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52% of Japanese distrust U.S. gov't
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Sunday, July 24, 2005 at 12:41 JST
TOKYO — While 52% of Japanese people do not trust the U.S. government, 59% of U.S. citizens think of Tokyo as trustworthy, a joint public perception survey by Kyodo News and the Associated Press found Sunday.
The survey, conducted earlier this month to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, covered 1,045 respondents aged 20 or older in Japan and 1,000 aged 18 or older in the United States. On the U.S. atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, 75% of the Japanese surveyed said it was unnecessary, while 68% of the U.S. respondents said they were unavoidable to bring the war to a rapid conclusion. (Kyodo News)
Sunday, July 24, 2005
Saturday, July 23, 2005
Joined at the Hip - New York Times
Joined at the Hip - New York TimesJuly 20, 2005
Joined at the Hip
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
On the question of whether China's Cnooc oil company should be permitted by the U.S. government to purchase the U.S. oil and gas company Unocal, my view is very simple: let the market rule. Oil is fungible. It is all one global market. And if China wants to overpay for a second-tier U.S. energy company, that's China's business. Anyway, the more starved Americans are for oil, the sooner we will adopt alternatives and get off this drug once and for all.
If I seem uninterested in this matter, I am. Because I do not think the important issue is who owns Unocal. The important issue is whether America and China are drifting into a dangerous confrontation over geoeconomics. How so? Well, in brief, the Chinese and U.S. economies have become totally intertwined. While we have been focused on 9/11 and Iraq, China and America have become, in economic terms, Siamese twins.
You know that cheap mortgage you just got? Well, who do you think subsidized it? In many ways it was China. Americans don't save anymore, and import more than they export. Normally, a nation that did that as long and lavishly as the U.S. has would have to raise interest rates to get other countries to hold its currency. But America has not had to do that, in part because China has been willing to hold most of the dollars it has been accumulating - gained from all the goods it is selling America - despite the low interest paid on those dollars and the fact that they have been depreciating against other major currencies.
How come? Call it the Tiananmen-Texas Bargain. After Tiananmen, China's leaders struck an implicit bargain with their people, argued Steven Weber, director of Berkeley's Institute of International Studies. "The bargain is that China's voters give up the right to vote, and the Chinese government guarantees China's middle class 9 percent annual economic growth. China's political stability today depends on that bargain."
The Texas side of that bargain came from the Bush team. For a long time, it ignored China's undervalued currency so China could sell us lots of cheap stuff and would continue holding our devaluing dollars and helping to keep U.S. interest rates low. Our buying binge helped keep China's workers employed and its leaders in power. Their holding our depreciating dollars helped you buy a house with no money down. We've been in symbiotic relationships like this before with Western Europe and Japan during the cold war, but they were allies and democracies, so we could adjust imbalances more easily. Not so with China.
We are Siamese twins, but most unlikely ones - joined at the hip, but not identical. That's a problem. Because we now need to adjust the Tiananmen-Texas bargain. So many U.S. dollars and jobs are flowing to China, it is becoming politically and economically unsustainable for the Bush team. Hedge funds have made huge speculative bets around the T-T bargain. We need China to revalue its currency upward against the dollar, so China buys more stuff from us and we buy less stuff from China.
But China's foreign exchange reserves today are nearly $750 billion and heading for $1 trillion - most in U.S. Treasury notes. If China is compelled by the U.S. to revalue its currency, and effectively devalue the dollar further, Beijing will take a big hit on all of its dollar reserves - especially since most experts say the dollar has to be devalued by 30 to 40 percent against the Chinese currency to have any impact on the trade balance. That would also be likely to affect the dollar's value against other currencies and create pressure for inflation and higher interest rates in the U.S.
"If the dollar falls and U.S. interest rates rise, it could cause a recession or stagflation in America," Professor Weber said. "But if the Chinese currency rises too far too fast and triggers unemployment, it could cause a revolution against the Communist Party. ... We might see our dollar policy as a market adjustment, but they could see it as an attempt at regime change."
As I said, the issue is not Unocal. The real issue is that we have slipped into a symbiotic relationship with another major power that is neither a free market nor a democracy. We have both grown dependent on that relationship - the U.S. for cheap goods and cheap mortgages, and China for high employment and regime stability. We now have to adjust the bargain at the heart of that relationship. Whether we can do that delicately, without destabilizing Beijing or the global economy, could be the big geopolitical story of 2005.
Joined at the Hip
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
On the question of whether China's Cnooc oil company should be permitted by the U.S. government to purchase the U.S. oil and gas company Unocal, my view is very simple: let the market rule. Oil is fungible. It is all one global market. And if China wants to overpay for a second-tier U.S. energy company, that's China's business. Anyway, the more starved Americans are for oil, the sooner we will adopt alternatives and get off this drug once and for all.
If I seem uninterested in this matter, I am. Because I do not think the important issue is who owns Unocal. The important issue is whether America and China are drifting into a dangerous confrontation over geoeconomics. How so? Well, in brief, the Chinese and U.S. economies have become totally intertwined. While we have been focused on 9/11 and Iraq, China and America have become, in economic terms, Siamese twins.
You know that cheap mortgage you just got? Well, who do you think subsidized it? In many ways it was China. Americans don't save anymore, and import more than they export. Normally, a nation that did that as long and lavishly as the U.S. has would have to raise interest rates to get other countries to hold its currency. But America has not had to do that, in part because China has been willing to hold most of the dollars it has been accumulating - gained from all the goods it is selling America - despite the low interest paid on those dollars and the fact that they have been depreciating against other major currencies.
How come? Call it the Tiananmen-Texas Bargain. After Tiananmen, China's leaders struck an implicit bargain with their people, argued Steven Weber, director of Berkeley's Institute of International Studies. "The bargain is that China's voters give up the right to vote, and the Chinese government guarantees China's middle class 9 percent annual economic growth. China's political stability today depends on that bargain."
The Texas side of that bargain came from the Bush team. For a long time, it ignored China's undervalued currency so China could sell us lots of cheap stuff and would continue holding our devaluing dollars and helping to keep U.S. interest rates low. Our buying binge helped keep China's workers employed and its leaders in power. Their holding our depreciating dollars helped you buy a house with no money down. We've been in symbiotic relationships like this before with Western Europe and Japan during the cold war, but they were allies and democracies, so we could adjust imbalances more easily. Not so with China.
We are Siamese twins, but most unlikely ones - joined at the hip, but not identical. That's a problem. Because we now need to adjust the Tiananmen-Texas bargain. So many U.S. dollars and jobs are flowing to China, it is becoming politically and economically unsustainable for the Bush team. Hedge funds have made huge speculative bets around the T-T bargain. We need China to revalue its currency upward against the dollar, so China buys more stuff from us and we buy less stuff from China.
But China's foreign exchange reserves today are nearly $750 billion and heading for $1 trillion - most in U.S. Treasury notes. If China is compelled by the U.S. to revalue its currency, and effectively devalue the dollar further, Beijing will take a big hit on all of its dollar reserves - especially since most experts say the dollar has to be devalued by 30 to 40 percent against the Chinese currency to have any impact on the trade balance. That would also be likely to affect the dollar's value against other currencies and create pressure for inflation and higher interest rates in the U.S.
"If the dollar falls and U.S. interest rates rise, it could cause a recession or stagflation in America," Professor Weber said. "But if the Chinese currency rises too far too fast and triggers unemployment, it could cause a revolution against the Communist Party. ... We might see our dollar policy as a market adjustment, but they could see it as an attempt at regime change."
As I said, the issue is not Unocal. The real issue is that we have slipped into a symbiotic relationship with another major power that is neither a free market nor a democracy. We have both grown dependent on that relationship - the U.S. for cheap goods and cheap mortgages, and China for high employment and regime stability. We now have to adjust the bargain at the heart of that relationship. Whether we can do that delicately, without destabilizing Beijing or the global economy, could be the big geopolitical story of 2005.
Friday, July 22, 2005
The Carrott And The Stick
I am afraid that a policy like the one Mr. Friedman is advocating in his column dated July 22nd 2005, “Giving Hatemongers No Place To Hide” could devolve into the forming of a right wing, political correctness truth squad with anyone who disagrees with current administration policy being labeled as soft on extremism. We have seen this here in
Criticizing government policy and attempting to understand what motivates terrorism is not condoning it. We can harshly denounce terrorism and at the same time recognize the self serving fallacy inherent in the argument that Islamic terrorists hate us for who we are. No, that is not the reason they hate us. They hate us for what we do. They want us out of the Islamic world. They envy our successes and resent their own failures. Obviously we cannot leave the Islamic world. We need their oil. We still however need to understand their motivations in order to devise a strategy to defeat the terrorists that moves beyond naked military force. We must reach out to the young Arab populations. We must win their hearts and minds.
Giving the Hatemongers No Place to Hide - New York Times
Giving the Hatemongers No Place to Hide - New York TimesJuly 22, 2005
Giving the Hatemongers No Place to Hide
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I wasn't surprised to read that British police officers in white protective suits and blue gloves were combing through the Iqra Learning Center bookstore in Leeds for clues to the 7/7 London bombings. Some of the 7/7 bombers hung out at the bookstore. And I won't be surprised if today's bombers also sampled the literature there.
Iqra not only sold hatemongering Islamist literature, but, according to The Wall Street Journal, was "the sole distributor of Islamgames, a U.S.-based company that makes video games. The video games feature apocalyptic battles between defenders of Islam and opponents. One game, Ummah Defense I, has the world 'finally united under the Banner of Islam' in 2114, until a revolt by disbelievers. The player's goal is to seek out and destroy the disbelievers."
Guess what: words matter. Bookstores matter. Video games matter. But here is our challenge: If the primary terrorism problem we face today can effectively be addressed only by a war of ideas within Islam - a war between life-affirming Muslims against those who want to turn one of the world's great religions into a death cult - what can the rest of us do?
More than just put up walls. We need to shine a spotlight on hate speech wherever it appears. The State Department produces an annual human rights report. Henceforth, it should also produce a quarterly War of Ideas Report, which would focus on those religious leaders and writers who are inciting violence against others.
I would compile it in a nondiscriminatory way. I want the names of the Jewish settler extremists who wrote "Muhammad Is a Pig" on buildings in Gaza right up there with Sheik Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sudayyis, a Saudi who is imam of Islam's holy mosque in Mecca. According to the Memri translation service, the imam was barred from Canada following "a report about his sermons by Memri that included Al-Sudayyis calling Jews 'the scum of the earth' and 'monkeys and pigs' who should be 'annihilated.' Other enemies of Islam were referred to by Sheik Al-Sudayyis as 'worshipers of the cross' and 'idol-worshiping Hindus' who must be fought."
Sunlight is more important than you think. Those who spread hate do not like to be exposed, noted Yigal Carmon, the founder of Memri, which monitors the Arab-Muslim media. The hate spreaders assume that they are talking only to their own, in their own language, and can get away with murder. When their words are spotlighted, they often feel pressure to retract, defend or explain them.
"Whenever they are exposed, they react the next day," Mr. Carmon said. "No one wants to be exposed in the West as a preacher of hate."
We also need to spotlight the "excuse makers," the former State Department spokesman James Rubin said. After every major terrorist incident, the excuse makers come out to tell us why imperialism, Zionism, colonialism or Iraq explains why the terrorists acted. These excuse makers are just one notch less despicable than the terrorists and also deserve to be exposed. When you live in an open society like London, where anyone with a grievance can publish an article, run for office or start a political movement, the notion that blowing up a busload of innocent civilians in response to Iraq is somehow "understandable" is outrageous. "It erases the distinction between legitimate dissent and terrorism," Mr. Rubin said, "and an open society needs to maintain a clear wall between them."
There is no political justification for 9/11, 7/7 or 7/21. As the Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen put it: "These terrorists are what they do." And what they do is murder.
Finally, we also need to shine a bright light on the "truth tellers." Every week some courageous Arab or Muslim intellectual, cleric or columnist publishes an essay in his or her media calling on fellow Muslims to deal with the cancer in their midst. The truth tellers' words also need to be disseminated globally. "The rulers in these countries have no interest in amplifying the voices of moderates because the moderates often disagree with the rulers as much as they disagree with the extremists," said Husain Haqqani, author of the new book "Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military." "You have to deal us moderates into the game by helping to amplify our voices and exposing the extremists and their amen corner."
Every quarter, the State Department should identify the Top 10 hatemongers, excuse makers and truth tellers in the world. It wouldn't be a cure-all. But it would be a message to the extremists: you are free to say what you want, but we are free to listen, to let the whole world know what you are saying and to protect every free society from hate spreaders like you. Words matter.
Giving the Hatemongers No Place to Hide
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I wasn't surprised to read that British police officers in white protective suits and blue gloves were combing through the Iqra Learning Center bookstore in Leeds for clues to the 7/7 London bombings. Some of the 7/7 bombers hung out at the bookstore. And I won't be surprised if today's bombers also sampled the literature there.
Iqra not only sold hatemongering Islamist literature, but, according to The Wall Street Journal, was "the sole distributor of Islamgames, a U.S.-based company that makes video games. The video games feature apocalyptic battles between defenders of Islam and opponents. One game, Ummah Defense I, has the world 'finally united under the Banner of Islam' in 2114, until a revolt by disbelievers. The player's goal is to seek out and destroy the disbelievers."
Guess what: words matter. Bookstores matter. Video games matter. But here is our challenge: If the primary terrorism problem we face today can effectively be addressed only by a war of ideas within Islam - a war between life-affirming Muslims against those who want to turn one of the world's great religions into a death cult - what can the rest of us do?
More than just put up walls. We need to shine a spotlight on hate speech wherever it appears. The State Department produces an annual human rights report. Henceforth, it should also produce a quarterly War of Ideas Report, which would focus on those religious leaders and writers who are inciting violence against others.
I would compile it in a nondiscriminatory way. I want the names of the Jewish settler extremists who wrote "Muhammad Is a Pig" on buildings in Gaza right up there with Sheik Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sudayyis, a Saudi who is imam of Islam's holy mosque in Mecca. According to the Memri translation service, the imam was barred from Canada following "a report about his sermons by Memri that included Al-Sudayyis calling Jews 'the scum of the earth' and 'monkeys and pigs' who should be 'annihilated.' Other enemies of Islam were referred to by Sheik Al-Sudayyis as 'worshipers of the cross' and 'idol-worshiping Hindus' who must be fought."
Sunlight is more important than you think. Those who spread hate do not like to be exposed, noted Yigal Carmon, the founder of Memri, which monitors the Arab-Muslim media. The hate spreaders assume that they are talking only to their own, in their own language, and can get away with murder. When their words are spotlighted, they often feel pressure to retract, defend or explain them.
"Whenever they are exposed, they react the next day," Mr. Carmon said. "No one wants to be exposed in the West as a preacher of hate."
We also need to spotlight the "excuse makers," the former State Department spokesman James Rubin said. After every major terrorist incident, the excuse makers come out to tell us why imperialism, Zionism, colonialism or Iraq explains why the terrorists acted. These excuse makers are just one notch less despicable than the terrorists and also deserve to be exposed. When you live in an open society like London, where anyone with a grievance can publish an article, run for office or start a political movement, the notion that blowing up a busload of innocent civilians in response to Iraq is somehow "understandable" is outrageous. "It erases the distinction between legitimate dissent and terrorism," Mr. Rubin said, "and an open society needs to maintain a clear wall between them."
There is no political justification for 9/11, 7/7 or 7/21. As the Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen put it: "These terrorists are what they do." And what they do is murder.
Finally, we also need to shine a bright light on the "truth tellers." Every week some courageous Arab or Muslim intellectual, cleric or columnist publishes an essay in his or her media calling on fellow Muslims to deal with the cancer in their midst. The truth tellers' words also need to be disseminated globally. "The rulers in these countries have no interest in amplifying the voices of moderates because the moderates often disagree with the rulers as much as they disagree with the extremists," said Husain Haqqani, author of the new book "Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military." "You have to deal us moderates into the game by helping to amplify our voices and exposing the extremists and their amen corner."
Every quarter, the State Department should identify the Top 10 hatemongers, excuse makers and truth tellers in the world. It wouldn't be a cure-all. But it would be a message to the extremists: you are free to say what you want, but we are free to listen, to let the whole world know what you are saying and to protect every free society from hate spreaders like you. Words matter.
China's Opaque Currency Policy - New York Times
China's Opaque Currency Policy - New York TimesJuly 22, 2005
China's Opaque Currency Policy
By KEITH BRADSHER
An old Chinese saying holds that the longest journey begins with the first step, but in the case of China's currency policy shift yesterday, the destination of the journey has been left completely unclear and the chosen route has many risks.
China has abandoned one of the world's clearest currency policies, a tightly managed peg of the yuan to the dollar that had endured since 1997. China has chosen instead to adopt one of the world's most opaque currency policies, with a secret mechanism to reset the yuan's value each night.
For nearly eight years, Beijing's leaders trusted in Alan Greenspan, assuming that where the dollar went, China could safely follow. Now China's rulers are putting their trust in a much less well-known central banker: Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of the People's Bank of China, who must manage the more discretionary policy put in place yesterday. Starting with the Asian financial crisis in 1997 and continuing through the rapid economic expansion since then, China has allowed the yuan to vary less than one-hundredth of a percent from its peg of 8.277 to the dollar. That impressive stability helped prompt business executives and entrepreneurs from around the world to invest $60 billion a year in new factories and other operations in China. These investors were confident that they knew what those businesses and their exports would be worth in dollars.
The People's Bank of China raised the value of the yuan by 2 percent on yesterday, to 8.11 to the dollar. But more important, the bank said that each evening, it would set a new trading range for the yuan to move within on the next trading day. To add to the uncertainty, each day's new range may not necessarily be expressed in terms of dollars, the bank warned. It did not provide examples, but the euro would be the most likely alternative.
To determine the new peg, the central bank will look at how a basket of foreign currencies moved the day before. But the central bank did not reveal which currencies it will track or their relative weightings within the basket. This policy gives enormous discretion to China's leaders to push the yuan up or down as they choose.
The only limit that the central bank put on its moves was a promise yesterday that the center of each day's trading range would not move more than 0.3 percent in either direction from the center of the previous day's range. But with 20 or so trading days in a month, that means China could in theory push its currency up by 6 percent a month - or push it down by the same amount.
Senior officials in China said in interviews last month that they were seriously considering the adoption of a so-called secret basket of currencies, an approach already followed by Singapore in setting the value of the Singapore dollar. But the officials also acknowledged that the secrecy of this approach carried a serious risk: it leaves China vulnerable to accusations from the United States and other countries that it is manipulating its currency so as to gain an advantage in trade.
The United States Treasury came close in May to labeling China as a currency manipulator and demanded that China allow its currency to appreciate before the next official review in October; countries categorized as manipulators can be subject to trade sanctions.
Economists disagreed yesterday about how much change China would allow over the next few months in the value of its currency. Nicholas R. Lardy, a China expert at the Institute for International Economics in Washington, said that Chinese central bankers had had the legal discretion for years to let the yuan move in a wider range against the dollar, and had chosen not to exercise it.
But Liang Hong, an economist in the Hong Kong office of Goldman Sachs, predicted that China would allow the yuan to rise gradually against the dollar. She compared the new policy to China's currency policy in late 1994, when Beijing first pegged the yuan to the dollar and then allowed it to crawl upward by a small fraction of 1 percent each trading day. This resulted in a total increase of 3 percent in 1994 and smaller increases thereafter.
For American consumers, China's new policy is unlikely to have much effect unless it is followed by much bigger currency moves in the months to come. Chinese exporters making everything from clothing to computers incur much of their costs in dollars, importing essentials like fuel, factory machinery and computer chips.
This will mean that the overall costs of good manufactured by Chinese producers will rise by considerably less than 2 percent, limiting their need to raise prices to American retailers. Moreover, China is strongest in the production of cheap goods like toys and T-shirts for which the wholesale price paid to the factory in China may be only a quarter of the price charged by a store in the United States. The stores charge much higher prices because they pay rents and wages at American levels.
"Prices in our stores are not changing any time soon," Amy Wyatt, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said.
Rival exporters in Asia, mostly countries with low-wage work forces like China's, are expecting the yuan's rise to bring them little relief from the relentless expansion of Chinese companies in world markets. "They will not increase their prices unless it really shoots up farther," said Annisul Huq, a textile magnate in Bangladesh.
Executives from more than a dozen Chinese companies said in interviews over the last four months that they expected very little impact on their exports if the yuan rose less than 5 percent, and only a modest effect if it rose by 5 to 10 percent.
A big question mark hanging over China's currency policy shift is not commercial but financial, economists said. If investors decide that China's secret currency policy will result in a stronger yuan, then they are likely to pour even more money into China - a step that could feed inflation in China and make many Chinese long for the days when China still paid more heed to Mr. Greenspan than Mr. Zhou.
China's Opaque Currency Policy
By KEITH BRADSHER
An old Chinese saying holds that the longest journey begins with the first step, but in the case of China's currency policy shift yesterday, the destination of the journey has been left completely unclear and the chosen route has many risks.
China has abandoned one of the world's clearest currency policies, a tightly managed peg of the yuan to the dollar that had endured since 1997. China has chosen instead to adopt one of the world's most opaque currency policies, with a secret mechanism to reset the yuan's value each night.
For nearly eight years, Beijing's leaders trusted in Alan Greenspan, assuming that where the dollar went, China could safely follow. Now China's rulers are putting their trust in a much less well-known central banker: Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of the People's Bank of China, who must manage the more discretionary policy put in place yesterday. Starting with the Asian financial crisis in 1997 and continuing through the rapid economic expansion since then, China has allowed the yuan to vary less than one-hundredth of a percent from its peg of 8.277 to the dollar. That impressive stability helped prompt business executives and entrepreneurs from around the world to invest $60 billion a year in new factories and other operations in China. These investors were confident that they knew what those businesses and their exports would be worth in dollars.
The People's Bank of China raised the value of the yuan by 2 percent on yesterday, to 8.11 to the dollar. But more important, the bank said that each evening, it would set a new trading range for the yuan to move within on the next trading day. To add to the uncertainty, each day's new range may not necessarily be expressed in terms of dollars, the bank warned. It did not provide examples, but the euro would be the most likely alternative.
To determine the new peg, the central bank will look at how a basket of foreign currencies moved the day before. But the central bank did not reveal which currencies it will track or their relative weightings within the basket. This policy gives enormous discretion to China's leaders to push the yuan up or down as they choose.
The only limit that the central bank put on its moves was a promise yesterday that the center of each day's trading range would not move more than 0.3 percent in either direction from the center of the previous day's range. But with 20 or so trading days in a month, that means China could in theory push its currency up by 6 percent a month - or push it down by the same amount.
Senior officials in China said in interviews last month that they were seriously considering the adoption of a so-called secret basket of currencies, an approach already followed by Singapore in setting the value of the Singapore dollar. But the officials also acknowledged that the secrecy of this approach carried a serious risk: it leaves China vulnerable to accusations from the United States and other countries that it is manipulating its currency so as to gain an advantage in trade.
The United States Treasury came close in May to labeling China as a currency manipulator and demanded that China allow its currency to appreciate before the next official review in October; countries categorized as manipulators can be subject to trade sanctions.
Economists disagreed yesterday about how much change China would allow over the next few months in the value of its currency. Nicholas R. Lardy, a China expert at the Institute for International Economics in Washington, said that Chinese central bankers had had the legal discretion for years to let the yuan move in a wider range against the dollar, and had chosen not to exercise it.
But Liang Hong, an economist in the Hong Kong office of Goldman Sachs, predicted that China would allow the yuan to rise gradually against the dollar. She compared the new policy to China's currency policy in late 1994, when Beijing first pegged the yuan to the dollar and then allowed it to crawl upward by a small fraction of 1 percent each trading day. This resulted in a total increase of 3 percent in 1994 and smaller increases thereafter.
For American consumers, China's new policy is unlikely to have much effect unless it is followed by much bigger currency moves in the months to come. Chinese exporters making everything from clothing to computers incur much of their costs in dollars, importing essentials like fuel, factory machinery and computer chips.
This will mean that the overall costs of good manufactured by Chinese producers will rise by considerably less than 2 percent, limiting their need to raise prices to American retailers. Moreover, China is strongest in the production of cheap goods like toys and T-shirts for which the wholesale price paid to the factory in China may be only a quarter of the price charged by a store in the United States. The stores charge much higher prices because they pay rents and wages at American levels.
"Prices in our stores are not changing any time soon," Amy Wyatt, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said.
Rival exporters in Asia, mostly countries with low-wage work forces like China's, are expecting the yuan's rise to bring them little relief from the relentless expansion of Chinese companies in world markets. "They will not increase their prices unless it really shoots up farther," said Annisul Huq, a textile magnate in Bangladesh.
Executives from more than a dozen Chinese companies said in interviews over the last four months that they expected very little impact on their exports if the yuan rose less than 5 percent, and only a modest effect if it rose by 5 to 10 percent.
A big question mark hanging over China's currency policy shift is not commercial but financial, economists said. If investors decide that China's secret currency policy will result in a stronger yuan, then they are likely to pour even more money into China - a step that could feed inflation in China and make many Chinese long for the days when China still paid more heed to Mr. Greenspan than Mr. Zhou.
In His Opinions, Nominee Favors Judicial Caution - New York Times
In His Opinions, Nominee Favors Judicial Caution - New York TimesJuly 22, 2005
In His Opinions, Nominee Favors Judicial Caution
By ADAM LIPTAK
A look at the 49 published opinions of Judge John G. Roberts, President Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court, reveals a distinct judicial philosophy, one that favors a strong executive, a cautious and self-effacing judiciary, limited federal power, and individual responsibility.
That aligns him in many ways with the conservative wing of the current court. But his insistence, in the two years he has sat on the federal appeals court in Washington, that judges must engage in considerable self-restraint could add a distinctive voice to a court that has not been shy in recent years in asserting its own dominance.
In a decision last year, Judge Roberts referred to "the cardinal principle of judicial restraint - if it is not necessary to decide more, it is necessary not to decide more."
He made the statement in joining a decision that the Drug Enforcement Agency had acted too aggressively in blocking the importation of ephedrine, which is used in both over-the-counter medications and methamphetamine. Judge Roberts said the majority's reasoning was too broad. "I cannot go along," he wrote of the majority's rationale, "for that gratuitous ride."
In other cases, similarly, he has shown himself to be a strict textualist, at least where legislation is concerned.
In a case concerning whether certain Navy officers had to testify in a discrimination suit, Judge Roberts chided the parties for not studying the plain words of a relevant law.
He said the lawyers' oversight reminded him of the three basic rules of statutory interpretation taught by Felix Frankfurter, before he was a Supreme Court justice, at Harvard Law School: "(1) Read the statute; (2) read the statute; (3) read the statute!"
Judge Roberts's court, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, is generally considered the second most important in the nation, after the Supreme Court. But its docket is at once idiosyncratic and dull. It tilts heavily toward regulatory cases, claims by disgruntled federal employees and the odd criminal prosecution.
A typical case involved whether the Federal Communications Commission could require new televisions to include digital tuners. Even though neither side had seriously argued the point, Judge Roberts explored at length the possibility that the court was not authorized to hear the case because the plaintiffs had filed their challenge a day too early.
"As a court of limited jurisdiction," he wrote, "we take seriously any suggestion that we are without power to act - even one raised at the eleventh hour and not embraced as an argument but instead meekly noted." He determined that jurisdiction existed and that the F.C.C. could impose the requirement.
A Supreme Court justice's task often differs from that of an appeals court judge. Justices are in many cases concerned with the open-textured clauses of the Constitution rather than with the cascade of subparts and conditions in workaday legislation. And Judge Roberts's decisions give few hints about how he would interpret the majestic phrases of the Constitution, like "freedom of speech," "due process" and "equal protection of the laws."
If his statements about judicial restraint in his appellate decisions prove to be good guidance, though, Judge Roberts would add an approach "without any thoroughgoing representation on the current court," said Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago.
Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, said it would be easy to confuse the kind of restraint advocated by Judge Roberts with the pragmatic, case-by-case approach of the woman he aims to replace, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
Her approach often gave rise to no governing principle that could clearly be applied in future cases. Judge Roberts, on the other hand, has said that the courts must provide clear guidance.
"We have it on high authority," Judge Roberts wrote in a 2003 case chastising the Federal Aviation Administration for failing to follow its own precedents, "that the tendency of the law must always be to narrow the field of uncertainty." The authority he quoted was Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., from his masterwork, "The Common Law."
In some ways, said Richard H. Pildes, a law professor at New York University, Judge Roberts's approach most resembles that of Justice Antonin Scalia.
"Like Scalia," Professor Pildes said, "he appears to be committed to a strong priority to the texts of statutes. And that might extend to the texts of the Constitution."
One theme that emerges from Judge Roberts's decisions is wide deference to executive power, at least where Congress has authorized it.
"The Supreme Court has consistently instructed that statutes written in broad, sweeping language should be given broad, sweeping application," he wrote last year, concurring in a decision that rejected claims against Iraq from American servicemen who had been tortured there during the Persian Gulf war.
A 2003 war appropriations law gave the new Iraqi government immunity, Judge Roberts wrote, and the complex canons of statutory construction, studded with Latin phrases, offered by lawyers for the former prisoners could not change that. "Give me English words over Latin maxims," Judge Roberts wrote.
Judge Roberts joined a decision this month allowing war crimes trials against suspected terrorists held at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to resume. The decision, too, was a strong affirmation of executive power.
At the same time, Judge Roberts has indicated that he takes a limited view of the federal government's power. His clearest pronouncement was in a 2003 dissent in a case involving a federal regulation protecting arroyo toads as an endangered species.
"The panel's approach in this case," he wrote, "leads to the result that regulating the taking of a hapless toad that, for reasons of its own, lives its entire life in California" satisfies the constitutional requirement that Congressional power be used to regulate interstate commerce.
Professor Pildes said Judge Roberts's attitude toward federal power is similar to that espoused by Justice O'Connor.
"There is reason to believe," Professor Pildes said of Judge Roberts, "that he will be an aggressive scrutinizer of whether Congress has acted beyond its enumerated powers."
In some decisions, Judge Roberts took pains to say that there are many close questions in the law. Last year, he overturned an award of lawyers' fees to newsletter publishers who had successfully challenged an effort to license them under the commodities laws. The award of fees turned on the question of whether the government's position had been "substantially justified."
Judge Roberts said it had been. "Just as discovery of contraband does not establish probable cause," he wrote, "nor an accident negligence, nor poor returns an imprudent trustee, so too a loss on the merits does not mean that legal arguments advanced in the context of our adversary system were unreasonable."
In dissent, Judge Harry T. Edwards disagreed, saying the government's position had "bordered on the absurd."
In writings on and off the bench, Judge Roberts has bristled at efforts to punish people for the actions of members of their families.
Last year, in a case against the husband of a woman who defrauded the Department of Education of hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of electronic equipment, the judge ordered him resentenced, saying he could not be responsible for all his wife's crimes.
The husband, Luther E. Mellen III, Judge Roberts wrote, could be faulted for helping his wife, Elizabeth, give his son from an earlier marriage a stolen laptop and for using some of the stolen goods she brought home. But there was no evidence that he had anything to do with the hundreds of other items she doled out to friends and relatives, the judge said.
"The government would have us find agreement from nothing more than the closeness of the Mellens' marriage," Judge Roberts wrote. "We think the government's resort to such arguments indicates the weakness of its case."
In his writings while a lawyer in private practice, too, Mr. Roberts objected to forfeiture laws that allowed police to seize jointly owned property in cases where one spouse was blameless. In a 1995 article in Legal Times, he took up the cause of Tina Bennis, who lost the car she owned with her husband after he was caught having sex in it with a prostitute. "Mrs. Bennis, not unreasonably, thought this was a bit much on top of everything else," Mr. Roberts wrote.
But the Supreme Court disagreed, ruling against Mrs. Bennis in 1996 by a vote of 5-to-4.
Judge Roberts has an eye for the absurd and an impatience with bureaucracy. He ruled in 2004 for an owner of an air taxi and pilot-training company in St. Louis who lost certification because of confusion over whether he had refused to take a drug test. Federal Aviation Administration regulations appeared to make the owner, Charles E. Duchek, responsible for informing himself of the date of a surprise random drug test.
"A sport such as golf can have a system of rules grounded on the assumption that participants will in good faith call penalties on themselves," Judge Roberts wrote in vacating the revocation, "but such an approach seems ill-advised when it comes to designing regulations to protect the public from drug use by those in safety-sensitive positions."
Judge Roberts showed less sympathy for Jake West, a "not especially frugal union president" convicted of embezzling $51,000 for golf vacations, dinners and home furnishings. Judge Roberts refused to allow Mr. West to withdraw a guilty plea in 2004.
And he was impatient that same year with Thomas Penfield Jackson, a trial judge who ignored sentencing guidelines in determining that Darin M. Tucker deserved probation rather than imprisonment for possessing cocaine. Judge Jackson declared that he was "not going to be an instrument of injustice."
That was unacceptable, Judge Roberts wrote. "To the extent the district court based the departure on its belief that the sentence was unjust," he wrote, "it relied on a factor that is clearly impermissible under the guidelines."
In His Opinions, Nominee Favors Judicial Caution
By ADAM LIPTAK
A look at the 49 published opinions of Judge John G. Roberts, President Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court, reveals a distinct judicial philosophy, one that favors a strong executive, a cautious and self-effacing judiciary, limited federal power, and individual responsibility.
That aligns him in many ways with the conservative wing of the current court. But his insistence, in the two years he has sat on the federal appeals court in Washington, that judges must engage in considerable self-restraint could add a distinctive voice to a court that has not been shy in recent years in asserting its own dominance.
In a decision last year, Judge Roberts referred to "the cardinal principle of judicial restraint - if it is not necessary to decide more, it is necessary not to decide more."
He made the statement in joining a decision that the Drug Enforcement Agency had acted too aggressively in blocking the importation of ephedrine, which is used in both over-the-counter medications and methamphetamine. Judge Roberts said the majority's reasoning was too broad. "I cannot go along," he wrote of the majority's rationale, "for that gratuitous ride."
In other cases, similarly, he has shown himself to be a strict textualist, at least where legislation is concerned.
In a case concerning whether certain Navy officers had to testify in a discrimination suit, Judge Roberts chided the parties for not studying the plain words of a relevant law.
He said the lawyers' oversight reminded him of the three basic rules of statutory interpretation taught by Felix Frankfurter, before he was a Supreme Court justice, at Harvard Law School: "(1) Read the statute; (2) read the statute; (3) read the statute!"
Judge Roberts's court, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, is generally considered the second most important in the nation, after the Supreme Court. But its docket is at once idiosyncratic and dull. It tilts heavily toward regulatory cases, claims by disgruntled federal employees and the odd criminal prosecution.
A typical case involved whether the Federal Communications Commission could require new televisions to include digital tuners. Even though neither side had seriously argued the point, Judge Roberts explored at length the possibility that the court was not authorized to hear the case because the plaintiffs had filed their challenge a day too early.
"As a court of limited jurisdiction," he wrote, "we take seriously any suggestion that we are without power to act - even one raised at the eleventh hour and not embraced as an argument but instead meekly noted." He determined that jurisdiction existed and that the F.C.C. could impose the requirement.
A Supreme Court justice's task often differs from that of an appeals court judge. Justices are in many cases concerned with the open-textured clauses of the Constitution rather than with the cascade of subparts and conditions in workaday legislation. And Judge Roberts's decisions give few hints about how he would interpret the majestic phrases of the Constitution, like "freedom of speech," "due process" and "equal protection of the laws."
If his statements about judicial restraint in his appellate decisions prove to be good guidance, though, Judge Roberts would add an approach "without any thoroughgoing representation on the current court," said Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago.
Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, said it would be easy to confuse the kind of restraint advocated by Judge Roberts with the pragmatic, case-by-case approach of the woman he aims to replace, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
Her approach often gave rise to no governing principle that could clearly be applied in future cases. Judge Roberts, on the other hand, has said that the courts must provide clear guidance.
"We have it on high authority," Judge Roberts wrote in a 2003 case chastising the Federal Aviation Administration for failing to follow its own precedents, "that the tendency of the law must always be to narrow the field of uncertainty." The authority he quoted was Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., from his masterwork, "The Common Law."
In some ways, said Richard H. Pildes, a law professor at New York University, Judge Roberts's approach most resembles that of Justice Antonin Scalia.
"Like Scalia," Professor Pildes said, "he appears to be committed to a strong priority to the texts of statutes. And that might extend to the texts of the Constitution."
One theme that emerges from Judge Roberts's decisions is wide deference to executive power, at least where Congress has authorized it.
"The Supreme Court has consistently instructed that statutes written in broad, sweeping language should be given broad, sweeping application," he wrote last year, concurring in a decision that rejected claims against Iraq from American servicemen who had been tortured there during the Persian Gulf war.
A 2003 war appropriations law gave the new Iraqi government immunity, Judge Roberts wrote, and the complex canons of statutory construction, studded with Latin phrases, offered by lawyers for the former prisoners could not change that. "Give me English words over Latin maxims," Judge Roberts wrote.
Judge Roberts joined a decision this month allowing war crimes trials against suspected terrorists held at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to resume. The decision, too, was a strong affirmation of executive power.
At the same time, Judge Roberts has indicated that he takes a limited view of the federal government's power. His clearest pronouncement was in a 2003 dissent in a case involving a federal regulation protecting arroyo toads as an endangered species.
"The panel's approach in this case," he wrote, "leads to the result that regulating the taking of a hapless toad that, for reasons of its own, lives its entire life in California" satisfies the constitutional requirement that Congressional power be used to regulate interstate commerce.
Professor Pildes said Judge Roberts's attitude toward federal power is similar to that espoused by Justice O'Connor.
"There is reason to believe," Professor Pildes said of Judge Roberts, "that he will be an aggressive scrutinizer of whether Congress has acted beyond its enumerated powers."
In some decisions, Judge Roberts took pains to say that there are many close questions in the law. Last year, he overturned an award of lawyers' fees to newsletter publishers who had successfully challenged an effort to license them under the commodities laws. The award of fees turned on the question of whether the government's position had been "substantially justified."
Judge Roberts said it had been. "Just as discovery of contraband does not establish probable cause," he wrote, "nor an accident negligence, nor poor returns an imprudent trustee, so too a loss on the merits does not mean that legal arguments advanced in the context of our adversary system were unreasonable."
In dissent, Judge Harry T. Edwards disagreed, saying the government's position had "bordered on the absurd."
In writings on and off the bench, Judge Roberts has bristled at efforts to punish people for the actions of members of their families.
Last year, in a case against the husband of a woman who defrauded the Department of Education of hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of electronic equipment, the judge ordered him resentenced, saying he could not be responsible for all his wife's crimes.
The husband, Luther E. Mellen III, Judge Roberts wrote, could be faulted for helping his wife, Elizabeth, give his son from an earlier marriage a stolen laptop and for using some of the stolen goods she brought home. But there was no evidence that he had anything to do with the hundreds of other items she doled out to friends and relatives, the judge said.
"The government would have us find agreement from nothing more than the closeness of the Mellens' marriage," Judge Roberts wrote. "We think the government's resort to such arguments indicates the weakness of its case."
In his writings while a lawyer in private practice, too, Mr. Roberts objected to forfeiture laws that allowed police to seize jointly owned property in cases where one spouse was blameless. In a 1995 article in Legal Times, he took up the cause of Tina Bennis, who lost the car she owned with her husband after he was caught having sex in it with a prostitute. "Mrs. Bennis, not unreasonably, thought this was a bit much on top of everything else," Mr. Roberts wrote.
But the Supreme Court disagreed, ruling against Mrs. Bennis in 1996 by a vote of 5-to-4.
Judge Roberts has an eye for the absurd and an impatience with bureaucracy. He ruled in 2004 for an owner of an air taxi and pilot-training company in St. Louis who lost certification because of confusion over whether he had refused to take a drug test. Federal Aviation Administration regulations appeared to make the owner, Charles E. Duchek, responsible for informing himself of the date of a surprise random drug test.
"A sport such as golf can have a system of rules grounded on the assumption that participants will in good faith call penalties on themselves," Judge Roberts wrote in vacating the revocation, "but such an approach seems ill-advised when it comes to designing regulations to protect the public from drug use by those in safety-sensitive positions."
Judge Roberts showed less sympathy for Jake West, a "not especially frugal union president" convicted of embezzling $51,000 for golf vacations, dinners and home furnishings. Judge Roberts refused to allow Mr. West to withdraw a guilty plea in 2004.
And he was impatient that same year with Thomas Penfield Jackson, a trial judge who ignored sentencing guidelines in determining that Darin M. Tucker deserved probation rather than imprisonment for possessing cocaine. Judge Jackson declared that he was "not going to be an instrument of injustice."
That was unacceptable, Judge Roberts wrote. "To the extent the district court based the departure on its belief that the sentence was unjust," he wrote, "it relied on a factor that is clearly impermissible under the guidelines."
British Police Kill Man in Subway a Day After Bomb Attempts - New York Times
British Police Kill Man in Subway a Day After Bomb Attempts - New York TimesJuly 22, 2005
British Police Kill Man in Subway a Day After Bomb Attempts
By ALAN COWELL
LONDON, July 22 - One day after four attempted bombings on London's transport system, police officers fatally shot a man at a subway station today, the authorities said.
A witness told the BBC the man had been pursued by plainclothes police officers who fired five shots at close range.
"I saw them offload five shots into the person on the floor," an eyewitness, Mark Whitby, told BBC television. "I saw them kill a man."
Mr. Whitby said the man was shot by the officers as he ran into the train from the station. "He looked out of place," Mr. Whitby said, adding that the man was wearing a heavy winter coat in summer.
Police were hunting for bombers today after Thursday's apparent attempt to bomb London's transport network.
On July 7, suicide bombers killed 52 people in attacks on London's transport system. The four bombers also died. In a statement today, carried by the Press Association news agency, the police said: "We can confirm that just after 10 a.m. armed officers entered Stockwell Tube station. A man was challenged by officers and subsequently shot. London Ambulance Service attended the scene. He was pronounced dead at the scene."
A passenger at Stockwell station, Briony Coetsee, told the Press Association today, "We were on the tube when we suddenly heard someone say 'get out, get out' and then we heard gunshots someone was shooting."
Other witnesses said a man leaped over the barriers at the station pursued by plainclothes officers. Several witnesses said police caught up with the man and pushed him to the ground. Police did not immediately offer a detailed account today.
Stockwell station is in the same area south of the Thames River as Oval station, one of the targets of Thursday's attacks. Two subway lines the Victoria and Northern lines were suspended after the shooting, plunging London's transport system once more into chaos.
The police did not confirm television reports today that the dead man was suspected of being one of the assailants who attempted to set off explosives on three subway trains and a doubledecker bus on Thursday. Those bombs failed to explode and no one was injured.
The lunchtime attacks on Thursday were "pretty close to simultaneous," said Sir Ian Blair, the chief of the Metropolitan Police.
Senior police officials and witnesses reported that after the bombs had failed to detonate, the bombers then abandoned their backpacks and fled from the scene. The officials said it was only the detonators on the devices that went off, making sounds like firecrackers. The unexploded devices could provide important clues to the identity of the attackers; two British officials said they believed the explosives contained the same materials as the earlier bombs.
No one was wounded, officials said, though one person sought treatment for an asthma attack. "The intention must have been to kill," Sir Ian said, "and I think the important point is that the intention of the terrorists has not been fulfilled."
The attacks spread chaos and confusion as the three subway stations were evacuated, a No. 26 bus stopped short in Bethnal Green, East London, after an explosion on its upper deck, and parts of the London subway and road system came to a halt. In one instance, witnesses spoke of a panic after passengers smelled something burning on one subway car and rushed onto another to escape it, abandoning bags and shoes.
By early evening, there was no indication of who was responsible, or whether it was a copycat assault or a new attack by the same cell that struck July 7.
In rapid-fire sequence, the city relived the early moments of the first attacks on July 7, with the police cordoning off areas, sirens wailing and passengers pouring out of subway stations. As the day wore into a summer's evening, hundreds of people walked home because of closed subway lines and police cordons across bus routes. The images seemed hauntingly familiar after the attacks two weeks ago.
In several parts of London, the police kept people far from the sites of the attacks. London Underground, which runs the subway, said Thursday night that the combination of attacks on July 7 and Thursday had left only five of the city's 12 subway lines operating normally. The other seven were either suspended completely or operating with some sections closed.
Two people were arrested Thursday, but Scotland Yard officials said in the evening that neither arrest was related to the bombing attempts.
Asked if the bombers had escaped, a Scotland Yard official, who declined to be identified by name, said there had been "no arrests so far in this investigation."
In a statement on Thursday, the police appealed for witnesses to come forward at any one of four centers near the locations of the bombings. "We are keen to speak to anyone who may have seen anything," the statement said. "The public are our eyes and ears," it added, urging people to call in any information.
The police were also scrutinizing video footage from security cameras to help in identifying the suspects.
Earlier, television images showed a man in dark clothing lying on the sidewalk on Whitehall near Downing Street, where the prime minister's office is situated. Two armed police officers in bulletproof vests approached the man, and one of them kept him in the sights of an assault rifle as he raised his hands aloft then wriggled free of a backpack he was wearing.
Prime Minister Tony Blair, speaking Thursday after an emergency meeting of his security and intelligence chiefs, said, "We can't minimize incidents such as this because they obviously have been serious in four different places, as we know."
"I think all I would like to say is this: We know why these things are done," Mr. Blair said. "They are done to scare people and to frighten them, to make them anxious and worried." He had also met Thursday with his Australian counterpart, John Howard.
At first, Sir Ian, the Scotland Yard chief, repeated the same message as on July 7, telling Londoners to remain where they were.
But after more than three hours of paralysis in many parts of the city, he said: "The situation is now coming fully under control. We have all four scenes of the incidents confirmed and confined. We have no evidence at the present time, nothing to indicate any kind of attack which involves chemicals or anything else."
Sir Ian declined to tie the attacks directly to Al Qaeda, as the British authorities did in the immediate aftermath of the July 7 attacks.
An e-mail message from Ken Knightly, the commissioner of the London Fire Brigade, to brigade personnel on Thursday said the explosives were "conventional," adding, "The only chemicals involved were those used to the make the explosive mixture." A copy of the message was seen by The New York Times.
The subway bombings two weeks ago were closely synchronized to within seconds of one another, and the bus bomb followed roughly one hour later. The subway bombs on Thursday seemed to be spaced minutes rather than seconds apart.
After the blasts on July 7, the police concluded that four men aged between 18 and 30 had blown themselves up with bombs on the three subway trains and the bus. Since then, investigators have followed leads to northern England, Egypt and Pakistan, but there have been no further arrests.
The police had warned since then that Britain was at risk of further attacks, but Londoners had generally emerged from the shadow of the first attacks and had returned to the subway, which is known here as the Tube. "Until today, Londoners had started to move on," said Simon Hughes, a Liberal Democratic member of Parliament.
Initial accounts of the lunchtime bombing attempts seemed confused.
At Oval station, on the Northern Line, a police officer who spoke in anonymity according to police regulations, said a man threw a package or backpack into a subway car just before the train moved off. While the train was still in the station, "the device exploded," the officer said, and the attacker escaped.
"As you can imagine, the train was pretty packed," the officer said. "It was lunchtime, and it was pretty surprising that no one was hurt."
At the Shepherd's Bush station, where the subway line runs above ground, there was no immediate indication from the police about what had happened.
At Warren Street, Ivan McCracken, a passenger, told Sky News that he had heard from a fellow passenger that "a man was carrying a rucksack, and the rucksack suddenly exploded. It was a minor explosion but enough to blow open the rucksack." That reflected similar accounts from emergency workers.
On board the No. 26 bus - a red double-decker like the No. 30 bus blown up on July 7 - there were conflicting reports about the intensity of a reported explosion. Mark Bond, a passenger, said in a broadcast interview that there had been a noise from the rear of the bus.
"Everyone froze for a couple of minutes," he said. "Then everyone just rushed out. It can hit anyone at any time anywhere. I feel very unsafe."
At the Oval station, some passengers said the attack had left people feeling powerless.
"You don't want to start feeling scared to be in your own city," said Joseph Durrin, 33, a graphic designer. "It's scary to think terrorists might still be here. There is nothing you could really do about that. How can you stop someone taking public transportation?"
Sir Ian, the police chief, declined to say whether he believed the same group of people had carried out both sets of attacks.
After the July 7 bombing, an Internet posting claimed responsibility in the name of the Secret Organization of Al Qaeda Jihad in Europe.
No group claimed responsibility for Thursday's attack.
Reporting for this article was contributed by Stephen Grey, Hélène Fouquet, Karla Adams, Eric Pfanner of The International Herald Tribune and Heather Timmons.
British Police Kill Man in Subway a Day After Bomb Attempts
By ALAN COWELL
LONDON, July 22 - One day after four attempted bombings on London's transport system, police officers fatally shot a man at a subway station today, the authorities said.
A witness told the BBC the man had been pursued by plainclothes police officers who fired five shots at close range.
"I saw them offload five shots into the person on the floor," an eyewitness, Mark Whitby, told BBC television. "I saw them kill a man."
Mr. Whitby said the man was shot by the officers as he ran into the train from the station. "He looked out of place," Mr. Whitby said, adding that the man was wearing a heavy winter coat in summer.
Police were hunting for bombers today after Thursday's apparent attempt to bomb London's transport network.
On July 7, suicide bombers killed 52 people in attacks on London's transport system. The four bombers also died. In a statement today, carried by the Press Association news agency, the police said: "We can confirm that just after 10 a.m. armed officers entered Stockwell Tube station. A man was challenged by officers and subsequently shot. London Ambulance Service attended the scene. He was pronounced dead at the scene."
A passenger at Stockwell station, Briony Coetsee, told the Press Association today, "We were on the tube when we suddenly heard someone say 'get out, get out' and then we heard gunshots someone was shooting."
Other witnesses said a man leaped over the barriers at the station pursued by plainclothes officers. Several witnesses said police caught up with the man and pushed him to the ground. Police did not immediately offer a detailed account today.
Stockwell station is in the same area south of the Thames River as Oval station, one of the targets of Thursday's attacks. Two subway lines the Victoria and Northern lines were suspended after the shooting, plunging London's transport system once more into chaos.
The police did not confirm television reports today that the dead man was suspected of being one of the assailants who attempted to set off explosives on three subway trains and a doubledecker bus on Thursday. Those bombs failed to explode and no one was injured.
The lunchtime attacks on Thursday were "pretty close to simultaneous," said Sir Ian Blair, the chief of the Metropolitan Police.
Senior police officials and witnesses reported that after the bombs had failed to detonate, the bombers then abandoned their backpacks and fled from the scene. The officials said it was only the detonators on the devices that went off, making sounds like firecrackers. The unexploded devices could provide important clues to the identity of the attackers; two British officials said they believed the explosives contained the same materials as the earlier bombs.
No one was wounded, officials said, though one person sought treatment for an asthma attack. "The intention must have been to kill," Sir Ian said, "and I think the important point is that the intention of the terrorists has not been fulfilled."
The attacks spread chaos and confusion as the three subway stations were evacuated, a No. 26 bus stopped short in Bethnal Green, East London, after an explosion on its upper deck, and parts of the London subway and road system came to a halt. In one instance, witnesses spoke of a panic after passengers smelled something burning on one subway car and rushed onto another to escape it, abandoning bags and shoes.
By early evening, there was no indication of who was responsible, or whether it was a copycat assault or a new attack by the same cell that struck July 7.
In rapid-fire sequence, the city relived the early moments of the first attacks on July 7, with the police cordoning off areas, sirens wailing and passengers pouring out of subway stations. As the day wore into a summer's evening, hundreds of people walked home because of closed subway lines and police cordons across bus routes. The images seemed hauntingly familiar after the attacks two weeks ago.
In several parts of London, the police kept people far from the sites of the attacks. London Underground, which runs the subway, said Thursday night that the combination of attacks on July 7 and Thursday had left only five of the city's 12 subway lines operating normally. The other seven were either suspended completely or operating with some sections closed.
Two people were arrested Thursday, but Scotland Yard officials said in the evening that neither arrest was related to the bombing attempts.
Asked if the bombers had escaped, a Scotland Yard official, who declined to be identified by name, said there had been "no arrests so far in this investigation."
In a statement on Thursday, the police appealed for witnesses to come forward at any one of four centers near the locations of the bombings. "We are keen to speak to anyone who may have seen anything," the statement said. "The public are our eyes and ears," it added, urging people to call in any information.
The police were also scrutinizing video footage from security cameras to help in identifying the suspects.
Earlier, television images showed a man in dark clothing lying on the sidewalk on Whitehall near Downing Street, where the prime minister's office is situated. Two armed police officers in bulletproof vests approached the man, and one of them kept him in the sights of an assault rifle as he raised his hands aloft then wriggled free of a backpack he was wearing.
Prime Minister Tony Blair, speaking Thursday after an emergency meeting of his security and intelligence chiefs, said, "We can't minimize incidents such as this because they obviously have been serious in four different places, as we know."
"I think all I would like to say is this: We know why these things are done," Mr. Blair said. "They are done to scare people and to frighten them, to make them anxious and worried." He had also met Thursday with his Australian counterpart, John Howard.
At first, Sir Ian, the Scotland Yard chief, repeated the same message as on July 7, telling Londoners to remain where they were.
But after more than three hours of paralysis in many parts of the city, he said: "The situation is now coming fully under control. We have all four scenes of the incidents confirmed and confined. We have no evidence at the present time, nothing to indicate any kind of attack which involves chemicals or anything else."
Sir Ian declined to tie the attacks directly to Al Qaeda, as the British authorities did in the immediate aftermath of the July 7 attacks.
An e-mail message from Ken Knightly, the commissioner of the London Fire Brigade, to brigade personnel on Thursday said the explosives were "conventional," adding, "The only chemicals involved were those used to the make the explosive mixture." A copy of the message was seen by The New York Times.
The subway bombings two weeks ago were closely synchronized to within seconds of one another, and the bus bomb followed roughly one hour later. The subway bombs on Thursday seemed to be spaced minutes rather than seconds apart.
After the blasts on July 7, the police concluded that four men aged between 18 and 30 had blown themselves up with bombs on the three subway trains and the bus. Since then, investigators have followed leads to northern England, Egypt and Pakistan, but there have been no further arrests.
The police had warned since then that Britain was at risk of further attacks, but Londoners had generally emerged from the shadow of the first attacks and had returned to the subway, which is known here as the Tube. "Until today, Londoners had started to move on," said Simon Hughes, a Liberal Democratic member of Parliament.
Initial accounts of the lunchtime bombing attempts seemed confused.
At Oval station, on the Northern Line, a police officer who spoke in anonymity according to police regulations, said a man threw a package or backpack into a subway car just before the train moved off. While the train was still in the station, "the device exploded," the officer said, and the attacker escaped.
"As you can imagine, the train was pretty packed," the officer said. "It was lunchtime, and it was pretty surprising that no one was hurt."
At the Shepherd's Bush station, where the subway line runs above ground, there was no immediate indication from the police about what had happened.
At Warren Street, Ivan McCracken, a passenger, told Sky News that he had heard from a fellow passenger that "a man was carrying a rucksack, and the rucksack suddenly exploded. It was a minor explosion but enough to blow open the rucksack." That reflected similar accounts from emergency workers.
On board the No. 26 bus - a red double-decker like the No. 30 bus blown up on July 7 - there were conflicting reports about the intensity of a reported explosion. Mark Bond, a passenger, said in a broadcast interview that there had been a noise from the rear of the bus.
"Everyone froze for a couple of minutes," he said. "Then everyone just rushed out. It can hit anyone at any time anywhere. I feel very unsafe."
At the Oval station, some passengers said the attack had left people feeling powerless.
"You don't want to start feeling scared to be in your own city," said Joseph Durrin, 33, a graphic designer. "It's scary to think terrorists might still be here. There is nothing you could really do about that. How can you stop someone taking public transportation?"
Sir Ian, the police chief, declined to say whether he believed the same group of people had carried out both sets of attacks.
After the July 7 bombing, an Internet posting claimed responsibility in the name of the Secret Organization of Al Qaeda Jihad in Europe.
No group claimed responsibility for Thursday's attack.
Reporting for this article was contributed by Stephen Grey, Hélène Fouquet, Karla Adams, Eric Pfanner of The International Herald Tribune and Heather Timmons.
Thursday, July 21, 2005
Clues on how Roberts might act on high court | csmonitor.com
Clues on how Roberts might act on high court | csmonitor.comClues on how Roberts might act on high court
His record while at a federal appeals court, though sparse, shows a resistance to limits on presidential power.
By Warren Richey | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
In his two years as a member of the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., Judge John Roberts has helped decide more than 120 cases.
Not one of them examined abortion rights, affirmative action, or the separation of church and state. Rather than hot-button social issues, many of his cases involved litigation over complex regulatory matters and suits against some arm of the government. Most never made it into the headlines.
In the Monitor
Friday, 07/22/05
The sidewalks where terror breeds
An echo of attacks on London
Ideology's high profile in hearings
Clues on how Roberts might act on high court
China makes major shift on currency
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Still, with his nomination to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the US Supreme Court, Judge Roberts's appeals-court work is suddenly under heavy scrutiny for any clues about how he might behave should he win a lifetime appointment to the nation's highest court.
The record that is emerging, though surprisingly sparse, does offer some insight into what makes Roberts tick as a judge, legal analysts say.
Many conservatives are not concerned with the lack of a long judicial record. "I take comfort in the fact that he is very bright and that he seems to understand the role of a judge, and I think lots of good things ought to flow from that," says M. Edward Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington.
Liberals are worried that the lack of an extensive judicial record means a lack of ammunition for the campaign being mounted to defeat the Roberts nomination. Efforts are under way to reach even further back into his service in the Reagan and the first Bush administrations for documents that might help flesh out his thoughts on contentious issues.
Among cases drawing considerable interest are those in which Roberts:
• Upheld the president's authority to conduct terrorism tribunals at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.
• Raised questions in a dissent about whether the commerce clause authorizes enforcement of the Endangered Species Act in certain cases.
• Upheld the arrest of a 12-year-old girl apprehended for eating a single French fry in a subway station.
"The one thing that seems pretty clear is that he is very strong on resisting any limits on presidential power," says William Marshall, a constitutional law professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law at Chapel Hill.
Last week, a three-judge panel, including Roberts, delivered the legal equivalent of a home run to the Bush administration in upholding its use of military commissions to try individuals designated as enemy combatants who are being held at Guantánamo.
A federal judge in Washington had earlier ruled that the president did not have the power to conduct such commissions and that the Bush administration was violating terms of the Geneva Accords. The appeals court panel - including Roberts - disagreed.
The scope of presidential authority to wage the war on terror is expected to become a major issue before the Supreme Court in the months and years ahead.
One Roberts case receiving particularly close attention involves a 2003 challenge to the federal Endangered Species Act. At issue was whether the act could be invoked to protect a certain species of toad that exists entirely in California and was being threatened by a development project. The appeals court ruled that under Congress's commerce-clause powers, the Endangered Species Act extends protection to the toad.
Parties in the case asked the full appeals court to reconsider. All but two judges declined to take up the case.
Roberts was one of the two.
In his dissent, he said the full court should agree to hear the case to more faithfully apply two Supreme Court precedents establishing limits on Congress's commerce-clause powers. He noted that the Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals had recently adopted a similar, more restrictive, reading of commerce-clause authority and the Endangered Species Act.
"The panel's approach in this case leads to the result that regulating the taking of a hapless toad that, for reasons of its own, lives its entire life in California constitutes regulating 'commerce ... among the several states,' " Roberts wrote.
Legal analysts say Roberts's dissent is likely to spark sharp questioning during his confirmation hearing about his thoughts on judicial limits on federal and congressional power. He will also draw inquiries about his commitment to environmental protection by the national government, they say.
Alliance for Justice, a liberal advocacy group, says in a report that Roberts's dissent in the toad case raises a red flag. "The effect of Judge Roberts' views on Congress' commerce clause authority might threaten to undermine a wide swath of federal protections, including many environmental, civil rights, workplace and criminal laws," the report says.
The Roberts dissent was written in 2003. Last month, the Supreme Court limited its earlier commerce-clause rulings in a case that authorized federal policing of the intrastate possession and use of marijuana for medical purposes. Roberts, of course, did not have the benefit of that decision at the time he wrote his earlier dissent.
In the much-discussed French fry case, a 12-year-old girl was arrested for eating a French fry in a Washington, D.C., subway station. Rather than questioning the wisdom of the city's harsh policy, Roberts said the role of judges was to apply the law. He upheld the arrest and said it was up to elected city officials to decide the wisdom of the policy that prompted the arrest.
A conservative with few hard edges
Conservatives are praising the ruling as an example of the proper limited role of judges. Liberals say the case raises questions about fair treatment of juveniles by the government - issues that they say were glossed over by Roberts.
How Roberts might rule on abortion is at the top of the list of concerns being expressed by liberal advocacy groups. But he has had no known professional involvement with the issue since his confirmation hearings to the appeals court in 2003.
At that time, he was repeatedly asked by senators whether he believed the abortion precedent Roe v. Wade should be overruled. He dodged the question.
He said that Roe was binding legal precedent and that as an appeals-court judge he would be bound to follow it. He added, "Nothing in my personal views would prevent me from doing so."
Now, as a prospective Supreme Court justice, Roberts could have the power to overturn Roe - as well as to rule in other abortion-related cases. Still, there is nothing in his appeals-court experience that suggests how he might approach the issue.
His record while at a federal appeals court, though sparse, shows a resistance to limits on presidential power.
By Warren Richey | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
In his two years as a member of the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., Judge John Roberts has helped decide more than 120 cases.
Not one of them examined abortion rights, affirmative action, or the separation of church and state. Rather than hot-button social issues, many of his cases involved litigation over complex regulatory matters and suits against some arm of the government. Most never made it into the headlines.
In the Monitor
Friday, 07/22/05
The sidewalks where terror breeds
An echo of attacks on London
Ideology's high profile in hearings
Clues on how Roberts might act on high court
China makes major shift on currency
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Permission to reprint/republish
Still, with his nomination to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the US Supreme Court, Judge Roberts's appeals-court work is suddenly under heavy scrutiny for any clues about how he might behave should he win a lifetime appointment to the nation's highest court.
The record that is emerging, though surprisingly sparse, does offer some insight into what makes Roberts tick as a judge, legal analysts say.
Many conservatives are not concerned with the lack of a long judicial record. "I take comfort in the fact that he is very bright and that he seems to understand the role of a judge, and I think lots of good things ought to flow from that," says M. Edward Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington.
Liberals are worried that the lack of an extensive judicial record means a lack of ammunition for the campaign being mounted to defeat the Roberts nomination. Efforts are under way to reach even further back into his service in the Reagan and the first Bush administrations for documents that might help flesh out his thoughts on contentious issues.
Among cases drawing considerable interest are those in which Roberts:
• Upheld the president's authority to conduct terrorism tribunals at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.
• Raised questions in a dissent about whether the commerce clause authorizes enforcement of the Endangered Species Act in certain cases.
• Upheld the arrest of a 12-year-old girl apprehended for eating a single French fry in a subway station.
"The one thing that seems pretty clear is that he is very strong on resisting any limits on presidential power," says William Marshall, a constitutional law professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law at Chapel Hill.
Last week, a three-judge panel, including Roberts, delivered the legal equivalent of a home run to the Bush administration in upholding its use of military commissions to try individuals designated as enemy combatants who are being held at Guantánamo.
A federal judge in Washington had earlier ruled that the president did not have the power to conduct such commissions and that the Bush administration was violating terms of the Geneva Accords. The appeals court panel - including Roberts - disagreed.
The scope of presidential authority to wage the war on terror is expected to become a major issue before the Supreme Court in the months and years ahead.
One Roberts case receiving particularly close attention involves a 2003 challenge to the federal Endangered Species Act. At issue was whether the act could be invoked to protect a certain species of toad that exists entirely in California and was being threatened by a development project. The appeals court ruled that under Congress's commerce-clause powers, the Endangered Species Act extends protection to the toad.
Parties in the case asked the full appeals court to reconsider. All but two judges declined to take up the case.
Roberts was one of the two.
In his dissent, he said the full court should agree to hear the case to more faithfully apply two Supreme Court precedents establishing limits on Congress's commerce-clause powers. He noted that the Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals had recently adopted a similar, more restrictive, reading of commerce-clause authority and the Endangered Species Act.
"The panel's approach in this case leads to the result that regulating the taking of a hapless toad that, for reasons of its own, lives its entire life in California constitutes regulating 'commerce ... among the several states,' " Roberts wrote.
Legal analysts say Roberts's dissent is likely to spark sharp questioning during his confirmation hearing about his thoughts on judicial limits on federal and congressional power. He will also draw inquiries about his commitment to environmental protection by the national government, they say.
Alliance for Justice, a liberal advocacy group, says in a report that Roberts's dissent in the toad case raises a red flag. "The effect of Judge Roberts' views on Congress' commerce clause authority might threaten to undermine a wide swath of federal protections, including many environmental, civil rights, workplace and criminal laws," the report says.
The Roberts dissent was written in 2003. Last month, the Supreme Court limited its earlier commerce-clause rulings in a case that authorized federal policing of the intrastate possession and use of marijuana for medical purposes. Roberts, of course, did not have the benefit of that decision at the time he wrote his earlier dissent.
In the much-discussed French fry case, a 12-year-old girl was arrested for eating a French fry in a Washington, D.C., subway station. Rather than questioning the wisdom of the city's harsh policy, Roberts said the role of judges was to apply the law. He upheld the arrest and said it was up to elected city officials to decide the wisdom of the policy that prompted the arrest.
A conservative with few hard edges
Conservatives are praising the ruling as an example of the proper limited role of judges. Liberals say the case raises questions about fair treatment of juveniles by the government - issues that they say were glossed over by Roberts.
How Roberts might rule on abortion is at the top of the list of concerns being expressed by liberal advocacy groups. But he has had no known professional involvement with the issue since his confirmation hearings to the appeals court in 2003.
At that time, he was repeatedly asked by senators whether he believed the abortion precedent Roe v. Wade should be overruled. He dodged the question.
He said that Roe was binding legal precedent and that as an appeals-court judge he would be bound to follow it. He added, "Nothing in my personal views would prevent me from doing so."
Now, as a prospective Supreme Court justice, Roberts could have the power to overturn Roe - as well as to rule in other abortion-related cases. Still, there is nothing in his appeals-court experience that suggests how he might approach the issue.
Taipei Times - archives
Taipei Times - archivesPentagon highlights threat to Taiwan
RAPID MODERNIZATION: China is increasing its budget for military procurements and heightening its rhetoric, and although it can't take Taiwan yet, it will soon be able to
By Mac William Bishop
STAFF REPORTER
Thursday, Jul 21, 2005,Page 1
Advertising Advertising
Beijing is willing to use force to achieve its political goals, and although China's military does not yet have the ability to conquer Taiwan, especially if other countries intervene in a cross-strait conflict, the military gap between the two nations is widening, the Pentagon said in a report released yesterday.
In addition to Chinese efforts to create a modern military, the report cited Taiwan's lack of progress in military procurement as a major problem.
The report also warned of the possibility that the Chinese Communist Party could, nevertheless, lead China into a war through overconfidence or desperation caused by internal upheavals.
The US Department of Defense's annual report to Congress on "The Military Power of the People's Republic of China" was released yesterday after weeks of internal government wrangling over various details included in the document.
The report highlights the growing concern among US officials over China's rapid modernization of its military forces and pugnacity regarding Taiwan, as well as frustration over the special arms budget bill that has been blocked by the pan-blues in the legislature.
"Beijing sees Washington and ... Tokyo as the principal hurdles to any attempt to use military force."
Pentagon report
"Taiwan's defense spending has steadily declined in real terms over the past decade, even as Chinese air, naval, and missile force modernization has increased the need for countermeasures that would enable Taiwan to avoid being quickly overwhelmed," the report said.
The report also, on two separate occasions, points out that the NT$410.8 billion (US$15 billion) special arms budget -- which would allow Taiwan to purchase eight diesel-electric submarines, 12 P-3C Orion maritime patrol aircraft and three PAC-3 Patriot anti-missile batteries from the US -- is awaiting approval by the Legislative Yuan.
Meanwhile, China was becoming ever stronger, the report said.
"The cross-strait military balance appears to be shifting toward Beijing as a result of China's sustained economic growth, growing diplomatic leverage, and improvements in the PLA's [People's Liberation Army] military capabilities, including those that provide Beijing options short of full-scale invasion," the Pentagon said in the report.
"Beijing continues to see the threat and possible use of force as integral to its policy of dissuading Taiwan from pursuing independence and moving Taiwan ultimately to unite with the mainland," the report said.
However, it also said that a military strike against Taiwan would most likely not accomplish Beijing's stated goal of unification.
"China does not yet possess the military capability to accomplish with confidence its political objectives on the island, particularly when confronted with outside intervention," the report said.
"Outside intervention" would almost certainly be in the form of US and Japanese military action, according to the report.
"Beijing sees Washington and, increasingly, Tokyo as the principal hurdles to any attempt to use military force to coerce or capture Taiwan," the report said. Therefore, "Beijing will pursue diplomatic efforts to keep the United States and Japan from taking action to support Taiwan."
Although China has made significant advances in its military capabilities over the past decade, there were still serious deficiencies in its capabilities and overall structure, the report said.
But that would change with time, it said.
"The US intelligence community estimates that China will require until the end of this decade or later for its military modernization program to produce a modern force, capable of defeating a moderate-size adversary," the report said.
China is estimated to spend between US$50 billion and US$70 billion a year on its military budget, making it the third largest defense spender in the world. The US, which spends more money on defense than any other nation, has a military budget of approximately US$400 billion.
One of the key goals to China's military transformation is to thwart intervention by the US or other countries in the Taiwan Strait, the Pentagon said.
"Preventing foreign military intervention, particularly along China's coast, has been a goal for Beijing throughout history, reinforcing the geostrategic value of Taiwan for China's security planners," the report said.
Currently, Beijing does not appear to be contemplating military action against Taiwan, primarily because of two factors: Lack of military capabilities and "potential repercussions of any use of force against Taiwan."
One of those repercussions would be severe, long-term damage to China's economy, in part because Taiwan is the authoritarian giant's largest source of foreign direct investment.
Still, the report said, there was plenty of room for the Chinese Communist Party to miscalculate its military capabilities and the international situation, thus leading to a cross-strait conflict involving the US and Japan.
"China's leaders may overestimate the proficiency of their forces," the report said.
"Beijing could use limited strikes, employing information operations, special operations forces on Taiwan, and SRBM [Short-range Ballistic Missiles] or air strikes at key military or political sites, to try to break the will of Taiwan's leadership and population," the Pentagon wrote.
"Although Beijing might view these as a complement to non-military coercion and as less than a full use of force, others may view such actions differently," it said.
"Such a Chinese miscalculation could lead to a full-fledged conflict."
This story has been viewed 2752 times.
RAPID MODERNIZATION: China is increasing its budget for military procurements and heightening its rhetoric, and although it can't take Taiwan yet, it will soon be able to
By Mac William Bishop
STAFF REPORTER
Thursday, Jul 21, 2005,Page 1
Advertising Advertising
Beijing is willing to use force to achieve its political goals, and although China's military does not yet have the ability to conquer Taiwan, especially if other countries intervene in a cross-strait conflict, the military gap between the two nations is widening, the Pentagon said in a report released yesterday.
In addition to Chinese efforts to create a modern military, the report cited Taiwan's lack of progress in military procurement as a major problem.
The report also warned of the possibility that the Chinese Communist Party could, nevertheless, lead China into a war through overconfidence or desperation caused by internal upheavals.
The US Department of Defense's annual report to Congress on "The Military Power of the People's Republic of China" was released yesterday after weeks of internal government wrangling over various details included in the document.
The report highlights the growing concern among US officials over China's rapid modernization of its military forces and pugnacity regarding Taiwan, as well as frustration over the special arms budget bill that has been blocked by the pan-blues in the legislature.
"Beijing sees Washington and ... Tokyo as the principal hurdles to any attempt to use military force."
Pentagon report
"Taiwan's defense spending has steadily declined in real terms over the past decade, even as Chinese air, naval, and missile force modernization has increased the need for countermeasures that would enable Taiwan to avoid being quickly overwhelmed," the report said.
The report also, on two separate occasions, points out that the NT$410.8 billion (US$15 billion) special arms budget -- which would allow Taiwan to purchase eight diesel-electric submarines, 12 P-3C Orion maritime patrol aircraft and three PAC-3 Patriot anti-missile batteries from the US -- is awaiting approval by the Legislative Yuan.
Meanwhile, China was becoming ever stronger, the report said.
"The cross-strait military balance appears to be shifting toward Beijing as a result of China's sustained economic growth, growing diplomatic leverage, and improvements in the PLA's [People's Liberation Army] military capabilities, including those that provide Beijing options short of full-scale invasion," the Pentagon said in the report.
"Beijing continues to see the threat and possible use of force as integral to its policy of dissuading Taiwan from pursuing independence and moving Taiwan ultimately to unite with the mainland," the report said.
However, it also said that a military strike against Taiwan would most likely not accomplish Beijing's stated goal of unification.
"China does not yet possess the military capability to accomplish with confidence its political objectives on the island, particularly when confronted with outside intervention," the report said.
"Outside intervention" would almost certainly be in the form of US and Japanese military action, according to the report.
"Beijing sees Washington and, increasingly, Tokyo as the principal hurdles to any attempt to use military force to coerce or capture Taiwan," the report said. Therefore, "Beijing will pursue diplomatic efforts to keep the United States and Japan from taking action to support Taiwan."
Although China has made significant advances in its military capabilities over the past decade, there were still serious deficiencies in its capabilities and overall structure, the report said.
But that would change with time, it said.
"The US intelligence community estimates that China will require until the end of this decade or later for its military modernization program to produce a modern force, capable of defeating a moderate-size adversary," the report said.
China is estimated to spend between US$50 billion and US$70 billion a year on its military budget, making it the third largest defense spender in the world. The US, which spends more money on defense than any other nation, has a military budget of approximately US$400 billion.
One of the key goals to China's military transformation is to thwart intervention by the US or other countries in the Taiwan Strait, the Pentagon said.
"Preventing foreign military intervention, particularly along China's coast, has been a goal for Beijing throughout history, reinforcing the geostrategic value of Taiwan for China's security planners," the report said.
Currently, Beijing does not appear to be contemplating military action against Taiwan, primarily because of two factors: Lack of military capabilities and "potential repercussions of any use of force against Taiwan."
One of those repercussions would be severe, long-term damage to China's economy, in part because Taiwan is the authoritarian giant's largest source of foreign direct investment.
Still, the report said, there was plenty of room for the Chinese Communist Party to miscalculate its military capabilities and the international situation, thus leading to a cross-strait conflict involving the US and Japan.
"China's leaders may overestimate the proficiency of their forces," the report said.
"Beijing could use limited strikes, employing information operations, special operations forces on Taiwan, and SRBM [Short-range Ballistic Missiles] or air strikes at key military or political sites, to try to break the will of Taiwan's leadership and population," the Pentagon wrote.
"Although Beijing might view these as a complement to non-military coercion and as less than a full use of force, others may view such actions differently," it said.
"Such a Chinese miscalculation could lead to a full-fledged conflict."
This story has been viewed 2752 times.
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