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NUCLEAR
Powdered plutonium to hit the roads
British Energy considers taking on old reactors
French banks to raise $350 million for Romania nuke
U.S. India-Pakistan Mission Fails to Ease the Standoff
War Clouds Seen Gathering Over South Asia
Courting nuclear disaster
Bush wins the final battle for star wars
Bush Wants Missile Defense Cooperation
Bush to Propose Project With Russia
China welcomes U.S.-Russia nuclear pact, calls for more cuts
Restarting Reactor Could Boost Nuclear Power Industry
Powdered plutonium to hit the roads
More Talk On Gas Plant Scheduled
Ohio nuke woes won't impact other units this summer
Energy Secretary Sees Senate OK of Yucca Site
Agreement Accelerates Oak Ridge Cleanup
Yucca Mountain Not Enough for Waste
9/11: Did Bush Do Enough?
Bush Was Told of Hijacking Dangers
Cheney 'Deeply' Disturbed by Criticism
Terror Warnings Provide Political Fuel
MILITARY
Congress Nears Bioterror Bill Deal
Death Toll in N.Colombia Nears 80
Fla. Court OKs Drug Initiative
India, U.S. Hold Joint Exercises
India Weighs Response to Deadly Kashmir Raid
Khatami Says U.S. Group Threatens World with War
Iraq Accepts U.N. Sanctions Reforms
Iraq May Be Considering Inspections
Admitting Errors, Arafat Promises a Wave of Reform
West Bank Damages Put at $361 Million
Arafat concedes making mistakes
Israeli Tanks Enter West Bank City
Senate Debates NATO Expansion
Drugs, Terror and Tuna: How Goals Clash
Rumsfeld Wants Focus on New Technology
US Troops to Stay 2 Years in Georgia
GAO: "Encroachment" Not Affecting Readiness
Gathering News in the New Russia Can Be Fatal
POLICE / PRISONERS
Ill. House Passes DNA Samples Bill
FBI chief proposes anti-terrorism team
Issue in 2 Death Sentences: Judge's Drug Use
Bush Was Warned bin Laden Wanted to Hijack Planes
Lindh Cites U.S. Argument in Bid for Dropping Charge
White House was told planes might be hijacked
Lawmakers Push for Hearings on Warning Given to Bush
Airlines Warned of Possible Attack
List of Airline Warnings
ENERGY AND OTHER
Analysis: More Untapped Oil in Alaska
ACTIVISTS
Terrorist Warnings
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Powdered plutonium to hit the roads
Gannett News Service
May 16, 2002
From: "L.V. Citizen Alert" kalynda@citizenalert.org
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Department of Energy plans to ship an especially deadly form of plutonium over the nation's highways this summer as part of dismantling and cleaning the former Rocky Flats nuclear bomb factory in Colorado.
If lawsuits from the state of South Carolina and a California nuclear watchdog group don't stop it, the Energy Department plans to truck tons of powdered plutonium from Rocky Flats to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Smaller amounts of the radioactive powder also would be shipped from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco to Savannah River.
"Transportation of radioactive material in powdered form generally should be avoided," said Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear engineer and president of the nuclear watchdog group Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Md.
Although plutonium in any form is dangerous, the powder is more of a problem: Wind or fire could spread it if shipment containers broke in an accident or terrorist attack, he said. Immobilizing the powdered plutonium by combining it with molten glass would be safer.
"There's a larger variety of accidents in which powder can be disbursed because it's in an easily disbursable form," Makhijani said.
The routes these shipments would travel are classified because the material still could be used to make nuclear weapons. But the powder likely would pass through a dozen states.
The Energy Department converts plutonium scrap metal left over from the bomb-making process into powder - using heat and pure oxygen in a controlled environment - because scraps can spontaneously ignite. Plutonium metal machined into bomb parts does not burst into flame. Neither does raw plutonium originally shipped to the factories in the form of metal "buttons." DOE officials won't say how much of the seven tons of plutonium at Rocky Flats scheduled to go to South Carolina is powder, but environmental groups estimate about half of it is.
Can cause cancer
A man-made material created when neutrons bombard uranium in a nuclear reactor, plutonium is not highly radioactive. The radiation it gives off is so weak that it cannot penetrate the skin. However, plutonium's radioactivity lasts a long time. It has a half-life of 24,000 years. And it becomes deadly when people breathe it or absorb it through cuts in the skin. Then it causes lung and bone cancer.
"You don't want this stuff disbursed in an accident," said nuclear physicist Frank Von Hippel, director of Princeton University's Science and Global Security Program. "It would be much worse, radiologically, than a spent (nuclear) fuel accident."
Powdered plutonium never would be released into the environment in an accident, Energy Department officials say.
Before shipment, the material is encased in three very strong steel containers filled with inert helium gas and welded shut. They say the containers have passed fire and crush tests and are certified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board.
"It has multiple layers of protection with certain security measures in place," said DOE spokesman Joe Davis, who declined to elaborate on the security.
Those who track classified Energy Department nuclear shipments say the material travels in unmarked tractor-trailer rigs escorted by heavily armed guards and tracked via satellite.
States are not notified when the shipments come through. That's in contrast to DOE shipments of spent fuel rods from commercial nuclear power plants. In those cases, state public safety officials are notified 30 days in advance so they can prepare. States provide police escorts for spent fuel shipments when they go through urban areas and do periodic safety inspections on the equipment.
The classified DOE shipments have none of those protections.
That does not particularly worry Western governors, said Ron Ross, program manager for environmental policy for the Western Governors' Association.
"It's of concern, but it's not alarming," he said. "Our (emergency) folks in the states and local communities are trained and know how to respond."
Making cross-country trip
The Southern States Energy Board, which coordinates nuclear waste transportation planning among the 16 Southern states and the Energy Department, is concerned about the larger issue of unnecessarily moving nuclear waste.
The board supports South Carolina's lawsuit filed earlier this month against the Energy Department, Executive Director Ken Nemeth said. The suit seeks to get a firm commitment that plutonium brought into the Savannah River Site from Rocky Flats eventually will be removed.
The Energy Department plans to turn some of the plutonium into a new kind of fuel for nuclear power plants at a facility to be built at Savannah River. The agency has not yet said what it will do with about three tons to five tons of plutonium now stored at Rocky Flats that is contaminated with other materials and cannot be converted into reactor fuel.
Eventually, the plan is to move all this plutonium to the nation's nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev. But it first must be converted into a form not easily made into bombs.
"Why bring it in the first place?" Nemeth asked. "That stuff which eventually is going to Yucca Mountain needs to go to Yucca Mountain. Why ship it to the South and then ship it to the West. Why not leave it in the West?"
Another lawsuit, filed in February by Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment nuclear watchdog group in the San Francisco Bay Area, asks the Energy Department to justify shipping machined plutonium parts from Rocky Flats to Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. The lawsuit alleges the agency plans to ship the pieces to Lawrence Livermore in a container that failed to pass crush tests.
DOE's Joe Davis denies the agency has such plans and says it has only discussed using the containers, which are larger than those used for powdered plutonium.
At Lawrence Livermore, the parts would be heated in an oven, then the pure plutonium would be separated from partly contaminated pieces. The contaminated pieces would be shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico for permanent storage. The pure pieces would be converted to powder and shipped to Savannah River.
Marylia Kelley, spokeswoman for Tri-Valley CAREs, said the plutonium could be broken down at Rocky Flats or at Savannah River.
Sending the material on a national tour only increases the risk of an accident on the highways, she said.
"If you're managing a rock band, this strategy makes sense," Kelley said. "It's a strategy of maximum exposure. But when you're managing plutonium, the strategy makes no sense."
On the Web:
www.ieer.org, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.
www.princeton.edu/(TILDE)globsec, Princeton's Science and Global Security Program.
www.sseb.org, Southern States Energy Board.
www.trivalleycares.org, Tri-Valley CAREs
www.westgov.org, Western Governors' Association.
www.energy.gov, U.S. Department of Energy.
-------- britain
British Energy considers taking on old reactors
Story by Andrew Callus
REUTERS UK:
May 16, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15972/story.htm
LONDON - British Energy Plc, the privatised nuclear power producer, said yesterday that it might take on seven ageing nuclear reactors that are still in state hands, but that taxpayers must pay the clean-up costs.
State nuclear clean-up liabilities have been estimated at some 35 billion pounds ($51 billion) - something cash-strapped British Energy could not countenance as it struggles to keep up dividend payments amid weak UK wholesale power prices.
"There's a range of opportunities, from contracts, through leases, through acquisitions," Managing Director David Gilchrist said after announcing annual results that met expectations.
The reactors involved are known as Magnox plants, and generate about six percent of the UK's power. Built mainly in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, they proved costly to run, and only 13 were ever commissioned anywhere in the world.
"The form of the transaction could be done many different ways," Gilchrist said in a telephone interview.
"(But) as the Magnox plants stand in the current form, they have very large unfunded liabilities, and any transaction which involved our taking over... would have to ensure that those liabilities were met in some way or another otherwise we'd just be taking a deficit onto our balance sheet."
British Energy said last week that it was in talks with British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), state-run owner of the Magnox plants, on a "wide range of issues".
WRITEDOWNS ECLIPSE PROFITS
The company's annual profits met market expectations, but 47 million pounds of annual pre-tax profit was swept away by 500 million pounds worth of exceptional writeoffs associated with the 30 percent slide in the price of the power it produces.
The company maintained its dividend at eight pence a share despite analyst fears that it may have to signal a cut. Its shares were up 1.5 percent in early trade at 186-1/4 pence.
Acquisition of the Magnox plants, or a service contract, could provide the cash-strapped business with much needed revenue until they all close by 2021. Last year, Britain said it would set up a national body to take on BNFL's nuclear liabilities, including the cost of decommissioning old plants and cleaning up the sites.
The proposed Liabilities Management Authority would assume the 35 billion pounds liabilities of BNFL in a move seen as a precursor for a partial selloff.
Eleven Magnox stations were built in Britain. Due to their age and high running costs they were kept in state hands along with BNFL's fuel reprocessing arm when the rest of Britain's nuclear industry was sold to private investors in 1996 as British Energy Plc.
Four have been closed, along with the only two that were built outside Britain. Magnox stations use reactor rods of pure uranium metal, while most types of modern nuclear power station use uranium oxide and can produce more electricity per plant.
-------- europe
French banks to raise $350 million for Romania nuke
REUTERS ROMANIA:
May 16, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15971/story.htm
BUCHAREST - Romania appointed French banks Societe Generale and Credit Lyonnais to raise $350 million in loans to complete work at the second reactor at the country's only nuclear plant, officials said yesterday.
"We started talks with the consortia on the terms of the external financing," Teodor Chirica, director of Nuclearelectrica, the owner of the plant told Reuters.
Romania aims to finalise works at the second unit of the Cernavoda nuclear power plant, on the Danube, by 2004, as part of its plans to overhaul an energy system plagued by inefficiency and obsolete facilities.
Chirica said the credits, guaranteed by the state and with maturities of up to 20 years, would be used to import equipment from Canada, Italy, France and the United States.
The equipment suppliers are Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, Ansaldo SpA , Alstom , Nexans and General Electric Co .
Commercial bank BRD-Groupe Societe Generale, also a member in the consortia, said the bank would grant Nuclearelectrica a separate seven-year commercial loan worth 25 million euro ($22.58 million).
The 700-megawatt new reactor, to be built up with CANDU-technology, accounts for 10 percent of Romania's tottal electricity output.
-------- india / pakistan
U.S. India-Pakistan Mission Fails to Ease the Standoff
New York Times
May 16, 2002
By HOWARD W. FRENCH with CELIA W. DUGGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/16/international/asia/16STAN.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, May 16 - A senior American diplomat ended a two-day visit to India and Pakistan today aimed at reducing the military standoff between the nuclear-armed rivals but reported little sign of progress, saying "this is not the work of one trip."
The mission here by the assistant secretary of state for South Asia, Christina Rocca, came a day after an attack in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir that killed 34 people, mostly women and children, in a passenger bus and at an Indian Army barracks.
India quickly blamed Pakistan for sheltering the Islamic militants who it charged were behind the attack, and Pakistan condemned the killings almost immediately. But it was the kind of incident that diplomats fear could open a war between the two nations, which have a million troops facing each other on a hair trigger along their 1,800-mile border.
The risks of a conflict were also highlighted by a recent report that Pakistan's military may have prepared its nuclear weapons for use during the last round of skirmishing between the two countries in Kashmir's icy mountains in 1999.
"We're very worried about the continued mobilization of two major armies facing each other at close proximity and the possibility of a spark that could lead to an unintended conflict," Ms. Rocca said in New Delhi this morning before leaving for Islamabad.
Once here, she met with President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, as she put it, "to explore ways with which India and Pakistan can move away from the dangerous confrontation that has characterized their relations" since India mobilized troops after it blamed Pakistan-based militants for a suicide attack on its Parliament last December.
The attack on Tuesday placed more pressure on Ms. Rocca's mission, as well as on India's government for possible retaliation. In a sign of just how difficult her discussions in the two countries have been, Ms. Rocca today refused even to describe the substance of her talks.
Indian officials expressed hopes that Ms. Rocca would use America's full influence to get General Musharraf to end what they charge is Pakistan's continued support for extremist Islamic groups waging a holy war to drive India from Kashmir, India's only Muslim majority state.
In January, General Musharraf banned several militant Islamic groups, including some that have sent fighters across the border into Indian-ruled Kashmir. Diplomats say that most of these groups continue to function, however, often simply changing their names.
"All that I can at this point say is that it's a situation which calls for punishment," India's defense minister, George Fernandes, said today at a news conference in Jammu. "What that punishment should be is something that will need to be deliberated upon."
But Pakistan's information minister, Nisar Memon, today rejected responsibility for the latest killings. "Pakistan itself is a victim of terrorism," he said. "We will not allow any group or organization to use Pakistani soil against any country."
Reflecting the balancing act at the heart of her mission, Ms. Rocca strongly condemned the Kashmir attack while still in New Delhi, calling it barbaric. "Acts like this are intended to undermine peace in the region," she said. "I think acts that occurred in Jammu are terrorism.
"No matter what the levels are, infiltration must stop," she added, referring to what Indian officials say have been scores of incursions in recent months by Islamic fighters into its side of Kashmir.
But Pakistan is also essential to the United States campaign against Al Qaeda holdouts in Afghanistan and Pakistan itself. Mindful of those priorities, once she arrived in Islamabad this evening, Ms. Rocca expressed "great respect" for General Musharraf's cooperation in fighting terrorism.
The report that Pakistan may have prepared its nuclear weapons during its last confrontation with India offered scant detail, but it provided new reason for caution during the current high tensions.
The report, by Bruce Riedel, who was special assistant to President Bill Clinton, was published by the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania.
In it, Mr. Riedel says that Pakistan's prime minister at the time, Nawaz Sharif, flew to Washington and met with President Clinton on July 4, 1999, desperate to find a way out of a conflict that threatened to turn into a full-scale war.
"Clinton asked Sharif if he knew how advanced the threat of nuclear war was," Mr. Riedel wrote in the paper. "Did Sharif know his military was preparing their nuclear tipped missiles?"
In an interview today, Mr. Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel R. Berger, said that Mr. Sharif "was surprised by the fact, or perhaps surprised that we knew the fact."
The Pakistani prime minister pressed Mr. Clinton to act as a mediator, but the United States rejected that role, Mr. Berger said. Mr. Sharif agreed in any case to withdraw the Pakistani forces unconditionally, and the crisis was defused.
Asked about Mr. Riedel's account, Mr. Berger noted that the United States was worried that neither India nor Pakistan "understood each other's doctrine or capabilities, and therefore misunderstood each other's red lines," the actions that could prompt a nuclear response. Bush administration officials have said in recent months that they share the same fear.
Some experts and Indian military officials said today that they doubted Pakistan actually coupled its missiles with warheads. V. P. Malik, who was India's army chief at the time, said he had no such intelligence, nor did the Americans share what they knew with India.
George Perkovich, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said he, too, doubted that the Pakistanis went that far. They may have moved the missiles around, he speculated, as a way to grab American attention in hopes that the United States would intervene on Pakistan's behalf.
But Mr. Riedel's retelling, and Mr. Berger's comments, indicated that President Clinton's success in convincing Mr. Sharif to pull back from the conflict may nonetheless have averted a possible nuclear catastrophe.
"I thought that this was a very dangerous moment," Mr. Berger said.
--------
War Clouds Seen Gathering Over South Asia
May 16, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-southasia.html
NEW DELHI/ISLAMABAD - Indian and Pakistani newspapers said on Thursday the threat of war was growing with New Delhi expected to retaliate for a deadly raid in Kashmir blamed on Pakistan-based militants.
``War clouds gather,'' read a headline in India's Asian Age. ''We'll take action,'' said another in the Hindustan Times.
The Pakistani paper, Dawn, said the fear was that the Kashmir attack ``could provide India with the pretext for an armed adventure that could trigger a full-scale war'' between the nuclear-armed neighbors.
Tuesday's raid on an army base in the disputed Himalayan Indian state of Kashmir killed 34 people, mainly wives and children of soldiers.
The two countries have massed a million men along their border since December in a confrontation over Kashmir, the trigger of two of their three wars.
That build-up in turn was triggered by a December suicide attack on India's parliament which New Delhi also blamed on Pakistani-based Kashmiri rebels.
India accuses Pakistan of fomenting rebellion against its rule in its only Muslim-majority state by arming and training militants and sending them across the heavily militarized border.
Pakistan denies the charge.
But the confrontation is entering a critical phase as the Himalayan snows melt, opening up mountain passes and infiltration routes.
Senior Indian security officials led by Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani and Defense Minister George Fernandes were to meet on Thursday to discuss how to retaliate, a Home Ministry official said.
Indian newspapers said the government, led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, under fire over religious violence in western India and reeling from a string of regional election routs, was under pressure to act.
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee described the Kashmir raid as a ``massacre of innocents'' and said India would have to take action. He did not elaborate.
Fernandes has also said India must act. ``We cannot certainly have this kind of terror go unpunished,'' he said.
Pakistan has condemned the attack and urged an investigation.
President Bush, whose administration has stepped up pressure on both sides to defuse tension, condemned the Kashmir attack as terrorism.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca, in New Delhi on her third shuttle diplomacy mission to the subcontinent since March, said the raid was aimed at sabotaging efforts to ease tension.
``Acts like this are clearly aimed at achieving the opposite objective,'' she said on Wednesday.
About a dozen separatist groups are battling Indian forces in Kashmir. At least 33,000 people have been killed since the revolt erupted in 1989.
Separatists say the toll is at least 80,000.
--------
Courting nuclear disaster
Praful Bidwai (mailto:praful@del3.vsnl.net.in),
Thursday May 16, 2002
The News International, Pakistan
http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/may2002-daily/16-05-2002/oped/o1.htm
When India detonated five nuclear bombs this week four years ago, many of its leaders, especially BJP ministers, convinced themselves that New Delhi had now staked an irrefutable claim to both international prestige and security. When Nawaz Sharif set off six of his own blasts in "retaliation", he boasted: "Ab Pakistan hamesha ke liye mahfooz ho gaya." (Now Pakistan has become safe forever).
Strategic "experts" in both countries duly spun out fanciful ex post rationalisations for the blasts. India and Pakistan, they prophesied, would both become more secure. "Maturity" and sobriety would be infused into their fraught relationship. South Asia would become "stable". India and Pakistan would gain in global stature and expand their room for independent manoeuvre.
And of course, as the theory of nuclear deterrence ordains, India and Pakistan, being nuclear powers, would never go to war again. Their leaders, however reckless, would be compelled to realise that even conventional war is unacceptably risky. Doesn't deterrence theory tell you that? The US and the USSR didn't exchange a single shot during the Cold War.
Today, all these predictions stand demolished -- many times over. The hope that India and Pakistan would behave with "maturity" lies in tatters as they confront each other with more than a million troops, but without a clearly defined political purpose. The barbaric Jammu terrorist attack has further aggravated matters. New Delhi blames it on Pakistan-sponsored militants.
"Limited strikes" by India seem imminent. So does "retaliation" by Pakistan, leading to a full-scale conventional conflict. Indian and Pakistani leaders may well bend to the inexorable logic of action-reaction, escalate that conflict to the nuclear plane, and thus finally disprove deterrence theory -- with catastrophic consequences for their peoples.
Four years on, it should be plain that nuclear weapons have failed to deliver to India and Pakistan any of the "beneficial" things they were meant to give. But they have fulfilled the most dismal of pessimistic projections.
I personally plead guilty to some such projections. A year after Pokharan-Chagai, Achin Vanaik and I co-authored "South Asia on a Short Fuse: Nuclear Politics and the Future of Global Disarmament" (since published by Oxford University Press, Karachi), in which we argued that nuclear weapons would degrade India and Pakistan's security.
In India, we said, they would disastrously strengthen the forces of Hindutva nationalism, militarism, and communalism. Their strategic, social, economic, and political costs would prove onerous.
On Pakistan, our analysis was even more sombre: "In ... retrospect, [nuclearisation] might well be seen as the final act that precipitated a decisive historical transformation of the Pakistan polity, dramatically reversing for a long time to come the difficult process of democratic consolidation. One hopes this will not be the case, but it could be...
"The systemic crisis of legitimacy, the increasing loss of the state's moral purpose, the inability of Islam to provide the foundations of a viable state, have all contributed to the growing failure of the Pakistani political system... If Pakistan proceeds to manufacture and deploy nuclear weapons ..., the economic consequences could become unbearable ..."
Regrettably, these forecasts have largely materialised. A particularly corrosive consequence of nuclearisation, mediated by the 1999 Kargil war, has been Pakistan's greatly deepened crisis of governance. Pakistan got a major break because of Pervez Musharraf's decision to execute a U-turn on his Afghan policy and join the US' "war on terrorism". Musharraf took some action against jihadi fundamentalists, haltingly and hesitantly. But the recent downslide in this is only too obvious.
To return to Kargil, it has turned out a more horrific story than we all imagined. In a sensational report, The Sunday Times (London) has revealed that the Pakistani army mobilised its nuclear arsenal against India during that war without the knowledge of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.
Citing Bruce Riedel, a senior White House adviser, the story says that US intelligence had gathered "disturbing information," suggesting India and Pakistan "were heading for a deadly descent into full-scale conflict, with a danger of nuclear cataclysm".
Although Riedel is silent on India's counter-preparations, it is almost inconceivable that New Delhi would not have drawn up plans for using nuclear weapons.
Sharif was told the truth about Pakistan's nuclear preparations by Bill Clinton, in Washington. Pakistan's army tightly controls all information about nuclear activities -- to the point of keeping the civilian leadership in the dark. Earlier, Benazir Bhutto too had to beg the CIA to brief her on Islamabad's nuclear capability. Her own army denied her that -- when she was prime minister!
When reminded by Clinton of how the US and the USSR had come close to nuclear war over Cuba in 1962, an "exhausted" Sharif recognised the "catastrophic" danger, and "said he was against [the preparations], but worried for his life back in Pakistan". This prepared the ground for an end to the Kargil conflict -- much to Musharraf's annoyance.
The rest is history.
This gives a hair-raising edge to the well-founded fears expressed by many analysts, including me, that the Kargil conflict had a dangerous nuclear-escalation potential. I once counted that India and Pakistan exchanged nuclear threats no fewer than 13 times during that seven weeks-long war -- itself the world's biggest-ever conventional conflict between two nuclear weapons-states.
The disclosure that we were on the brink of a nuclear catastrophe in 1999 should chill many spines. In nuclear war, it doesn't take two to tango. A single adventurist move can have catastrophic consequences for millions of people. Wreaking nuclear devastation upon the adversary after he has used a nuclear weapon against you can only be an act of mindless revenge, not of regaining your security.
Such a dangerous stand-off may again be imminent. Pakistan and India have not only failed to evolve a stable deterrent equation. They probably cannot do so. Nuclear weapons will always be a strategic liability for them. India's rulers are discovering that time and again.
As for Pakistan, nuclear weapons figure in Musharraf's January 12 address as a constraint, as something to be guarded and protected, not as a means with which to negotiate Washington's demand to "cooperate" with its Afghan operation.
So much for nukes expanding your room for independent policy-making or giving you a greater voice in the world!
Nuclear weapons have failed to bestow great power status upon India too. India's profile has recently risen in the US more because of Silicon Valley immigrants than because of factors intrinsic to India, and in spite of nuclear weapons -- largely because the Vajpayee government has entered into a subordinate partnership with the US. That is no invitation to the world's high table.
There are no worthy arguments for nuclear weapons. There are many strong ones for ridding South Asia of these instruments of genocide. The strongest one comes from the grave threat of annihilation which they pose to millions of us non-combatant civilians.
South Asia will remain the world's most dangerous place so long as it has nuclear weapons -- the globe's only region where two strategic rivals remain locked in a continuous hot-cold war for half a century, and where countless disputes and events can suddenly precipitate a terrible crisis with an escalation potential.
To become even minimally secure, South Asia must come out of the Bomb's dark shadow.
The writer is one of India's most widely published
columnists. Formerly a Senior Fellow of the Nehru
Memorial Museum and Library, he is a winner of the Sean MacBride Prize for 2000 of the International Peace Bureau
-------- missile defense
Bush wins the final battle for star wars
Ian Traynor in Moscow and Julian Borger in Washington
Thursday May 16, 2002
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/bush/story/0,7369,716259,00.html
The Bush administration is poised for a major political breakthrough in gaining international acceptance of its controversial star wars plans.
After a year of bitter Russian opposition to a scheme which Moscow warned could jeopardise global nuclear stability and spark a new arms race, the Kremlin has accepted a White House offer to cooperate on the national missile defence project (NMD).
The Pentagon is to start construction work on NMD in Alaska within weeks following a frenzy of intense diplomacy that this week has resulted in the announcement of a major arms control treaty with Russia and a new deal between Nato and Russia that allows Moscow inside the alliance's councils for the first time.
The Americans are capitalising on the new spirit of partnership to sweep away opposition to the missile shield scheme and co-opt the world's second nuclear power.
With Washington and Moscow apparently bent on forging a new partnership, Presidents George Bush and Vladimir Putin have agreed to set up a joint committee on NMD, a senior Russian official revealed yesterday, to head off Russian opposition.
The agreement is in turn expected to undermine resistance to the project in western Europe.
The initiative will be unveiled next week when Mr Bush visits Russia for the first time for a summit with Mr Putin.
The key declaration to be issued by the summit, finalised this week by Russian and US negotiators, will redefine relations between the two countries and includes US promises to cooperate with Russia on missile defence, the Russian official said.
The new committee would be consultative and would be headed by the defence and foreign affairs chiefs of both countries.
Despite fierce Russian opposition to the Pentagon's missile defence plans, next week's summit looks likely to result in the White House co-opting Mr Putin behind NMD.
The muting of opposition in western Europe to the project was also evident at the two-day meeting of Nato foreign ministers which ended in Reykjavik last night.
A Nato communique issued at the end of the meeting said that terrorism and the spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons were the key dangers facing the alliance after September 11.
"The role that missile defence could play is being actively considered as we continue our consultations with the US on this issue."
Despite warnings from the Kremlin as recently as six months ago that NMD could spark a new arms race, the two presidents next week will also sign a treaty scrapping thousands of nuclear warheads over the next decade. Republicans in the US are citing that as proof that star wars need not result in a new arms race.
The Russians pushed for an explicit link in the arms cuts treaty with missile defence, but the Americans balked. The soothing words on the missile shield will come, however, in the accompanying document, while the joint committee will draw Russia further into the star wars project.
For much of last year Washington sought to cajole Moscow into jointly abandoning the 1972 anti-ballistic missiles treaty - which bans the missile shield - but Mr Putin refused to budge, forcing the US in December to abrogate unilaterally the treaty widely seen as the foundation of nuclear arms stability.
More in sorrow than in anger, Mr Putin described the US move as a mistake.
The six-month notice period expires a couple of weeks after the Bush-Putin summit and the Americans are to start work immediately on building missile silos at the Fort Greely military base in Alaska.
Mr Bush served notice of US withdrawal from the ABM treaty on December 13, in order to allow the Pentagon to pursue testing of NMD. Fort Greely is intended as a test site for land-based interceptors, which are the central element of the plan.
Last year, in a tactical ploy to rally opposition to the US plans, the Russians offered to cooperate with the Europeans in developing smaller-scale and less ambitious "theatre missile defence". No one took the proposals seriously. But the notion could now be revived.
The Russians now hope to win a few contracts from the Americans in the multibillion dollar scheme. Mark Bromley, of the British American Security Information Council, said that Russian military industries had been lobbying for the past year and a half for Moscow to get involved in missile defence cooperation with the US, in the hope of winning American contracts and investment.
Official Russian comment on the project has undergone an abrupt change.
A senior Russian military source told the Interfax news agency yesterday: "During bilateral talks the US side emphasised that the future anti-ballistic missile system will be of a limited nature and will not pose a threat to either Russia's strategic forces or the global strategic balance."
--------
Bush Wants Missile Defense Cooperation
May 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Russia.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush intends to ask Russian President Vladimir Putin next week to cooperate with the United States in joint projects to defend against missile attack.
If the Russian leader accepts the offer, it would mean a turnabout in Putin's skepticism about missile defenses and would accelerate cooperation between Washington and Moscow on a number of fronts.
According to a senior U.S. official, Bush also will offer to share American technology with Russia, a move first proposed by President Reagan two decades ago as part of his space-defense dream.
Bush's intention is to enshrine anti-missile cooperation in a document of strategic cooperation that will be issued when he meets Putin in Moscow. The move would be parallel to the treaty the two leaders have approved to slash U.S. and Russian long-range nuclear weapons arsenals.
Putin had opposed the U.S. missile defense program as apt to reignite a dangerous arms race by encouraging potential aggressors to develop better nuclear weapons to overcome an anti-missile shield.
Bush is proposing cooperation in so-called theater missile defenses -- regional systems designed to guard against terror groups and so-called rogue regimes.
National missile defenses were banned in a 1972 treaty that Bush canceled because it stood in the way of his ambitious U.S. testing program. On June 14, the first day the U.S. government is free of treaty's strictures, work on underground silos for missile interceptors will begin in Alaska.
Cooperation between the United States and Russia is surging.
Russia has strengthened ties with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, backed the United States in revising international sanctions on exports to Iraq and reached agreement on nuclear weapons reductions.
At the same time, Bush has abandoned the 1993 START II weapons reduction treaty his father signed a week before leaving office. It would have banned Russia's multiwarhead SS18 missiles.
John Holum, in charge of arms control policy at the State Department in the Clinton administration, criticized the Bush administration for not making deeper cuts in warheads in the coming treaty.
It requires the United States and Russia to reduce to 1,700 to 2,200 warheads by 2012. The private Arms Control Association estimates the United States had 7,206 warheads in January and Russia 5,606.
``The international community will have a hard time figuring out why we have to keep so many nuclear weapons,'' Holum said at a conference arranged by the association.
Karl Inderfurth, a former assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration, urged Bush to seek a comprehensive inventory of Russia's tactical, or battlefield, nuclear weapons stockpile.
Inderfurth estimated Russia could have 4,000 to 15,000 of those weapons.
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said another issue that ought to be on the Moscow summit's agenda is to clarify what is going on at U.S. and Russian nuclear test sites.
Kimball cited U.S. intelligence reports that Russia may be preparing to test again. And, he said, the Bush administration has been drifting in the direction of nuclear testing by distancing itself from the 1996 treaty to ban all nuclear tests.
The Senate voted against ratifying the treaty in 1999, and Bush has vowed not to seek Senate approval. He has extended a moratorium on U.S. testing.
For several months, officials at the Pentagon and elsewhere in the administration have considered whether the administration should ``unsign'' the treaty as it did a treaty to establish an international war crimes tribunal. There has been no decision to do so.
On the Net:
Arms Control Association: http://www.armscontrol.org/
Library of Congress Russia country study: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/rutoc.html
-------- russia
Bush to Propose Project With Russia
May 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Russia.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush will propose to Russian President Vladimir Putin next week that the two countries cooperate in joint projects to defend against missile attack, a U.S. official says.
Bush will offer to share American technology with Russia, a move first proposed by President Reagan two decades ago, a senior U.S. official said Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Bush's intention is to enshrine anti-missile cooperation in a document of strategic cooperation that will be issued when he meets Putin in Moscow along with formal notification of a treaty to slash U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear weapons arsenals.
Putin had opposed the U.S. missile defense program as potentially restarting an arms race in an effort to overcome a shield, but Bush brushed aside Russia's concerns and next month the United States will officially abandon a 1972 treaty with Moscow that prohibits national missile defenses.
Cooperation between the two countries is on the upswing.
On Wednesday, the Bush administration welcomed closer cooperation between Russia and NATO, but remained noncommittal on whether Moscow eventually could join the military alliance.
Some former allies of Moscow are in, while others are anxious to be added.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, after two days of meetings with NATO ministers in Reykjavik, Iceland, pointed to progress: an arms-control breakthrough with Russia, expanded NATO-Russia partnership and tightened U.N. military sanctions against Iraq that won approval with Moscow's help.
Powell said he also raised concerns with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov at the NATO meeting about Moscow's suspected complicity in assisting Iran's weapons buildup, including technology for nuclear devices.
The Russians do not deny selling items to Iran but ``they don't believe they are selling them anything that individually or together should cause us to have the kind of concern that we do,'' Powell told reporters en route to Washington.
Powell also said he had received assurances from Ukrainian authorities that President Leonid Kuchma was not involved in the transfer or planned transfer of military equipment to Iraq.
Powell said the new NATO-Russia Council, negotiated after Putin's support for the West in countering terrorism, is leading to a new partnership'' after the end of the Cold War.
The deal falls short of full NATO membership for Russia but offers a forum for the 19-member alliance to develop ways to cooperate on terrorism and other issues.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer praised the agreement but said the Bush administration was not signaling that Moscow would join NATO.
``Over time, other assessments will be made,'' Fleischer said. ``That's going to depend on cooperation. It's going to depend on events. And this is a garden that will be watered and now will grow.''
Fleischer said NATO took a major step toward ``integrating Russia with the European-Atlantic community of nations.''
Fleischer said the move was in line with Bush's efforts to improve relations with Russia.
-------- treaties
China welcomes U.S.-Russia nuclear pact, calls for more cuts
Thu May 16, 2002
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020517/ap_wo_en_ge/china_us_russia_nuclear_1
BEIJING - China welcomed a pact between the United States and Russia to slash their nuclear arsenals by two-thirds, but called for more reductions, the official Xinhua News Agency said Friday.
Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan laid out China's position in a phone call Thursday night with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites), Xinhua said.
Tang "expressed the hope that the two countries will continue their efforts to reduce their nuclear arsenals in this manner, so as to further advance the process of international nuclear disarmament," Xinhua said.
The accord announced Monday is to be signed by U.S. President George W. Bush (news - web sites) and Russian President Vladimir Putin (news - web sites) during a summit in Moscow next week. It foresees cuts in each country's nuclear arsenals to 1,700 to 2,200 warheads from the approximately 6,000 each is now allowed.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Restarting Reactor Could Boost Nuclear Power Industry
TVA Board to Vote on $1.7 Billion Proposal To Switch On Mothballed Unit in Alabama
By Dan Morgan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 16, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23504-2002May15?language=printer
The U.S. nuclear power industry, in a holding pattern for years because of concerns about safety and costs, could get a strong boost today when the Tennessee Valley Authority takes up a $1.7 billion proposal to restart a reactor that has been shut down for 17 years.
There have been strong indications that the TVA's three-member board supports the plan to revive the 1,280-megawatt unit at the Browns Ferry plant in Decatur, Ala. An ultimate decision to restart the unit -- where the target date is 2006 -- would mark the first go-ahead for bringing a U.S. nuclear reactor on line in well over a decade.
Browns Ferry's Unit 1 was mothballed in 1985, during a broad reassessment of nuclear power by the federal government, which owns the TVA. Its resurrection could signal that nuclear power is beginning to emerge from its status as the pariah of the U.S. energy industry.
William Baxter, a Knoxville businessman appointed to the board last year, told a local interviewer this month that restarting the unit would be a good business decision. The TVA's professional staff supports the proposal, as do some key politicians, including Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.).
But in a letter to TVA Chairman Glenn L. McCullough on Monday, White House budget director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. urged a careful approach. "We agree on the goal," he said, but added: "The question of how to complete it is a big one."
Daniels, who met with McCullough on Tuesday, said he had not seen a financial analysis of the proposal, adding that the White House would prefer that the TVA delay a final decision until it has revised its long-term business plan.
Whatever the board decides at its meeting today in Huntsville, Ala., critics and advocates of nuclear power agree that a reconsideration of the nuclear option is underway in the public and private sectors. Driving it are rising demands for electricity and increasingly tough environmental controls on the coal-burning power plants that account for nearly half of the nation's electricity output.
"We have got to be open in this country to nuclear power," said Sessions, who has lobbied hard to bring the unit back on line. "Many politicians just seem to take it as a given that there cannot be any more nuclear power. That is just wrong."
Sessions estimated that the four-year construction project at the Browns Ferry Unit 1 reactor would provide 2,400 jobs for northern Alabama. The plant's other two reactors were brought back on line in the early 1990s, thanks to decisions made several years earlier.
A white paper produced last year by Vice President Cheney's energy task force declared that expanded nuclear power production was "a major component of our national energy policy." It said there was room at many nuclear facilities for additional reactors.
To underscore that nuclear power plants do not emit greenhouse gases, acid-rain-causing chemicals or health-threatening particles, the task force called on the Environmental Protection Agency "to assess the potential of nuclear energy to improve air quality."
No new reactor has been ordered in the United States since the 1979 accident at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island. But three major utilities -- Exelon Corp., Entergy Corp. and Dominion Resources Inc. -- have said they are looking at possible sites for future reactors.
Once considered white elephants, some reactors recently have been snapped up by investors and independent power companies that are betting they can run them profitably in the nation's newly deregulated wholesale electricity market.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has renewed the licenses of eight of the nation's 103 reactors and is considering renewal applications from 15 others. Last year, the NRC allowed 22 reactors to increase their generating capacity by installing new technologies, a process called "uprating."
"For a decade, the performance, reliability and safety has been getting better," said Marvin Fertel, vice president for business operations at the Nuclear Energy Institute.
TVA officials say they believe the mothballed facility at Browns Ferry can be brought on line safely and relatively quickly. "As we look down the road we need the power, and because the unit has been licensed, and because we know exactly what has to be done, there is a confidence level," said John Scalice, chief nuclear officer for the TVA.
The TVA is the country's largest public power producer, providing electricity to 8.3 million people in seven states while also managing the 652-mile Tennessee River system of dams and hydroelectric stations.
Any effort at a nuclear renaissance will face strong opposition from environmental organizations, scientists and those skeptical about the commercial viability of nuclear power. Environmental activists recently picketed TVA offices in Tennessee, protesting the plan to restart the Browns Ferry unit. In 1998, the Union of Concerned Scientists petitioned the NRC to revoke the license for Unit 1, arguing that the TVA had no basis for keeping it in mothball status indefinitely. It asked that Unit 1 be decommissioned or subjected to the same rigorous inspections and controls as operating units. The NRC denied the petition after the TVA said some parts of the unit were needed to support the operations of the two functioning reactors at the site.
Unit 1 began generating electricity with a 1960s-vintage boiling water reactor in 1973. In 1985, the TVA voluntarily shut it down and removed its fuel after discovering that the designs used to operate it did not precisely match the physical layout. The NRC placed all TVA plants on a "watch list" in 1986.
The two other Browns Ferry reactors, Units 2 and 3, were also shut down for the same reasons in 1985, but they were restarted after corrections were made.
Only five of the 17 reactors started by the TVA after the 1960s are operating today. Eight were subsequently canceled after the expenditure of billions of dollars. Several, such as the two units at Bellefonte, have never produced power. The last to come on line was Watts Bar in Tennessee, which took 23 years from start to finish and cost about $7 billion.
Reviving the TVA's nuclear program now would be a major mistake, said Stephen Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. TVA officials, he said, "are rushing to do it over any common sense."
Smith said a better use of the $1.7 billion would be cleaning up dirty coal-burning plants and promoting energy conservation. The TVA's customers enjoy some of the cheapest electricity in the nation while consuming more power per household than any other region, he said.
The TVA's debt is $25.2 billion, well above the levels of privately owned utilities of comparable size. The TVA promised in 1997 to cut it to $14 billion by 2007, but as a government agency it is under no pressure from stockholders or credit markets to do so.
"Congress is asleep at the wheel while TVA is about to run up more debt," Smith said. "No private business could get away with doing this. That's the fundamental weakness of TVA."
-------- colorado
Powdered plutonium to hit the roads
Gannett News Service
May 16, 2002
From: "L.V. Citizen Alert" <kalynda@citizenalert.org>
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Department of Energy plans to ship an especially deadly form of plutonium over the nation's highways this summer as part of dismantling and cleaning the former Rocky Flats nuclear bomb factory in Colorado.
If lawsuits from the state of South Carolina and a California nuclear watchdog group don't stop it, the Energy Department plans to truck tons of powdered plutonium from Rocky Flats to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Smaller amounts of the radioactive powder also would be shipped from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco to Savannah River.
"Transportation of radioactive material in powdered form generally should be avoided," said Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear engineer and president of the nuclear watchdog group Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Md.
Although plutonium in any form is dangerous, the powder is more of a problem: Wind or fire could spread it if shipment containers broke in an accident or terrorist attack, he said. Immobilizing the powdered plutonium by combining it with molten glass would be safer.
"There's a larger variety of accidents in which powder can be disbursed because it's in an easily disbursable form," Makhijani said.
The routes these shipments would travel are classified because the material still could be used to make nuclear weapons. But the powder likely would pass through a dozen states.
The Energy Department converts plutonium scrap metal left over from the bomb-making process into powder - using heat and pure oxygen in a controlled environment - because scraps can spontaneously ignite. Plutonium metal machined into bomb parts does not burst into flame. Neither does raw plutonium originally shipped to the factories in the form of metal "buttons." DOE officials won't say how much of the seven tons of plutonium at Rocky Flats scheduled to go to South Carolina is powder, but environmental groups estimate about half of it is.
Can cause cancer
A man-made material created when neutrons bombard uranium in a nuclear reactor, plutonium is not highly radioactive. The radiation it gives off is so weak that it cannot penetrate the skin. However, plutonium's radioactivity lasts a long time. It has a half-life of 24,000 years. And it becomes deadly when people breathe it or absorb it through cuts in the skin. Then it causes lung and bone cancer.
"You don't want this stuff disbursed in an accident," said nuclear physicist Frank Von Hippel, director of Princeton University's Science and Global Security Program. "It would be much worse, radiologically, than a spent (nuclear) fuel accident."
Powdered plutonium never would be released into the environment in an accident, Energy Department officials say.
Before shipment, the material is encased in three very strong steel containers filled with inert helium gas and welded shut. They say the containers have passed fire and crush tests and are certified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board.
"It has multiple layers of protection with certain security measures in place," said DOE spokesman Joe Davis, who declined to elaborate on the security.
Those who track classified Energy Department nuclear shipments say the material travels in unmarked tractor-trailer rigs escorted by heavily armed guards and tracked via satellite.
States are not notified when the shipments come through. That's in contrast to DOE shipments of spent fuel rods from commercial nuclear power plants. In those cases, state public safety officials are notified 30 days in advance so they can prepare. States provide police escorts for spent fuel shipments when they go through urban areas and do periodic safety inspections on the equipment.
The classified DOE shipments have none of those protections.
That does not particularly worry Western governors, said Ron Ross, program manager for environmental policy for the Western Governors' Association.
"It's of concern, but it's not alarming," he said. "Our (emergency) folks in the states and local communities are trained and know how to respond."
Making cross-country trip
The Southern States Energy Board, which coordinates nuclear waste transportation planning among the 16 Southern states and the Energy Department, is concerned about the larger issue of unnecessarily moving nuclear waste.
The board supports South Carolina's lawsuit filed earlier this month against the Energy Department, Executive Director Ken Nemeth said. The suit seeks to get a firm commitment that plutonium brought into the Savannah River Site from Rocky Flats eventually will be removed.
The Energy Department plans to turn some of the plutonium into a new kind of fuel for nuclear power plants at a facility to be built at Savannah River. The agency has not yet said what it will do with about three tons to five tons of plutonium now stored at Rocky Flats that is contaminated with other materials and cannot be converted into reactor fuel.
Eventually, the plan is to move all this plutonium to the nation's nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev. But it first must be converted into a form not easily made into bombs.
"Why bring it in the first place?" Nemeth asked. "That stuff which eventually is going to Yucca Mountain needs to go to Yucca Mountain. Why ship it to the South and then ship it to the West. Why not leave it in the West?"
Another lawsuit, filed in February by Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment nuclear watchdog group in the San Francisco Bay Area, asks the Energy Department to justify shipping machined plutonium parts from Rocky Flats to Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. The lawsuit alleges the agency plans to ship the pieces to Lawrence Livermore in a container that failed to pass crush tests.
DOE's Joe Davis denies the agency has such plans and says it has only discussed using the containers, which are larger than those used for powdered plutonium.
At Lawrence Livermore, the parts would be heated in an oven, then the pure plutonium would be separated from partly contaminated pieces. The contaminated pieces would be shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico for permanent storage. The pure pieces would be converted to powder and shipped to Savannah River.
Marylia Kelley, spokeswoman for Tri-Valley CAREs, said the plutonium could be broken down at Rocky Flats or at Savannah River.
Sending the material on a national tour only increases the risk of an accident on the highways, she said.
"If you're managing a rock band, this strategy makes sense," Kelley said. "It's a strategy of maximum exposure. But when you're managing plutonium, the strategy makes no sense."
On the Web:
www.ieer.org, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.
www.princeton.edu/(TILDE)globsec, Princeton's Science and Global Security Program.
www.sseb.org, Southern States Energy Board.
www.trivalleycares.org, Tri-Valley CAREs
www.westgov.org, Western Governors' Association.
www.energy.gov, U.S. Department of Energy.
Kalynda Tilges Nuclear Issues Coordinator Citizen Alert - Las Vegas P.O.Box 17173 Las Vegas, NV 89114 702-796-5662 Voice 702-796-4886 Fax "mailto:kalynda@citizenalert.org" http://www.citizenalert.org
Citizen Alert "A Voice for the Land and People of Nevada"
-------- maryland
More Talk On Gas Plant Scheduled
Third Meeting to Focus On 'What-If Scenarios'
By Raymond McCaffrey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 16, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17607-2002May14?language=printer
A meeting in Solomons on Wednesday will assemble the Coast Guard and other agencies to further assess the risk of allowing tankers to deliver liquefied natural gas to the Cove Point plant on the Chesapeake Bay in southern Calvert County.
At the conference, the Tulsa-based Williams Co. will discuss the implications of its plan to reactivate the facility. The Coast Guard and other officials have met twice since December to evaluate the project -- the first meeting involved what were termed "safety" issues, the second "security" concerns, Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Gordon A. Loebl said.
Next week's meeting, which is closed to the public, "will focus on response and contingency preparedness issues," Loebl said.
"The goal of the third one is to look at the what-if scenarios brought up in the first two," Loebl said.
"The big question I heard time and time again is: 'Who's in charge?' If something goes wrong, who's in charge?" he said.
Calvert residents and Maryland lawmakers have raised concerns that allowing large oceangoing foreign tankers into the bay could lead to a terrorist attack involving the nearby Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant. Despite those fears, in December the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission voted at a meeting in Washington to reaffirm an earlier decision to allow the Williams Co. to move forward with the $120 million project.
Following its initial approval of the plan, the commission announced in November that it would reconsider that decision. That move Nov. 9 came just two days after Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) criticized the commission's original endorsement of the project a month after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The commission's second review included a technical conference at which interested parties and regulatory agencies discussed national security issues raised after Sept. 11.
Issues to be decided by the Coast Guard include whether to require moving buffers and Coast Guard escorts around tankers when they move into the Chesapeake Bay, Loebl said.
Williams Co. plans to reactivate the Cove Point offshore terminal, where the liquefied natural gas would be unloaded from tankers, and build a fifth onshore storage tank. The company, which originally expressed hope it could begin importing gas before the beginning of July, has delayed the start date for receiving liquefied natural gas shipments. Williams Co. still must receive state approval.
"We still don't have the permit from the Maryland Department of the Environment," said Cindy Ivey, a company spokeswoman.
"I think we all are still hoping for construction to begin [in the year's] third quarter," she said.
The pier where the product is offloaded -- roughly a mile and a quarter offshore and connected to the plant by an underwater tunnel -- would be refurbished to handle tankers that typically are about 1,000 feet long, officials said.
Natural gas in a vapor form then would be transported from the plant through a pipeline that runs 87 miles from Calvert to utilities in Prince George's, Charles, Fairfax and Loudoun counties.
At a meeting last year, Calvert County Commissioners President David F. Hale (R-Owings) told Federal Energy Regulatory Commission officials of local support for the plant, which when fully operational would become the county's second-highest taxpayer, behind the Calvert Cliffs nuclear facility. However, on Nov. 13, Hale and the other Board of Commissioners members sent a letter to the commission requesting a reevaluation in light of the need to prevent terrorism.
Neighbors of the plant had voiced such worries to federal officials long before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
-------- ohio
Ohio nuke woes won't impact other units this summer
REUTERS USA:
May 16, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15970/story.htm
NEW YORK - The corroded reactor vessel head problem that idled FirstEnergy Corp.'s Davis Besse nuclear power plant in Ohio is not expected to impact other nuclear plants this summer, the group that oversees the operation of the North American power grid said.
In a teleconference yesterday to discuss its 2002 summer reliability assessment, the North American Electric Reliability Council said, however, that the full scope of the problems may not be known until later this year.
"Although it is not expected to impact the industry this summer, the total impact of the Davis Besse problem will not be known until all the inspections are completed, sometime later in the year," NERC spokesman Tim Gallagher said.
The 925 megawatt Davis Besse plant has been shut since Feb. 16 when FirstEnergy engineers found boric acid had leaked at the base of control rod nozzles that are part of the reactor.
Boric acid is used in the primary coolant bath surrounding uranium rods in the reactor core.
Sixty eight nuclear plants, or more than half of the nation's 103 plants, of similar design to Davis Besse were required to inspect their reactor caps following the discovery of the cracked reactor vessel head.
The power industry has been concerned that a shutdown of similar plants could cause a spike in power and natural gas prices if utilities needed to ramp up generation at other plants.
Nuclear power provides about 20 percent of U.S. electricity generation, with natural gas accounting for about 15 percent and coal about 50 percent.
NERC said many of the plants with similar designs had completed their inspections recently and it was determined there are no signs of cracking within any other heads.
Other units that have not completed inspections yet are going to be running throughout the summer and will be fully inspected when their next refueling outage occurs, Gallagher said.
In early April, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which launched the investigation into the Ohio plant and other similarly designed plants, said there had not been any corrosion in reactor caps similar to that at Davis Besse.
Based on current repair plans submitted to the NRC, FirstEnergy hopes to have the Davis Besse plant back in service during the third quarter of 2002.
The unit provides about 7 percent of FirstEnergy's overall electricity supply.
-------- nevada
Energy Secretary Sees Senate OK of Yucca Site
May 16, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-energy-congress-yucca.html
WASHINGTON - Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham predicted on Thursday the Democratic-led Senate would grant final congressional approval of the administration's decision to bury deadly nuclear waste from across the nation in Nevada.
``I think the majority of senators will conclude we have made a strong and compelling case,'' Abraham told reporters after testifying before the Senate Energy Committee.
The Senate will decide within the next few months whether to follow the lead of the Republican-led House of Representatives and vote to override Nevada's veto of Bush administration plans to construct the nation's first permanent nuclear waste storage facility in Yucca Mountain, 90 miles (145 km) northwest of Las Vegas.
On May 8, on a bipartisan vote of 306-117, the House rejected Nevada's safety concerns and endorsed President Bush's decision to bury nuclear waste in the Nevada desert.
The Senate Energy Committee held its first hearing on the project on Thursday and plans two more before voting on June 5 on whether to recommend approval by the full Senate.
Senate Republicans predict the chamber will approve the $58 billion project with the help of many Democrats from states with nuclear reactors and mounting radioactive waste.
Senate Democratic Whip Harry Reid and Republican Sen. John Ensign, both of Nevada, admitted they had an uphill fight to stop the project.
``We have not given up,'' Ensign said after Thursday's hearing, during which he and Reid challenged Abraham on a number of fronts. ``We're in the fight of our lives.''
SITE 'SAFE AND SUITABLE'
Abraham, citing more than $4 billion in studies over the past two decades, told the Energy Committee, ``We have concluded that the site is safe and suitable for storage.''
He said that if the Senate gave its blessing, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would then make the final determination on suitability when it decides whether to grant a license.
Last month, Nevada Republican Gov. Kenny Guinn vetoed Bush's decision earlier in the year to accept Abraham's recommendation to build the depository in Nevada. Guinn has also challenged the project in federal court.
Under a 1982 federal law on nuclear waste disposal, a state
governor may veto the president's plans to put a depository in his or her state. The veto can be overridden by Congress with a majority vote of each chamber.
Nuclear power plants produce more than 20 percent of the country's energy, and many waste storage tanks are nearly full. The government has faced lawsuits for failing to meet a 1998 deadline to open a permanent nuclear waste storage site.
The proposed site would permanently hold 70,000 tons of radioactive material and open in 2010.
-------- tennessee
Agreement Accelerates Oak Ridge Cleanup
May 16, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/may2002/2002L-05-16-09.html#anchor4
OAK RIDGE, Tennessee, Two federal agencies and the state of Tennessee have signed an agreement to accelerate cleanup of the Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge nuclear laboratory.
The DOE, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Tennessee officials signed a Letter of Intent to complete cleanup operations at Oak Ridge by 2016, with high risk cleanup slated to be finished by 2008.
"This pact provides the framework necessary to accelerate cleanup and it is a major step to effectively reduce health risks and expedite the environmental cleanup of the Oak Ridge nuclear sites," said Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham.
The DOE is setting aside $105 million under the Cleanup Reform Account for Oak Ridge, boosting the total Oak Ridge environmental management budget to about $520 million in fiscal year (FY) 2003.
Previous appropriated funding levels for the Oak Ridge Site were $448 million in FY 2001 and $480 million in FY 2002.
The parties to the agreement will use results of the Oak Ridge Comprehensive Closure Plan, which focuses on strategies for accelerating cleanup and closure of the East Tennessee Technology Park, the Melton Valley Watershed and the further development of a comprehensive sitewide waste disposition strategy.
Among the cleanup challenges will be the complete decontamination and decommissioning of the East Tennessee Technology Park at Oak Ridge, the removal of spent nuclear fuel from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the cleanup of a groundwater plume of volatile organic compounds beneath Oak Ridge's Y-12 facility.
The DOE plans to develop a set of specific progress goals by June 14.
"Accelerated cleanup agreements will accomplish results in a manner that is safe, protective of human health and the environment, and in compliance with state and federal environmental laws," Abraham said. "The Oak Ridge pact is a framework for all Department sites to follow in moving toward an accelerated cleanup plan because it provides the necessary level of detail and criteria to reach a commitment to faster, safer cleanup."
This is the second agreement reached under the DOE's new Environmental Management Accelerated Cleanup Program, whose goal is to streamline operations by working with states and regulators to target and reduce the greatest health and environmental cleanup risks at the country's Cold War nuclear weapons production facilities.
-------- us nuc waste
Yucca Mountain Not Enough for Waste
May 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Yucca-Mountain.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham acknowledged on Thursday that a proposed Nevada waste dump will be too small to accommodate all the nation's nuclear waste and might have to be expanded.
Under intense questioning from Nevada's two senators, Abraham conceded that the Yucca Mountain repository as currently envisioned could handle only a fraction of the waste expected to be generated by commercial power plants and the government in the coming decade.
Thousands of tons of ``this stuff is still going to be (stored) around the country,'' Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., told Abraham, who acknowledged that probably would be the case.
The Bush administration has argued repeatedly that the proposed Nevada repository should be built so that radioactive waste now at commercial power reactors and federal sites in 39 states can be consolidated and better protected at a single location.
About 45,000 tons of radioactive waste currently are kept around the country. Another 20,000 tons are expected to be generated by power reactors before Yucca Mountain can be opened, Abraham said.
If a federal license is obtained, the Yucca facility would be scheduled to accept its first waste shipments in 2010. Abraham said it would receive a minimum 3,000 tons of waste a year for 23 years. The industry has estimated that reactors produce about 2,000 tons of new waste annually.
Ensign and his Nevada colleague, Democratic Sen. Harry Reid, said those figures debunk the administration's national security argument, since thousands of tons of waste will remain without a central repository even after Yucca Mountain becomes filled to capacity.
Still, insisted Abraham, any waste taken to Yucca Mountain would be waste no longer kept in less-safe temporary facilities including some near highly populated or environmentally sensitive areas.
After the hearing, Abraham opened the possibility that the Yucca Mountain facility eventually might be expanded. Congress has limited its initial design to 77,000 tons of waste, but Abraham said a future energy secretary after 2007 can consider expansion.
Abraham said the Nevada site has room for more than the initial 77,000 tons. It was unclear how such a move would affect the project's licensing or the likelihood of further legal challenges by Nevada.
President Bush designated the Nevada site as the country's central nuclear waste repository and said he would seek a federal license for it. As was its right under a 1982 nuclear waste law, Nevada filed a formal objection. That can be overridden only by majority vote of both chambers of Congress.
The House already has overridden the Nevada veto. The Senate must vote before July 26, or the Nevada objection will stand. The Nevadans are waging a difficult fight. A survey in this week's National Journal magazine showed that 48 senators already planned to vote against Nevada, with 32 undecided.
Abraham reiterated his conviction that the Yucca Mountain site, which has been studied for two decades, is geologically safe to hold the waste, which will remain highly radioactive for thousands of years.
Nevada's senators have long argued that even if Yucca Mountain were built, thousands of tons of used reactor fuel would still be kept at reactors around the country. They also have argued shipping wastes through 43 states would pose greater risks than leaving the caches where they are.
Abraham rejected the claims that the waste would pose a transportation hazard. The government and nuclear industry has had ``30 years of safe shipment of spent nuclear fuel ... without any harmful radiation release,'' said Abraham.
-------- us politics
9/11: Did Bush Do Enough?
May 16, 2002
CBS
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/15/attack/printable509096.shtml
WASHINGTON, Members of Congress are raising questions as to whether the Bush administration should have reacted better to warnings in August that Osama bin Laden's followers might hijack a jet.
The White House revealed Wednesday night that President Bush was briefed on U.S. intelligence in August, while at his Crawford, Texas, ranch, that bin Laden's network might hijack U.S. passenger planes.
CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin first disclosed the fact that the White House had received the bin Laden warning.
On Thursday, Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer said all possible action was taken given what was known.
"All appropriate action was taken based on the threat information that we had," Fleischer said. "The president did not - not - receive information about the use of airplanes as missiles by suicide bombers. This was a new type of attack that was not foreseen."
Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, said the disclosures in the memos marked an important discovery in Congress' investigation into why the FBI, CIA and other U.S. agencies failed to learn of and prevent the Sept. 11 plot.
"How in the world could somebody have read this document and not had lights, firecrackers, rockets go off in their head that this is something that is really important?" Graham said of the Phoenix FBI memo.
House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said Congress needs to find out - in hearings open to the public - what Bush and other officials knew, when they knew it and what they did with the information, in order to prevent future terrorist attacks.
"The way to do better is to understand what happened in the past," Gephardt said. "Was there a failure of intelligence? Did the right officials not act on the intelligence in the proper way? These are things we need to find out."
Senate Majority leader Tom Daschle said Thursday he was "gravely concerned" and asked President Bush to turn over to Congress information that he received.
"Clearly there is a lot more to be learned before we can come to any final conclusion about all of the facts, but it clearly raises some very important questions that have to be asked and have to be answered," he said. "Why did it take eight months for us to receive this information? And secondly, what specific actions were taken by the White House in response?"
After the information was presented to Mr. Bush, the administration put domestic agencies on alert in the summer, just months before the Sept. 11 attacks, Fleischer said. That alert was not announced publicly but Fleischer said it may have prompted the hijackers to change their tactics.
Members of Congress pointed to three pre-Sept. 11 warning signs: the U.S. intelligence Bush received, the fact that an FBI agent had written a memo urging FBI headquarters to investigate Middle Eastern men enrolled in American flight schools, and the arrest in Minnesota of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was believed to be training for a suicide hijacking.
Moussaoui has emerged as the lone defendant charged in the aftermath of the attacks, which killed more than 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. He is charged with conspiring with bin Laden and the 19 suicide hijackers to attack Americans.
FBI Director Robert Mueller repeatedly has said he wished the FBI had acted more aggressively in addressing the Arizona and Minnesota leads but said nothing the FBI possessed before Sept. 11 pointed to the multiple-airliner hijacking plot.
The disclosure came amid questions about whether U.S. authorities failed to recognize and respond to warnings about possible terrorist attacks before the hijackings of the four passenger planes on Sept. 11.
"We've got terrorists connected to al Qaeda out in Arizona engaging in flight training, we've got Moussaoui arrested and being interrogated in Minnesota, we've got the president being briefed while he was on vacation in Texas about the possibility of these airplanes being hijacked. I mean, was anything done about any of those things?" said Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C.
Edwards called on the administration to help Congress investigate what happened, saying there has been some tension from the White House over starting a probe.
Mr. Bush made no immediate comment on the situation. He attended a National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast in Washington and said prayer has helped Americans of faith to get through the last eight months.
"The last eight months have showed the world the American character is incredibly strong and confident. Yet, prayer reminds us that a great people must be humble before God, searching for wisdom - constantly searching for wisdom from the Almighty," he said.
----
Bush Was Told of Hijacking Dangers
Aug. Report Had No Details on Sept. Plot
By Dan Eggen and Bill Miller
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, May 16, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23188-2002May15?language=printer
President Bush and his top advisers were informed by the CIA early last August that terrorists associated with Osama bin Laden had discussed the possibility of hijacking airplanes, according to reliable sources.
The information, given to Bush as part of his daily intelligence report, lacked specific details about how the terrorist plans would be carried out, the sources said. The White House said last night that law enforcement agencies were quietly placed on alert as a result of the intelligence.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer confirmed that Bush had been told about the possibility of hijackings but he declined to say what had been revealed during his intelligence briefings.
"There was . . . an awareness by the government, including the president, of Osama bin Laden and the threat he posed in the United States and around the world," Fleischer said. "That included long-standing speculation about hijacking in the traditional sense, but not involving suicide bombers using airplanes as missiles."
A CIA spokesman said the agency routinely passed on intelligence citing the possibility that al Qaeda might be planning to hijack an airliner as part of a terrorist action against the United States. But a suicide attack involving an aircraft was never envisioned, the spokesman said.
The intelligence briefing on al Qaeda hijackings, first reported last night by CBS News, marks the most detailed disclosure of what Bush was told about the possibility of terror attacks before Sept. 11. It also represents a shift in the official version of events surrounding the attacks on New York and Washington, which Bush and other administration officials have generally characterized as a sneak attack that could not have been foreseen by U.S. intelligence.
"It's hard to envision a plot so devious as the one that they pulled off on 9/11," Bush said in a January interview with NBC's Tom Brokaw. "Never did we realize that the enemy was so well organized."
The new information adds to the debate over whether more could have been done to halt the attacks.Congress is conducting an inquiry into possible intelligence failures before the attacks.
The information provided to Bush was included as part of the president's daily briefing, a highly restricted classified document prepared by the CIA. The document is seen by only a handful of people, White House officials said: Bush, Vice President Cheney, CIA Director George J. Tenet, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and, less frequently, Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr.
Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) said yesterday that he has been told of a CIA document that reached Bush in August, warning him of a more specific al Qaeda attack involving an airliner. Graham, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, said he had not yet read the document, but that congressional staffers have.
Until now, the growing congressional scrutiny of possible warning signs before Sept. 11 has focused on the FBI's actions, including the bureau's handling of a memo written in July 2001 by an agent in Phoenix. A senior U.S. official who has reviewed the classified memo said yesterday that the FBI agent had made a "strong connection" between a group of Middle Eastern aviation students he was investigating and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. The link was included in the five-page memorandum sent to FBI headquarters two months before the attacks.
The agent was so concerned that he mentioned bin Laden in the first sentence of the memo, which suggested that terrorists from al Qaeda or other groups might be using flight schools to prepare for a hijacking or bombing plot, several officials said.
The new details heightened a controversy that developed two weeks ago, when the outline of the agent's memo surfaced in news reports.
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III told a Senate committee last week that he wished the agency had been more aggressive in following up on the memo. But Mueller said doing so would not have led investigators to the Sept. 11 plot, and that none of the aviation students has been connected to the hijackings.
The Phoenix office's concerns were never relayed to a separate group of FBI agents in Minnesota, who were scrambling to determine the intentions of French national Zacarias Moussaoui. Moussaoui had been arrested at a flight school in August after he had aroused school officials' suspicions. It was only later that the FBI concluded that Moussaoui, now under indictment, was part of the hijacking conspiracy.
FBI officials have repeatedly declined to release the entire memorandum, citing its classified status and providing only a one-paragraph portion that describes the agent's suggestion that flight schools nationwide be canvassed for Middle Easterners. It remained unclear yesterday exactly what led the agent to make a link between al Qaeda and the students he was investigating from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Ariz. But one source said the memo was "thorough" in outlining his concerns.
As details emerged, criticism of the FBI intensified on Capitol Hill.
Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), the ranking minority member of the Intelligence Committee, yesterday said the Phoenix agent's memo "was a very important warning and it was not heeded. It was not distributed. It was not acted upon."
"That in itself is a damning piece of evidence of the FBI losing an opportunity," Shelby said. Combined with the Bush briefing and "events in Minnesota five weeks later, it's more than damning," he said. "Why didn't the FBI link them? They were either asleep, or inept, or both. What more is it going to take to wake up the FBI?"
Shelby is a leader of a joint House and Senate investigation into the attacks and the performance of the FBI, CIA and other agencies.
Three of the Sept. 11 hijackers received training from U.S. flight schools, although none was enrolled at the time of the July 10 memo, officials said. None received training at Embry-Riddle, although Flight 77 suicide pilot Hani Hanjour may have practiced on a flight simulator of a school in Phoenix.
During his Senate appearance last week, Mueller stressed that none of those under investigation in Arizona has since been connected to the attacks.
That point was reinforced yesterday by Fleischer, who said at a news briefing yesterday that Bush agreed with Mueller that the memo "in and of itself would not have led to the prevention of the September 11th attacks."
Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), a member of the Intelligence Committee who has read the memo "several times," said yesterday that the memo "was very explicit in terms of connecting suspected terrorists in the United States with aviation training schools. That should have been a red flag."
Durbin also said sentiment is growing in Congress for the Bush administration to release the memo, or at least hold classified briefings on it.
Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) sent a letter to Mueller yesterday demanding public release of the memo "to demonstrate that the FBI has nothing to hide and that from this point forward, candor and straight talk will be the FBI's mode of operation."
Grassley said in an interview that the reference to bin Laden "is so obvious that it should have gotten more attention."
Staff writers Mike Allen and Dana Priest contributed to this report.
----
Cheney 'Deeply' Disturbed by Criticism
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 16, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Cheney.html
NEW YORK (AP) -- Vice President Dick Cheney said Thursday that congressional Democrats need to be ``very cautious'' about their criticism of the Bush administration's decision not to disclose intelligence before Sept. 11 that terrorists wanted to hijack U.S. airplanes.
In a speech at the New York state Conservative Party's annual dinner, Cheney warned Democrats ``to not seek political advantage by making incendiary suggestions ... that the White House had advance information that would have prevented the tragic attacks of 9-11.''
The White House acknowledged that a month before the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush was told by U.S. intelligence that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network might hijack American airplanes. That prompted the administration to issue a private warning to federal agencies.
The public was not informed of the threats, which administration officials called vague and uncorroborated. But congressional Democrats have demanded to be told what the president knew about terrorist threats before the attacks.
At the behest of the president, Cheney said he is working with House and Senate leadership to investigate any intelligence failures. He also said the White House would cooperate fully with the probe, but he urged that it be handled professionally.
``The investigation undertaken must protect sensitive sources and information, must be devoid of leaks and it must avoid sensational and outrageous commentary,'' he said.
Cheney said that Democratic attacks could backfire.
``The people and agencies responsible to help us learn to defeat such an attack are the very ones most likely to be distracted from their critical duties if Congress fails to carry their obligation in a responsible fashion,'' he said.
------
Terror Warnings Provide Political Fuel
May 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Analysis.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Revelations that President Bush was told of hijacking dangers prior to the Sept. 11 attacks are providing fuel for an intelligence blame game.
Democrats, hesitant in the past to criticize the administration's handling of the crisis, are pouncing on what they see as a new vulnerability. Even some members of Bush's own party were critical, including Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller, CIA Director George Tenet and the president himself are coming under sudden, intense scrutiny.
``Why did it take eight months for us to receive this information? And what specific actions were taken by the White House in response?'' asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D. ``I'm not going to jump to any conclusions, but it's hard to understand why the information was not released.''
House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., joined the refrain with a variation on the Watergate-era question: What did the president know and when did he know it?
A series of disclosures of pre-Sept. 11 intelligence warnings -- which in hindsight could seem to have pointed to the crashes in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania -- have raised fresh questions about the performance of the CIA, the FBI and the White House.
Could officials have done more to prevent the terror attacks? Why was the government unable to put together the pieces of evidence? Why did it take so long for the information to be disclosed to the public? Is someone to blame for a failure to act?
Democrats were initially reluctant to criticize the administration's post-Sept. 11 performance in a show of national unity. But eight months have now passed. And Bush's approval ratings, while still in the 70 percent range in most surveys, are drifting down from the astronomical 90s.
A parade of Republicans, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, quickly tried to counter the criticism by suggesting Democrats were out to use the issue for short-term political gain.
``They need to be very cautious and not seek political advantage by making incendiary comments like some did today,'' Cheney said.
Bush was informed early last August, as part of his daily intelligence briefing, that Islamic militants associated with Osama bin Laden might hijack American airliners. The administration quietly put law enforcement, certain federal agencies and U.S. embassies on alert.
White House officials said the information was not specific enough to predict or prevent the terror attacks -- and did not anticipate that hijacked planes would be turned into guided missiles. ``This was a new type of attack that had not been foreseen,'' White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Thursday.
Even so, U.S. intelligence officials were well aware that terrorists inspired by bin Laden had considered using airliners as weapons in the past.
In 1994, Algerian terrorists hijacked a plane with the intention of crashing it into the Eiffel Tower, but the attack was thwarted by French authorities, who stormed the plane before it took off. In 1995, terrorists in the Philippines considered hijacking several trans-Pacific planes to crash into U.S. targets, including CIA headquarters, but that plot never got beyond the planning stages.
The disclosure of Bush's briefing follows the revelation that FBI headquarters did not act on a memo last July from its Phoenix office urging an investigation of Middle Eastern men enrolled in U.S. flight schools. That memo mentioned bin Laden by name, speculating his followers could organize such flight training.
The FBI also has been faulted for not acting more aggressively in the case of accused Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, who was arrested in August after he raised concerns by seeking flight training at a Minnesota flight school.
Having the benefit of hindsight is easy, suggested Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge.
``But the notion that somehow there was a piece of intelligence ... that al-Qaida was massing to turn commercial airplanes into missiles, I don't think that existed,'' Ridge said in a phone interview.
Ridge said that evaluating intelligence ``is arduous, cumbersome and complex. I think a lot of professionals do as good as they can. But in the war against terror, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to design a fail-safe system.''
Shelby, R-Ala., vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a longtime critic of CIA Director Tenet, called the administration's failure to put the pieces together before Sept. 11 ``a lost opportunity.''
White House officials said Bush had confidence in Tenet and the director's job was not in jeopardy.
Anthony Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, suggested administration detractors were overreacting, largely for political reasons.
``We need to understand that, no matter how we improve the intelligence effort, we still are going to have some successful attacks. And, probably in most cases when we look back, we're going to see there were some kind of indicators.''
-------- MILITARY
-------- biological weapons
Congress Nears Bioterror Bill Deal
May 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Bioterrorism-Congress.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Legislation aimed at strengthening the nation's defenses against biological attacks appears near passage.
Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La., and Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., predicted Thursday that a bill could be passed and sent to President Bush before Congress adjourns next week for the Memorial Day recess.
Tauzin, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Kennedy, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, are the lead negotiators of the deal.
Tauzin said staffers working to reconcile versions of the bill passed by the House and Senate have been ``instructed to work diligently over the weekend.''
The bills, both around $3 billion, have similar provisions. Both would increase vaccine stockpiles; establish a new assistant secretary for emergency preparedness within the Department of Health and Human Services; and enact greater controls over dangerous agents kept in laboratories around the country.
The bills also increase funding so the Food and Drug Administration can hire more inspectors to protect the nation's food supply.
There are areas that remain unresolved. Lawmakers are still trying to determine the mix by which grants will be administered to states and localities.
Also, the House version calls for drinking water systems across the country to assess their vulnerability to terrorist attack and develop emergency plans. The Senate wants those plans to be submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency, but House Republicans say the agency does not have the capacity to handle such sensitive information.
Lawmakers are also considering adding several unrelated measures to the bill. One would renew a law that allows the FDA to charge fees to pharmaceutical companies to pay for speedier review of new medications.
The House bill is H.R. 3448.
The Senate bill is S. 1715.
-------- colombia
Death Toll in N.Colombia Nears 80
May 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Colombia-Fighting.html
BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- Fifty bodies were found scattered about a battlefield in northwest Colombia, raising the death toll to nearly 80 in fighting there between leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and the army, an official said Thursday.
The dead were mostly guerrillas and paramilitaries battling for strategic territory in northern Antioquia state, a prime corridor for moving troops, arms and the illegal drugs that are financing the country's 38-year war.
``There are 78 people confirmed dead, apparently all combatants,'' Dairo Quinones, town manager for Campamento in Antioquia, said by telephone Thursday.
Quinones said 28 bodies were already stacked in the town morgue. Town officials who reached the site late Wednesday spotted more than 50 bodies of rebels and paramilitaries still lying about the fields, he said.
The army has reported one soldier killed in the clashes, which broke out Tuesday and tailed off Wednesday.
Since the collapse of peace talks in February, guerrillas have been trying to recapture territory lost to their rivals in the area. The battle line stretches toward the border with Panama, and includes the village of Bojaya, where a stray guerrilla mortar struck a church May 2 amid fighting with paramilitaries, killing 117 civilians.
Army officials on Wednesday reported at least 25 dead around Campamento, located about 180 miles northwest of the capital, Bogota.
Troops and government warplanes were called into the area after fighting broke out between the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and the paramilitary group known as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC.
Air force fighters reportedly strafed the area, adding to the deaths.
Human rights monitors accuse Colombia's U.S.-backed security forces of collaborating with the paramilitaries, who have massacred thousands of suspected leftist collaborators. President Andres Pastrana's government, seeking wider U.S. military aid, claims it is battling both outlaw groups with the same intensity.
At least 3,500 people die annually in Latin America's longest running guerrilla conflict. The Marxist-inspired rebels say they are waging their war to seize power and rid Colombia of its chronic poverty and corruption. The landowner-backed paramilitaries arose to combat the guerrillas.
-------- drug war
Fla. Court OKs Drug Initiative
May 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-BRF-Drug-Treatment.html
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) -- The state Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that voters can decide on a proposal that would let some low-level drug offenders avoid jail by entering treatment programs.
The 4-3 decision came a month after the Campaign for New Drug Policies said it would not try to get enough signatures to make the November ballot and would instead try for 2004.
The measure would let first-time offenders charged with or convicted of possessing or buying small amounts of illegal drugs go into treatment instead of trial or jail.
To get proposed constitutional amendments on the ballot, sponsors must have 500,000 verified signatures and clearance from the state's high court.
-------- india
India, U.S. Hold Joint Exercises
May 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-India-US-Military.html
AGRA, India (AP) -- As a symbol of rapidly expanding ties between Washington and New Delhi, U.S. soldiers on Thursday strapped on Indian parachutes and jumped from a Soviet-made AN-32 transport aircraft in the first U.S.-India joint military exercise in seven years.
Minutes later, an American C-130 Hercules transport plane dropped a group of Indian soldiers in green camouflage on the outskirts of Agra -- the ancient home of the Taj Mahal.
``The best thing is trying to train together, learning about each other's methods and sharing ideas,'' said Maj. Thomas Seagrist, joint mission commander for the U.S. Special Operations Forces.
A heat wave has hit India, making conditions tough for troops participating in the exercise, dubbed ``Balance Iroquois,'' after a native American tribe. Temperatures reached 113 degrees.
Most of the Americans came from Fort Lewis, Wash., where daytime summer temperatures hover around 70 degrees.
``It's hot here. But it won't slow us down. We take more water breaks and stand in the shade,'' said Master Sgt. Michael Farris from New Jersey.
The U.S. soldiers come from the Special Forces departments of the Air Force and the Army, and are forbidden from giving many details about their identities.
After 19 years with the Air Force, Farris described the exercise as a new experience. ``It's the first time I have seen a Soviet-built aircraft.''
One hundred and eighty U.S. personnel and 150 Indian troops are taking part in the exercise, which ends May 26. They are exchanging expertise in special operations and airborne assault.
The exercise is being held against a background of rising tensions between India and neighboring Pakistan, also being courted by Washington as an ally in its war on terror.
Col. Jaswinder Pal Singh, an Indian army officer overseeing the exercise, said the current war games did not include a focus on an imaginary enemy.
``We don't have a specific target,'' said Singh.
Two larger exercises are planned in Agra in October and in Alaska in December.
The Indian air force's only paratrooper training school is located at Agra, 110 miles southeast of New Delhi.
Defense cooperation between India and the United States has had a checkered history.
Training links were established in the 1960s, but faltered through the 1970s and 1980s as India moved closer to the then-Soviet Union, which became a major supplier of military hardware.
After the Cold War, tensions eased and joint training resumed in 1992. It stopped again in 1995 when India refused to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and Washington imposed economic sanctions after nuclear tests by India.
But relations warmed under Clinton, who in 2000 made the first visit by an American president in 22 years. When the Bush administration lifted the sanctions, military cooperation, visits by top generals and a constant stream of U.S. government official visits have followed.
Relations tightened after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks when India was among the first to offer operational support to the United States.
--------
India Weighs Response to Deadly Kashmir Raid
May 16, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-southasia.html
NEW DELHI/ISLAMABAD - India's army chief said on Thursday the country needed to respond to a deadly raid on an army camp in revolt-racked Kashmir as ministers and military commanders debated New Delhi's next move.
``This is time for action,'' General S. Padmanabhan told reporters but added the decision on what steps to take had to be made by ``the entire nation.''
The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party-led government was due to make a statement on Friday in parliament on India's response to the raid in the disputed Himalayan territory that New Delhi has blamed on Pakistan-based Kashmiri separatist militants.
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has called the attack in which three suspected separatist Islamic rebels killed 31 people -- mainly women and children -- a ``massacre of innocents.'' The three attackers were gunned down by security forces.
He said India will take ``appropriate action'' in response to the raid, the bloodiest in eight months in the scenic region that used to be a tourist favorite before the revolt erupted in 1989.
The attack renewed fears of war between nuclear foes India and Pakistan, which have massed a million men on both sides of their border in a standoff sparked by a December raid on India's parliament that New Delhi also blamed on Pakistan-based rebels.
Most analysts said New Delhi was weighing risks of a limited strike, most likely at rebel bases across the Line of Control dividing Indian and Pakistani forces in Kashmir.
``I would not rule it (a limited strike) out in the coming four months. The weather is clear. Between now and the end of September is the crucial period,'' former Indian foreign secretary J.N. Dixit told Reuters.
``The army is in a mood to do something across the Line of Control,'' he said. ``Indian public opinion generally has been in favor of action against Pakistan.''
Few think India would risk a large-scale attack against Pakistan, which has not ruled out using nuclear weapons to defend itself from a conventional assault.
Pakistan's government has also condemned the death of civilians during the attack and strongly denied any involvement, but said it stood ready to ``defend every inch of Pakistan.''
On Thursday, Indian ministers, army and security chiefs met to discuss New Delhi's reply to the attack on the army camp.
The Home Ministry later said India would bolster measures to check infiltration by Pakistan-based rebels into Jammu and Kashmir, India's only Muslim-majority state.
``Action against overground support base of the terrorists were discussed,'' it added in a statement, without elaborating.
U.S. KEEPS UP PRESSURE
The meeting came as the United States kept up pressure on India and Pakistan to avoid a conflict and reiterated its support for India in fighting terrorism.
``Terrorism against India is as unacceptable as it is against America or any other country,'' Robert Blackwill, U.S. ambassador to India, said after meeting Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani.
Advani, seen as a hawk, had earlier on Thursday criticized western nations for continuing economic aid to Pakistan, despite what he called Islamabad's support of terrorism against India.
``There's deep anger in India toward Pakistan but also disappointment in India toward these western countries,'' he said.
In a flurry of telephone diplomacy on Wednesday, President Bush called Vajpayee to condemn the raid while Secretary of State Colin Powell phoned Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf to ease tensions.
The United States, which has won the backing of both countries in its war on terror, is fearful that even limited military action by India could escalate into war and derail its fight to root out al Qaeda militants in Afghanistan.
Analysts said the government under fire over religious violence in western India and reeling from a string of regional election routs, may feel under pressure to take military action.
``This is a distinct possibility they might do something to rally the people behind them,'' said defense strategist Bharat Karnad. ``It (the raid) could goad them into doing it considering there are some political payoffs.
The escalating tension hit Indian shares which ended at near a three-week low. ``We're concerned about the emerging situation,'' said London-based Tim Dickson who manages $200 million in India for F&C. But Pakistani shares closed slightly up.
The standoff between the foes who have fought three wars -- two over Kashmir -- since independence from Britain in 1947 has entered a critical stage as the Himalayan snows melt, opening up mountain passes and infiltration routes.
In fresh violence, an Indian security force officer was killed when rebels fired on a security patrol south of Srinagar, the state's summer capital, police said. Elsewhere four died in shootouts but their identity was not disclosed.
India accuses Pakistan of fomenting rebellion against its rule in Kashmir by arming militants and sending them across the heavily militarized border. Pakistan denies the charge.
Some dozen rebel groups are battling Indian rule in Kashmir. Officials say at least 33,000 people have been killed since the revolt erupted. Separatists say the toll is at least 80,000.
-------- iran
Khatami Says U.S. Group Threatens World with War
May 16, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-iran-usa.html
TEHRAN - Iranian President Mohamad Khatami has accused ``a small, but influential group in the United States (of) threatening the world with war.''
Khatami was speaking on Wednesday during a tour of a northern province bordering the Caspian Sea, the official IRNA news agency said on Thursday.
``We are not so selfish as to accuse all the American nation of being evil. However there is a small, but influential group in the United States that is threatening the world with war through their violent and war-mongering policies,'' IRNA quoted the normally mild-mannered president as saying.
``We have a national, religious and humanitarian duty to defend our country and we will not surrender to any aggressor,'' Khatami said.
Sharp rhetoric from Washington has sparked fierce debate in Tehran, which President George Bush accuses of forming part of an ``axis of evil.''
Some Iranian reformists have called for opening talks with the ``Great Satan'' and conservatives have demanded an end to dissent for the sake of national unity.
``We don't accuse the United States of being part of an axis of evil, although we believe that what Washington says today is clear proof of their evil,'' Khatami said.
The reformist president has always argued for trying to repair ties with Washington, but says it should first apologize for past misdeeds and ease sanctions on Iran.
Hard-liners who look to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei have ruled out any talks with their arch-enemy which cut ties with Iran in 1980 after radical students seized dozens of U.S. diplomats and held them hostage for 444 days.
HARD-LINER TALKS WITH U.S.?
Yet reformists have persistently accused conservatives in the last month of sending delegates to meet U.S. officials in Europe and on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. They say talks should be conducted through official government channels.
Analysts say Khatami's hawkish comments on relations with Washington in the last week are an attempt to expose alleged conservative double-standards on the issue.
Hard-liners have denied conducting talks with U.S. officials, but a spokesman for Khatami's government said on Wednesday the Intelligence Ministry had been asked to investigate the charges.
Bush said in January that Iran, along with Iraq and North Korea, formed ``an axis of evil'' for trying to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Other U.S. leaders have since heaped blame on Iran, accusing the Islamic Republic of harboring al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters fleeing from neighboring Afghanistan -- charges Tehran denies.
In his speech Khatami also indirectly accused the United States of interfering in the Caspian Sea, where U.S. companies are involved in helping other littoral states develop its potentially rich energy resources.
``The Caspian Sea should be under the dominion of the five coastal countries and foreigners should not interfere in it,'' he said. ``We want this sea to be a sea of peace and we are trying to reach a proper legal regime through dialogue and understanding.''
The coastal states -- Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan -- have failed to agree on how to divide the sea's resources since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 which rendered older treaties out of date.
-------- iraq
Iraq Accepts U.N. Sanctions Reforms
May 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-UN.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Iraq begrudgingly accepted a new U.N. resolution that makes sweeping changes to the current sanctions program, but still criticized the new measures Thursday, saying they exposed America's ``tendency toward harming Iraq.''
The comments come two days after the U.N. Security Council revamped the sanctions to speed the delivery of food and medicine and also strengthen an 11-year-old military embargo. It extends a humanitarian program under which Iraq can sell oil for things like food, medicine and educational services.
Tuesday's vote was the greatest change in the humanitarian program since its launch in 1996 to help Iraq's people cope with sanctions imposed after President Saddam Hussein sent troops into Kuwait in 1990.
Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf told the official Iraqi News Agency that ``Iraq will reluctantly accept Resolution 1409 regarding the renewal of the oil-for-food deal for another six months.''
But in a separate statement released to the agency, the Iraqi leadership described the new U.N. sanctions plan as a U.S. manipulation of the Security Council.
``Once again the Security Council ... exposes its weakness and inability to face the American tendency toward harming Iraq,'' INA quoted a statement issued in a joint meeting of the Revolutionary Command Council and the Regional Command of the ruling Baath party as saying.
To what extent Iraq would work with the resolution beyond agreeing to an extension under its terms for the humanitarian oil-for-food program wasn't clear. Baghdad has yet to agree to the U.N.'s chief demand -- permitting weapons inspectors to return to Iraq.
Tough U.N. sanctions were imposed on Iraq following its invasion of Kuwait, which led to the 1991 Gulf War. To lift the sanctions, international inspectors must certify Iraq has eliminated its weapons of mass destruction. Baghdad claims it has done this, but has not let inspectors into Iraq since 1998, saying sanctions must be lifted first.
In Cairo, Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa said the Iraqi approval was ``a positive step'' and said ``the sanctions issue is gradually heading toward being solved.''
The new sanctions regime capped yearlong U.S. and British efforts to both get more humanitarian goods to Iraqis and tighten the military embargo on Baghdad. Under the program, most civilian goods are to be allowed into Iraq, but a 332-page checklist spells out civilian items with potential military use that require approval of the United Nations.
Iraq's U.N. ambassador, Mohammad Al-Douri, had said earlier that the new goods review list will complicate, not simplify, delivery of humanitarian items and harm Iraq's economy by blocking agricultural, electrical and sanitation imports. He said Baghdad was ``unhappy'' with any resolution that didn't lift sanctions.
The influential state-run Babil newspaper called the revamped sanctions a U.S. attempt to prolong the economic embargo rather than to ease Iraqis' suffering.
``Changing the U.N. party responsible for monitoring the flow of goods to Iraq will not end the evil and negative impact of the ongoing embargo imposed on our country since 1990,'' the daily owned by President Saddam Hussein's eldest son Odai said in a front-page editorial.
Babil also said the Security Council resolution ``is a breach to the U.N. charter because it neglects Iraq's right to self defense against any external attack.''
Also Thursday, the ruling Baath party newspaper al-Thawra labeled British Defense Minister, Geoffrey Hoon ``another evil liar.''
Hoon, referring to calls for the return of U.N. weapons inspectors, told reporters Tuesday in Kuwait that it was important for the sake of international security to know ``what is happening in Iraq as far as the development of weapons of mass destruction are concerned.''
Al-Thawra said Iraq has no intention of threatening neighboring countries or world security.
--------
Iraq May Be Considering Inspections
May 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-UN-Iraq.html
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Iraq appears to be seriously considering allowing U.N. weapons inspectors to return more than three years after barring them from the country, a top U.S. diplomat says.
``I think a lot of people are telling us the Iraqis are seriously thinking about this now,'' James Cunningham, the U.S. Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations, told reporters Wednesday.
Since March, Iraq's Foreign Minister Naji Sabri has held two rounds of talks with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the return of inspectors who left Baghdad ahead of U.S. and British airstrikes 3 1/2 years ago and have been barred from returning.
``As long as the secretary-general and his people ... think there's a chance of bringing the Iraqis to that point for whatever reason, we think it's a useful thing to do,'' Cunningham said. A tape recording of his comments was obtained by The Associated Press.
Cunningham said the Iraqis have had ``ample opportunity'' to exchange views with Annan, discuss technical issues with chief weapons inspector Hans Blix, and consult Security Council members on other questions it raised. Some were political, including U.S. threats to topple Saddam Hussein and U.S. and British enforcement of ``no-fly'' zones over northern and southern Iraq.
``I don't think anybody thinks that this process should drag on for months,'' Cunningham said, noting that the 15 members of the Security Council were united in wanting the inspectors to return as soon as possible.
The council imposed sanctions after Saddam's forces marched into Kuwait in 1990. The sanctions can only be lifted when U.N. inspectors declare that Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs have been dismantled along with the long-range missiles to deliver them.
The United States has threatened to use force if Saddam doesn't allow inspectors to return.
Cunningham said the United States is pursuing ``two tracks'' toward Iraq that aren't necessarily linked: getting inspectors back into Iraq and improving the delivery of civilian goods to ordinary Iraqis by revamping the U.N. oil-for-food program, and pursuing the Bush administration's goal of getting rid of Saddam.
``Not everybody yet agrees with us on the concept of regime change, but we're working on that,'' he said. ``We don't have any plans or timing for a specific project, military or otherwise, that has yet been put into place to effect regime change, but we're looking at a lot of options.''
The Security Council voted unanimously Tuesday to revamp sanctions, capping a yearlong effort by the United States and Britain to get more humanitarian goods to the Iraqi people and try to keep weapons of mass destruction out of Saddam's hands.
The resolution allows the free flow of most civilian goods into Iraq and requires U.N. approval for delivery of civilian items with potential military use on a 332-page checklist.
Initially, the two Western allies also wanted to plug Iraqi oil smuggling routes and post new monitors along Iraq's borders. But that proposal was dropped in July after Russia -- Iraq's most powerful council ally, which wants sanctions suspended -- threatened a veto.
In a compromise reached in November, Russia agreed to adopt the dual-use review list. The United States, in turn, agreed to Russia's long-standing demand to discuss what steps Iraq needs to take to suspend sanctions.
Russia's U.N. Ambassador Sergey Lavrov said after Tuesday's vote that the council should now discuss ``a comprehensive settlement'' of the sanctions issue -- including spelling out the steps.
But Cunningham seemed to back away from the commitment to Russia.
-------- israel / palestine
Admitting Errors, Arafat Promises a Wave of Reform
New York Times
May 16, 2002
By JAMES BENNET
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/16/international/middleeast/16ARAF.html
RAMALLAH, West Bank, May 15 - Yasir Arafat responded today to growing Palestinian and international pressure for reform by acknowledging mistakes and promising changes to his administration and new elections, though he presented scant details.
But his pledges to move ahead with reforms were unlikely to sway an Israeli government and army convinced that no promises from Mr. Arafat are credible.
A senior Israeli military official said today in Washington that the Bush administration's plans to send George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, to the region were pointless because Israel would never trust any Palestinian security force controlled by Mr. Arafat, even one that Mr. Tenet helped build. [Page A12.]
The Palestinian leader spoke a day after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel demanded reform as a condition for negotiations. But Mr. Arafat appeared to be responding more to American pressure and to a rising clamor among Palestinians for change, including elections and improvements in fighting corruption, in separation of powers and in civil freedoms. Many long-simmering frustrations are suddenly boiling over.
"This is the right time for change and reform, despite all the attempts to undermine our efforts," Mr. Arafat said in a speech here to the Palestinian Legislative Council. "This is the time for work, for building."
The speech fell on the annual Palestinian commemoration of the Nakba, or catastrophe, as they call the 1948 declaration of Israeli independence in what they consider their homeland. A year ago, thousands of Palestinians demonstrated in downtown Ramallah. Today, perhaps 200 people showed up, and Mr. Arafat made only passing reference to it in his speech, which pivoted from a grim account of the recent struggle with Israel to his proposals for the future, blending promises of change with appeals for patience.
The developing change in Palestinian politics, which is seen as no immediate threat to Mr. Arafat's hold on power, was reflected in legislators' pleased but skeptical reception of the speech. Applause for his call for elections turned to gentle laughter when he suggested there was no hurry, adding, "We should be responsible - we should implement what we can."
"This is great," Ahmad al-Deek, a longtime member of Mr. Arafat's Fatah movement, said afterward. But, he added, "We don't want programs. We want practical steps."
Some advocates of governmental reform fear that the sudden interest at the top may be less a reflection of desire for change than of hope that it can be shaped to benefit the current leadership.
Nader Said, a sociologist at Bir Zeit University, said that some potential beneficiaries of reform were "the people who are behind the corruption. So how can we trust them again to lead the society on a democratic basis?"
Nabil Amr, who resigned last week as Mr. Arafat's minister of parliamentary affairs, citing a lack of reform, said, "We must see what he will do on the ground. We need a new government." Mr. Amr, long viewed as a member of Mr. Arafat's circle, is suspected by other Palestinian politicians and political analysts of trying to leap to the head of the parade - evidence, in any event, of the political dynamic at work.
Abdul Jawad Saleh, a leader of the legislative opposition, waved a copy of a speech that he said Mr. Arafat gave more than a year ago. "It's the same," he said, "only now it's more detailed." He added, "Nothing he said last year he has implemented."
Mr. Saleh said of Mr. Arafat: "He's not serious. He's serious when there is pressure against him." He called for demonstrations and civil disobedience by Palestinians to express what he called their desire for "real and substantive reforms and freedoms," noting a lack of freedom of the press.
But Mr. Saleh warned that Israeli and American demands "make it harder" for advocates of reform by making them appear to serve foreign interests.
Some Palestinian politicians, including members of Fatah, have called for years for civic reform. Hussam Khader, a Palestinian legislator from Nablus, has derided Mr. Arafat's intimates as "the Oslo Economic Party," a reference to corruption he believes was fostered by the Oslo peace process.
In his speech, Mr. Arafat repeated his stated opposition to attacks on Israeli civilians, saying that "they do not serve our interests."
Some of the men prompting calls for reform may be among those who gain from it. Many Palestinians are angry with Muhammad Rashid, a financial adviser to Mr. Arafat who has served as a conduit to Israel by meeting with Mr. Sharon's son, Omri. Mr. Rashid is linked to Muhammad Dahlan, the chief of Palestinian security in Gaza, who has emerged as a favorite of Mr. Arafat.
Mr. Dahlan has been chafing at the lack of promotion within the Palestinian Authority as aging ministers cling to their portfolios.
Another ally of those officials, Hanan Asfour, a Palestinian minister, was badly beaten outside his home here by five masked men on Sunday, in a sign of the intensity of the jockeying for power.
Mr. Arafat has been sharply criticized by many Palestinians for permitting 13 Palestinians accused by Israel of terrorism to be sent into exile to resolve the 39-day standoff at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Mr. Rashid was involved in striking that deal. Obliquely referring to such criticism today, Mr. Arafat said that only he should be blamed for any mistakes.
"I am telling you, if there is a mistake, I am responsible," he said, in a highly unusual acknowledgment. But, he added, "There is no movement without mistakes in the whole world."
Israel's president, Moshe Katsav, said after Mr. Arafat's speech: "Leaders are allowed to make mistakes - it's only human. But the problem with Arafat is that he consciously and deliberately makes these mistakes."
Palestinians are dispirited by the overwhelming Israeli military offensive and by their dwindling economy, some Palestinian leaders said. "What's frustrating is the political situation and the leadership, which did not achieve what it is calling for," said Jamal Barghouti, a Fatah activist.
In his speech, Mr. Arafat called on the legislators to make "a review that touches all our aspects of life." After ignoring the bill for 18 months, Mr. Arafat on Tuesday signed into a law a measure granting judicial independence.
After Mr. Sharon made his demand for Palestinian reform on Tuesday, some Israeli politicians suggested that he was asking too much of the Palestinian Authority, which has been crippled by the conflict with Israel. But Palestinian politicians said today that real reform would speed their pursuit of a state.
They may lack a state, but the Palestinians have established a formidable bureaucracy. Mr. Arafat oversees 28 ministries, from agriculture to youth and athletics. Many Palestinians complain that they get little help from the administration, but they also blame the Israeli incursions and their blockades of Palestinian areas.
Palestinians have not held elections since January 1996, when they voted for the president, Mr. Arafat, and 88 members of the legislative council. Israel would have to ease its restrictions for elections to be held.
The Bush administration has been urging reform of the Palestinian Authority, with particular attention to the multiple security agencies. But it recently balked at a French proposal for prompt elections, fearing that extremists would gain.
Mr. Said, the sociologist, said of the prospect of elections, "What is missing is the more liberal, secular, democratic faction, which is not very organized."
He said that the United States views Arab states only as corrupt clients or fundamentalist dictatorships. "They can't see that there is a potentially vibrant democratic movement in the Arab world," he said.
--------
West Bank Damages Put at $361 Million
New York Times
May 16, 2002
By JOEL GREENBERG
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/16/international/middleeast/16DAMA.html
JERUSALEM, May 15 - Israel's recent military offensive in the West Bank caused physical damage estimated at $361 million, according to an assessment issued here today by international donors who are mobilizing to finance reconstruction. By comparison, the first 15 months of Israeli-Palestinian fighting, which erupted in September 2000, caused an estimated $305 million in damage.
The damage assessment was carried out by the World Bank, United Nations agencies, the European Union, the United States Agency for International Development, and officials from Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and Norway, in cooperation with the Palestinian Authority.
It was the first attempt to quantify the damage caused by the Israeli military campaign against six cities and other towns and villages in the West Bank, which began on March 29 in Ramallah and ended last Friday with a pullout from Bethlehem. The estimate does not cover losses of income, which are far greater.
According to the donors' estimate, private businesses took the heaviest losses, suffering $97 million in damage, of which $50 million was harm to buildings and equipment and loss of inventory.
Damage to roads was estimated at $64 million, housing at $66 million and cultural heritage sites at $48 million.
The Nablus area was the hardest hit, with repair costs there estimated at $114 million. Losses in Jenin were put at $83 million; damage to housing in the Jenin refugee camp was put at $27 million, and 800 families there were left homeless, the donors said.
In Ramallah, the seat of Palestinian government, ministries were ransacked, with computers and office equipment destroyed. Replacement and repair costs were estimated at $9.5 million, with total damages in the city put at $51 million, including 350 cars wrecked.
Donors have already promised initial aid of $150 million for urgent repairs, and the bulk of the damage could be fixed within a year, said Nigel Roberts, director of the World Bank office for the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He added that the aid would have to come entirely from foreign contributions, because the Palestinian Authority is "effectively bankrupt."
--------
Arafat concedes making mistakes
May 16, 2002
From combined dispatches
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020516-80863390.htm
RAMALLAH, West Bank - Yasser Arafat, responding to pressure at home and abroad to overhaul his government, yesterday said he had made mistakes and called for sweeping reforms and new elections.
But he gave few details and won only polite applause when he announced his plans to the Palestinian Legislative Council, a day after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ruled out peace talks unless he cleaned up his "corrupt terror regime."
"It is the time for change and reform," Mr. Arafat said in a speech on the day Palestinians commemorate the "Nakba" (Catastrophe), the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in fighting as Israel was created in 1948.
"I call for a review of all our administrative, ministerial and security forces," Mr. Arafat, wearing his trademark military uniform and Arab headdress, told the lawmakers gathered in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
The United States and the European Union welcomed the statement but said they were looking for action from the Palestinian leader to fulfill his promises, which, if carried out, could push the stalled Middle East peace process forward.
Mr. Arafat said the struggle for a Palestinian state would continue and that peace remained his "strategic" goal.
But he reiterated calls for attacks on Israeli civilians to cease and, in a rare display of self-criticism, accepted blame for any mistakes made by the Palestinian leadership.
There was little expectation that Mr. Arafat would loosen his grip on power despite Mr. Sharon's efforts to sideline him, and some of the legislators said they had heard such promises before.
European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana told the European Parliament that Mr. Arafat had told him he planned to hold legislative and local council elections by the fall.
Palestinian parliamentary Speaker Ahmed Korei said he expected the municipal elections before the end of this year and elections to the legislature at the start of next year.
Mr. Arafat's comments followed demands by Israel, Palestinians and the United States for change in the Palestinian Authority after years of failure to bring prosperity and charges of cronyism, corruption and inefficiency.
The White House said President Bush was looking for deeds from Mr. Arafat to follow his pledges.
"Yasser Arafat's words are positive. What is important, and what the president will await to see, is whether there is any action," spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters.
Israel took a wait-and-see approach. "These words must be accompanied by an uncompromising fight against terrorism, by a consolidation of all Palestinian armed forces under a single central authority," Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said.
Calls for change have grown more insistent since Israeli forces ended a 35-day siege of Mr. Arafat's Ramallah headquarters earlier this month after a major Israeli offensive across the West Bank.
"Our dream is real freedom and complete independence in the state of Palestine with Jerusalem as the capital. Whoever likes it or not, it is our aim to have that," Mr. Arafat said.
In Israel, the status of Jerusalem was among the topics at a heated debate between two top Labor party leaders at a convention yesterday.
Meeting at a seaside convention hall at a collective village north of Tel Aviv, the Labor leader, Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer, 65, and Haim Ramon, 52, a charismatic legislator and ex-Cabinet minister proposed conflicting views on peace with Palestinians. The two are competing for Labor's nomination to run for prime minister next year.
Speaking at the convention, Mr. Ben Eliezer endorsed a December 2000 plan by President Clinton, calling for an Israeli pullback from Gaza, virtually all of the West Bank and Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem.
He said there should be a "special regime" for the city's disputed shrines, holy to Jews, Muslims and Christians, meaning that Israel would drop demands to be the sovereign there.
It was the most far-reaching proposal yet by any senior Israeli official regarding the division of Jerusalem. The deal offered to the Palestinians in July 2000 by Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Labor was similar to what Mr. Ben-Eliezer outlined yesterday, but Mr. Barak stopped short of giving up sovereignty over the Temple Mount, known to Muslims as Haram-as-Sharif.
Mr. Ramon proposed pulling out of all of Gaza and much of the West Bank, dismantling settlements and building a border fence.
Mr. Ramon's concept, called "unilateral separation," is gaining popularity in public opinion surveys, reflecting disillusionment with peace talks and disappointment with the military's inability to stop Palestinian attacks in Israel without a West Bank-Israel border.
The Labor meeting followed a convention of Mr. Sharon's Likud Party on Sunday, where Mr. Sharon suffered a humiliating defeat when delegates voted in favor of a proposal - backed by his main rival Benjamin Netanyahu - opposing the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Labor has long advocated far-reaching compromises with the Palestinians in exchange for peace.
In fresh violence, Palestinian officials said a 17-year-old was killed by Israeli tank fire in central Gaza. The Israeli army said its forces fired back after a mortar attack but denied they used tank shells.
Israeli troops backed by four tanks and an armored bulldozer, pushed 200 yards into a Palestinian-controlled sector of the southern Gaza Strip early yesterday and destroyed three houses, Palestinian security sources said.
--------
Israeli Tanks Enter West Bank City
May 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Palestinians-Incursion.html
RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) -- Israeli tanks roared into the Palestinian city of Jenin in the West Bank early Friday, and shooting exchanges broke out, witnesses said.
More than 20 tanks and other armored vehicles entered the city from the west at about 3:30 a.m., and soon after, gunfire and explosions were heard, Palestinian residents of the city said.
There was no immediate word on casualties and the Israeli military declined immediate comment.
Last week, Israeli troops completed a six-week sweep that targeted militants in the Palestinian cities and towns of the West Bank.
Israeli forces have continued to make brief incursions to arrest or kill suspected militants, but the operation in Jenin appeared to be on a larger scale.
The Jenin refugee camp, which is adjacent to the city of Jenin, was the scene of fierce fighting last month.
Friday's incursion targeted the city, and troops did not immediately enter the refugee camp.
-------- nato
Senate Debates NATO Expansion
May 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-NATO-Expansion.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Despite misgivings over costs, the Senate seemed headed toward passage of a bill endorsing NATO expansion and giving $55.5 million in security assistance to seven countries that hope to join the military alliance.
``This bill is a symbolic one,'' Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said as debate began Thursday night, noting that a spending bill approved the money last year for the seven nations, all former Warsaw Pact members.
``Symbolism, however, matters,'' he said. ``Millions of Central and East Europeans, and millions of Americans of Central and East European descent, will welcome this restatement of NATO's so-called `Open Door' policy, which was the policy of the Clinton administration and which has been continued by the current Bush administration.''
The Senate was to vote on the measure Friday. The House approved it Nov. 7 by a 372-46 vote.
Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld endorsed the bill in a letter to lawmakers May 7.
The legislation, they said, would ``reinforce our nation's commitment to the achievement of freedom, peace and security in Europe ... and would greatly enhance our ability to work with aspirant countries as they prepare to join with NATO and work with us to meet the 21st century's threats to our common security.''
Sen. John Warner, R-Va., said he supports the outlay but not the rhetoric accompanying it, which he said ``could send the wrong message'' by failing to say how the countries would be judged for admittance to the military alliance.
``What we're doing is saying to the American taxpayer, ... and the men and women of the armed forces of the United States, that attack against one is an attack against all,'' said the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee. ``And such new members as we may admit, what do they bring to the table to participate in first deterring an attack, and, if necessary, repelling that attack?''
Warner noted that other NATO countries' military budgets are not increasing at the same pace as the U.S. defense budget, and he wanted the Senate to ensure that any new NATO members ``are ready and able to contribute to security.''
NATO is to decide at a Prague summit next year whether to admit new members. The bill expresses support for that expansion, in line with statements by Bush last June and by former President Clinton in October 1996.
All candidates invited to join are submitted to the legislatures of the 19 NATO members for ratification, Biden said, and the Senate will be able to express its views on nations' fitness for inclusion in NATO in the ratification debate. ``Why we're doing this now is that it is important, in my view, to continue to display to these European aspirants that we are seriously considering them,'' he said.
The security assistance in the bill: Estonia, $6.5 million; Latvia, $7 million; Lithuania, $7.5 million; Slovakia, $8.5 million; Slovenia, $4.5 million; Bulgaria, $10 million; and Romania, $11.5 million.
The Senate bill is S. 1572.
The House bill is H.R. 3167.
-------- philippines
Drugs, Terror and Tuna: How Goals Clash
New York Times
May 16, 2002
By KEITH BRADSHER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/16/international/asia/16TUNA.html
GENERAL SANTOS CITY, the Philippines, May 15 - This industrial city on the southern coast of Mindanao Island illustrates how America's various strategic aims in the wars on drugs and terrorism can clash, alienating important allies engaged in battling terrorism.
Among leaders of the Philippines' important tuna industry here, resentment is running high over trade legislation now on the Senate floor in Washington. The bill includes a provision to eliminate steep import taxes on canned tuna from Andean nations while keeping taxes in place for other countries like the Philippines.
The provision has attracted Congressional support because it is seen as bolstering America's war on drugs. The idea is that the bill will help create well-paid jobs in Ecuador and Colombia as an alternative to the drug trade.
But in another war - the one against terrorism - the legislation is causing anger in a country that has become an important part of the administration's plans.
It comes at a time when 600 American soldiers are helping the Philippine Army track Abu Sayyaf Muslim insurgents in the southernmost Philippines, and President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has staked much political capital on helping the United States fight terrorism.
Virtually all of the tuna industry of the Philippines is located here and it employs thousands of migrant workers from small Muslim fishing communities that used to be bastions of various Muslim insurgencies. Local officials warn that the legislation could wipe out the tuna industry.
President Arroyo said that passage of the trade provision would deal a severe blow to the economy here while handing a propaganda victory to the Abu Sayyaf movement.
The combination would create heavy domestic pressure for the Philippines to retreat from its active support for the American war on terrorism, she warned in a telephone interview tonight.
"I will try very hard not to, but I will be under tremendous pressure," she said.
In much of the developing world, including Latin America and Africa, trade restrictions or tariffs on products ranging from steel to textiles are causing growing resentment toward the United States. The perception that the Bush administration is a protectionist one is growing.
President Arroyo argued that General Santos, the main city on the southern coast of Mindanao and home to most of the Philippines' tuna fishing fleet and canneries, was central both to the economic future of this region and to the fight against terrorism.
A powerful pipe bomb packed with nails exploded on a crowded sidewalk outside a supermarket here on April 21, killing 15 people and wounding dozens. A second pipe bomb was safely defused before it exploded at another supermarket the same day, and two shopping complexes have recently burned down here in the middle of the night in separate, unexplained incidents.
Police detectives here say that they are still unsure whether the attacks were terrorist incidents, criminal attempts at extortion or some combination of the two. But President Arroyo expresses no such doubts, saying tonight, "The Abu Sayyaf has been trying to get into General Santos and it has been very difficult for us to justify our support for the United States."
In a city where tunas festoon everything from billboards to restaurant signs, and where even the golf tournament is the Tuna Cup, the fishing industry's influence is impossible to miss.
Workers heave baskets of fish onto crude steel carts, which they then pull by hand over to a long open-sided shed. Women wash and sort the fish on long tables, the concrete floor beneath them dark and slippery with fish blood. A few larger tuna, some the size of a man, are carried individually to large, white boxes packed with half-melted ice, to be shipped directly to Japan to be turned into sashimi.
Renato Alonzo, 47, a fisherman in a ragged T-shirt and flip-flops whose boat had just docked after two weeks at sea, said that he had sold his tiny farm and joined a boat crew 10 years ago after learning he could nearly double his income, to roughly $4,000 a year. Now he can afford to send his two sons, aged 12 and 8, to school.
The bustling fishing port here and the nearby row of tuna canneries contrast sharply with most of Mindanao, where peasants still toil on subsistence farms or on large pineapple and coconut plantations. Years of drought, coupled with inadequate irrigation, have crippled agriculture while the global glut of low-priced steel has forced the closing of a big steel mill in northern Mindanao.
The tuna industry here barely existed until the late 1980's when the United States led Japan, Italy and other donor nations in an ambitious foreign aid program aimed at rebuilding the Philippines after the fall of Ferdinand Marcos.
A full-scale guerrilla war was being waged in Mindanao then, a far broader conflict than the handful of kidnappings and possibly bombings linked to Abu Sayyaf now. General Santos City was nearly surrounded by several very large insurgencies that attracted poor youths from the island's Muslim minority. The city had a small fishing fleet, but it mostly caught fish for local consumption.
But the world's richest tuna fishing grounds lay between here and Indonesia, although boats from Thailand mainly fished them then. Foreign donors built the fishing port here as well as a large cargo airport, a container port, extensive roads and a modern phone system, hiring security guards from rebel forces and buying sand, gravel and other construction materials from rebel leaders' businesses.
With ready transportation to foreign markets, six big canneries were built, each employing more than 1,000 workers. The only two other tuna canneries in the Philippines are in Zamboanga City in southwestern Mindanao, the staging area for American troops pursuing Abu Sayyaf. Some 30,000 fishermen now supply the canneries.
The tuna boom has helped persuade all of the rebel movements except the Abu Sayyaf splinter group to lay down their arms under armistices with the government. Many former rebel commanders and foot soldiers have taken jobs at the canneries, which have had no problem with the bombings that have afflicted shopping centers.
Abuhasan Jama is a former major in the Moro National Liberation Front who studied guerrilla warfare in Malaysia in 1979 and 1980 and then spent 13 years fighting the Philippine government in the jungles of Mindanao.
Now he is the security chief at Ocean Canning here, his eldest daughter is in college and he has found jobs at the same cannery for three cousins who are also former guerrillas. "I like to work," said Mr. Jama, 41, recalling that in the jungle "sometimes you'd just eat leaves, the roots."
Mariano M. Fernandez, the general manager of Ocean Canning, said that he used to carry two Smith & Wesson handguns, one strapped on each hip. "It was like the Wild West here," he said, adding that he carries only a cellphone now.
Most of the tuna canned here is sold in the United States under less famous brands like Geisha and Dagim. Bumble Bee and Starkist used to buy large quantities of tuna here but have recently begun relying on Ecuador instead, allowing that country to edge past the Philippines last year to become the second-largest foreign supplier of tuna to the United States, after Thailand. Starkist in particular is now pushing for the elimination of import tariffs on canned tuna from Ecuador.
-------- us
Rumsfeld Wants Focus on New Technology
May 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Crusader.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld tried Thursday to sell the Senate Armed Services Committee on his decision last week to cancel the Crusader mobile cannon program.
The key behind the decision, he said, was the need to spend finite resources wisely by focusing on new technologies to face the enemies of the future.
``It is clear that continuing to fund a program we know will not best meet the mission would be irresponsible and a misuse of taxpayers' dollars,'' he said. ``If there is one thing that Sept. 11 has taught us, it is that we can no longer ignore the warnings of the past or delay preparation for the future.''
Terminating Crusader ``is not about killing a bad system,'' he said. The issue, he said, ``is about forgoing a system originally designed for a different strategic context to make room for more promising technologies that can accelerate transformation.''
Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., questioned Rumsfeld's abrupt change of view: ``Until very recently the civilian and military leadership of the Defense Department consistently and strongly supported the Crusader program in testimony before the Congress.''
Levin cited a Pentagon inspector general's finding that the Army first learned about Crusader's cancellation from a contractor. Word quickly spread to Capitol Hill, prompting a public announcement by Rumsfeld.
``We shouldn't let leaks drive policy, or else we're all going to be driven crazy and make bad decisions,'' Levin said.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said the timing was driven not by leaks but by the ``need to get information to the committee in a timely fashion for your deliberations'' on the 2003 defense budget.
The Crusader has some strong supporters on Capitol Hill.
Despite a veto threat, the House last week voted for a defense authorization bill for the 2003 budget year that included the Bush administration's previously requested $475 million for Crusader, plus nonbinding language telling the Pentagon not to kill the program before producing a study on alternatives.
The Senate Armed Services Committee's version of the bill also contained the $475 million, but Levin said senators included no orders about the Crusader's future so they could hear first from Rumsfeld.
The Crusader is planned as a 40-ton, self-propelled cannon designed to rain 155 mm shells every six seconds on enemy forces more than 25 miles away. Slated as an $11 billion program, $2 billion has already been spent. The only one built so far weighs 60 tons, Rumsfeld said.
Rumsfeld and other critics have said it's too big and too unwieldy to fit in with the Army's plans for a lighter, faster and more mobile force. He said it would take 60 to 64 giant C-17 transport planes -- one half the fleet -- to move 18 Crusaders with all their accouterments to a foreign battlefield.
Supporters -- who until last week included Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Army Secretary Thomas White -- said Crusader would save soldiers' lives by hitting enemy forces before they are within striking range of U.S. troops.
Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki told the committee the Crusader remains the best answer to the military's artillery needs.
Committee reaction was mixed.
``I hope that you succeed here,'' Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told Rumsfeld. ``All of us should be aware that if you fail here, it would be very difficult to make any of the much needed changes and transformations that you committed to at your confirmation hearings in response to questions from members of this committee.''
But Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga., told Rumsfeld, ``I'm embarrassed for you and the department.'' Questioning how the money from Crusader would be used, Cleland said, ``I'm not going to buy a pig in a poke, not with troops in the field out there needing artillery support.''
--------
US Troops to Stay 2 Years in Georgia
May 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Georgia-US-Troops.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- American troops landing in Georgia in the next few days plan to remain in the former Soviet republic for almost two years as they train key units of the Georgian armed forces, the commander of the U.S force said Thursday.
The Pentagon has said the training will help the Georgian military ``address the situation in the Pankisi Gorge,'' a lawless area of northeast Georgia where Washington says terrorists linked to al-Qaida may be sheltered among Muslim guerrillas.
The training program commander told reporters, however, that he and his officers will not visit the rugged Pankisi area, just 21 miles by air from Tbilisi, the Georgian capital.
``We have not now nor do we plan to survey or go near Pankisi,'' Lt. Col. Robert M. Waltemeyer said when asked whether they would first reconnoiter the terrain where their trainees may fight. ``My job is to train and equip.''
The training mission ``will complement other counterterrorism efforts around the globe and will increase stability in the Caucasus,'' the Pentagon has said. But it has said U.S. troops will not participate in any military operations in Georgia.
The government in the Black Sea nation of 5 million people remains at an impasse with its breakaway northwestern region of Abkhazia, nine years after fighting a war with Muslim separatists there. In the Pankisi Gorge, spillover from the anti-Russian insurgency in Chechnya heightened tensions as thousands of Chechen refugees crossed into the area in recent years. Moscow says Chechen rebels are among them.
An advance team of about two dozen Americans arrived in Tbilisi in recent weeks to check training sites and otherwise prepare for the Georgia Train and Equip Program, as the U.S. Army mission is called.
The program begins officially May 27 with the opening of a 70-day period of training for Georgian army staff officers, conducted by 70 U.S. Army personnel, Waltemeyer told Moscow journalists in a telephone news conference from Tbilisi.
Some 150 American trainers will then embark on four consecutive 100-day tactical training programs for four specialized Georgian army units, including special forces and commando battalions, Waltemeyer said. That will extend the program into 2004.
Georgian officials have said about 2,000 of their best soldiers will benefit from the training, all of which Waltemeyer said would take place in the Tbilisi area.
The training corps will be based on Special Forces personnel, including soldiers with skills in mountain fighting, urban combat and other specialties, Waltemeyer said.
Under the $64 million program, the Georgian military also will be supplied with small arms and ammunition, some uniform items, and communications and other equipment.
Asked about the quality of the Georgian military, Waltemeyer said some have studied at the Army War College and other advanced U.S. military schools, and ``the talents and capabilities they have are really quite high.'' Of the troops, he said, ``my Green Berets are very impressed with the mental and physical discipline we see in the soldiers.''
-------
GAO: "Encroachment" Not Affecting Readiness
From: Steve Taylor - mailto:Steve@miltoxproj.org
Steve Taylor Military Toxics Project
Date: Thu, 16 May 2002
Testimony delivered to Congress this morning rebuts the Pentagon's claim that exemptions from environmental and public health laws must be enacted immediately to protect military training.
For a couple of years now, the Pentagon has used the term "encroachment" to describe its assault on laws that protect the environment and human health. Military officials argue that training and readiness are being slowly destroyed by urbran sprawl and environmental and human health laws.
The U.S. General Accounting Office - the investigate arm of Congress - testified before the House Government Reform Committee this morning (Thursday, May 16) about its new report on military training. GAO's testimony - based on its draft report, which will not be published until at least mid-June - states that while encroachment is having some impact at some installations, DoD has not demonstrated any effect on troop readiness.
In a section entitled "Effects of Encroachment on Training Readiness Are Not Reflected in Reported Data," the report concludes that:
"Despite the loss of some training range capabilities, service readiness data do not indicate that encroachment has significantly affected training readiness. Even though in testimonies and during many other occasions DOD officials have cited encroachment as preventing the services from training as they would like, DOD's primary readiness reporting system does not reflect the extent to which encroachment is a problem. In fact, it rarely cites training range limitations at all. Similarly, DOD's quarterly reports to Congress, which should identify specific readiness problems, hardly ever mention encroachment as a problem."
The report also notes that none of the armed services have created a comprehensive inventory of training range resources available and whether those resources are adequate to meet training needs. The services also do not generally share information about training range capabilities with other services, inhibiting the cross-service use of ranges to meet training needs.
GAO's testimony is available at http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d02727t.pdf
-------- propaganda wars
Gathering News in the New Russia Can Be Fatal
New York Times
May 16, 2002
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/16/international/europe/16RUSS.html
TOGLIATTI, Russia - In this Russian capital of cars and crime, where contract killings occur as often as once a week, Valery Ivanov, a sharp-penned journalist with a ferocious sense of public duty, had many enemies.
Recently Mr. Ivanov's newspaper, Togliatti Review, published a series of articles on a local crime group. The stories described a spate of contract killings and drew attention to the group's connections with the local police. The articles were Mr. Ivanov's last.
As the 32-year-old reporter was leaving his apartment on the night of April 29, a gunman shot him seven times in front of a handful of stunned neighbors.
Mr. Ivanov was not the first. Since 1995 three other journalists have been killed in this city of 700,000 that is home to Russia's largest carmaker, Avtovaz. Yet another journalist died in a suspicious fire at a police station in neighboring Samara, where records on corruption at Avtovaz were kept.
Ten years after Russia began its rocky ride away from Communism, it is a deeply perilous place to be a journalist. In contrast to the well-publicized tussles between the Kremlin and the independent television network NTV, the killings happen mostly far from the public eye, in provincial towns like these, where the new bandit class is enforcing a form of censorship more brutal than that of Soviet days.
A class of gangsters thrived on the lawlessness and chaos that engulfed Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. They frequently bought the entire apparatus of the local police, prosecutors and judges, who welcomed bribes to supplement their crumb-like salaries. In places like Togliatti, ringed by chemical plants in the west and Russia's main auto manufacturing belts in the east, criminal groups bought virtual impunity.
Few journalists think muckraking is worth the risk anymore. One foreign-financed grant program that gives $1,000 to $2,000 to investigative journalists is not finding as many takers this year as last.
"I am sitting on money, but there is no one to give it to," said Leonid Nikitinsky, a veteran reporter based in Moscow who administers the grants. "There has been a change of mood. It is a very hard genre."
Mr. Ivanov was a college dropout who became a journalist in the early 1990's, just as gang wars were erupting in Togliatti, a center of Russian crime because of its hold over the lucrative car market. In 2000 alone there was an average of about one contract killing a week here.
In 1996, Mr. Ivanov opened Togliatti Review, a scandal-filled tabloid that uncovered numerous connections between gangsters and the city government.
"Valery began to publish the real life of Togliatti that no journalist had touched because it was too dangerous," said Aleksandr Drobotov, chairman of the city council. "He said, `You citizens, you elect government to manage the city budget, but you have no idea how the money is spent.' No one had put the question like this before."
A 1998 exposé on $30 million missing from city coffers cost the mayor his bid for re-election. An article about a series of contract killings enraged one of the crime bosses, who warned Mr. Ivanov in late March that he could be killed.
"Our sources began to tell us: `Are you idiots? Why are you digging there?' " said Aleksei Sidorov, deputy editor of the newspaper and Mr. Ivanov's best friend since college. "We didn't take it seriously enough."
Mr. Ivanov crossed the crime group again with an investigation into city purchases of fuel. The group controlled the fuel market in Togliatti and was selling gasoline to the city at inflated prices and skimming the difference.
The newspaper exposed the practice, and the city was close to stopping it. Mr. Sidorov suspects that was why Mr. Ivanov was killed.
"I think the government knows everything," said Mr. Sidorov, a charge that Aleksandr Loginov, an aide to the mayor, vigorously denied. The prosecutor said 50 people had been questioned, including nine witnesses. So far, no arrests have been made.
The mayor, Mr. Sidorov noted, was on vacation at the time of the killing.
Local governments are often slow to investigate, and nothing moves swiftly through any Russian bureaucracy. But that is especially true when it comes to slain journalists. Aleksei Simonov of the Glasnost Defense Foundation in Moscow estimates that since 1994 about 90 percent of the killings of journalists remain unsolved.
Dmitri Kholodov, a journalist investigating corruption in the military, was killed by a bomb blast in 1994. His newspaper, Moskovsky Komsomolets, with one of the highest circulations in Russia, demanded an investigation, which has dragged on for two years in a special military court.
"The government does not want to admit its guilt in these deaths," said Pavel N. Gusyev, editor in chief of Moskovsky Komsomolets. "Local governments see the federal center is looking away, not demanding that these cases be looked into. That creates impunity. Journalists' mouths are bound when they try to speak about corruption in government."
In the Siberian city of Chita, Vitaly Cherkasov, a police officer turned journalist, recently tasted victory. Mr. Cherkasov, 36, wrote an article that criticized the local prosecutor for quietly closing a criminal case against a well-connected local mobster.
The prosecutor threatened to take legal action against Mr. Cherkasov's newspaper, but a public outcry and attention from Moscow forced him to back down and reopen the case. In April, Mr. Cherkasov was awarded an American journalism prize named after the late investigate journalist Artyom Borovik.
Russian authorities "are on the leash of criminal groups," said Mr. Cherkasov. "It is a crisis that everyone sees, but no one wants to write about. People are sleeping. My job as a journalist is to wake them up."
Back in Togliatti, Mr. Sidorov said his paper would keep asking the uncomfortable questions that appear to have killed his friend.
"If the killers thought, `No Valery, no problem,' they are wrong," Mr. Sidorov said. "We won't stay quiet. They can't kill us all."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS
Ill. House Passes DNA Samples Bill
May 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-BRF-DNA-Database.html
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) -- The state House approved legislation Wednesday that would require all convicted felons to submit DNA samples for use in a national database.
The state already collects DNA samples from sex offenders and some other violent criminals. The legislation to expand the program now goes to the Senate.
Police and prosecutors can identify suspects in unsolved crimes by finding genetic matches between database samples and DNA obtained in blood, hair or other evidence collected at the crime scene.
Eleven states collect DNA information on all convicted felons, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Twenty-nine other states, including Illinois, contribute to the national database from smaller groups of offenders.
--------
FBI chief proposes anti-terrorism team
May 16, 2002
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020516-2195480.htm
A new anti-terrorism team proposed by FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III will centralize the global war against terrorists and minimize intelligence gaffes that surfaced after the September 11 attacks on America, authorities said yesterday.
The team, to be headquartered in Washington, will oversee terrorism investigations worldwide to ensure that intelligence data is properly evaluated, the authorities said. Mr. Mueller is expected to meet shortly with agents in charge of FBI field offices to finalize the proposal.
The team is aimed, in part, at preventing the kind of intelligence flaws that allowed separate memos last year sent to FBI headquarters in Washington from the bureau's Arizona and Minnesota field offices to go unheeded - although they both noted that suspicious Arabs were seeking pilot training.
The New York Times reported yesterday that the Phoenix memo, written in June, contained a reference to Osama bin Laden and that it suggested, but offered no specific evidence, that his al Qaeda terrorist network and other groups could have been involved in organizing flight training in this country.
In August, FBI agents in Minneapolis had described the suspicious activities of Zacarias Moussaoui, a French-Moroccan who raised concerns by seeking flight training at a Minnesota school while expressing disinterest in learning to take off and land.
Moussaoui has since been charged as a conspirator with bin Laden and the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks.
Mr. Mueller has said the FBI did not act aggressively in addressing the Phoenix and Minneapolis memos, but that the bureau had no evidence before September 11 pointing to the subsequent attacks that killed more than 3,000 people.
Sen. Charles E. Grassley, a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, yesterday asked Mr. Mueller to make the Phoenix memo public in an effort to "demonstrate that the FBI has nothing to hide and that from this point forward candor and straight talk will be the FBI's mode of operation."
The Iowa Republican also asked the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General for a "full accounting of what happened to the June 2001 memo from the moment it left Phoenix through today."
He said the public had a right to know why the memo did not receive adequate attention "given the alarming contents and the specific reference to Osama bin Laden."
The new anti-terrorism team is part of a reorganization ordered in December by Mr. Mueller. It calls for a massive overhaul of the bureau's priorities and missions. The plan will increase the emphasis on counterterrorism, counterintelligence, cyber-crimes and relations with state and local law enforcement.
It also provides for an enhanced information technology upgrade, expands training for the FBI work force at all levels, improves security, and upgrades capabilities for FBI investigators, analysts, forensic examiners and other specialists.
Named in December to head the FBI's Office of Counterterrorism/Counterintelligence was Dale L. Watson, a 24-year veteran who served as assistant director for the FBI's counterterrorism division.
Sen. Bob Graham, Florida Democrat and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said through a spokesman yesterday that the Phoenix memo was an important discovery in Congress' inquiry into why the FBI, CIA and other agencies failed to learn of the September 11 attacks.
"It represents a failure to connect the dots," said Graham spokesman Paul Anderson. "This was dismissed rather lightly at FBI headquarters."
Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, Mississippi Republican, praised the proposed anti-terrorism team, saying having a "superunit" in Washington to evaluate information from across the country "makes sense to me."
-------- death penalty
Issue in 2 Death Sentences: Judge's Drug Use
New York Times
May 16, 2002
By ADAM LIPTAK
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/16/national/16JUDG.html
PHOENIX, May 15 - The judge bought marijuana by mail. He paid with a cashier's check, and he used the office stationery. The envelope bore a handsome imprint: "Philip Marquardt, Superior Court Judge, Phoenix, Arizona."
Mr. Marquardt lost that job and his license to practice law after his second marijuana conviction, in 1991, and he is today a retired ski instructor in Carefree, just north of here. Now, two men he sentenced to death in the 1980's are asking courts to look into whether his use of marijuana deprived them of a fair trial.
Their assertions test attitudes about whether using drugs while not working should be of concern in the workplace, about how much extra scrutiny is warranted in death penalty cases and about the limits of judicial privacy. Judges and prosecutors worry that allowing criminal defendants to examine the human element in the judicial process will have enormous consequences.
"There is a floodgate that can be opened here," said Robert L. Ellman, an Arizona assistant attorney general.
When a federal appeals court ordered a hearing to consider evidence about the assertions of one of the prisoners, Warren Summerlin, the majority quoted Shakespeare:
He who the sword of heaven will bear
Should be as holy as severe.
The dissenting judge on the three-judge panel, Alex Kozinski, noted that there was no proof that Judge Marquardt's drug use had affected his performance on the bench, and he said the decision invited intrusion into judges' personal lives.
"Judges rightly expect to have medical histories, family tragedies, even occasional overindulgences in intoxicating substances, remain private," Judge Kozinksi wrote.
John Pressley Todd, another assistant attorney general, said there was no principle to distinguish questions about Judge Marquardt's marijuana use from inquiries into all sorts of matters that might influence judicial decision making.
"If this is a legitimate inquiry," Mr. Todd said, "what about a divorce or loss of a child?"
Steven Lubet, a professor at Northwestern University Law School, said unwarranted intrusions were a real danger.
"Desperate defendants should not be allowed to rummage through judges' personal lives," Professor Lubet said.
But he disagreed about the assertions involving Judge Marquardt, saying, "Wherever the line is, it is somewhere well short of a double conviction for illegal drugs."
Mr. Marquardt conceded in an interview that he used marijuana regularly in the years in which he sentenced the two men to death. Sipping a soft drink by the pool at a golf resort outside town, Mr. Marquardt talked on Monday about his past and its significance for the men he sentenced to death. He acknowledged once having had a taste for the fast life, "but it never carried onto the bench," he said.
Mr. Marquardt, 68, who spent 20 years on the bench, is fit and vigorous, and he was in a reflective mood. "By the very nature of marijuana you don't wake up drugged up or glazed over," he said. "I walked into the courtroom clearheaded, clear-eyed and absolutely in control of my intellectual abilities."
Richard Michael Rossi, 54, whom Mr. Marquardt sentenced to death in 1988, speaking by phone from death ow in Arizona State Prison, said of the judge: "There is a lot of irony here. We both had addiction problems. I acknowledged mine. He didn't acknowledge his."
At his sentencing hearing for killing a man in a dispute over the sale of a typewriter in 1983, Mr. Rossi submitted a doctor's report seeking leniency based on his cocaine addiction. But Judge Marquardt took the opposite view at the court hearing, saying, "I want it to be clear that this court finds that the cocaine addiction does not negate the factors of the cruel, heinous or depraved factors."
Three years later, Judge Marquardt hired Mr. Rossi's doctor to prepare a report in connection with his own sentencing on drug charges, seeking leniency on the basis of marijuana addiction. He now regretted that, Mr. Marquardt said; "marijuana is just not that addictive."
In addition to agreeing to resign his judgeship, Mr. Marquardt was sentenced to probation, fined $20,000 and forced to give up some of his retirement benefits. For his first offense, which was in 1988, a month after Mr. Rossi's hearing, Mr. Marquardt was given a suspended sentence. He was later suspended from the bench without pay for a year by the Arizona Supreme Court.
Mr. Marquardt said he did not remember Mr. Rossi, but he said he had no doubt that the death penalty was warranted. "These guys have sentenced themselves," he said.
In Arizona, judges rather than juries decide whether defendants convicted of capital crimes should be sentenced to death. The United States Supreme Court will soon decide whether that is constitutional, and the appeals court decision about Mr. Marquardt's drug use has been withdrawn while the parties wait to see how the Supreme Court will rule on that separate issue.
Judge Marquardt also decided the fate of Mr. Summerlin, who was convicted of sexually assaulting and then killing a debt collector in 1981. On a scorching Friday in the summer of 1982, Judge Marquardt heard final arguments on whether Mr. Summerlin should be put to death, and, he said, "over the weekend."
Two decades later, the appeals court focused on that comment. The majority was troubled, it wrote, "by the fact that Judge Marquardt deliberated and made the key life or death decisions in this case `over the weekend,' while not on the bench or on public view."
Mr. Marquardt said he did not recall that particular weekend, but added, "I certainly haven't admitted using marijuana on the bench or during my deliberations."
Judge Kozinski wrote that "no doubt hundreds" of convicted criminals might challenge the fairness of their trials before the former judge. While Mr. Marquardt defended his conduct on the bench, he said he believed an inquiry into it was appropriate: "When you have initial proof, as Summerlin does, that the judge who sentenced him used drugs, I think that triggers an entitlement to ask questions."
Whether justice would be served by such questioning turns in large part on how marijuana use is viewed. The chronic abuse of marijuana "renders smart people average and average people stupid," the appellate court majority wrote.
"If it is against the law to drive a vehicle under the influence of marijuana," the majority said, "surely it must be at least equally offensive to allow a judge in a similar condition to preside over a capital trial."
Judge Kozinski wrote that Mr. Summerlin should have offered specific evidence of on-the-job intoxication before the court ordered a hearing. He gave several examples of possible proof. One was a statement by a courtroom observer that the judge fell asleep in court.
Mr. Rossi, whose appeal is pending before the same court, said he had offered such proof. Judge Marquardt had not presided over Mr. Rossi's trial, but it fell to the judge to resentence him in 1988 after the Arizona Supreme Court reversed a previous death sentence. The hearing started at 11:30 a.m., paused at noon for a two-hour break and ended at 4:40.
Mary Durand, an investigator who was a member of Mr. Rossi's defense team and was at the hearing, said Judge Marquardt slept through much of it. "This was not a two-minute nod-off after lunch," Ms. Durand said. "This was slumber." She estimated that the judge slept for 30 minutes at one point, woke up and fell asleep again. She took notes at the hearing. They concluded, "Pity Marquardt slept thru most of this!"
Mr. Ellman, who represents the state in Mr. Rossi's appeal, has reviewed the transcript of the hearing. He said there was no support in it for Ms. Durand's assertion. "The judge appears to be very coherent and tracking the evidence accurately," Mr. Ellman said.
Mr. Rossi recalled his frustration. He said he and Ms. Durand cleared their throats loudly, banged pens on the table and tried to get the court clerk's attention, all to no avail.
Mr. Rossi said he deserved a hearing to examine whether marijuana played any role in his death sentence.
In his dissent in the Summerlin case, Judge Kozinski questioned just what such a hearing might show.
"Even if Judge Marquardt did think about Summerlin while under the influence of marijuana, it's not clear why this would taint his decision," he wrote. "Does having a fleeting thought on a subject while intoxicated then vitiate all of a judge's sober deliberations? Or is the test whether the judge actually made up his mind under the influence? How would one know?"
-------- terrorism
Bush Was Warned bin Laden Wanted to Hijack Planes
New York Times
May 16, 2002
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/16/politics/16INQU.html
WASHINGTON, May 15 - The White House said tonight that President Bush had been warned by intelligence agencies last August that Osama bin Laden was seeking to hijack aircraft but that the reports did not include the possibility that the hijackers would turn the planes into guided missiles for a terrorist attack.
"It is widely known that we had information that bin Laden wanted to attack the United States or United States interests abroad," Ari Fleischer, the president's press secretary, said this evening. "The president was also provided information about bin Laden wanting to engage in hijacking in the traditional pre-9/11 sense, not for the use of suicide bombing, not for the use of an airplane as a missile."
Nonetheless the revelation by the White House, in response to a report this evening on CBS News, is bound to fuel Congressional demands for a deeper investigation into whether American intelligence agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation failed to put together pieces of evidence that were in front of them.
In the past few days, government officials have acknowledged for the first time that an agent in Phoenix had urged the F.B.I. headquarters to investigate Middle Eastern men enrolled in American flight schools. That memorandum also cited Osama bin Laden by name and suggested that his followers could use the schools to train for terror operations, officials who have seen the memorandum said.
Administration officials reached this evening said the warning given to Mr. Bush did not come from the F.B.I. or from the information developed by the Phoenix agent. Instead, it was provided as part of the C.I.A. briefing he is given each morning, suggesting it was probably based on evidence gathered abroad.
The briefing was given to the president at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., where he was on vacation.
Taken together, the news of the C.I.A. warning and the information developed separately by the F.B.I. explains Mr. Bush's anger after Sept. 11 that intelligence gathered on American soil and abroad was not being centrally analyzed and that the agencies were not working well together.
Several times he has told audiences that he is working on solving that problem, and these days he is briefed jointly by the F.B.I and the C.I.A., ensuring that each hears information from the other agency.
It was not clear this evening why the White House waited eight months after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington to reveal what Mr. Bush had been told.
But Mr. Fleischer noted that in the daily flow of intelligence information the president receives, the warning of what appeared to be the threat of a conventional hijacking was not as serious. "We were a peacetime society, and the F.B.I. had a different mission," he said.
Mr. Fleischer said the information given to the president in Texas had prompted the administration to put law enforcement agencies on alert. But there was no public announcement.
Nonetheless, a senior administration official said tonight that there was speculation within the government that heightened security - if it truly existed in August and September - might have prompted the hijackers to use box cutters and plastic knives to avoid detection.
The C.I.A. warning might also explain why Mr. Bush's aides were so certain that Mr. bin Laden was behind the attacks almost as soon as they happened. "We never had any real doubt," one senior official involved in the crucial decisions at the White House on Sept. 11 said several months ago.
Until recently, Mr. Bush has deflected demands for a lengthy and detailed investigation into the intelligence failures surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks. White House officials were concerned that the investigation would feed into demands by Senator Richard C. Shelby, the Alabama Republican who is the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, for the replacement of George J. Tenet as director of central intelligence.
But the news that the hijacking warning was in the president's brief, which Mr. Tenet sees and approves, and that it was linked to Mr. bin Laden is almost certain to widen the scope of the investigation.
Already, several lawmakers who have read the Phoenix memorandum written by the F.B.I. agent have described it as the most significant document to emerge in Congressional inquiries into whether the government might have been warned about possible hijackings.
Now those investigators are almost certain to demand the details of the president's August briefing by the C.I.A. and may ask to hear about how that evidence was developed.
--------
Lindh Cites U.S. Argument in Bid for Dropping Charge
New York Times
May 16, 2002
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/16/national/16LIND.html
WASHINGTON, May 15 - Lawyers for John Walker Lindh, the Californian accused of fighting with the Taliban, sought today to dismiss a firearms charge against him based in part on the Justice Department's new interpretation of the Second Amendment.
In papers filed in federal court, the lawyers said that charging Mr. Lindh with firearms violations would violate his Second Amendment right "as an individual" to use and possess a firearm. They are seeking the dismissal of a charge that Mr. Lindh used firearms and "destructive devices" in crimes of violence. In a recent filing with the Supreme Court, the Justice Department argued that the Second Amendment conferred a broad right to bear arms.
The firearms charge is one of 10 counts against Mr. Lindh, who has pleaded not guilty to all of them. Three counts carry a life sentence, and the others carry terms that could add up to 90 years in prison.
The indictment says that several of the acts he was accused of are crimes of violence, which increases the number of years he can be sentenced to prison by 30 years each.
But his lawyers argued today that they were not crimes of violence.
In a second set of papers, the defense argued that the government's charges against Mr. Lindh were overly broad and based on nothing more than guilt by association. The indictment alleges that Mr. Lindh received military training in a military camp run by Al Qaeda, but it does not claim that he provided anything to Al Qaeda or the Taliban other than himself, which, his lawyers argue, is not illegal.
"There is nothing illegal about providing military training, and fighting in a foreign military conflict is not per se illegal," George C. Harris, one of Mr. Lindh's lawyers, wrote.
"Central to First Amendment freedoms is the right to associate with unpopular and disfavored groups," Mr. Harris wrote.
Today's filings in the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, combined with filings on Monday and more expected Thursday, contain the defense's most detailed arguments to date in trying to get the case dismissed. The trial is set to begin Aug. 26.
The Second Amendment argument was in a footnote in today's dense legal motions. Experts said that this case appeared to be among the first to rely on the Justice Department's newly stated view that an individual has a right to bear arms.
In a case in February, the Justice Department said it believed the Second Amendment, which refers to "a well regulated militia" and "the right of the people to keep and bear arms," covers an individual's right to keep firearms, whether or not that person is in a militia. The Supreme Court has not ruled on the case.
Mr. Lindh's lawyers quoted from the government's brief today, saying the Second Amendment "broadly protects the rights of individuals, including persons who are not members of any militia or engaged in active military service or training, to possess and bear their own firearms."
Mr. Lindh's lawyers said he was protected from any firearms charges for two reasons. One is the individual right to possess firearms. The second is the principle of "combat immunity," which they argued in papers filed on Monday.
Under that principle, the defense argued that Mr. Lindh's participation in a foreign army as a foot soldier was not illegal because all soldiers in combat are immune from prosecution. They said today that "combat immunity" also protected him from firearms charges.
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White House was told planes might be hijacked
May 16, 2002
By Ron Fournier
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020516-6291640.htm
U.S. intelligence told President Bush before the September 11 terrorist attacks that Osama bin Laden's network might hijack American airplanes, prompting the administration to issue a private warning to federal agencies, the White House acknowledged last night.
But officials said the president and U.S. intelligence did not know that suicide hijackers were plotting to use the planes as missiles, as they did against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
"There has been long-standing speculation, shared with the president, about the potential of hijackings in the traditional sense," White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said. "We had general threats involving Osama bin Laden around the world and including in the United States."
He said the administration, acting on the information received last summer, notified the "appropriate agencies" that hijackings "in the traditional sense" were possible. The warning was never made public, he said.
The development, first reported by CBS News, comes as congressional investigators intensify their study of whether the government did not respond adequately to warnings of suicide hijackings. It is the first direct link between Mr. Bush and intelligence gathered before September 11.
Mr. Fleischer would not discuss when or how the information was given to the president, but a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the president was made aware of the potential for hijackings of U.S. planes during one or more routine intelligence briefings last summer.
The CIA would not confirm what it told Mr. Bush, but the agency said the issue of bin Laden's attempting an airline hijacking was among a number of terrorist methods raised to U.S. government officials at the time.
But the information did not suggest that hijackers would crash planes into American landmarks, nor did it mention a date, a CIA official said.
The information was based on intelligence obtained by the U.S. government, the official said, without specifying.
"I will tell you there was, of course, a general awareness of Osama bin Laden and threats around the world, including the United States; and if you recall, last summer we publicly alerted and gave a warning about potential threats on the Arabian Peninsula," Mr. Fleischer said.
But he said Mr. Bush had never been told about the potential for suicide hijackers steering the planes toward U.S targets.
Still, acting on the information the government did have, the administration "notified the appropriate agencies," he said.
"I think that's one of the reasons that we saw the people who committed the 9/11 attacks used box cutters and plastic knives to get around America's system of protecting against hijackers."
Mr. Fleischer said he did not know which agencies were notified or what they were told.
The Associated Press reported earlier this month that FBI headquarters did not act on a memo last July from its Arizona office warning that there were a large number of Arabs seeking pilot, security and airport-operations training at at least one U.S. flight school and which urged a check of all flight schools to identify more possible Middle Eastern students.
A section of that classified memo also makes a passing reference to Osama bin Laden, speculating that al Qaeda and other such groups could organize such flight training, officials said. The officials said, however, that the memo offered no evidence that bin Laden was behind the students who raised the concern.
Sen. Bob Graham, Florida Democrat and Senate Select Intelligence Committee chairman, said through a spokesman yesterday that the revelations in the memos marked an important discovery in Congress' investigation into why the FBI, CIA and other U.S. agencies did not learn of and prevent the September 11 plot.
"It represents a failure to connect the dots," said Graham spokesman Paul Anderson. "This was dismissed rather lightly at FBI headquarters."
The FBI also has faced tough questioning about whether it acted aggressively enough after arresting Zacarias Moussaoui, a Frenchman of Moroccan descent, in August after he raised concerns by seeking flight training at a Minnesota flight school.
Moussaoui has emerged as the lone defendant charged in the aftermath of the attacks, which killed more than 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. He is charged with conspiring with bin Laden and the 19 suicide hijackers to attack Americans.
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III repeatedly has said he wished the FBI had acted more aggressively in addressing the Arizona and Minnesota leads but said nothing the FBI possessed before September 11 pointed to the multiple-airliner suicide-hijacking plot.
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Lawmakers Push for Hearings on Warning Given to Bush
New York Times
May 16, 2002
By DAVID E. SANGER with SHERRI DAY
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/16/politics/16CND-INQU.html
WASHINGTON, May 16 - A day after the White House revealed that the Bush administration knew prior to Sept. 11 that Osama bin Laden was seeking to hijack aircraft, lawmakers called for a deeper investigation into why American intelligence agencies had failed to put together individual pieces of evidence that, in retrospect, now seem to suggest what was coming.
"Was there a failure of intelligence?" Richard Gephardt, the House Democratic leader from Missouri, said in a news conference today. "Did the right officials not act on the intelligence in the proper way? These are the things we need to find out."
Senator Tom Daschle, the Democratic majority leader from South Dakota, said there was much to be learned before lawmakers could come to a final conclusion about exactly how much the president knew and if that knowledge could have been used to prevent the attacks. But he said the Bush administration owed the American public some concrete answers.
"Why did it take eight months for us to receive this information?" Mr. Daschle said at a news conference. "And secondly, what specific actions were taken by the White House in response?"
In a press briefing this afternoon Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, said President Bush began receiving warnings from American intelligence agencies of heightened terrorist threats as early as last May. Those threats, however, dealt with the possibility of terrorist attacks overseas, Mr. Fleischer said.
During the first week of August, Mr. Bush was told of Mr. bin Laden's desires to hijack airplanes in the continental United States. But, Mr. Fleischer said the warnings were general in nature and did not contemplate the possibility that the hijackers would turn the planes into guided missiles for a terrorist attack.
"The president did not - not - receive information about the use of airplanes as missiles by suicide bombers," Mr. Fleischer said. "This was a new type of attack that had not been foreseen."
After the president was briefed about the possibility of terrorist hijackings on American soil, the Bush administration notified the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration and airports around the country. But those notifications were general in nature and did not include specific or detailed warnings, Mr. Fleischer said.
"I want to remind you, information about hijackings in the pre-9/11 world is totally different from information about hijackings in the post-9/11 world," Mr. Fleischer said. "Traditional hijackings prior to Sept. 11, it might as well be in a different language from what we have all unfortunately come to know about the post-9/11 world."
Mr. Fleischer said he was unable to share exactly what was said in the president's security briefings, as he is not allowed to attend because of their confidential nature. Later this afternoon Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, is scheduled to hold a news conference to provide more details about exactly what the president knew prior to the attacks.
While much of the outrage over the White House's revelation could be traced to Democrats today, Republicans sought answers as well.
On the NBC News program "Today," Senator Richard C. Shelby, the Alabama Republican who is the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said: "There was a lot of information. I believe and others believe if it had been acted upon properly, we may have had a different situation on Sept. 11. We don't know."
Senator Jon Kyl, a Republican from Arizona, called for calm.
"It is not at all uncommon for the president to be briefed in the way that it's been described here," Mr. Kyl said.
"No one should be surprised that he might have been told that terrorists might have a hijacking plan as part of their general activities but there's no suggestion that there was any specific or credible evidence of a particular attack that was briefed to the president."
The revelation by the White House came in response to a CBS News report on Wednesday about the intelligence warning.
In the last few days, government officials have acknowledged for the first time that an F.B.I. agent in Phoenix had urged the F.B.I. headquarters to investigate Middle Eastern men enrolled in American flight schools. That memorandum also cited Mr. bin Laden by name and suggested that his followers could use the schools to train for terror operations, officials who have seen the memorandum said.
Administration officials reached Wednesday evening said the warning given to Mr. Bush did not come from the F.B.I. or from the information developed by the Phoenix agent. Instead, it was provided as part of the C.I.A. briefing he is given each morning, suggesting that it was probably based on evidence gathered abroad.
The C.I.A. had been listening intently over the July 4 holiday last year, after what one investigator called "a lot of static in the system suggesting something was coming." But then the evidence disappeared as quickly as it had arisen, and by August, officials have said, little was heard from Al Qaeda.
The warning of the hijacking was given to the president at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., where he was on vacation.
Taken together, the news of the C.I.A. warning and the information developed separately by the F.B.I. explains Mr. Bush's anger after Sept. 11 that intelligence gathered on American soil and abroad was not being centrally analyzed and that the agencies were not working well together.
Several times he has told audiences that he is working on solving that problem, and these days he is briefed jointly by the F.B.I and the C.I.A., ensuring that each hears information from the other agency.
It was not clear Wednesday evening why the White House waited eight months after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington to reveal what Mr. Bush had been told.
But Mr. Fleischer noted that in the daily flow of intelligence information the president receives, the warning of what appeared to be the threat of a conventional hijacking was not as serious as it appears in retrospect. "We were a peacetime society, and the F.B.I. had a different mission," he said.
Mr. Fleischer said the information given to the president in Texas had prompted the administration to put law enforcement agencies on alert. But there was no public announcement.
Nonetheless, a senior administration official said on Wednesday night that there was speculation within the government that heightened security - if it truly existed in August and September - might have prompted the hijackers to use box cutters and plastic knives to avoid detection.
The C.I.A. warning might also explain why Mr. Bush's aides were so certain that Mr. bin Laden was behind the attacks almost as soon as they happened. "We never had any real doubt," one senior official involved in the crucial decisions at the White House on Sept. 11 said several months ago.
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Airlines Warned of Possible Attack
May 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Airlines.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Airport and airline security was not increased before Sept. 11 despite warnings that Osama bin Laden's terrorist group might be planning hijackings. Federal regulators said they told the airlines, but the information was too vague to force changes.
Fifteen times between January and August, the Federal Aviation Administration warned airlines about terrorist threats, the Transportation Department said Thursday.
In April, for example, the government encouraged ``U.S. airlines to practice a high degree of awareness,'' a department summary said. In June, carriers were told that ``American interests may be targeted by extremist groups,'' the summary said.
Transportation officials said they were prevented by law from releasing the text of information circulars.
Pilots' and flight attendants' unions say their members were never told. Airlines and other industry officials said any warnings they received were not about a specific threat.
In a written statement Thursday, American Airlines said it ``received no specific information from the U.S. government advising the carrier of potential terrorist hijacking in the United States in the months prior to Sept. 11.''
American said it receives Federal Aviation Administration security information bulletins periodically, but they were ``extremely extremely general in nature and did not identify a specific threat or recommend any specific security enhancements.''
Other airline officials, and the companies that screen passengers, said any warnings they got did not contain a specific threat that would prompt action. Until Feb. 17, the airlines were responsible for airport security checkpoints.
``Carriers receive security alerts and cautions from time to time in their daily interface with government agencies, and are typically very general in nature,'' said Joe Hopkins, a spokesman for United Airlines, which lost two planes on Sept. 11.
``During 2001, there were no alerts or cautions that indicated a Sept. 11th scenario was credible or possible.''
Boston's Logan Airport, where two of the hijacked planes took off from, ``was never provided with intelligence information that indicated an increased risk of an aircraft hijacking from Logan,'' said Jose Juves, spokesman for the Massachusetts Port Authority.
Jeff Zack, a spokesman for the Association of Flight Attendants, said the group's members were not told anything before Sept. 11. ``If we're supposed to be looking for suspicious people, we should know we're supposed to be looking for them,'' Zack said.
At the end of July, the FAA warned airlines and airports that terrorists might be planning hijackings, said Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser.
She said they were told that ``there's no specific target, no credible info of attack to U.S. civil aviation interests, but terror groups are known to be planning and training for hijackings, and we ask you therefore to use caution.''
The warning followed other, more general warnings to airlines in June and July that cautioned of the possibility of an attack, especially abroad, Rice said.
At least one FAA alert warned that terrorists might hijack a plane so they could trade the passengers for Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, imprisoned for plotting to blow up New York landmarks, officials said.
``All of this reporting about hijacking was about traditional hijacking,'' Rice said. ``They were mostly worried that they might try to take a plane and use it for release of the blind sheik or some of their own people.''
One warning named Osama bin Laden and said his or other terrorist groups could hijack airplanes, a government official said Thursday.
The warnings, sent over secure telephone lines or posted on a secure Web site, said there were intelligence reports of terrorists talking about hijacking planes and alerted the airlines and airports to be careful, the official said.
The FAA did not order new security measures in response to the warnings, agency spokesman Scott Brenner said.
There was no information about when an attack might occur or the possibility of terrorists crashing hijacked airplanes into buildings, officials said.
FAA Administrator Jane Garvey and other agency officials receive regular intelligence briefings and for years have been aware of threats made by bin Laden, Brenner said.
``This is a threat we've been watching intensely since 1998 when bin Laden made some very public statements,'' Brenner said. ``While we were watching these groups, we never had a credible hijacking threat. It was never, 'This group was going to do a hijacking.'''
Airline experts said the FAA should have tightened security after receiving the warnings.
``With that threat escalating, why was it permissible to continue to take cutting tools on airplanes, and why did we have a flawed computer assisted passenger profiling system that didn't require a search of the passenger and carryon articles?'' former FAA security chief Billie Vincent said.
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List of Airline Warnings
May 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Airlines-List.html
The Federal Aviation Administration issued 15 warnings, known as information circulars, last year before the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Federal law prevents the Transportation Department from releasing the texts of the circulars, but the agency summarized the warnings in response to revelations Thursday that President Bush and the airline industry were warned in advance of the threat of hijackings.
The warnings are now issued by the new Transportation Security Administration, which has taken over aviation security from the Federal Aviation Administration and the airlines.
The warnings are:
January -- U.S. airlines were warned of violence against American citizens and interests due to continuing Middle East violence.
March -- Airlines that fly to Middle Eastern countries were warned of threats from suspected terrorists in those nations.
April -- Two advisories gave airlines updates about possible threats against Americans and encouraged them to ``practice a high degree of awareness.''
June -- Airlines flying to Middle Eastern countries received additional information about terrorist activity.
June -- Airlines were warned about increased violence in Israel.
June -- Airlines were told about the case of Ahmed Ressam, convicted of explosives smuggling, lying to customs officials and planning to commit acts of international terrorism. He was trained in terrorist camps financed by Osama bin Laden and was in charge of the failed plot to detonate a suitcase bomb at the Los Angeles International Airport during the millennium celebrations, U.S. officials said.
June -- Airlines were warned that extremist groups may target U.S. interests.
July -- Airlines received an update of the terrorist plot directed at Los Angeles airport.
July -- Airlines received information about a weapons system that terrorists could use against civil aviation.
July -- Airlines and airports received two warnings of possible terrorist threats in the Middle East. One warning specifically mentioned bin Laden, a government official said.
August -- Airport security personnel were told about ways to disguise weapons. National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice said the warning mentioned the possible use of cell phones, key chains and pens as weapons.
August -- Aviation security personnel received another update on violence in Israel and threats to Israeli civil aviation. Airlines were told to review the State Department's guidance on traveling to the Middle East.
August -- Airlines serving Spain were warned about recent bombings conducted by separatist groups in that country.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- energy
Analysis: More Untapped Oil in Alaska
May 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Alaska-Oil.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal land west of Prudhoe Bay on Alaska's North Slope holds nearly as much untapped oil as does a wildlife refuge in the state that Bush administration wants to exploit, an updated Interior Department analysis says.
The National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska has up to four times as much oil as previously estimated, the analysis released Thursday by the department's U.S. Geological Survey finds.
The reserve was created specifically for energy development before World War II. The Clinton administration opened 4 million acres of the reserve to oil drilling in 1998, although with stringent environmental restrictions.
The reserve likely contains a mean amount of 9.3 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil, according to the analysis. In 1980, when the last official estimate was made, that amount was put at 2.1 billion barrels.
The new figure compares with the estimate of 10.3 billion barrels for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to the east of Prudhoe Bay.
The administration has made developing the refuge's oil an energy priority, but has said little about the oil potential of the reserve. Recently the Senate rejected drilling in the refuge, although the House last summer voted to open the refuge to oil development.
The analysis ``shows there are plenty of prime opportunities for oil discovery outside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on lands where exploration and development of oil is legal,'' said Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., a leading opponent of drilling in the refuge.
The study said oil in the reserve is more scattered and in some cases ``may be far from existing infrastructure'' and more expensive to develop.
The study estimated that if oil prices are below $35 a barrel -- the price now is about $28 -- more oil would be economically recoverable in the refuge. Above $35 a barrel favors the reserve.
The Interior Department has said it plans to issue additional oil leases in the reserve next month within the 4 million acres opened in 1998. It also is expected to open more areas of the reserve in the near future, according to government and industry officials.
The report said that the amount of economically recoverable oil in the reserve at a price of $22 to $30 a barrel is between 1.2 billion and 5.6 billion barrels.
The technically recoverable oil in the refuge has been put by the Geological Survey at 5.7 billion to 16 billion barrels with a mean of 10.3 billion barrels -- about 80 percent of it likely to be economical to develop at $25 a barrel.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Terrorist Warnings
Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney
truth out |
Statement by Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney
May 16, 2002
http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/05.17AA.Mckinney.Bush.NU.htm
Several weeks ago, I called for a congressional investigation into what warnings the Bush Administration received before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. I was derided by the White House, right wing talk radio, and spokespersons for the military-industrial complex as a conspiracy theorist. Even my patriotism was questioned because I dared to suggest that Congress should conduct a full and complete investigation into the most disastrous intelligence failure in American history. Georgia Senator Zell Miller even went so far as to characterize my call for hearings as "dangerous, loony and irresponsible."
Today's revelations that the administration, and President Bush, were given months of notice that a terrorist attack was a distinct possibility points out the critical need for a full and complete congressional investigation.
It now becomes clear why the Bush Administration has been vigorously opposing congressional hearings. The Bush Administration has been engaged in a conspiracy of silence. If committed and patriotic people had not been pushing for disclosure today's revelations would have been hidden by the White House.
Because I love my country, because I am a patriot, and because the American people deserve the truth, I believe it would be dangerous, loony and irresponsible not to hold full congressional hearings on any warnings the Bush Administration had before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Ever since I came to Congress in 1992, there are those who have been trying to silence my voice. I've been told to "sit down and shut up" over and over again. Well, I won't sit down and I won't shut up until the full and unvarnished truth is placed before the American people.
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