentenced to death. Chinese embassy officials did not respond to requests for comment, but in the past the govt has denied promoting the for-profit organ trade. Diflo says he and his colleagues wrestled with the issue in a debate that was "quite lively and revealing, but the bottom line was that we take care of patients who come to us, regardless of their situation—moral, ethical, financial, or social. Although I might find what they had done reprehensible, I was still nonetheless obligated to care for them in the best way that I knew how, and that is what I do."
But Diflo refuses to let it end at that. "Because it is not really appropriate for me to take my outrage out on the patients who come to me, I began to think that I would be better off addressing the root problem, the pilfering of organs from prisoners in China. That is what pushed me to pursue this further," he says. And so he's going public. America-based human rights activists have sought this break for years. …

A Chinese man seeking political asylum in U.S. says that as a physician in China, he took part in removing corneas & harvesting skin from more than 100 executed prisoners, including one who had not yet died. Wang Guoqi, a burn specialist, said in a written statement that he also saw other doctors remove vital organs from executed prisoners and that his hospital, the Tianjin Paramilitary Police General Brigade Hospital, sold those organs for enormous profits. China executes more prisoners a year than any other nation, and some patients from U.S. and other Western countries travel there for organ transplants. Although China's practice of harvesting body parts after executions has been widely alleged, Wang's asylum petition offers a rare, eyewitness account from someone who was involved in a large number of cases. The House International Relations Committee has invited him to testify today.

Wang, 38, came to U.S. on April 30 with a tourist group and stayed on rather than returning to China as scheduled May 14. He later made contact with Harry Wu, a Chinese American who spent 19 years in prison in China for political offenses. Wu heads the nonprofit organization Laogai Fndtn campaigning against the collecting of organs from Chinese prisoners. He said that he went to great lengths to verify Wang's identity and that both he & congressional staff members found the doctor's statements "highly credible." Wang's detailed statements, provided to The Washington Post by Wu's foundation, include the dates & places of executions, the names of doctors involved in organ removals and graphic descriptions of the medical procedures.
According to his statement, the police hospital often was notified in advance of multiple executions, usually around the Chinese New Year or the government's "strike hard" campaigns against crime. Wang said security officials were paid $37 a corpse to tip off the hospital about executions. Kidneys later were sold to wealthy or high-ranking people for more than $15,000 each, he said. Wang said he worked at execution grounds & crematoriums, wearing plain clothes rather than a police uniform. In many cases, he said, prisoners were shot, then immediately placed in ambulances, where their kidneys were extracted within two minutes of death. Afterward, he and other doctors went to crematoriums and, in a small room next to the cremation furnaces, carved skin from the arms, legs, chest and back of each corpse. The skin was stored in saline solution at low temperatures to use later on burn victims. He said he also extracted corneas and other tissue.

"After all extractable tissues & organs were taken, what remained was an ugly heap of muscles, the blood vessels still bleeding, or all viscera exposed," he said. "Then the corpse was handed to the workers at the crematorium." Wang said his conscience has been "tortured" since an Oct. 1995 incident in Hebei Province, where he and other doctors arrived for the execution of a man sentenced to death for robbery & murder. Before the execution, Wang administered an injection of heparin to prevent blood clotting. A policeman told the prisoner it was a tranquilizer. An executioner then shot the prisoner, but the bullet did not immediately kill him, and he lay on the ground convulsing, Wang said. Nevertheless, the doctors were ordered to take him to the ambulance, where urologists extracted his kidneys and left the scene with the county staff & executioner. Wang & other burn surgeons remained inside the ambulance to harvest the skin. Then they threw the half-dead prisoner in a plastic bag on a flatbed truck and left, he said.

The sourness of GWBush admin policy towards China is beginning to alarm many Americans. The Defence Dept's decision last week to back away from military contacts with China came across as provocative. And the tit-for-tat cancellation of navy ships' future port calls to Hong Kong, after Beijing itself spiked the latest one, added downward momentum to the relationship. Where will this stop? How vicious will the volleying get? The Bush hawks cannot control everything, of course. They won't be able to reverse last year's congressional approval of permanent normal trading relations for China. They could appear out of touch if they continue to oppose awarding the 2008 Olympics to Beijing. And are they seriously thinking of boycotting this autumn's Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit in Shanghai? This important event raises consensus on both sides of the Pacific Rim.
Chiller-in-chief is Def.Sec Rumsfeld, who sometimes comes across as nostalgic for the Cold War. The Pentagon cited security concerns in justifying the military contact pull-back, a retrograde move Mr Rumsfeld had been itching to effect for months. In truth, America learns at least as much from these exchanges as China does. Can anyone stop Mr Rumsfeld, a veteran Washington player in prior GOP administrations? Surely sudden GOP loss of the Senate is an unexpected obstacle for him. The new Democratic chairmen of key Senate committees are not enthused about paying for super-expensive, unproven National Missile Defence weaponry, which many Bush campaign contributors favour and from which they would benefit economically. But the probable result of an American arms build-up would be a corresponding Asian arms build-up, not just in China but in Japan, too. The logic of how this would make the region safer is hard to follow.

The hawks could also be frustrated by clever Chinese diplomacy. The Chinese might regard Mr Rumsfeld's provocations as a tempting but dangerous detour from their solid, heretofore successful focus on economic development. Beijing needs to resist Mr Rumsfeld's neo-Cold War fandango and instead build on the development path that has lifted many Chinese out of poverty. To be sure, the impediments keeping the hawks from flying too high are far from foolproof. The Senate's Democratic committee chairmen have little to say about the Bush administration's public rhetoric. Nor can the Senate force the administration to consult sincerely on security issues of concern to E. Asia, from peace on the Korean peninsula to the mess in Indonesia. Plus, the Chinese care enough about what is said publicly not only to sulk when insulted but sometimes to do far more when taunted. Beijing could enhance Mr Rumsfeld's hand by overreacting.
It's conceivable, of course, that Mr Rumsfeld's strategy will bring China to its knees, much like former president Ronald Reagan did in out-spending the Soviets militarily in the 1980s. But China possesses nothing like the former Soviet Union's nuclear capability and won't for decades. For these reasons, the new Rumsfeld policy is premature and high-risk. It could elicit from a frightened Beijing precisely the aggressive conduct the American hawks say the new policy is designed to deter. It could also divide all of Asia into warring camps, pro-China or pro-America. And it could result in new tensions over Taiwan. Only the president can rein in a determined defence secretary, as Mr Rumsfeld definitely is. Sadly, it's far from clear Mr Bush comprehends the full implications of what is going on.

Jas.Kelly, local boy who became a policy boffin and has now gone to Washington for a big job in the State Dept, is still seen as "one of us" by many of the Hawaii-based business & academic professionals who populated a big meeting about Asia last week at the Hawaiian Convention Ctr. They say he is not Dr Strangelove masquerading as a responsible U.S. defence secretary or some two-step Texan masquerading as a cosmopolitan world leader. But are they right about the Asst Sec.State for E.Asian & Pacific Affairs? After all, working in Washington for too long can do strange things to people. But if Mr Kelly's statements at his confirmation hearings in the Senate reflect the views of his superiors, then he is the best thing the GWBush administration has done for Asia to date.
Mr Kelly served as NSC sr dir. for Asian affairs in Bush pere admin & understands East Asia as both headache & opportunity. "[It is] a place in which armed conflict could occur with little warning," he says. Caution about a region on edge despite economic & social development makes him respectful of the Korean Peninsula. He says: "Most Koreans, and I think most Americans, really do not have a better idea for approaching such a seriously deficient place as N.Korea than the one S.Korean President Kim Dae-jung is pursuing."

U.S. asst sec., due to lead a delegation to China today, paints the Sino-US relationship not in black-versus-white terms but in "a considerable range of grey". China's tendencies towards globalism & intense nationalism are "contradictions . . . that make it difficult to predict the future course of our relationship". But China "is not the Soviet Union in the 1970s; we do not see factories putting out thousands of tanks and jet bombers or anything of that sort". Taiwan's democracy is a regional high point. He insists US policy on that island's relationship with Beijing hasn't really changed, despite his boss' recent back-and-forths. Of Japan, he says: "Solving the problems of a huge & rich economy like Japan is not an easy task."
Mr Kelly talks of Indonesia with urgency. US policy needs to support the territorial integrity of this far-flung archipelago, or the world might wake up one morning to discover "a fragmented Indonesia that feeds fundamentalism, narrow regionalism and movements that, to put it most charitably, are very unstable and very dangerous". He skirts a direct clash with the well-intentioned but self-defeating congressional ban on US aid to the Indonesian armed forces by proffering the view that holding this sprawling nation together without the active co- operation of its military is hard to imagine. All the conceivable alternatives to Mr Kelly's approach to E. Asia are frightening. The worst would end up polarising the region into China-containment and China-alliance camps. Political opportunists in America such as Christopher Cox, the congressman who sought to exploit fears of Chinese spying in the U.S., would take centre stage. E.Asia would explode into costly & destabilising arms build- ups.
That is why many delegates to the Asian Development Bank & Hawaii Business Forum conference (which went off so smoothly that even the anti-globalisation protesters had a day of uninterrupted protest) view the former navy captain as on their side. They believe this is the one man, in this administration, at least, who understands Asia. The truth is, right now, what else and who else do they have to believe in?

U.S. strategy doesn't spell Asia troop cut-Admiral
7.19.01   Reuters

TOKYO   A possible shift in U.S. military strategy to focus on the capability to win one major conflict and defend against new threats would not spell a reduction in forces in Asia, Admiral Dennis Blair, commander-in- chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, said on Thursday. President Bush has vowed to modernize the cumbersome U.S. military, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Congress last month that the current U.S. strategy built on readiness to win two major wars at once was "not working" and he hoped to recommend changes.
"The review of defense strategy that is now going on, I am participating in, and I see no real reduction...I see an increase in emphasis on Asia as a region of both potential opportunities and of potential threat," Blair told a media luncheon. "Within the type of strategies being considered, the overall structure of the U.S. forces is, I think, going to remain pretty well the same," he added. Blair was in Japan as part of a swing through the region and has been holding talks with Japanese officials.

China question
In terms of regional threats, Blair said China has been giving mixed signals about whether it is likely to become a force for instability in the region. "I think that if China develops and presses its claims and influence in a multilateral cooperative way, then it can be good for the region, and I think that China's ideas and influence, and certainly economic activities, will be welcome," he said. "If China chooses to turn its growing influence and power into aggressive bullying behavior, then I think it's quite a different story for the region," he said.
Sino-U.S. relations have been strained by a number of issues since U.S. President George Bush took office in January, while Tokyo's ties with Beijing, always touchy, have also been frayed of late by renewed disputes over wartime history and trade.

North Korea
Blair, echoing the Bush administration line, said it was important to pursue talks with North Korea on conventional forces in tandem with talks on its missile and nuclear programs. North Korea has said it would not discuss its conventional forces with the United States before Washington withdraws its 37,000 troops from South Korea, a condition unacceptable to the United States. "The DMZ (demilitarized zone on the Korean peninsula) is the most intense and fortified area of the world. There are massive North Korean artillery within range of Seoul where 16 million South Koreans live, it's the capital. Warning times are very low and the potential for damage is very high," Blair said.
"I think it is not unreasonable that, if we are to reach a durable peace agreement on the Korean peninsula, that we walk back these forces that are contributing to a hair trigger military situation there," he added. Blair said eventually there could be a quid pro quo in which U.S. and South Korea troops close to the DMZ also moved back. But he added: "I've got to tell you, we can talk about these theoretically, but we are so far away from them in a practical sense that we need to do some first baby steps which have already been proposed by South Korea that we have not seen response from the North Korean side on."

Okinawa matters
Blair's comments come amid revived local resentment of the U.S. military presence on Japan's southern island of Okinawa following a U.S. airman's alleged rape of a Japanese woman. Okinawa is host to about half the U.S. military presence in Japan and one-quarter of its presence in Asia as a whole. U.S. Air Force Staff Sergeant Timothy Woodland, 24, was charged on Thursday with raping a Japanese woman. Japanese perceptions that Washington dragged its feet before handing Woodland over to Japanese authorities last Friday revived calls to revise a pact on the status of U.S. military in Japan. Under the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), Washington need not hand over suspects until they are indicted, but has agreed to consider making exceptions for "heinous" crimes.
Blair said the SOFA was working well in general. "I think we can work this out," he said. "This is a detail of the working of SOFA, not something that exposes a fundamental short-coming in the entire arrangement." He said the U.S. forces in Okinawa were vital to regional security and defended the behavior of most as "exemplary." "They are three percent of the total population, they account for one percent of the serious crime committed in Okinawa, and contribute six percent of the economy of Okinawa. Our people operate well," he said.

American Forces Information service
Conflict Data Service
Joint Forces Command domestic NATO
Ctr on Intl Policy re IMET, JCET, etc.
FAS re IMET
Military.com subject portal
US Army Military History Inst.   campaign medals

Alpha Co. (3rd Batt.), 504th Parachute Infantry
U.S.Army Kosovo motto Get Ugly Early

  privateers   cf. article in column above

UN Bernales Ballesteros reports
Doug Brooks
pres. Int Peace Operations Assoc. (IPOA)
research assoc. S.African Inst. of Intl Affairs

Airscan Intl Sandline
Colombia & Castano   Peru
Rwanda   Sierra Leone
UN peacekeepers
Private sector military : Auctioning soldiers' pay
various ¹ ²   dialogues ¹

Panel finds CIA soft on China
7.6.01   Bill Gertz Wash.Times

The commission included several academics such as Harvard University professor Stephen Rosen, Princeton University professor Aaron Friedberg and University of Pennsylvania professor Arthur Waldron, as well as former Ambassador to China James Lilley. Peter Rodman, a current nominee for assistant defense secretary also took part, as did retired Army Col. Larry Wortzel, a former attache in China who is currently with the Heritage Foundation. The panel met 3 times with CIA Director George J. Tenet. CIA sources said Mr. Tenet tried unsuccessfully to persuade the commission to soften its findings, arguing that its findings would fuel critics of the agency. One of those critics is Sen. Richard C. Shelby, Alabama Republican and the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who took the lead in pushing for the CIA to form the "competitive analysis" commission. Mr. Shelby said in an interview that the CIA has "not viewed China in a realistic way." "They have tried to look the other way when China, in my opinion, may be moving toward a belligerent stand, if not attitude," Mr. Shelby said. "They are always looking the other way to put their spin on the U.S.-Chinese relationship, that everything is going well in the long run. It's just not very real. China is, has been and I believe will be a big competitor of ours, economically, militarily, politically, in every respect. They could be our biggest adversary. They are certainly not our strategic partner as Clinton and Gore would lead you to believe."

A Pentagon report issued in December by the Office of Net Assessment, headed by long-time defense strategist Andrew Marshall, also criticized U.S. intelligence shortfalls on China.

European presence   archive

Not so long ago, the idea of Russia & China signing their first treaty in decades would have alarmed the west. But the