Canadian Spy Chief Calls Iraq Home for Terrorism
MONTREAL -- Iraq has become a "kind of latter-day Afghanistan" that is training foreign terrorists and providing a testing ground for new terrorist techniques that are being exported, the head of Canada's intelligence service said Thursday.
In rare public comments, Jim Judd, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, said the U.S. war in Iraq was "creating longer-term problems" than it set out to solve.
Although Judd insisted the view was "not new," his remarks were unusually critical for the intelligence head of a significant U.S. ally. The Canadian government did not support the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but it has 900 troops attached to NATO operations in Afghanistan and cooperates with the United States on terrorism issues.
Judd, who took over the agency last November, spoke to reporters while attending a conference of security professionals and experts in Montreal.
-- Doug Struck
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ASIA
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D), completing a three-day trip to North Korea, said the government in Pyongyang reaffirmed its intention to attend six-nation disarmament talks in early November.
Richardson, in a phone call from Tokyo, said senior North Korean officials did not respond when he asked them to shut down a plutonium reactor at Yongbyon as a show of good faith. He took a rare two-hour tour of the facility, and said he was told plutonium fuel usable for nuclear weapons had been moved to a reprocessing facility or "transferred elsewhere."
Richardson, a former U.N. ambassador, was not an official envoy but received permission from the Bush administration to travel to Pyongyang.
-- Glenn Kessler
