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NUCLEAR
S.C. Moves To Bar Entry Of Plutonium
Central Asia emerges as source of 'dirty bomb'
Prosecutors want three arrested
Call for assistance over DU exhibition
Dr Helen Caldicott on DU & use in Iraq
Sitar-playing nuclear scientist set to be India's next president
Israel Has Sub-Based Atomic Arms Capability
A hole in our missile defense system
US puts Cold War tactics in an Alaska deep freeze
Anti - Missile Work Begins in Alaska
Fear Factor
After U.S. Scraps ABM Treaty, Russia Rejects Curbs of Start II
Quake Hits Near Nevada Site Proposed for Nuclear Dump
Quake near Yucca Mountain rattles lawmakers
Mayors Oppose Dump in Nevada
Evacuation Plan Is Focus of New Indian Point Battle
S.C. Watches for Plutonium Shipments
Axis of errors has America's friends Bushed
Dirty tricks
Rumsfeld's ignorance won't stop him opening his mouth
Speculation that Powell may quit caps bad week for Bush cabinet
Government Snooping Is a Bipartisan Thing
MILITARY
Tensions on Lebanese Border Cast a Pall Over Peace Effort
Preemptive Strikes Must Be Decisive, Powell Says
To the Shores of Hollywood
POLICE / PRISONERS
Police school for Americas considered
ACTIVISTS
Quake Stirs Opposition To Nuclear Waste Plan
-------- NUCLEAR
S.C. Moves To Bar Entry Of Plutonium
Troopers Dispatched To Stop U.S. Shipment
Associated Press
Saturday, June 15, 2002; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54137-2002Jun14?language=printer
COLUMBIA, S.C., June 14 -- Gov. Jim Hodges (D) ordered state troopers and other authorities to South Carolina's borders today to stop federal shipments of plutonium that could begin arriving from Colorado as early as this weekend.
"I order that the transportation of plutonium on South Carolina roads and highways is prohibited," Hodges said. "I order that any persons transporting plutonium shall not enter the state of South Carolina."
An Energy Department spokesman replied that the governor has no legal authority to interfere with the shipments of weapons-grade plutonium. He said that, as a practical and logistical matter, the shipments could begin no sooner than June 22.
Hodges, who has vehemently opposed the shipments, declared a state of emergency but refused to answer questions about specific plans for roadblocks or other barricades at South Carolina's Savannah River Site, a nuclear weapons complex near Aiken.
On Thursday, a federal judge refused to block the shipments. Hodges appealed the ruling and asked for a delay until the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals could hear the case.
The Energy Department plans to move the material from the Rocky Flats weapons installation in Colorado, which is being cleaned up and closed, to the Savannah River Site, where the material would be converted into nuclear reactor fuel over two decades.
Hodges has said he fears the government will end up leaving the plutonium permanently in South Carolina, making the state a tempting target for terrorists.
"The Department of Energy has broken promises, offered no assurances and left few options," Hodges said. "They want South Carolina to quietly become the nation's plutonium dumping ground."
Energy Department spokesman Joe Davis said, "We are extremely disappointed the governor has chosen to totally disregard the court's admonition and intend to ask the Department of Justice to seek further relief from the court as expeditiously as possible."
Vice President Cheney said the fuel-conversion program is important to ensure that plutonium "never falls into the wrong hands."
"This administration is totally committed to helping pass legislation to guarantee that South Carolina does not become a permanent storage site for plutonium," he said.
------- asia
Central Asia emerges as source of 'dirty bomb'
By Charles J. Hanley
ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 15, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020615-94748729.htm
In March, a passenger toted 20 pounds of radioactive thorium powder, in his luggage, onto a bus crossing into Russia from Kazakhstan. In 2000, Chechen rebels were the apparent customers for stolen radium. In 1999, a smuggler unwisely stuck a highly radioactive capsule in his trouser pocket as he boarded a flight in Kyrgyzstan.
The new nations of Central Asia have become a trafficker's marketplace for radioactive materials. Pakistani investigators say this was the region Abdullah al Muhajir, who was born Jose Padilla, headed to when he sought material for a "dirty bomb."
Confronting the threat is a big job, but the U.S. government has begun sending detection equipment to border posts in the vast region and training customs officers in intercepting nuclear contraband.
Pakistani officials said al Muhajir, an American citizen in U.S. custody and al Qaeda suspect, traveled to a Central Asian country in April hoping to buy radioactive materials. The convert to Islam had conferred with senior members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terror network about detonating a radiation weapon, or "dirty bomb," in the United States, American authorities say.
Such a device would not be a nuclear bomb, with its devastating fission explosion, but instead would set off conventional explosives to scatter harmful radioactive material, contaminating and panicking people, and forcing abandonment of parts of cities.
The Pakistani officials would not say whether al Muhajir was successful in obtaining radioactive substances, nor would they identify the country he is said to have visited. Officials in Washington, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the United States had no such information and questioned whether the reported mission occurred.
Since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the newly independent Central Asian states - Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan - have dealt with a legacy of nuclear facilities left poorly staffed after Russian specialists went home and abandoned radioactive materials.
The only nuclear weapons in the region, in Kazakhstan, were withdrawn to Russia in the early 1990s. In 1994, a half-ton of highly enriched uranium - raw material for nuclear bombs - was spirited out of Kazakhstan in a U.S. operation.
But material for possible "dirty bombs" remains scattered and often poorly controlled in the region. This includes cesium, strontium, cobalt and other radioactive substances used in medicine and industry, as well as the low-grade uranium and radioactive waste of nuclear-power plants.
"Protecting against radioactive sources is much harder than securing nuclear materials," said Dmitry Kovchegin, a nuclear-proliferation specialist at Moscow's Center for Policy Studies in Russia. "It's not so hard to create a 'dirty bomb,' and it's not so hard to find the material. It's used everywhere."
Here are some cases from the marketplace where al Muhajir purportedly shopped, based on local media reports:
•In March, a radiation check of a bus crossing into Russia from Kazakhstan turned up a Russian passenger who had packed at least 22 pounds of thorium-232 powder in his luggage. Its radiation was "hundreds of times" normal background levels, authorities said. Its origin and destination were not reported.
•In Kyrgyzstan, airport guards grew suspicious of a man who looked ill as he boarded a flight to the United Arab Emirates. The Uzbek was found to have pocketed a smuggled capsule of what he was told was plutonium. Local media said it emitted fatal doses of radiation at close range. There were no subsequent reports about the 1999 case.
•In July 2000, two brothers from Kazakhstan were arrested after purportedly smuggling radium-226 into Russia to sell to Chechens. Chechen separatists in the mid-1990s had threatened to detonate "dirty bombs" in Moscow, but never did.
•In Tajikistan, six residents were convicted in April 2000 in the theft of 3 pounds of uranium mixed with highly radioactive cesium-137 from a uranium-processing plant. It was not reported how enriched - suitable for nuclear weapons - the uranium was.
All of those substances theoretically could be used for a radiation-dispersal bomb.
Reports indicate that Pakistan and Afghanistan, until eight months ago a hub for international terrorism, were the destination in some nuclear-trafficking cases in recent years. Those monitoring the situation have no way to judge how many other such smuggling operations succeeded.
The U.S. Customs Service last year conducted in Texas a three-week course focused on radioactive contraband for 80 border officers from the five republics. The Americans also have dispatched detection equipment to the Russian-Kazakh border and Uzbekistan.
Last month, Washington and Moscow announced the formation of a joint task force to study the securing of radioactive sources in Russia. This "shows how serious this issue is and that we're ready to solve it," Russian atomic energy minister Alexander Rumyantsev said. No such comprehensive approach has been organized for Central Asia.
--------
Prosecutors want three arrested for alleged corruption at nuclear power plant
Sat Jun 15, 2002
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020615/ap_wo_en_po/taiwan_nuclear_1
TAIPEI, Taiwan - Prosecutors have called for the arrest of three nuclear power plant construction workers for allegedly trying to cover up shoddy work, a spokesman for the prosecutors said Saturday.
Work on the base of one of the reactors at the plant in the northern Taiwanese fishing village of Kungliao was halted a week ago when it was discovered that welding work was substandard.
Discovery of the flaw stirred fresh debate over the safety of the 185.8 billion Taiwan dollar (U.S. dlrs 5.45 billion) facility, set to become the fourth nuclear plant in earthquake ( news - web sites)-prone Taiwan when completed in 2006.
Chou Chin-chang, a spokesman for the district prosecutors office in the southern city of Kaohsiung, told reporters that the manager of a subcontractor and the welder responsible for the faulty work bribed a plant construction supervisor to hide it.
"They've seriously threatened the safety of the fourth nuclear plant," Chou said, adding that prosecutors have filed papers with the Kaohsiung district court asking for permission to arrest the three.
Kaohsiung is the headquarters of state-owned China Shipbuilding Corp., which oversees the plant's construction.
The Economics Ministry has publicly criticized the head of China Shipbuilding and over 20 others in the company for failing to prevent the problem at the plant in Kungliao, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) outside of the capital, Taipei.
The manager of the subcontractor allegedly treated the plant supervisor - a China Shipbuilding employee - to hostess bars to gain approval for the cover-up, Chou said.
-------- depleted uranium
Call for assistance over DU exhibition
Date: Sat, 15 Jun 2002
dear anti-DU'ers
In the early autumn the Pandora Project has the opportunity to stage an exhibiton on Gulf War Syndrome, and the effects of DU in the Scottish Parliament (working in conjunction with Scottish veterans) and also has been offered the chance to stage a similar exhibition but on wider DU issues, and Iraq, Kosovo, possibly in the European parliament, plus a few sites in Italy and France (this is provisional at this time).
What we need really now is any photos that may help with this, be it from journalists, activists or veterans working on these issues, be it in their own countries, or naturally from the zones where DU has been used, Iraq, Kosovo etc. The amount of Veterans pictures we have is small, so that could be extended, with any facts and figures concerning effects upon service personell or their offspring.
We have set up an email account especially for this which is at: veterans2002@hotmail.com Like other pressure groups we have no cash, so we sadly can't pay for photos or images sent. Any assistance would be much appreciated, as well as any offers to stage the exhibtion in other areas or countries.
many thanks
davey garland
(pandora DU research project)
thunderelf@yahoo.co.uk
-------- depleted uranium
Dr Helen Caldicott on DU & use in Iraq
Broadcast on The Science Show (Radio National)
Saturday 15/6/2002 Australia
From: davey garland <thunderelf@yahoo.co.uk>
Uranium 238: Depleted Uranium
Summary:
Anti-nuclear campaigner Dr Helen Caldicott says that although it's not generally known, the Gulf War was a nuclear war and the leftover radioactive pollution, Uranium 238, has had devastating health consequences for the Iraqi people, among them dramatic increases in serious birth defects and cancer in the general population. Another critic is Dr Robert Hunter of Scientists for Global Responsibility, who also comments on depleted uranium.
Transcript:
Helen Caldicott: Yes, uranium 238 is called depleted uranium because 235 has been removed which is a fissionable portion. It's only present in 0.7% when you mine it, it's enriched to 3% for nuclear power and over 50% for weapons, so the stuff left behind is useless, it's very radioactive, it's all the stuff up at Ranger and Olympic Dam and all over the place. But it's 1.7 times more dense than lead. Now, shells are usually made of lead or titanium, which is more expensive. So this stuff's free, so if you make shells out of it, it actually, at high momentum, penetrates the armour of tanks, slices through it like a hot knife through butter. But when it hits it, it's pyrophoric and burns and produces tiny particles less than 5 microns that are inhaled into the terminal air passages. Now this is an alpha emitter, highly carcinogenic, so it sits in the lungs for many years irradiating a small volume of cells and causes lung cancer. It's translocated from the lungs, excreted through the kidneys where it can cause kidney cancer or bladder cancer, it's a heavy metal where it can produce renal failure. It's deposited in bones like calcium where it can cause leukaemia and/or bone cancer.
The men who fought in the Gulf War, they are excreting uranium in their semen; they call it 'burning semen' and their wives notice it too. Now what's in the semen? The genes for all future generations.
Robyn Williams: Are there signs of this already in Iraq?
Helen Caldicott: Oh yes, the incidence of childhood cancer in Basrah, where they used a lot of it, has gone up 6 to 12 times and the paediatricians stand at the food of the children's beds wringing their hands, actually weeping, because they have no drugs, no radio therapeutic instruments because of the sanctions. The incidence of genetic malformations has doubled and women are too frightened to give birth because they give birth to Cyclopses, or babies with no brains, anencephaly, who breathe, suck, cry and sneeze for a week and then die.
Robyn Williams: So, the uranium is on the ground: how can it be removed?
Helen Caldicott: Well, it's on the ground and it's half life is 4.5 billion years. It will never be removed, it's blowing around in the desert winds. Those people are subject to those cancers and genetic diseases for the rest of time. This is obscene. It violates all the Geneva conventions of war. They've left a radio active battle field for the rest of time. How dare they! And you bet, there's Australian uranium in those weapons too. Then they used them in Kosovo, and if you're in the north of Greece and it's a windy day with the wind blowing from there, they measure high levels of radiation in the wind. And I'm sure they used it in Afghanistan and they're selling these things all over the world. And we are participants.
Robyn Williams: What is the evidence for Afghanistan?
Helen Caldicott: Afghanistan. Yeah, I've watched very closely. I haven't got any hard actual data, but if you go to Janes, where all the weapons are enunciated.
Robyn Williams: Janes books of war.
Helen Caldicott: Yep, the weapons they're using are the same weapons they used in the Gulf with uranium in them. I haven't got any hard data yet, but I am surmising that that's what they did.
Robyn Williams: OK, so in war zones in the Gulf there are these remnants of uranium.
Helen Caldicott: They used 300 to 800 tons of it, Robyn.
Robyn Williams: But this is not generally known.
Helen Caldicott: No, it was a nuclear war.
Robyn Williams: Why isn't it generally known?
Helen Caldicott: Well, it's known in Europe. The European Parliament and the Danish Parliament, the Italian Parliament were fit to kill because their soldiers are getting leukaemia in high numbers than normal, their peace keepers. I was asked to write a piece for the New York Times about this: I did it, and they sent it back and said, we are unable to publish this - as if someone is preventing them. Yeah, probably the Pentagon. So I sent it to USA Today: they said, too technical. It wasn't technical at all. The LA Times, they wouldn't publish it. There is a total blackout on this event in the US media, a total cover up. Now, you see that Dan Rather was interviewed the other day by the BBC and he said, never before has there been such press censorship of a war as there was in Afghanistan. They learnt from Vietnam - body bags is bad for business for the Pentagon, so they just block the media out and there's no one with the guts to go in and show the babies with their heads blown off; show the children playing with radioactive shells on the desert floor in Iraq. Well, there are a few: Robert Fisk and a few like that.
Robyn Williams: From The Independent.
Helen Caldicott: Yeah, well the British papers are good but the American papers are terrible, terrible.
Robyn Williams: Well, Dr Helen Caldicott talking on a theme from her new book The New Nuclear Danger. Listening to that interview is Professor Bob Hunter who's had a long association with debates about the use of nuclear material. Were you surprised to hear those figures about depleted uranium.
Robert Hunter: No I wasn't. I've worried about it for sometime. We don't see much of it in the newspapers but there's quite a lot on the net. If you go to a web site and just say: what can you tell me about depleted uranium, you get a pile of downloads that make very interesting reading.
Robyn Williams: If I was to turn up and look at materiel, would I actually find weapons covered in depleted uranium as armour?
Robert Hunter: Oh yeah, it is the modern armour-piercing shell. It's used all the way from things like Gatling gun-type bullet things, up to cannons or particularly anti-tank weapons, where you want to pierce the 5 or 10 centimetres of armour-plated steel which protects the vital parts of the tank, and depleted uranium is better than titanium, which was the one used earlier. And the wonderful thing from the American point of view is, of course, it costs them nothing. It's the waste material from their production of enriched uranium for power generation or pure 235 for weapons production.
Robyn Williams: And if you were to hold one of these things with a pointy end covered in this uranium, it's perfectly OK to handle, is it?
Robert Hunter: Well, before it goes off it probably is, because the rate at which it radiates is not all that large. The problem is after the weapon's been fired. I haven't actually done a calculation on what the casing would produce but the thing that makes the spent shell more dangerous is that, in the process of penetrating the armour plate, the high pressure and temperatures to which it's subjected as it pierces through, actually sets in on fire and it produces very small particles of the oxide, uranium oxide.
Robyn Williams: As we've just heard. Yes.
Robert Hunter: Those would be the things that would be the problem.
Robyn Williams: OK, well, if so much of it is there in the Gulf is it the case that it'll be dangerous almost forever?
Robert Hunter: Well, I think so. There's something like there's something like 500 tonnes of the stuff was fired off there. Some sizable fraction of that is still there and the Americans took away some obvious large pieces of equipment that were damaged by 'friendly fire': they were able to identify that interestingly enough, because of the radioactivity of the 'friendly fire'.
Robyn Williams: Is there some sort of plan as to what you do after a conflict with such material?
Robert Hunter: Well, there is, but I mean, in decontaminating soils evidently you'd have to go through an enormously complicated process. They haven't done it in Iraq of course, they've had to do it on some of their weapon's ranges where they've been firing depleted uranium shells to test them, and to attempt to clean them up has been an enormous operation. At one particular site in, I think Indiana, was to cost $5 billion just for this military firing range. So, spread that to the sort of size of the battle field in Iraq and you imagine the kinds of money that would be involved and there's no doubt the Americans are not going to clean that up.
Robyn Williams: We've just had some horrifying facts and figures about the health effects in Iraq. Do you agree?
Robert Hunter: Oh yes, I don't think there's any doubt about that. There's a very interesting article by Felicity Arbuthnot in which she outlines her own experiences there. She spent some time there talking to people particular in Basrah, which is a city in the south of Iraq, the closest large city to the action, it's got a population of about 1.5 million people and the stories that come out of there are just horrendous. I mean, a doctor trained in England and America who was working there was saying, for example, that he would have expected in England to run into a case of bone cancer perhaps once in three years, he was getting one a fortnight in Basrah. So there is no doubt that there are huge increases in the incidences of cancers particularly, and the incidence of birth deformities.
Robyn Williams: There should be surely a good case for banning depleted uranium then?
Robert Hunter: Well, it should be. I mean, there's a very interesting article by a fellow called Doug Rocke; he was a medical physicist with the US army, he was actually given the job of going over there and recommending what should be done after the war in 1991. He went out there as something of a fitness fanatic, you know, he could do a forced march for 20 kilometres with 100 pound pack on his back, and he came back almost a total wreck, he can hardly breathe now, his lungs are totally ruined because he was out there looking at the stuff, appraising it, but his recommendations have just been completely ignored.
He's presented his material to the British government, the British parliament, and no action has been taken as far as one can gather. They just don't want to know because it's just such a lovely material because it costs nothing and is enormously effective and they don't give a hill of beans about the effect, even on their own soldiers.
Further information: Dr Helen Caldicott http://www.noradiation.org/caldicott/
Publications: 'The New Nuclear Danger: Why we can't let the Military-Industrial complex determine foreign policy Author: Dr Helen Caldicott Publisher: New Press in the United States Scribe in Australia
-------- india / pakistan
Sitar-playing nuclear scientist set to be India's next president
By Rahul Bedi in Delhi
June 15 2002
Sydney Morning Herald;
The Telegraph, London
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/06/14/1023864349298.html
A Muslim nuclear scientist of humble origins is poised to become the next president of India.
The extraordinary rise of Avil P.J. Abdul Kalam from newspaper seller in a southern fishing village to the presidential palace in New Delhi became a near certainty after the opposition Congress party agreed to back his candidacy.
Famed for his shoulder-length hair, casual manner and heavy Tamil accent, Missile Man Kalam, as he is known, responded obliquely to the news on Thursday. "Whatever has happened has happened for the good," he said.
The self-effacing 70-year-old is viewed as a politically correct choice for the Hindu nationalist-led government of Atal Behari Vajpayee, which has been attacked by the opposition and human rights groups over a three-month pogrom against Muslims in western Gujarat state.
Mr Kalam's ancestors converted to Islam after contact with Arab traders who settled along India's coast hundreds of years ago.
He enjoys a special status in the highly revered Hindu temple at Rameshwaram, on the southernmost tip of India, because one of his ancestors dived in and retrieved its main idol from a water tank.
His promise was spotted early on by a Brahmin family who encouraged him to pursue aeronautical engineering.
His Brahmin links persuaded him to become a strict vegetarian and teetotaller. He reads long passages from the Bhagavad Gita, Hinduism's holy book, every day, along with his Muslim prayers.
Mr Kalam was chosen as the ruling coalition's candidate this week after frantic negotiations between the Government and the opposition failed to arrive at a consensus candidate, which is the preferred approach.
Although the presidency is a ceremonial appointment, it has played a crucial role in forming coalition governments.
Assured of the Congress party's backing, Mr Kalam, a sitar-playing bachelor, is now certain to move from his modest university digs in the southern port city of Chennai, where he is a professor emeritus, to the 340-room, sandstone presidential palace. The building has a workforce numbered in thousands, a private golf course, polo ground, a hospital and a school for the household staff.
The incumbent president, Kocheril Raman Narayanan, who lives in the resplendent palace built by the British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, completes his five-year term next month.
After an education at the Madras Institute of Technology, Mr Kalam joined India's fledgling space program and designed satellites. He later began India's integrated guided missile development program, which developed short, medium and long-range conventional and nuclear-capable missiles.
He also presided over the underground nuclear tests in 1998 that made India the world's sixth nuclear weapon state.
"Conduct dreams into thought and then transform them into action," Mr Kalam said recently.
"Do not indulge in short cuts by importing equipment. Do things yourself," he declared while launching an ambitious program for self-sufficiency in all military equipment by 2005 that remains widely unfulfilled.
"I too am 100per cent indigenous," Mr Kalam proudly told an American journalist who asked after the nuclear tests whether he had studied in the United States.
He takes strong exception to the media referring to him as US-trained after a four-month visit he made to various US space facilities in the 1960s.
-------- israel
Israel Has Sub-Based Atomic Arms Capability
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 15, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54225-2002Jun14.html
Israel has acquired three diesel submarines that it is arming with newly designed cruise missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads, according to former Pentagon and State Department officials, potentially giving Israel a triad of land-, sea- and air-based nuclear weapons for the first time.
The U.S. Navy monitored Israeli testing of a new cruise missile from a submarine two years ago off Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean, according to former Pentagon officials.
One former senior American official said U.S. analysts have studied the nuclear capability of the cruise missile. But, according to a former Pentagon official, "It is above top secret knowing whether the sub-launched cruise missiles are nuclear-armed." Another former official added, "We often don't ask."
The possible move to arm submarines with nuclear weapons suggests that the Israeli government might be increasingly concerned about efforts by Iraq and Iran to develop more accurate long-range missiles capable of knocking out Israel's existing nuclear arsenal, which is primarily land-based.
Although developing a sea-based leg would preserve the deterrent value of Israel's nuclear force, according to analysts, it would complicate U.S. efforts to keep other countries in the Middle East and elsewhere from seeking to acquire nuclear arms. It also could spur a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.
Israel has long refused to confirm or deny it has nuclear weapons. U.S. analysts say it has a modest arsenal of short- and medium-range nuclear-capable missiles, nuclear bombs that could be delivered from jet fighters and Harpoon missiles that could be launched from planes or ships.
Mark Regev, spokesman for the Israeli Embassy, confirmed that his country had recently acquired three submarines from Germany but would not comment on whether they were being outfitted with nuclear weapons. "There has been no change in Israel's long-standing position not to introduce nuclear weapons in the Middle East," Regev said.
A book published this week by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reported that Israel was attempting to arm its diesel submarines with nuclear cruise missiles.
"Probably the most important nuclear-related development in Israel is the formation of its sea-based nuclear arm," wrote Joseph Cirincione, director of the Carnegie Endowment's nonproliferation project and a former staff member of the House Armed Services Committee who served as chief author of the book.
The U.S. government "favors" Israel's preserving the ambiguity surrounding its nuclear force, just as it has since the late 1960s, a former senior U.S. diplomat said. "It gives it a strategic deterrence," he said, adding, "If [Israel] were being explicit, that would create problems with its neighbors like Egypt and Syria . . . whose leaders years ago agreed that [ambiguity] did not pose an offensive threat to them."
Iraq and Iran, he added, are different because "they are destabilizing" countries and could launch a first strike against Israel or U.S. forces in the region if they succeed in developing and deploying nuclear weapons.
There have been published reports going back to 1998 that describe Israel's acquisition of the diesel submarines and its testing of a cruise missile.
In an article two years ago in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, Reuven Pedatzur, a former Israeli fighter pilot and director of the Galili Center for Strategy and National Security, wrote that Israel was motivated by "the need to find deterrence solutions . . . from the probability that during the next decade Iran, and maybe even Iraq, will acquire the nuclear ballistic capability to hit Israeli targets."
Pedatzur said that faced with that threat, a submarine force armed with missiles is a reliable deterrent because Israel's enemies would not be able to locate and destroy them and thus "that it is impossible to avoid their lethal counterstrike."
The Carnegie Endowment book said Israel "is believed to have deployed" 100 Jericho short-range and medium-range missiles that are nuclear-capable. In addition, it has nuclear bombs that could be delivered from U.S.-made F-16 jet fighters and U.S.-built Harpoon missiles that could be launched from planes or ships.
Israel's nuclear-capable, sea-launched cruise missiles were tested in May 2000, the book said, and might have a range of more than 900 miles. With three submarines, Israel could "have a deployment at sea of one nuclear-armed submarine at all times," the book said.
"Such a survivable deterrent is perceived as essential because of Israel's unique geopolitical and demographical vulnerability to nuclear attack, and one that no potential enemy of Israel could ignore," it said.
Cirincione said Israel's possession of nuclear weapons and modernization of its systems creates an "extremely difficult situation" not just for the United States, but also for preventing other countries that have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty from breaking away. Israel's possession of weapons remains officially ambiguous, but Israel, along with Pakistan and India, did not sign the treaty.
Israel is only one of 15 countries discussed in the book, which describes the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and their missile delivery systems. It updates a similar volume produced by the Carnegie Endowment four years ago.
Cirincione said at least eight countries have nuclear weapons -- the United States, Russia, Britain, France, China, Israel, India and Pakistan -- and three more are apparently seeking them -- Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Four countries, he said, have in recent years given up their weapons -- South Africa and the former Soviet republics Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
The book attributed Iran's decision to seek nuclear, chemical and biological weapons to its experience during its war with Iraq in the 1980s, when Iraqi President Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iranian forces. Iran is influenced by its "extended neighborhood [where] it sees Israel, India and Pakistan with advanced nuclear weapons" and Iraq's weapons program no longer subject to inspection by the United Nations, the book said.
The authors said U.S. sanctions against Iran, which have hurt its ability to build conventional military forces, "have likely worked toward reaffirming belief in the utility of unconventional weapons."
Iraq's search for nuclear and biological weapons rests on Hussein's desire to be the "dominant power in the Middle East" and his belief that "a nuclear bomb would provide him with the ultimate symbol of military power," the book said. It said "Iraq may have a workable design for a nuclear weapon" and that if Baghdad "were to acquire material from another country, it is possible that it could assemble a nuclear weapon in months."
-------- missile defense
A hole in our missile defense system
By Theodore A. Postol,
6/15/2002
Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/166/oped/A_hole_in_our_missile_defense_system%2B.shtml
WHAT WOULD you do if you had a missile defense system that couldn't tell a warhead from a balloon decoy? If you're the US Missile Defense Agency, you'd classify the data about missile defense tests to hide this fatal flaw.
In May of 2000 I wrote a letter to the White House that described how the Missile Defense Agency had doctored results of National Missile Defense tests to hide the fact that they could not tell the difference between simple decoys and warheads. I also described how the agency had altered its entire test program to hide the flaw. Two General Accounting Office reports issued in March of this year verified the facts I provided to the White House. The agency responded to my letter by claiming that it was classified, and it engaged in multiple attempts to stop me from revealing that its claims amounted to scientific fraud.
In one of these attempts, the agency tried to enlist the help of MIT's president in order to seize research papers from my office, and in another, it sent three agents to deliver a letter to me that was classified ''secret.'' The letter contained nothing more than publicly available information deemed classified by the government so that the agency could claim that I would be violating security agreements if I continued to speak about this matter of national security.
Now the agency wants to have the authority to, in effect, classify the fact that it cannot tell warheads from decoys. It claims that the nature of the decoys that experts know would easily confuse its defense will now be classified.
The intent of this ploy has nothing to do with national security. It is an admission that the only way it can save its unworkable missile defense from reviews that will kill it is to hide information from the public.
The current National Missile Defense interceptor tries to identify warheads and decoys by ''looking at them'' with infrared eyes. Because the missile defense is essentially using vision to tell which objects are decoys and which are bombs, this technique is no more effective than trying to find suitcase bombs at an airport by studying the shape and color of each suitcase.
All of the objects that are seen by the missile defense are in space, where there is no air-drag to cause light decoys to slow up relative to heavy bombs. In addition, because there is no air-drag, it is possible to wrap the bomb in light material and make it look like a decoy. The possibilities for changing the visual appearance of bombs and decoys in the near vacuum of space are virtually endless.
After the first two tests in 1997 and 1998, the agency learned that decoys shaped like nuclear warheads - and even balloons with stripes on them - could not be distinguished from actual warheads. The agency responded by removing these decoys from all subsequent flight tests. In one of the flight tests, the agency claimed a success in telling warheads from decoys that was beyond expectations.
Later on, General Accounting Office investigators found that the sensor in that test had failed to perform and that the claims of success could not possibly have been true.
When the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense inspector general were investigating the false claims of success for fraud, the agency used researchers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory to create a bogus study that had the effect of misleading the investigators.
In yet later tests the agency used a balloon that was intentionally designed to be 10 times brighter than the bomb and claimed that the fact that it could tell the difference between the bright and dim objects meant it could tell warheads from decoys.
It neglected to explain that it had to know in advance that the brighter object was a decoy, and if the warhead were placed inside a large balloon it would then be indistinguishable from the empty decoy balloon.
The agency has no technical program for solving this fundamental problem. It has also been unable to provide any credible scientific evidence or analysis to show that it can ever solve this problem. So what it proposes to do is to classify the fact that the targets it is flying have been preconstructed in ways that will allow it to tell one from another.
This misuse of the classification system to hide the fact that the National Missile Defense System has no credible scientific chance of working is a serious abuse of our security system.
A missile defense system cannot work unless it is based on sound science. Classifying the fact that there is no sound science that can be used to make this white elephant fly is a disservice to our democracy and the American people.
Theodore A. Postol is professor of science, technology, and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
----
US puts Cold War tactics in an Alaska deep freeze
By George Edmonson in Washington
June 15 2002
Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/06/14/1023864349256.html
One of the United State's most controversial military programs takes a big step forward this weekend when workers in Alaska begin converting part of a closed army base into a testing site for missile defence.
Construction of the site would not have been permitted under the 30-year-old Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that the US formally renounced on Thursday.
President George Bush called for an aggressive push to build missile defences against "terrorists" and "rogue" states.
The 1972 ABM Treaty served as a bedrock of US-Soviet nuclear deterrence by essentially barring either side from building missile defences, leaving each vulnerable to the other's arsenal and therefore with little incentive to attack because of the certain massive retaliation.
Last December, Mr Bush announced his decision to pull out of the treaty in six months, having derided it as a Cold War relic. He warned of new threats from what he has called rogue states or terrorists that might attack the US.
"As the events of September 11 made clear, we no longer live in the Cold War world for which the ABM Treaty was designed," Mr Bush said.
"We now face new threats from terrorists who seek to destroy our civilisation by any means available to rogue states armed with weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles.
"Defending the American people against these threats is my highest priority as commander in chief."
In a sign of Mr Bush's determination to push ahead with a missile defence system, the Pentagon is set to break ground this week at Fort Greely, Alaska, on the previously prohibited construction of six underground silos for missile interceptors.
The World War II-era base was shut in July as part of the last round of base closings. Officials note that it could become an operational site if the program goes forward, but they are careful to point out that it is being renovated now purely for testing and development of what's known as "ground-based midcourse defence".
Chris Taylor, spokesman for the Pentagon's Missile Defence Agency, said: "It just will allow for better, more robust testing of all the systems."
Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Rick Lehner said the main construction effort will be six silos and several buildings.
Construction is expected to be completed in September 2004. A full-time crew of 50 will be assigned to the base when it begins testing.
However, no missiles will be launched from the test site, Colonel Lehner said.
An existing launch site, which is several hundred kilometres away on Kodiak Island, would be used for that purpose.
Proponents of a missile defence system contend that it is a vital plan that the nation cannot afford to ignore.
Opponents often point to the uncertainty of the technology and the enormous cost.
The most recent controversy over the program focuses on how much information is being released and how much is classified as secret.
Mr Taylor said it was necessary to keep some details of the testing secret.
"We don't want to help potential adversaries in theirl attempts to exploit weaknesses in our systems uncovered during the testing," he said.
Cox Newspapers and agencies
----
Anti - Missile Work Begins in Alaska
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 15, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Missile-Defense.html or
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/showcase/sns-ap-missile-defense0616jun15.story
FORT GREELY, Alaska (AP) -- Federal officials broke ground Saturday on six underground missile interceptor silos as part of the new national missile defense system.
It will take more than two years to install the silos 115 feet beneath the earth at Fort Greely for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system.
``We need this for the defense of our country,'' said Brigadier Gen. John W. Holly, program director for the GMD Joint Program Office.
The Fort Greely site, about 100 miles southeast of Fairbanks in the Alaska interior, will at first be used for testing. But the Pentagon hopes to have it ready as an emergency anti-missile system by September 2004, should the need arise.
The Bush administration's hurry to put a rudimentary system in place in Alaska by 2004 comes 19 years after President Reagan proposed a national defense against nuclear missile attack. Critics suggest presidential politics is the driving force behind the timetable.
The project's stated purpose is to defend against the use of a limited number of nuclear missiles by rogue nations such as North Korea, and is designed to eliminate mutual destruction as a strategy, said Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens.
The actual missile test bed work will be done by Boeing and its subcontractors, while Fluor Alaska will handle the general contracting.
``They're just going to start digging holes,'' said Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, spokesman for GMD.
When completed, the six silos, about 100 feet apart, will each have a 24-foot circumference and hold 70-foot-long missiles. There is room for 100 missile beds on the site. Fluor will install roads, fencing, support buildings and a power substation.
Officials say the work at Fort Greely is expected to cost $325 million. The full system is estimated to cost $64 billion, including a sophisticated ``X-band'' radar station in the Aleutian Islands and a new satellite system to detect launches.
Protesters waited at the main gate of Fort Greely and at a pulloff along the highway about two miles north of the entrance. No Nukes North, a Fairbanks-based anti-nuclear group, organized the protest, which began June 6 as a peace caravan across Alaska.
The protesters have been in the area since Thursday voicing objections to the GMD as an offensive, not defensive program, its expense and the nuclear dangers.
-------- terrorism
Fear Factor
New York Times
June 15, 2002
By BILL KELLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/15/opinion/15KELL.html
During the maximum jitters of the Cuban missile crisis, the high school where I was an impressionable freshman happened to be holding an assembly. The star speaker was a priest from San Francisco, who arranged to have his remarks interrupted by a student delivering a note. The priest studied the note, then looked up with a somber face and announced that the Soviet Union and the United States had just launched nuclear missiles at each other.
Forty years later, I can still hear the terrified whimper in that auditorium as we all considered our imminent doom. But I can't remember a word of what the speaker said afterward. That's the thing about fear: It gets your attention and then refuses to give it back.
Fear has been on my mind a good deal lately, since this paper's Sunday magazine assigned me to survey the possibilities of nuclear terror, from stolen warheads and homemade nuclear explosives to dirty bombs and the sabotage of nuclear power plants. Some of the threats actually struck me as less alarming on close examination. Dirty bombs, for instance - conventional explosives packed with radioactive contaminants - are fairly easy to make but the radiation is unlikely to be very lethal. Sober analysis had a hard time competing with grisly scenarios, though, and readers were more likely to remember the one-kiloton nuclear weapon I detonated (hypothetically) in front of the World Wrestling Federation gift shop on Times Square.
By coincidence, the article landed just as the Bush administration was trying to inoculate itself against further charges of insufficient vigilance. While the magazine was at the printer, Donald Rumsfeld was telling Congress that terrorists would "inevitably" be armed some day with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, and New Yorkers were hearing vague warnings about the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty. We now know that the government already had in custody a Chicago street punk turned jihad wannabe who allegedly talked about making a dirty bomb; the man was put forward this week by our hyperventilating attorney general as some kind of nuclear Jackal. As a fear-monger, I've had powerful company.
Letters and e-mails have poured in. A few readers objected that I had published a "road map for terrorists." Rest assured, the technical information in the article would not surprise a sophomore physics major. The few useful details I learned that are not widely known I left out, thinking less about the next World Trade Center than about the next Columbine High School. A couple of readers suggested that I had abetted the evildoers by identifying targets; tragically, I'm not the first to think of New York City in this regard, and the other iconic destination that came up in the article, Disneyland, was actually suggested by an elderly Russian physicist.
A more common complaint was that it is senseless, sensationalistic or just way too depressing to dwell on threats without offering answers. Not that the article was entirely without prescriptions, but it was not a to-do list, and there was perhaps an undertone of fatalism. Some readers pleaded for guidance. One mordant New Yorker wrote in asking for a list of neighborhoods likely to remain beyond the range of radioactive fallout - "and please indicate which have the best school systems."
The problem with threats like nuclear terror is that they are not solved but managed, not eliminated but faced, cut down to size and endured.
We lived with our last great nuclear nightmare - that hurricane of intercontinental ballistic missiles from the Soviet Union - for nearly half a century, and we kept our fears in check by employing a range of defenses that were none of them foolproof. We fumbled for decades to find the right mix of military readiness, geopolitical calculation, negotiation and attitude so we could coexist with the danger of Armageddon. To a significant degree, we redesigned our society around the threat.
The things that worked best - a sufficient arsenal to deter attack, the diplomacy of containment, the painstaking business of arms control - were imperfect and complicated. They also had unforeseen consequences, some of which haunt us now, like the black market in nuclear remnants and the cold-war blowback of places like Afghanistan. (Meet the new threat, son of the old threat.) But here we still are.
The easy answers were expensive placebos, like President Reagan's fantasy of an impermeable defensive umbrella, or before that the brief national obsession with civil defense. Remember that? At one point President Kennedy, afraid of being politically outflanked by New York's shelter-crazy Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller, planned to create fallout shelter space for 54 million people, who were to survive the nuclear aftermath on barrels of crackers, water and hard candy. Civil defense succumbed to an astronomical price tag and, as the cold-war historian Lawrence Freedman dryly put it, "the basic unreality of the proposition that straightforward measures were available to survive a nuclear war."
Now, too, there is no single leap of technology, no grand strategic gambit or fortification that can render us completely secure against a determined terrorist. That is not an argument for doing nothing, but for doing many things at the same time, with the right degree of urgency and a steadiness of purpose.
People who worry about terror for a living will tell you that the first priority is prevention. That means repairing an intelligence network that was built for the last threat, and locking up (or diluting) the fissile stockpiles where the material for ultimate terror is available. Prevention of terror can be military, such as denying terrorists the conveniences of a host state, and it can be geopolitical, such as pressing our Arab allies to counter Islamist intolerance.
A close second is interdiction - securing routes and borders, inventing better detection technology and installing it at ports and other choke points, conducting stings to disrupt the market in fissile materials.
And if prevention fails, third comes response and recovery. New York City, as befits the foremost target, has the most sophisticated response system in the country, enhanced and refined by sad experience.
In the end, though, the question is not just how to fight terrorism, but how to live with it. Even if you give our leaders passing marks (or the benefit of the doubt) for dealing with the actual threat, they have been dreadful at dealing with the fear of the threat. The silly color-coded gimmicks, the pre-emptive we-told-you-so's, the hype and spin and bluster and political opportunism, the willingness to make terrorism a lobbying prop for every cause on the Republican agenda - these are eating away at the administration's credibility. How much confidence can you have in people who contrived a bogus claim of a Cuban bio-weapons threat just to embarrass Jimmy Carter when he visited Castro? Sure, it is important to tell us if you arrest a suspect contemplating dirty-bomb terror. It's cynical overkill to stage a victory-over-terror press conference a month after the arrest - from Moscow - and to invoke a newly invented category of military justice, all because some loser dreamed of spraying Washington with gamma rays.
I live in a city that has been, twice, successfully targeted for major acts of terror, and I believe that atrocities on a large scale remain well within the means of bad guys. And yet, here I stay. Personally, I worry less about a dirty bomb than about a suicide killer packed with Home Depot shrapnel. Personally, I don't lie awake over the vulnerability of nuclear power plants, though if I lived downwind of one I might keep some potassium iodide tablets on hand. I do have bad dreams about the big one, an actual nuclear explosion, but I practice what psychiatrists call healthy denial. I've ordered a potted Ohio spiderwort for my windowsill; it changes color when the radiation level increases. I plan to name it Tom Ridge.
That's me. Maybe you cope with the fear by reading up on the world. Or maybe what works for you is a set of hazmat suits for the family, or a fallout shelter. The companies that sell shelters on the Internet report a surge of new business; makes a nice spare guest room, they say.
The urge to do something is normal, but problematic. I know a man who was stricken with a serious case of doomsday anxiety during the cold war. He pored over climate maps and studied the trade winds, looking for a refuge beyond the reach of windborne nuclear fallout. The most promising haven he found was a small group of islands off the coast of South America where the radioactive poison would never reach.
Fortunately for him, the fear passed before he moved to his new sanctuary, because a few years later it was under bombardment. The islands were the Falklands.
-------- treaties
After U.S. Scraps ABM Treaty, Russia Rejects Curbs of Start II
New York Times
June 15, 2002
By MICHAEL WINES
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/15/international/europe/15RUSS.html
MOSCOW, June 14 - One day after the United States formally abandoned the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, Russia responded in curt kind today, saying it was no longer bound by the 1993 accord known as Start II that outlawed multiple-warhead missiles and other especially destabilizing weapons in the two nations' strategic arsenals.
Russia's action was the sort of statement that would have induced global seizures a decade ago. This time some experts called it a political gesture, signaling displeasure but little else in a world remade by forces unleashed after the Soviet Union's collapse.
But that view was not unanimous, and some American experts said Russia's move could exacerbate a trend toward a more unstable nuclear balance - especially if the current thaw between East and West began to chill.
In Washington, a State Department spokesman said tonight that Russia's action "was not unexpected."
"Both the United States and Russia have moved beyond the treaty on further reduction and limitation of strategic offensive arms with the recent signing of the Moscow Treaty," the spokesman said. "Under the Moscow Treaty, the United States and Russia will reduce their strategic nuclear warheads to a level of 1,700 to 2,200 by Dec. 31, 2012, a level nearly two-thirds below current levels."
Official Russia seemed of two minds today. Even as its Foreign Ministry proclaimed Start II dead, accusing the United States of wrecking the arms-control process, its Defense Ministry said there were no grounds to retaliate against Washington for abandoning the missile defense treaty.
Other senior Russian defense officials told the Interfax news service that some Russian nuclear rockets might be kept in service longer because of the American action, but that no major shifts in Russia's strategic posture were envisioned.
"There's no point in talking about this treaty anymore, just as there is no point in talking about the ABM treaty," Vladimir Z. Dvorkin, a retired major general who heads the Russian center for Problems of Strategic Nuclear Forces, said in an interview tonight. "It's all in oblivion. It's time to start thinking of something else."
Others noted that the new nuclear-arms accord that Presidents Bush and Vladimir V. Putin signed in May already would reduce each side's stocks to between 1,750 and 2,200 warheads, well below the Start II levels. In that respect, Start II was an outmoded treaty even before Moscow buried it today.
Few doubted that today's announcement was in large part a bow to Russian politicians who have ached for a stronger response to the United States' go-it-alone policies on arms control.
In truth, the Start II treaty, which the Kremlin threw overboard today, while a landmark in arms control accords, had never officially been binding on either side.
The treaty, agreed upon by Presidents Clinton and Boris N. Yeltsin in 1993, proposed to slash United States and Russian strategic nuclear stockpiles over 10 years by nearly half, to no more than 3,500 warheads on each side. More important, it would have eliminated land-based multiple-warhead missiles, or MIRV's, and so-called "heavy" intercontinental missiles. Arms-control scholars call those weapons the most dangerous and destabilizing in the two nations' arsenals.
Roiled by conservative arguments that Start II endangered American security, Congress did not ratify the treaty until 1996, and refused a protocol that would have deferred it. Russia's Parliament approved the treaty and the new deadline in 2000, but only on the condition that the United States did not abandon the antiballistic missile accord.
One result is that Russia has yet to remove multiple warheads from some of its missiles, including ones whose service lives will now be extended. In the interim, Russia has developed a new missile, the Topol-M, which its military experts say is decades ahead of any American design and can penetrate any missile defense the United States can erect.
In the arcane world of arms control, some American experts essentially call this a heartening development - primarily because the United States no longer views Russia as an enemy, and thus does not worry about a surprise attack from Moscow. Also because the existence of Russia's Topol-M suggests that the missile shield the United States is developing is not aimed at swarms of Russian warheads, but rather at single or double shots from terrorist nations.
Today the director of the Arms Control Association in Washington, Daryl G. Kimball, said the Russian move, while long expected, was not to be dismissed lightly. Among other things, he said, it frees Russia to equip its new Topol-M missiles with multiple warheads, a move the Kremlin has not formally endorsed, but that would actually save money as Russia shrinks its nuclear force.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- nevada
Quake Hits Near Nevada Site Proposed for Nuclear Dump
New York Times
June 15, 2002
By NICK MADIGAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/15/national/15YUCC.html
A low-intensity earthquake shook the desert floor early yesterday near Yucca Mountain in Nevada, where the government plans to install the nation's first long-term repository for high-level radioactive waste. The authorities reported no damage or injuries.
The epicenter of the earthquake was about 15 miles east of the proposed site, which has been the subject of a long dispute between the Bush administration and Nevada officials about the wisdom of placing nuclear waste there.
Scientists at the United States Geological Survey in Golden, Colo., said the quake had a magnitude of 4.4.
A statement released by the Department of Energy, which is behind the proposed dump site, said pointedly that the quake was not at Yucca Mountain but at Little Skull Mountain, in a "known and studied" geologic zone.
"There was no damage to any Yucca Mountain project facilities, structures or the underground Exploratory Studies Facilities," the statement said.
The proposed repository is designed to withstand an earthquake with 1,000 times more energy than the one reported yesterday, the statement said.
But Judy Treichel, executive director of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force, which opposes use of the Yucca Mountain site for radioactive waste, said in an interview that the area had endured 620 earthquakes of magnitude 2.5 or higher over the last 20 years within a radius of 50 miles, and that there was no way of predicting a catastrophic one that might destroy the proposed repository.
"If any sane person or country was going to be looking for a place to store nuclear waste, you could hardly find a worse place than this," said Ms. Treichel, whose organization has been based in Las Vegas for 17 years. "This is just a stupid decision by Congress to go to a state where they thought the population either wouldn't care or wouldn't oppose it."
On Feb. 14, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham told President Bush that more than 20 years of scientific study, at a cost of $4 billion, had demonstrated Yucca Mountain's suitability as a place to store the nation's spent industrial, commercial and military nuclear waste. The next day, Mr. Bush announced his choice of the site, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Storage of the waste, which could remain radioactive for more than 10,000 years, would begin in 2010 about 1,000 feet below ground.
Nevada officials have other plans. Last month, Gov. Kenny Guinn exercised his option under the law to veto the president's selection, although Congress has until July 26 to override the governor's action.
--------
Quake near Yucca Mountain rattles lawmakers
By KEITH ROGERS
Saturday, June 15, 2002
Las Vegas Review-Journal
http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2002/Jun-15-Sat-2002/news/18979079.html
A small earthquake Friday that shook an area 12 miles southeast of the planned Yucca Mountain repository stirred a big reaction from Nevada leaders who claimed, again, the place is not safe for storing nuclear waste.
Authorities reported no damage or injuries from the magnitude 4.4 earthquake that the Nevada Seismological Laboratory recorded on its statewide network at 5:40 a.m.
It struck about seven miles beneath Little Skull Mountain at the Nevada Test Site, slightly west of where a moderate, magnitude 5.6 temblor rumbled through the sparsely populated area 10 years ago this month. That quake damaged a field operations building for the Yucca Mountain Project, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
"Today we saw more proof that the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear dump site is not safe," Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said in a statement.
Reid said though there also are risks with possible transportation accidents "from 100,000 truckloads and 20,000 trainloads of deadly waste through 43 states ... we cannot forget that there's another danger that after the waste arrives at Yucca Mountain, it will still not be safe."
"There is no need to rush to build a nuclear repository when there are so many unanswered questions about its safety and security," Reid's statement says.
His concerns were echoed by other Nevada officials as the Senate is poised to act on Gov. Kenny Guinn's veto of the Yucca Mountain repository site in a few weeks.
Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., was on a plane Friday afternoon heading to Nevada and could not be reached. But his spokeswoman, Traci Scott said, "This is something we've already known, that Yucca Mountain is not a safe place to store deadly nuclear waste."
However, Troy Wade, chairman of the Nevada Alliance for Defense, Energy and Business, an organization of Nevada Test Site contractors, said Friday's earthquake is "good news."
"It (provides) very clear experimental data that shows the facility's design" can withstand an earthquake.
David von Seggern, a seismologist at the state's laboratory in Reno, said scientists "we're not surprised. The region has had little earthquakes all along."
He said instruments up until noon recorded "tens of aftershocks" up to magnitude 3 after the main shock hit. Some Southern Nevadans called the Nevada Seismological Laboratory to report the magnitude 4.4 quake.
"We got a half dozen or so felt reports, from the Las Vegas area to Beatty," von Seggern said.
In Amargosa Valley, south of Yucca Mountain, residents felt shock waves from the quake as it rattled through rural Nye County.
"I was sitting in my living room drinking my coffee and my house started to shake," said Amargosa School Principal Faye Porche.
"This one was a pretty good one. It lasted 10 or 15 seconds. It was more like shaking, not rolling," she said.
No water sloshed out or leaked from a 1 million-gallon tank, a covered, plastic liner surrounded by a metal frame that was constructed and filled in February for the project, according to Yucca Mountain Project spokesman Allen Benson.
Friday's quake is considered to be at the high end on the scale of small earthquakes. Magnitude 4.5 and greater is considered to be moderate, according to von Seggern.
The magnitude 5.6 Little Skull Mountain earthquake on June 29, 1992 knocked out windows, cracked walls and downed lights and ceiling panels in the Yucca Mountain Project field operations center.
The 2 1/2-story concrete structure, built in the 1960s is located about 10 miles from Yucca Mountain, the volcanic-rock ridge where the Department of Energy wants to entomb 77,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel in a maze of tunnels, 1,000 feet beneath the top of the ridge.
Energy Department scientists have said a repository in Yucca Mountain could be built to withstand earthquakes registering up to 6.5 on the Richter scale on faults close to the mountain.
The Nuclear Energy Institute, the lobbying arm of the nation's nuclear power industry, downplayed the significance of Friday's earthquake. A fact sheet released by the institute said the repository "will be designed to withstand earthquakes and avoid specific fault lines."
"The design effort is backed by 20 years of scientific study of local fault movement, which is infrequent, occurring at intervals of many thousands of years," the institute's document reads.
The repository, by law, must be able to safely hold canisters of highly radioactive, metal-clad spent fuel pellets for 10,000 years even though scientists estimate peak doses from some of the materials won't occur for 300,000 years to 800,000 years.
--------
Mayors Oppose Dump in Nevada
June 15, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Mayors.html
MADISON, Wis. (AP) -- A committee of mayors voted Saturday to oppose transporting high-level nuclear waste to a national repository unless federal officials can guarantee the safety of all cities along proposed routes.
The resolution adopted on an unanimous voice vote stopped short of opposing the creation of a nuclear waste repository in Nevada's Yucca Mountain. Three Western mayors had urged their counterparts earlier in the day to oppose the repository, saying that shipping radioactive waste to the site would threaten the entire country.
Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman said an earthquake centered 12.5 miles from the proposed site at Yucca Mountain on Friday reinforced his concern that the site was unsafe for storing nuclear waste.
``That's our problem,'' Goodman told the U.S. Conference of Mayors. ``The nation, however, has a problem with transportation.''
Goodman, Salt Lake City Mayor Ross Anderson and Reno, Nev., Mayor Jeff Griffin said the federal government had not done enough to study the risks posed by shipping nuclear waste to the proposed site by highway or rail.
The federal plan would bury 77,000 tons of nuclear waste in tunnels inside Yucca Mountain, where it would remain radioactive for more than 10,000 years. The House has already approved the plan; the Senate has to vote on it by July 26.
The conference energy committee's resolution calls on Congress to prohibit moving high-level nuclear waste until cities along its route have adequate funding, training and equipment in the event of an accident. The full conference was expected to vote on the resolution Monday.
The conference, which drew about 250 mayors, includes a series of meetings on issues ranging from affordable housing to the environment.
The mayors also approved a resolution urging Washington to distribute homeland security block grants directly to cities and counties. President Bush has proposed sending about $3.5 billion in such grants to states, with three-fourths of it targeted for local governments.
``There should be no middlemen. It should go directly to the cities,'' said Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, a Democrat who is president of the group.
Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson told the mayors that distributing money through the states was the quickest way.
He noted that before states could receive the money, their plans for spending it had to be approved by the federal government.
``If we had to do this with all of the cities, we probably wouldn't have been able to do it,'' said Thompson, who was governor of Wisconsin for 14 years.
A survey of 122 mayors found that three-fourths were concerned about the threat of a chemical or biological attack, and almost four out of five said they had inadequate funding to detect threats. Three out of four said they do not have enough money for emergency response equipment or programs to protect city infrastructure.
Also scheduled to speak at the conference, which started Friday, are Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge and FEMA Director Joe Allbaugh.
The mayors' international affairs committee put off a vote on a resolution urging the administration to lift the trade embargo against Cuba and restore diplomatic relations.
The mayors met under tight security, with the city closing nearby streets as well as the shore of Lake Monona that borders the front of the convention center. Police outnumbered the handful of protesters, many of whom favored legalization of marijuana, who gathered down the block from the meeting.
On the Net:
Conference of Mayors: http://www.usmayors.org/
-------- new york
Evacuation Plan Is Focus of New Indian Point Battle
New York Times
June 15, 2002
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/15/nyregion/15NUKE.html
ELMSFORD, N.Y., June 14 - Four state lawmakers, opening a new avenue in their fight to close the Indian Point nuclear plant complex in Westchester County, have asked the federal government to withdraw its approval of an evacuation plan required for the plant operators to keep their license.
Led by Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky, a Democrat who represents central Westchester, the legislators filed a petition on Thursday with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, saying the evacuation plan fails to protect the health and safety of residents and should be rejected.
Under Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules, states must have an evacuation plan, approved by FEMA, that covers a 10-mile zone around reactors. This fall, FEMA had already intended to review the Indian Point plan, drafted by Westchester County and approved by the state, as part of an assessment it does every two years.
Mr. Brodsky suggested that if Indian Point did not have a FEMA-approved evacuation plan, the nuclear commission would have the power to pull the plant's license. But federal officials said the matter might not be so clear-cut.
FEMA officials said they had received such petitions before and, while the process had never resulted in a plant losing its license, petitions had led the agency to order improvements in evacuation plans. Lara Shane, a spokeswoman for the agency, said it was studying the petition but would have no further comment.
A spokesman for the nuclear commission said it was unclear whether a plant would automatically lose its license if FEMA withdrew or rejected the required evacuation plan. The commission gives heavy weight to FEMA's evaluation of the plans, but the agency's endorsement may not be needed to maintain a license, said the spokesman, Neil Sheehan.
Mr. Brodsky said he and the other legislators - Assemblymen Alexander J. Gromack and Sam Colman, both Rockland County Democrats, and State Senator Thomas P. Morahan, a Rockland Republican - decided there was no reason to await the results of the next FEMA evaluation. "We have an illegal plan," Mr. Brodsky said. "We chose not to wait."
He said the evacuation plan, among other things, does not fully take into account factors that may impede an evacuation, including the possibility that people outside the 10-mile zone or parents retrieving schoolchildren may clog roads.
The plan, and the overall safety of the two active reactors at the plant complex in Buchanan, N.Y., 35 miles from Midtown Manhattan, have received closer attention since Sept. 11 and the discovery that Al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan possessed diagrams of American nuclear plants.
Susan Tolchin, a spokeswoman for County Executive Andrew J. Spano, said the county stood by the plan, though it had been undergoing revision to improve it. She said Mr. Brodsky's petition included outdated information about the plan.
"He is in left field, trying to play umpire," Ms. Tolchin said. "He's gotten updated information, and has current information from us that he has chosen to ignore."
-------- south carolina
S.C. Watches for Plutonium Shipments
June 15, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Plutonium-Standoff.html
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) -- State troopers ordered to stop traffic outside the Savannah River Site didn't find any plutonium destined for the former nuclear weapons complex.
But that could change next weekend, when the U.S. Department of Energy says it can start shipping the nuclear material to the site near Aiken.
One day after Gov. Jim Hodges' request to block the shipments from the Rocky Flats facility in Colorado was denied in federal court, the governor read a statement Friday declaring a state of emergency and sent troopers to block roads near the site.
Hodges ordered state police to prevent anyone transporting plutonium into South Carolina starting Friday, even though the Energy Department said it couldn't start shipping the weapons-grade plutonium until June 22 because of logistical problems.
Legally, the shipments could have begun Saturday.
The Energy Department wants to move 6 1/2 tons of plutonium to South Carolina as part of its ongoing effort to close down the Rocky Flats site. The radioactive material would be converted into fuel for nuclear reactors, then shipped out of the state, the agency said.
But Hodges worries the program will never be funded and plutonium will never leave South Carolina.
``I am pleased to learn that the Department of Energy will not begin plutonium shipments until June 22,'' Hodges said. ``Fundamentally, however, little has changed. The plutonium still presents a threat to our state, and my executive order stands.''
Sid Gaulden, a spokesman for the state Department of Public Safety, said troopers were sent to New Ellenton to begin checking vehicles entering the Savannah River Site.
Gaulden admits there aren't enough troopers to block every entry point into the state. The Highway Patrol has been ordered to pay closer attention to the state line, but no extra troopers have been assigned to watch the borders.
Along with declaring the emergency Friday, Hodges also appealed to the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va. He wants the judges to overturn a Thursday ruling that allowed the shipments to begin as scheduled.
While U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie dismissed Hodges' suit, she refused an Energy Department request to declare the road blocks illegal.
``We will follow any court order regarding the shipment of this plutonium,'' Hodges said. ``But until ordered otherwise, I will continue to exercise any and every lawful power I possess to keep the plutonium from threatening the safety of our citizens.''
Vice President Dick Cheney, in South Carolina on Friday for a fund-raiser, said the fuel-conversion program is important to ensure that plutonium ``never falls into the wrong hands.''
``This administration is totally committed to helping pass legislation to guarantee that South Carolina does not become a permanent storage site for plutonium,'' Cheney said.
Federal officials have said the nuclear material would be under constant guard, and its path and time of arrival would be kept secret. They also say security at the Savannah River Site is sound.
-------- us politics
Axis of errors has America's friends Bushed
By Paul McGeough,
Sydney Morning Herald Correspondent in New York
June 15 2002
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/06/14/1023864349316.html
The White House stumblebum team played fast and loose this week - rushing headlong into every crisis, their loose lips risking greater tension, fear and panic in a world that was trying to cool it.
Along the way they angered, upset or confused the Israelis and the Palestinians, and European and Arab leaders who want to see more effective world leadership in settling the Middle East conflict; the warring Indians and Pakistanis; and an anxious American public and increasingly testy Democrats in the war on terror.
The latest embarrassment was yesterday's backflip by the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, on whether or not al-Qaeda terrorists were fomenting the volatile tension over Kashmir. First the terrorists were in there, now it seems they are not.
Mr Rumsfeld set his own trap after talks with the Indian Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, this week when he told reporters: "I have seen indications that there are al-Qaeda operating [in Kashmir]."
But after meeting yesterday with a furious General Pervez Musharraf, and others in the Pakistani leadership who made little effort to hide their ridicule of the Defence Secretary for being suckered by Indian propaganda, Mr Rumsfeld backed down.
This time he tortured the language as he told reporters: "We do have a good deal of scraps of intelligence that come in from people who say they believe al-Qaeda are in Kashmir or are in various locations. It tends to be speculative, it's not actionable, and it's not verifiable."
It is not surprising that the Indians, who want Washington to believe they each face the same enemy in their war on terror, would tell a visiting American that al-Qaeda was involved. It is staggering that Mr Rumsfeld bought it with little or no qualification.
The Bush Administration also did a spectacular backdown in the case of the dirty bomber. On Monday, a triumphant Attorney-General, John Ashcroft - in a live TV hook-up from Moscow - announced the US had "disrupted an unfolding terrorist plot" to strike America with a dirty radioactive bomb. He spoke of "mass death and injury" and Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz warned of imminent danger to "thousands of Americans".
The alleged dirty bomber, in custody in the US, subsequently was described as a "scout" who was thought to be looking for targets but who did not have the materials to make a bomb and did not appear to have a target.
In the face of widespread criticism that Mr Ashcroft had ramped the story to take the heat -off the FBI and CIA for their intelligence failures, and to prod Congress into passing the latest Bush anti-terrorism plan, Mr Wolfowitz was much more circumspect a day later. "I don't think there actually was a plot beyond some fairly loose talk," he said.
And White House sources leaked to USA Today that Mr Ashcroft had been reprimanded for exaggerating a threat which was known to be minimal.
And then there is the Middle East. The Secretary of State, Colin Powell, spent much of this week's meeting of G8 foreign ministers in Canada insisting that he and his department were not at war with virtually the entire Bush team on Middle East policy.
Ministers from Canada and Europe expressed frustration at Mr Bush's policy flip-flops and his inclination to accept the Israeli view. One said: "We are all waiting for the President to speak."
This was a reference to a speech by Mr Bush, possibly early next week, in which he will set down the latest version of his policy on the Middle East.
This week he comforted the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, agreeing with him that Palestinian violence had to stop before there could be progress towards peace, and sharing his sentiment that the Palestinian Authority was a spent force. But a couple of days later he called Mr Sharon to say he was in favour of setting up a provisional Palestinian state.
And when Mr Powell gave an interview to a London-based Arab newspaper this week - saying there would be a summit and that he would chair it, that the Palestinian leadership was an issue for the Palestinian people and that Mr Bush was committed to a Palestinian state - he was publicly dismissed by White House spokesman Ari Fleischer for parroting the views of foreign leaders.
Mr Bush tends not to be too concerned with the thinking of European leaders. But he will be offended by rising criticism in Britain, where Prime Minister Tony Blair is one of his stoutest international supporters.
Yesterday the Guardian quoted senior British official complaints about Washington's "vague and meaningless" anti-terror warnings that were so exaggerated they only caused panic and amounted to gratuitous propaganda victories to the terrorists.
One official had said the US refusal to acknowledge the Geneva Convention in the aftermath of the Afghanistan war was "not the benchmark of a civilised society".
But the reality of the Bush presidency is that no policy is fixed without an internal war, and increasingly it seems Mr Powell is pitted against a hawkish band that includes Vice-President Dick Cheney, Mr Rumsfeld, Mr Wolfowitz and, more often than not, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
It appears Mr Bush allows the team to pull him every which way with their competing views, leaving the decision to lock in on policy to the latest possible minute. It is about that time now on Middle East policy.
Mr Powell has been able to slow the White House lunge for a new war against Iraq, but if the president's inclination to go with the Israelis and to abandon the Palestinians is the foundation to next week's speech, the pragmatic Mr Powell may have difficulty dealing with it. The Secretary of State has been the only one in the team to fight for the peace process. What survives in the policy may influence who survives in the team.
---
Dirty tricks
By Paul McGeough,
Sydney Morning Herald Correspondent in New York
June 15 2002
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/06/14/1023864349286.html
Dirty bomber or dirty politics? For weeks the terror diet in the US has included hefty serves of name-calling and finger-pointing, as the CIA and the FBI tried to duck the blame for the litany of intelligence failures that preceded the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
Worried that the war on terror was becoming a civil war, with a flood of leaks and counter-leaks leaving Americans preoccupied more with the ability of the nation to protect itself than with terrorism itself, the White House weighed in abruptly last week with a plan it had resisted for months.
The CIA and the FBI would be joined in battle by a super new department of homeland security which would bring together under one umbrella more than 20 federal agencies - with their combined staffs of 170,000 and budget of $70 billion - which were overseen by 88 congressional committees and subcommittees.
But the plan served only to light a new fire under the debate - what difference would it make? Who would run it? Could the FBI and the CIA be made to co-operate with it? Would it get through the Congress unscathed and would it be in place by September 11 this year?
It was not the circuit-breaker the Administration wanted - questions on the ability of the US to defend itself remained on page one. And they stayed there until this dramatic announcement by the Attorney-General, John Ashcroft, in a special TV hook-up from Moscow on Monday: "We have captured a known terrorist who was exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or a dirty bomb, in the US."
Politics gave way to fear. And as Ashcroft warned of "mass death and injury", he kicked off an intense examination of the ease with which a dirty bomb might be assembled - by combining readily available radioactive industrial devices with conventional explosives - and the likelihood of contamination causing whole city blocks in downtown New York or Washington to be abandoned.
The Attorney-General had a star exhibit - prisoner Abdullah al Muhajir, who is an American citizen. But the timing and manner of the announcement sparked a new wave of accusations in Congress and in the media that this was an attempt by Ashcroft to use fear to ensure swift congressional endorsement for the proposed department of homeland security and to take the heat off the CIA and the FBI.
Al Muhajir had been in US custody for a full month, so why the attention-seeking hook-up to Moscow where Ashcroft was on unrelated business?
How could he declare from Moscow that the US had "disrupted an unfolding terrorist plot to attack the United States by exploding a radioactive dirty bomb" and on Wednesday have the Deputy Defence Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, play it all down with this: "I don't think there was actually a plot beyond some fairly loose talk."
By midweek the "bomber" had become a "scout" and his Internet "research" on dirty bombs became as "he surfed the Net".
Then USA Today reported that the White House had reprimanded Ashcroft for exaggerating the extent of a threat that, in fact, was minimal.
Al Muhajir was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare Airport when he arrived from Pakistan on May 8.
The authorities say that he was in Afghanistan in November and December of last year and that he had proposed a dirty bomb attack to Abu Zubaydah, al-Qaeda's specialist in foreign recruitment, who so far is the most senior of Osama bin Laden's associates to be captured by the US.
Apparently, al-Qaeda sent al Muhajir back to the US to check possible targets - but the FBI was awake to him. He had been under surveillance for weeks and on the last leg of his flight, from Zurich to Chicago, six FBI agents and as many of their Swiss colleagues clustered around the unsuspecting al Muhajir.
But questions also are being asked about the evidence against al Muhajir because, first, he was being held as a "material witness" and then he was declared by the President, George Bush, to be an "enemy combatant", which allowed him to be handed over to the military for indefinite detention.
And at the same time the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, set out the Administration's priorities for reporters: "We are not interested in trying him at the moment, or punishing him at the moment. We are interested in finding out what he knows." But if al Muhajir was intent on attacking the US, why use this back-pedalling language?
After senators were briefed on the case against al Muhajir, the Los Angeles Times was told: "Not many people were satisfied that we had a whole hell of a lot."
The Administration claims there is legal precedent for its handling of al Muhajir, but legal commentator Ian Weinstein of Fordham University said: "What they want to do is hold him incommunicado, break him down and get information. It would be a reasonable thing to do - except that it's illegal."
The US authorities have spent much of the week giving themselves big pats on the back. But it is not unreasonable to ask whether the arrest was good detective work by the authorities or sloppy terrorism by al-Qaeda. As an Administration insider told The New York Times: "He left an amazing number of tracks around."
Al Muhajir was dumb enough to draw attention to himself with an irregularity in his travel documents when he attempted to leave Pakistan in early April and then he shone a klieg light on himself by going to the US consulate and applying for a new passport.
Quick thinking by a consular officer who suspected him of identity theft prompted an examination of his criminal record and questions about what he might be up to in Pakistan. The upshot was that his picture was included in a rogues' gallery being shown to Zubaydah and other al-Qaeda captives who were teasing their interrogators with tales that one of their own, an unnamed US citizen, wanted to plant a dirty bomb.
Thirty-one-year-old al Muhajir was born Jose Padilla, a Roman Catholic of Puerto Rican descent. As a child his chubby face earned him the nickname "Pucho". He was born in Brooklyn, his father died when Jose was young and after his family moved to Chicago, he became involved in street gangs.
He was put in detention at 13 for his part in a murder; he became involved in a brawl when he was caught trying to steal a doughnut; later he was jailed again for a road-rage incident in which he fired a gun at another car from six metres away - and missed. His criminal record says thief and bully.
In prison for the road-rage attack in Florida in the early 1990s, he converted to Islam - apparently one of the few Hispanics to do so in US prisons. On his release he legally changed his name (as opposed to the seven aliases he had used over the years) and married an Egyptian.
They moved to Egypt for two years but al Muhajir is said to have gone on to Pakistan after deciding that the extremist mosques of Cairo were not extreme enough for him.
Given his propensity for erratic and violent behaviour and the clumsiness of having to apply for a new passport in the middle of an operation, it is hard to see what al-Qaeda saw in al Muhajir, apart from the fact that he had documentary gold - a US passport - and was prepared to put it into the service of al-Qaeda.
None of this is to underplay the risk of a dirty bomb strike against the US or to present al Muhajir as an innocent.
For many - in the intelligence, military, political and general communities - more strikes within the US are inevitable. And for terrorists, a dirty bomb is cheap and effective.
And while some experts said in the debate this week that death and post-attack cancer rates in the event of a dirty bomb attack would be very low, other reports focused on the alarming advice given to a Senate committee by Henry Kelly, a physicist who heads the Federation of American Scientists.
Using as an example a radioactive industrial gauge which went missing in March and later was found at a scrap metal plant in North Carolina, he said that it contained sufficient caesium to contaminate "a swathe about one mile long, covering 40 city blocks".
Speculating on the ability of a terrorist to mill the caesium into finer particles and combine it with about five kilograms of TNT, he went on: "If the device was detonated at the National Gallery of Art, the Capitol, Supreme Court and the Library of Congress would exceed EPA contamination limits and would have to be abandoned for decades."
There are about 2 million industrial, medical and research installations in the US that are licensed to have radioactive devices. According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, about 300 of these devices go missing each year.
The White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, snapped at reporters whose questions suggested that the Administration was using the dirty bomber story to pile on pressure to get its latest anti-terrorism plans nailed down, saying they could come only from "the most cynical among the most partisan".
But for all that, some Washington observers argue that the Administration has succeeded in refocusing the debate on this year's threats, rather than last year's failures.
The dirty bomber arrest prompted an editorial in The Wall Street Journal saying that it had "lifted nuclear terrorism out of Tom Clancy novels and into a clear and present danger".
Given how the story has unfolded this week, it could be argued that Clancy needs to lift his game if he is going to produce storylines like this.
---
Rumsfeld's ignorance won't stop him opening his mouth
ANALYSIS
by Mark Baker,
Sydney Morning Herald Correspondent in Singapore
June 15 2002
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/06/14/1023864349313.html
Donald Rumsfeld is rapidly emerging as the Dennis the Menace of American diplomacy - an accident-prone hyperactive with an alarming propensity to shoot from the lip and ask questions later.
This week the Defence Secretary was sent to South Asia to play umpire between two neighbours threatening a war in which their nuclear arsenals could well be brought into play. But instead of calming troubled waters he whipped up a fresh storm - appearing to endorse the propaganda of one side, angering the other and, in the process, showing every sign of being blissfully ignorant of the complexities of the argument.
Fresh from his landmark discourse in Brussels last weekend about the "known unknowns" and "things we don't know we don't know" (regarding the tricky business of tracking terrorists), Rumsfeld stumbled into New Delhi mid-week with a brief to counsel restraint in the 55-year feud between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.
Yet no sooner had he emerged from a round of talks with Indian leaders than he dropped a sensational assertion about militant activity across the United Nations-mandated Line of Control that separates the divided parts of Kashmir - the root of the current crisis.
"I have seen indications that there are al-Qaeda operating near the Line of Control," Rumsfeld told a news conference. "But I do not have hard evidence of precisely how many or who or where."
The claim of significant al-Qaeda activity along the frontier - long suggested by India without any evidence - carried the incendiary implication that Pakistan was failing to control its territory or was sanctioning activity by the remnants of Osama bin Laden's network. Either way, Rumsfeld was seen to be siding against America's ostensible ally in the war in Afghanistan.
The Pakistani response was immediate and blunt. "That's absolutely incorrect," the presidential spokesman, Major-General Rashid Qureshi, said. "I don't know where they got this from. It seems they believed Indian propaganda."
The next day, after meeting President Pervez Musharraf in Islamabad, Mr Rumsfeld hurriedly revised his script.
"The facts are that I do not have evidence and the United States does not have evidence of al-Qaeda in Kashmir," he told another news conference. "We do have a good deal of scraps of intelligence that come in from people who say they believe al-Qaeda are in Kashmir or are in various locations. It tends to be speculative. It is not actionable. It is not verifiable."
So a declaration one day by one of the most powerful figures in the Bush Administration that Kashmir is not just a turf war between India and Pakistan but a potential new front in the wicked empire of Osama bin Laden is revealed the next day to be the stuff of hearsay and speculation.
More disturbing than this Olympian gaffe and backflip with pike is what it suggests about the depth of US understanding of the issues that have triggered the present stand-off in which an estimated 1million troops face each other along the frontier in Kashmir.
There is no doubt that the decade of violence that has brought Kashmir to flashpoint is now being driven by Islamic militants - the so-called jihadis, or holy warriors - who are determined to see India expelled from the Muslim-dominated region.
Many of them are Pakistanis who were trained by Pakistani military intelligence before Islamabad allied itself with the US after September11. A small number, senior Pakistani sources concede, may indeed be Pakistanis and other nationalities who fought with al-Qaeda and the Taliban before fleeing Afghanistan late last year. But most are Kashmiris from both sides of the Line of Control who are fighting what they see as a struggle for national liberation.
Moreover, there is mounting evidence that, while Musharraf is indeed moving to curtail cross-border infiltration into Indian-controlled Kashmir, he is relatively powerless to control those Pakistani-based fanatics who hate his government as much as they hate India and the United States - and have demonstrated that hatred with deadly bombings in Karachi and Islamabad this year.
If America, as Rumsfeld's antics this week suggest, is now viewing the problem of Kashmir through its myopic fixation with al-Qaeda, there is a real danger that its responses will only inflame an already explosive conflict. If Washington is persuaded by the Indian view of the problem and New Delhi's preferred remedies, it runs a real risk of driving moderate opinion in Pakistan behind a tougher stance - and driving Musharraf into a political corner from which a military response may prove the only way out.
At the press conference in Islamabad late on Thursday that ended his South Asian mission, Rumsfeld declared that some progress had been made towards easing tensions in the region. But the only concrete proposal that appeared to have been brought by Rumsfeld to defuse the border tensions was a bizarre scheme to install US-made electronic sensors along the 2880km frontier in Kashmir to monitor any illegal incursions, an idea that seems to have been politely forgotten as soon as it was raised.
The Pakistani Foreign Minister, Abdul Sattar, had a far more sanguine assessment of the outlook, post-Rumsfeld. Acknowledging the "marginal" Indian concessions this week of naming a new ambassador to Pakistan, withdrawing warships from the Pakistani coast and lifting a ban on commercial flights over Indian airspace, he said there had been no real reduction in the threat posed by Indian troops along the Line of Control.
If the question is nuclear war and the answer is Donald, we should all start digging.
----
Speculation that Powell may quit caps bad week for Bush cabinet
By Toby Harnden in Washington
15/06/2002
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/06/15/wpow15.xml&sSheet=/news/2002/06/15/ixnewstop.html
Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, is becoming so frustrated at being undermined by the White House that he may stand down after the mid-term elections, according to some American diplomats.
The damaging speculation sweeping Gen Powell's Foggy Bottom headquarters has been dismissed as unfounded by senior State Department sources, but it caps a very bad week for President George W Bush's cabinet.
John Ashcroft, the attorney-general, was reprimanded for his announcement of the arrest of an alleged "dirty bomber". Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defence, was forced to make an embarrassing retreat over claims of al-Qa'eda activity in Kashmir.
But the biggest problem has been the simmering internal dispute over Middle East policy, which burst into the open when Gen Powell contradicted Mr Bush and Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, appeared dismissive of the secretary of state.
Gen Powell, who led US forces to victory in the Gulf war, is a towering figure in American politics. His domestic approval ratings top even those of Mr Bush.
The Foreign Office and continental diplomats view him as the "moderate" and pragmatic face of a unilateralist Bush administration. "It's fair to say that Powell is the one we can do business with," said one British official.
His premature departure would be seen as disastrous by the White House, not least because he could become a powerful focus of discontent if he were outside the administration.
The tensions between Gen Powell and senior figures such as Mr Rumsfeld have been exacerbated by the White House contradicting the State Department on key foreign policy issues.
Officials at the Pentagon privately accuse Gen Powell of a tendency to "freelance" and consider himself the most important figure in the administration.
The trouble began on Monday when Mr Bush gave unequivocal backing to Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, and appeared to rubbish Gen Powell's proposed ministerial conference on the Middle East.
"It totally undercut what we were trying to do and was very damaging," said a State Department source. "We have spent the rest of the week trying to reassure Arab nations that the president was misinterpreted." There was also considerable State Department anger directed towards Mr Fleischer.
On Wednesday, Mr Fleischer answered a question about whether Mr Bush supported Gen Powell's stance on a provisional Palestinian state by saying the president was "listening to a variety of people who have some thoughts to share".
He added: "The secretary [Mr Powell] from time to time will reflect on the advice that he gets, and do so publicly. Which is his prerogative, of course."
Mr Bush is expected to announce next week that he is in favour of establishing a timetable for an interim Palestinian state. But a titanic battle is going on within the administration, with Mr Rumsfeld's allies saying Mr Sharon should be given a free hand.
This appears to be Mr Bush's instinct but, as a president with limited foreign policy experience, he can tend to be pushed one way and then the other by competing advisers.
Mr Rumsfeld, who is described by his enemies within the administration as abrasive and arrogant, has annoyed the State Department with his "Rummygrams" - notes that question Gen Powell's policies or offer unsolicited advice.
One recent note from Mr Rumsfeld cited a newspaper article suggesting that Gen Powell's officials favoured lifting sanctions against Libya. "Is this true?" he asked.
The Pentagon chief has been overhead correcting Mr Powell's pronunciation of Kabul - the stress should be on the second syllable, he insisted - and poking fun at him for describing Afghans as "Afghanis".
Officials dismiss this as nothing more than jocular banter and it is true that there seems to be no personal animus between the two men. But this means that the dispute is ideological - which could be more damaging to the Bush administration in the long term.
Since September 11, Mr Bush has tended to tilt towards conservative hawks such as Mr Rumsfeld on important issues such as withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and targeting Iraq.
"He is intensely loyal to the president but there may well come a point when Gen Powell will wonder whether it is worth being secretary of state if he cannot shape American foreign policy," said the State Department official.
"After all, he can earn millions of dollars a year on the lecture circuit and still spend three times as much time with his wife."
--------
Government Snooping Is a Bipartisan Thing
By Colbert I. King
Saturday, June 15, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54506-2002Jun14.html
Would an Al Gore administration:
• Round up and keep secret the names of hundreds of foreign-born individuals?
• Place an American under indefinite detention without charges or an attorney?
• Issue new FBI guidelines that open the possibility of a return to past domestic intelligence abuses?
Of course, we'll never know, since it was George W. Bush, not Al Gore, who was president of the United States when terrorists struck America last September.
Another question: If, as I'm hearing around town, the delicate balance between the government's investigative powers and civil liberties is shifting rightward, is it the sole result of conservatives' controlling the White House and Justice Department? Or are we witnessing another Washington power dynamic -- the overreach of government when the nation is feared under attack?
A stipulation: This is indeed a very conservative administration. And, yes, there are aspects of Attorney General John Ashcroft's new FBI investigative guidelines that call to mind the J. Edgar Hoover era, when federal agents engaged in appalling abuses of power in the name of national security.
But there is unequivocal evidence that the egotistical, tyrannical Hoover was also given a green light to go over the edge by government officials higher than Hoover's pay grade -- and much further to Hoover's left.
For instance, it was Attorney General Ramsey Clark, following the 1960s riots in Newark and Detroit, and under pressure from the Lyndon Johnson White House, who established a Justice Department unit to collect "civil disorder intelligence." Oh, yes, this is the same Ramsey Clark described today as left-wing, radical, controversial civil rights lawyer etc.
Clark's Justice Department -- aided by the FBI, the Army and a host of federal agencies -- put together a massive domestic intelligence apparatus that collected information on anything that appeared on the scene with the heading "black power, new left, pacifist, pro-Red Chinese, anti-Vietnam war, pro-Castro," according to the Church special committee report.
The Ramsey Clark-built vacuum cleaner sucked up and spit out files on Cesar Chavez, Sammy Davis, Jr., Coretta Scott King, Charles Evers, New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, the Urban League and VISTA among others.
Clark set no limits on FBI collection and reporting. In fact, he thought the bureau was taking too narrow an approach, by focusing on "traditional subversive groups." So Clark issued a directive that, in his view, set forth "a relatively new area of investigation and intelligence reporting for the FBI" of domestic groups and individuals.
The FBI's "ghetto informant program," which recruited thousands of inner-city residents and workers to spy for the FBI, was launched in response to Clark's demand for civil-disorder intelligence.
Ramsey Clark wasn't alone.
Attorney General Robert Kennedy signed off on FBI requests for approval of wiretaps on Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Kennedy also received the "fruits" of the taps on King. And Kennedy, whose name now graces the Justice Department building, gave written ex post facto approval to wiretaps that had been installed on the residence of New York Times reporter Hanson Baldwin and his secretary, again according to the Church report.
Lyndon Johnson himself, believing some foreign force was behind anti-war protests, encouraged the CIA to probe the peace movement.
Before you knew it, under a perceived mandate to "neutralize" subversive forces, the FBI was anonymously mailing letters to the spouses of domestic intelligence targets to destroy their marriages; falsely and anonymously branding members of violent groups as government informants to expose them to attacks or expulsion, and anonymously attacking the political beliefs of investigative targets to get them fired by their employers.
My point is this: In their day, good Democrats Kennedy, Johnson, Clark et al. believed the country faced serious domestic threats: civil disorder, subversive forces and revolutionary beliefs, black nationalism, communist infiltration.
Kennedy, Clark and Johnson weren't driven by their Democratic Party registration or by some perverse desire to infringe upon civil liberties. They justified and rationalized their actions -- intrusive, abusive and injurious to constitutional values -- as in the nation's interest: They were keeping us secure.
The September attacks and the threat of al Qaeda-sponsored terrorism are similarly driving the current Washington crowd. As with Democrats of decades ago, detecting the violent and foiling threats to the social order are, in the minds of this administration, their highest calling.
Fair enough. That's their job.
The issue, at least for me as a journalist in this time of crisis, is how do so-called watchdogs of democracy -- the press, some would add the courts and Congress -- guard against the excesses of government power. Party label, as we should have learned in the '60s and '70s, is irrelevant.
When the likely outcome is overbroad intelligence activity, more government control, departures from due process and less individual liberty, power shouldn't be easily ceded to any administration, whether it's Democratic or Republican, conservative or liberal or something in between.
What would Al Gore do?
Sorry, but at this critical moment, who cares?
e-mail: kingc@washpost.com
-------- MILITARY
-------- israel / palestine
Tensions on Lebanese Border Cast a Pall Over Peace Effort
New York Times
June 15, 2002
By TODD S. PURDUM
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/15/international/middleeast/15DIPL.html
WASHINGTON, June 14 - Even as President Bush prepares to issue his new plan for reviving Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, a senior Western diplomat warned here today that the increased threat of military action along Israel's border with Lebanon could jeopardize any chance of an international peace conference.
The diplomat said there were indications of new weapons shipments from Iran to Hezbollah, the militia in southern Lebanon that has ties to both Iran and Syria. He said these included longer-range rockets that could be launched deep into Israeli territory, perhaps within the next several days. The diplomat said such an attack could prompt a severe Israeli reprisal that could include an invasion of Lebanon.
But a range of senior Bush administration officials, from the White House to the Pentagon and the State Department, said they were not aware of any such new or immediate threat, while acknowledging that the situation remained volatile and a matter of intense concern.
An Israeli diplomat here confirmed that Israel was concerned about the northern border and that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had spent considerable time discussing it with Mr. Bush this week.
"I know that our people have seen indications that there is an intention on the Hezbollah side to act in the short term, and possibly to escalate in comparison with activities that we've seen in recent months," the diplomat said. "If they fired against a population center some sort of missile, Israel I think would have to respond, though I can't be specific about what we would do."
For months, there has been intermittent shelling by Hezbollah and return fire from Israel. On a visit to the region in April, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell took time out to visit Lebanon and Syria to pressure leaders there to crack down on activity by Hezbollah for fear it could prompt a regional war.
American officials said that in the last 36 hours, diplomats in the region had renewed contacts with Lebanese and Syrian officials, urging restraint, especially given the administration's efforts to establish peace.
"Starting with the secretary's visit, we've been underscoring to all the parties the need for maximum restraint along the border area," one senior administration official said this evening. "We don't see much of a difference in patterns of activity. It remains a volatile situation, and the message is, `Everybody keep cool.' Israelis have expressed their concerns, but the broader reason is that this is the worst possible time of having something ignite up there."
Indeed, Secretary Powell and senior State Department officials held another round of meetings today in preparation for Mr. Bush's expected announcement next week of his plans for reviving political talks and for an international peace conference to address the Middle East crisis.
After meeting with Secretary Powell, the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, told reporters as he left the State Department: "I am afraid again I don't have much to tell you. I think your interest and the talk that you want to hear is not me talking, but what the message and the statement of the president is going to be. And I, like you, am waiting for that."
At the same time, the State Department's top Middle East expert, Assistant Secretary William J. Burns, met with his counterparts from the United Nations, the European Union and Russia to discuss the administration's next steps.
Both American and European officials said the meeting produced strong consensus on the need to move forward simultaneously in efforts to re-establish security, address economic and human needs in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and to provide a path for settling the conflict.
One diplomat said that the idea of declaring a provisional Palestinian state whose borders and capital could be determined later was under serious consideration by Mr. Bush, but that he believed no decision had yet been made on that or a host of other points, and that there was some ambivalence about the idea from other nations.
"When you start twisting it, both legally and psychologically, it's very fluffy," the diplomat said.
-------- us
Preemptive Strikes Must Be Decisive, Powell Says
Secretary Says Force Isn't Only Option in New Policy
By Glenn Kessler and Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, June 15, 2002; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54288-2002Jun14?language=printer
The Bush administration's new policy of considering preemptive attacks against terrorists and hostile states could include pressure short of military action, but if force is used it must be decisive, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said yesterday.
Expanding on a policy shift first announced by President Bush two weeks ago, Powell warned of the perils of preemptive strikes, noting that intelligence concerning potential threats is not always reliable and the rest of the world would demand evidence the attack was justified.
He added that there were many tools besides military strikes -- including arrests, seizures and financial and diplomatic measures -- that could be used for preemptive action.
But military strikes, once ordered, must not be half-hearted measures, Powell said in an interview. "If you have a preemption option, a target, you should do it in a way that removes the threat, that is decisive," he said.
Powell, to some extent, offered a corollary of what has been dubbed the "Powell Doctrine," first articulated when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the Persian Gulf War, that the United States should be cautious in its use of force, but overwhelm its opponents to ensure victory if action is taken.
In an address at West Point, Bush argued that the Cold War doctrines of deterrence and containment were no longer sufficient in a world of terrorist threats and hostile states armed with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. "If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long," Bush said, noting he would take action against "mad terrorists and tyrants."
The new preemption doctrine will be more fully fleshed out in the administration's first National Security Strategy, being drafted for release by early this fall.
Powell said if he had had any inkling of the car bombing yesterday at the U.S. consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, which killed 11 people, "should I have acted preemptively? You bet."
"To the extent that you can prevent those actions it is a sensible thing to do," he added, "recognizing that there is a burden on those who take preemptive action to be able to show the world that there was basis for the action, that it made sense, that it protected innocent people and the response was consistent with the kind of threat that was being presented."
Powell, who only a few hours earlier had returned from a meeting of foreign ministers in Whistler, British Columbia, appeared relaxed yesterday morning as he met with a group of Washington Post reporters in the secretary's conference room at the State Department.
While Bush's approach has aroused concern within NATO, which is designed to be a defensive military alliance, Powell said it had stirred little controversy in diplomatic circles.
"Frankly, I have not received a lot of blowback on the president's statement," Powell said. "It did not come up at all in two days of meetings with my G-8 [Group of Eight industrial nations] colleagues."
Powell said the policy could be used to justify an attack against a country, as well as a stateless terrorist organization. Asked, for example, whether policy could be used to justify an attack on nuclear facilities in North Korea, Powell cited Israel's attack two decades ago on Iraq's Osiraq nuclear power plant after Israeli intelligence concluded the plant had the capability of producing weapons-grade plutonium.
"The Israelis did it in 1981," he said. "It was clear preemptive military strike. Everyone now is quite pleased even though they got the devil criticized out of them at the time."
But Powell emphasized that while military attacks must be decisive, it might be equally effective to simply threaten military force. "If getting their attention is decisive, in changing their behavior and changing their action, that's fine," he said.
In what Powell called the "perfect example," he recalled a coup attempt in the Philippines on Nov. 30, 1989, shortly after he became chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Philippine President Corazon Aquino had said rebel forces were attacking the presidential palace by air, and she requested that U.S. aircraft drop bombs on an airfield used by the rebels. The State Department favored a U.S. bombing run, he said.
Powell proposed a series of tactics to show "extreme hostile intent" against the rebels and "scare the hell out of them," hoping to avoid using munitions. Then-Defense Secretary Richard B. Cheney and his boss, President George H.W. Bush, quickly approved the plan.
The first step was for U.S. F-4 jets to buzz the airfield. If rebel planes moved toward the runway, the F-4s would fire in front of them. If they took off, the U.S. forces were instructed to shoot them down.
The F-4s soon made their menacing motions, and the Philippine pilots stayed on the ground. The coup collapsed within hours, and the coup leader later said the actions of the U.S. jets persuaded him the cause was futile. Later, the Americans learned that forces friendly to the Aquino government were also at the airport.
"It was decisive, but there were breakpoints in there to allow common sense to prevail, and nobody started their engines," Powell said. "We didn't kill any Filipinos. There were no funerals that could be blamed on Americans."
-------- propaganda wars
To the Shores of Hollywood
Marine Corps Fights to Polish Image in 'Windtalkers'
By David Robb
The Washington Post
Saturday, June 15, 2002; Page C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54632-2002Jun14?language=printer
In the original screenplay for the new MGM movie "Windtalkers," a Marine nicknamed "The Dentist" creeps across a battlefield strewn with the bodies of Japanese soldiers. "The Dentist bent over a dead Japanese soldier, doing what he does, relieving the dead of the gold in their mouth," the original script reads. "The Dentist twists his bayonet, struggles to get the gold nugget out of the corpse's teeth."
"Come to Poppa," says The Dentist.
It's a grisly scene, one of several that you won't see in the World War II-era movie -- directed by John Woo and starring Nicolas Cage, Christian Slater and Adam Beach -- which opened yesterday. The scene was written out of the script after the Marine Corps and the Department of Defense -- which lent production assistance to the movie -- complained about it.
When filmmakers ask the Defense Department for help, they have to submit their screenplays to Phil Strub, the head of the department's film and TV liaison office in Washington. He reviews them for accuracy and to determine whether they will help the military's recruiting efforts. Hollywood's top producers regularly trek to Strub's office, pleading for assistance. Strub has clout. If he likes a script, he can recommend that the Pentagon give the movie's producers access to billions of dollars' worth of military hardware -- ships, airplanes and tanks. But if he doesn't like a script, the producers will have to make the changes he recommends if they want the military's assistance.
That's what happened to "Windtalkers," which tells the story of Marines assigned to guard the Navajo "code talkers" who used their unique language to confound Japanese code breakers.
After receiving the original "Windtalkers" script on Jan. 28, 2000, Strub passed it along to Capt. Matt Morgan, the head of the Marine Corps' film liaison office in Los Angeles. Morgan liked the script, but had some major reservations. He discussed the Dentist scene in a March 3, 2000, memo to Strub.
"This has to go," Morgan wrote. "The activity is un-Marine. . . . I recommend these characters be looting the dead for intelligence, or military souvenirs -- swords, knives, field glasses. Loot is still not cool, but more realistic and less brutal."
Strub agreed. "Stealing gold teeth, yep, has to go!" he wrote back to Morgan.
A few days later, Morgan sent a memo to Terence Chang, Woo's producing partner. "The 'Dentist' character displays distinctly un-Marine behavior," he told Chang. "He is, in fact, committing an atrocity. While I recognize the war in the Pacific was brutal, I don't see a need to portray a Marine as a ghoul."
Morgan said he told Chang: " 'Listen, if you're gonna do something like this, is this gonna be something that's gonna be dealt with in the movie? Because you don't deal with it. I mean, you just got a guy who shows up and he's doing it like he was washing his car or something.' And I say, 'If you're gonna portray this, let's deal with it. The why. The how. Was it reciprocal? You know, because the Japanese were doing awful things to the Marines, too.' So Terence said, 'You know what? John [Woo] doesn't like this scene either. It's gonna go away.' And I think by two more drafts, it was gone."
But Chang said that the scene was cut because the movie was "too long" anyway -- not because the Marines complained.
Screenwriters Joe Batteer and John Rice fought to keep the scene in the film, but in the end took it out. Batteer said the scene was dropped only after the Marines objected. "The Marines' notes came prior to the decision to drop that," he said.
"Through Terence Chang we got the word. It was, 'You gotta lose the filling-pulling,' " Batteer said. "We saw Morgan's missive about the ghoulishness. We argued that it was true, but we ultimately relented and yanked it, no pun intended. We tried to argue our case, but it was a fine line because we had to appease the Marine Corps and the studio. The studio wanted the cooperation from the Marines."
"They said a Marine would never do that," Rice said. "But who can say one Marine would never do that? "
Despite his claim that this kind of atrocity was "un-Marine," even Capt. Morgan acknowledges that such crimes were committed.
"You can look at various books about Marines in World War II, and this obviously happened," Morgan said. "I am very proficient on my Marine Corps World War II history, and I know that these things happened. Horrible, awful atrocities happened, especially in the Pacific."
Another scene that Morgan and Strub didn't like involved a war crime committed by the lead character -- Sgt. Joe Enders, played by Cage. In the original screenplay, Enders kills an injured Japanese soldier who is attempting to surrender.
In his memo to Strub, Morgan wrote: "Enders uses the flame-thrower to toast the Japanese cave. One of the soldiers attempts to surrender, and Enders happily roasts the unarmed man. Killing this man is potentially a war crime, and an experienced Marine in a signal unit would know how rare and valuable a Japanese prisoner is."
Morgan relayed his concerns to Chang, and that scene, too, was written out.
Chang said he and Woo "hated that scene" because "it was too brutal. It would be very hard for the audience to sympathize with Enders later on in the movie."
Once again, the screenwriters fought to keep their vision intact. "It showed that Enders was enraged and wanted to kill Japanese," Batteer said. "We didn't want to paint him in a positive light. We wanted to show him as a damaged guy."
But in the end, they bowed to pressure from the Marine Corps and the director.
As in any film production, tensions arise about whose vision will make it to the screen.
"Everybody has an agenda," Batteer said. "It's a collaborative art form. You have the writer and the director and the studio, and in this case, you also have the USMC, and everybody has their point of view, and everybody compromises."
The military also wanted the producers to change a scene in which Enders is given orders to kill his Navajo code talker should they face imminent capture. The battle over this scene raged for weeks, and once again the Marine Corps' version of history won. Only this time, the writers' version was backed by not only the code talkers but also the U.S. Congress.
In the original script, a Marine Corps major tells Enders: "We can't risk one of our code talkers falling into enemy hands. If there's a chance that he might be captured, the code will be deemed more important than the man. If it comes to it, Enders, you're going to have to take your guy out."
Morgan, however, called such kill orders "fiction." And Batteer recalled that one of the producers called to say the Marines were concerned about the scene. "They essentially denied that such orders were given," he said. "The Pentagon requested that the language be altered to make it not quite so specific."
Chang said he still believes that Marines had been ordered to kill the code talkers rather than to allow them to fall into enemy hands.
"The whole movie was based on that assumption," he said. "We did talk to code talkers, and they said that was true. Why would they lie to me? But I also understand the Marines' position."
In the end, Chang agreed to make the change requested by the Marines. In the movie, the major now tells Enders: "Under no circumstances can you allow your code talker to fall into enemy hands. Your mission is to protect the code at all costs. Do you understand?"
Chang noted, however, that "it's still pretty obvious" what is meant when Enders is given his orders.
Several of the Navajo code talkers have said that there were indeed orders to kill them in the event of capture. John Brown Jr., one of the original 29 code talkers, told Reader's Digest: "The Marine order was to let them shoot you if you were captured. That was war. We were obligated."
In his imperfect English, code talker Carl Gorman, who died in 1998 at the age of 90, told "CBS Evening News" in 1997: "Orders was given that if any of the code talkers being captured, shoot the code talkers."
Even Congress concurs. Two years ago it passed a bill awarding Congressional Gold Medals to the 29 original code talkers. The medals were presented by President Bush to four of the five living original code talkers at a ceremony last July in the Capitol Rotunda.
Batteer and Rice, whose movie had just finished shooting in Hawaii, sat just a few rows back from the honorees. As he watched the ceremony, Rice was well aware that the language the Pentagon had forced the producers to remove from his screenplay was part of the very bill Congress had passed authorizing the medals.
The legislation states: "Some Code Talkers were guarded by fellow Marines, whose role was to kill them in case of imminent capture by the enemy."
"It was kind of ironic," Rice says.
The Marine Corps, however, still insists that no such orders were given and is trying to get Congress to rewrite the legislation.
The writers said they were relieved that the Pentagon didn't insist on more changes.
"We're happy that's all they wanted," Batteer said.
"The integrity is still there," said Rice.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS
Police school for Americas considered
By Andy Olsen
The Washington Times
June 15, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020615-86056994.htm
New Costa Rican President Abel Pacheco said yesterday that his country, which has no army and has experienced nearly half a century of peace, may become the site of a U.S.-supported international police academy.
In an interview, Mr. Pacheco said he spoke with President Bush at the White House on Thursday about opening the police school in Costa Rica.
It would train officers from throughout North and South America to handle "modern" threats, Mr. Pacheco said.
"The police will learn management of very modern crime circumstances for which our traditional police aren't prepared," Mr. Pacheco said in Spanish.
The West Virginia-sized country - known by locals as the "Switzerland of Central America" - was chosen because of its central location and peaceful history, according to Costa Rican Ambassador Jaime Daremblum.
Officers would train to face such problems as terrorism, drug trafficking, domestic violence and kidnapping. The project would be a joint venture within the Americas to promote better law enforcement.
Costa Rica's legislative assembly must approve the plans before work on the police school begins.
"We believe globalization has to start with the globalization of justice," Mr. Pacheco said. "We can't talk about the globalization of commerce without talking about what happens to the people."
Mr. Pacheco, who took office last month, also spoke of Costa Rica's concerns about access to the U.S. market.
He discussed with Mr. Bush a Central America Free Trade Agreement, which would open U.S. markets to small businesses in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.
"The president was very emphatic in saying, 'This is going to happen,'" Mr. Pacheco said.
The five Central American countries recently began negotiations as a bloc with the United States to find new outlets for crafts, textiles and food made by thousands of workers in small home industries, Mr. Pacheco said.
For the first time, democratically elected presidents lead all five nations.
Improving the scene for agricultural trade, however, will be more difficult because Costa Rica fears that cheap American rice will drive its own farmers out of business.
"I do not think the state will be eager to accept agricultural products in Costa Rica," Mr. Pacheco said. "We are an agricultural country."
The U.S. Congress will begin looking at the proposed Central American trade zone as soon as it completes a U.S.-Chilean trade agreement, which may be as soon as August, Mr. Daremblum said.
Critics of the trade agreement, which Mr. Bush proposed in January, say the Central American nations have not settled their economic differences to come together as a single negotiating unit with appointed leadership, as the European Union has. That may hinder Central America's biggest exports - agriculture and textiles - from entering U.S. markets..
-------- ACTIVISTS
Quake Stirs Opposition To Nuclear Waste Plan
By Eric Pianin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 15, 2002; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54118-2002Jun14.html
A mild earthquake early yesterday in the Nevada desert about 12 miles southeast of Yucca Mountain has added fuel to the controversy over the Bush administration plan to build a centralized nuclear waste repository beneath the mountain.
The earthquake had a preliminary magnitude of 4.4, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The Energy Department reported that there was no damage to any of the Yucca Mountain facilities or exploratory tunnels.
But opponents of the nuclear waste disposal project described the quake as a "wake-up call" for the Senate, which will vote this summer on whether to allow the administration to proceed with the multibillion-dollar project.
"If anyone ever wondered about the wisdom of locating an underground radioactive dump site on an active fault line, this shows why," Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.) said after the incident.
Senate Majority Whip Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), who is leading the effort to block the project, said: "There is no need to rush to build a nuclear repository when there are so many unanswered questions about its safety and security."
The Bush administration has declared Yucca Mountain "scientifically sound and suitable" for storing as much as 77,000 tons of radioactive waste from nuclear facilities in 39 states. Yet Yucca Mountain sits on one of the largest earthquake fault zones east of California. In 1992, a magnitude 5.6 earthquake caused tens of thousands of dollars of damage to DOE facilities at Yucca Mountain, although federal officials note that it did not dislodge the boulders on the mountain's slope. More than 600 earthquakes greater than magnitude 2.5 have been recorded at Yucca Mountain in the past two decades, state officials say.
The proposed repository would be located about 1,000 feet underground in a relatively stable block of solid rock, which would keep its contents safe from any significant earthquake impact, according to administration officials.
"Yucca Mountain repository designs could withstand a local earthquake with 1,000 times more energy than the one reported this morning," a statement issued by DOE's Yucca Mountain Project office in Las Vegas said.
But critics say they are far more concerned about the potential for damage to above-ground storage facilities, where much of the waste brought to Yucca Mountain would be kept for decades while it cools.
"This is where seismic activity would cause the most damage," said an aide to Berkley.
In February, President Bush formally proposed moving ahead with the project and, in May, the House voted 306 to 117 to approve it. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee recently backed the project 13 to 10, but Reid has vowed to try to block the project on the Senate floor.
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