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NUCLEAR
Some states say no thanks to radiation pill
Loose nukes a la Hollywood
British nuclear power company faces storm over ship
USEC Says Fewer Jobs May Be Cut
US Dirty Bombs: Radioactive Shells Spiked with Plutonium
Japan set to rate nuclear plants for safety
Donors Agree on Aid to Clean Nuke Waste in Russia
Russian Arms Exporter Says Iran a Target Client
Powell Urges OK of Russia Arms Pact
Senate Panel Mulls Russia Arms Pact
Senate Panel Questions Russia Arms Treaty
Senate Votes to Entomb Nuclear Waste in Nevada
What's Ahead for Yucca Mountain
Yucca Mountain Controversy Chronology
Senators Declare Support for Waste Site
USEC Says Fewer Jobs May Be Cut
Congress Approves Yucca Nuclear Waste Dump
Senate Gives Final Approval to Nevada Nuclear Waste Site
GOP Moves to Force Nuke Waste Vote
Russia says US must learn to act with others
MILITARY
'Friendly fire' came amid hunt for Taliban
Bumpy Start for New Pan - African Body
Key Principles of the African Union
IRA uses Colombia to test new weapons
Britain approves export of jet parts destined for Israel
The international dealers in death
Colombian U'wa Indians brace for new battle
Britain to Relax Laws for Millions of Dope Smokers
Nev. to Vote on Legalizing Marijuana
Russia: Boost Anti - Drug Effort
Iraq 'ready for war'
Iraq says Farrakhan tells of U.S. Muslims' support
Israelis, Palestinians See Rare Glimmer of Hope
Letter from Congressman Michael McNulty
Shackles loosened on U.S. intelligence
Probe of U.S. Weapons Tests Expanded
POLICE / PRISONERS
FBI uneasy about plan to deregulate fast Net
N.J. Won't Release Detainees Names
New Penalty for N.Y. Death Row Inmate
See no evil?
Al Qaeda Says It Will Hit U.S., Jewish Targets Soon
ENERGY AND OTHER
EU to miss its target on boosting renewables - study
Paperwork, costs cloud Spain's solar potential
GAO Reports on Environment, Military
Thailand to Host HIV Vaccine Trial
ACTIVISTS
Nevada Vows to Continue Nukes Fight
Yucca vote, 60-39, release, vote list
Banned Falun Gong Movement Jammed Chinese Satellite Signal
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Some states say no thanks to radiation pill
By Haya El Nasser,
USA TODAY
07/09/2002
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2002/07/09/states-radiation-pill.htm
Fewer than half the states eligible for free pills that can protect people from thyroid cancer after a nuclear disaster have taken the federal government up on its offer.
As the nation increases stockpiles of medicines to protect against terrorist attacks, a program that offers two free potassium iodide pills to an estimated 4.5 million people who live within 10 miles of a nuclear power plant has created confusion. More than six months after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) announced the program, only 15 of the 33 states that qualify have asked for the pills.
Some states have rejected the program. They say it gives people a false sense of security that could hinder evacuations. Others are distributing the pills now or hoarding them in secret locations. And some don't want to participate because the pills don't provide enough protection to everyone who could be affected.
The pills represent a two-day supply for adults and a four-day supply for children. The NRC says that would be enough to protect people while they evacuate.
Critics say the program is more show than substance. The pills have to be taken daily for 10 to 14 days after exposure to radioactive iodine, which is prevalent in nuclear fallout.
Iowa declined to stock the pills. Potassium iodide doesn't protect against any other kind of cancer caused by exposure to radiation, such as breast and lung cancer and leukemia, says Stephen Gleason, Iowa's public health director. He also says that giving pills to people without checking their medical conditions is dangerous because of possible side effects.
The NRC stresses that people should evacuate contaminated areas, whether or not they're taking potassium iodide. "Administering potassium iodide is a reasonable, prudent and inexpensive supplement to evacuation," the agency says.
The pills are available without a prescription. Anbex, one of the largest makers of potassium iodide, is supplying the pills to states for the NRC.
Sales to individuals also have gone up. Alan Morris, Anbex president, says the company filled more than 7,500 individual orders since Jan. 1. "That same period a year ago, I doubt we did 100 sales," he says.
States that asked for the free pills have different strategies:
Florida is storing its 784,000 pills in secret locations until there is a danger at one of the state's three nuclear plants. New Hampshire wants to distribute its 350,000 pills soon but hasn't completed a plan. New York's Westchester and Rockland counties began handing out the pills in June.
----
[To reply - mailto:letters@washingtontimes.com]
Loose nukes a la Hollywood
James Gordon Prather
July 9, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20020709-13413218.htm
You've probably seen the "Peacemaker," a 1997 thriller by Steven Spielberg. It's about terrorists and loose nukes and has been on TV a lot lately.
The film opens with a renegade Russian general and his men stealing the 10 multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs) carried by the Soviet SS-24, which is similar to our Peacekeeper intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). The renegades detonate one nuke to cover the theft, disassemble a second and attempt to truck the remaining eight to Iran.
The rest of the flick is about the life and loves of the beautiful airhead in the White House responsible for preventing you from getting nuked in your jammies by terrorists.
Perhaps you can't accept the basic premise. Surely no president would put Nicole Kidman in charge of thwarting nuke terrorists. Well, President Clinton put Hazel O'Leary in charge of all our nuke and anti-nuke programs.
However, there are certain critical parts of the "Peacemaker" screenplay that you should not accept. In real life, renegade scientists probably could not set-off a MIRV-ed nuke on the ground. Nor could a renegade scientist remove a "primary" from a Soviet MIRV. And no man could carry a nuke "primary" in his knapsack.
At this point you need to know something about MIRVs. You can consult either Chapter II of the 1999 Cox Report, or the July 31, 1995 issue of US News and World Report. There you will find a cutaway - reportedly supplied by Hazel O'Leary - of our cone-shaped MK-21 MIRV which houses the W-87 nuke and protects it during reentry. Because form must frequently follow function, you may assume that the Soviet MIRV is very much like ours, both inside and out.
The W-87 is an integral part of the MIRV. The "primary" and "secondary" are literally joined at the waist and cannot be separated. Then the whole nuke is "potted" into the MIRV and can't be disassembled.
But, you say, perhaps the Soviet MIRV is not so sophisticated. Maybe the Soviet primary and secondary can be separated. Perhaps, but the primary is of no use - can't be armed or detonated - without the MIRV's arming-fuzing-firing package. Better to leave the stolen MIRV intact.
But wait. How much does the MIRV weigh? How big is it? Well, according to Mrs. O'Leary, our Peacekeeper MIRV weighs more than 600 pounds and is about six feet tall. The Soviet MIRV must weigh, if less sophisticated, even more. Try putting that in your knapsack.
Okay. Forget the knapsack. How about a minivan? Can your Islamic terrorist now take out the Pentagon with his minivan delivered nuke?
No way, Jose Padilla.
You see, the MIRV-ed nuke can only be detonated - producing an appreciable yield - at the end of its preprogrammed stockpile-to-target sequence.
When the MIRV is taken out of stockpile and mated - mechanically and electrically - to an ICBM, the nuke's AFF package begins communicating with the ICBM and its guidance system. From then on, if anything goes wrong in the missile's stockpile-to-target sequence, the nuke is automatically disabled.
So, if the MIRV-ed nuke is not delivered to the Pentagon via ICBM, it will be a dud.
Well, are there any Soviet nukes worth stealing by terrorists? Yes. The Soviets had hundreds of Atomic Demolition Munitions. According to the late General Lebed, they were very similar to ours.
Our ADMs were designed to deny the invading Red Army the use of bridges, tunnels, docks, railway hubs, etc. That is, they were intended to be used on our own territory, with our troops and friendly civilians not far away. Hence, the yields were low, a few tons. Not kilotons. Tons.
The ADM consisted of only a fission "primary" and an AFF package. The ADM was about the size of a large footlocker and could be carried for short distances by two men.
Large footlocker? Wherever did the idea get abroad that the Soviet ADMs were "suitcase" size? Well, Lebed told Congress - in Russian - that they were "footlocker" size. His interpreter translated that into "suitcase" in English. Lebed immediately realized his interpreter had made an error and tried to correct it. Too late.
ADMs were intended to be employed by junior officers and senior non-coms. So it is certainly conceivable that a good electrical engineer and a Ferrari mechanic might figure out how to arm, fuse and fire an ADM. And they might even bring down the Bay Bridge. Or the John Hancock building. But not the Pentagon. That place is built like a fort.
James Gordon Prather is a former national-security adviser with several federal agencies, including the Defense Department. He also worked as a nuclear weapons specialist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico.
-------- britain
British nuclear power company faces storm over ship
Story by Peter Graff
REUTERS UK:
July 9, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/16753/story.htm
LONDON - Britain's state-owned nuclear power company BNFL faced international criticism last week for sailing rejected nuclear fuel back from Japan, but insisted the shipment was safe from terrorists or environmental catastrophe.
The embattled industry also faced embarrassment over a government report that the cost to taxpayers of cleaning up waste and mothballing old plants would be billions of pounds more than previously estimated.
Two lightly armed BNFL ships set sail from Japan last week, bearing fuel the company had shipped to Japan three years ago but agreed to take back in a scandal after it emerged that BNFL had falsified some documentation.
The shipment of potentially weapons-usable material has provoked a storm of outrage from environmental groups, and from countries that fear the shipping route - undisclosed for security reasons - might pass nearby.
"We have now honoured the commitment we gave to our Japanese customers to return the fuel," BNFL head Norman Askew said in a statement promising to seek new sales to Japan, where the flap over the bogus documentation had caused widespread public anger.
It was the first transport of its kind since the September 11 attacks on the United States, and environmental groups and third party governments say the nuclear material could be a tempting target for militants on the high seas.
The company said armed guards on board, and safety measures to prevent a leak of radioactive material, had satisfied British, Japanese and U.S. regulators that the shipment of so-called MOX mixed uranium and plutonium oxide fuel was safe.
"We're confident, as are the governments of the UK, Japan and the U.S.... that the plans are sufficient to meet the credible risks," said BNFL spokesman Paul Vallance.
"These are frankly the right people, rather than people with an axe to grind, to lay down the standards which we meet. These shipments are safe and secure. There's no question about that."
He said security measures were covered by international agreements, and had been reviewed since September 11.
GOVERNMENTS COMPLAIN
Irish Environment Minister Martin Cullen said the shipment posed an "unacceptable risk to the environment of Ireland and the health and economic wellbeing of its population".
Its destination, the British reprocessing plant at Sellafield, is only 110 miles (180 km) across the Irish Sea from Ireland, on England's northwest coast.
New Zealand said its air force would track the ships to ensure that they do not enter its waters.
"While acknowledging the safeguards which have been put in place, these do not eliminate risks posed by accident or by terrorist attacks," Foreign Minister Phil Goff said.
New Zealand had informed both Britain and Japan of its opposition to such shipments in the Pacific Ocean and wanted "the transport states to accept full responsibility and liability for any accident that might occur", he said.
The launch of the shipment came as Britain's Energy Minister Brian Wilson published a policy paper outlining plans to reform the creaking nuclear power industry.
A new state agency would be responsible for paying to clean up existing waste sites and mothball old plants, taking on huge liabilities from BNFL in what industry experts see as a move toward privatising the remaining profitable bits of the company.
Wilson estimated the total liabilities to be assumed by the new agency at nearly 48 billion pounds ($73 billion) - between eight and 13 billion pounds more than previous estimates.
The BNFL's Vallance said it was in the public interest to sweep liabilities for mothballing decades-old plants off the state-owned operating company's books, allowing it to attract investment for newer, cleaner nuclear power projects.
But environment watchdogs Greenpeace wrote: "The creation of a new authority to bail out the nuclear industry from the 48 billion pound bill for cleaning up waste and decommissioning old power stations will free...(BNFL) to expand its nuclear business and create more deadly radioactive waste."
-------- business
USEC Says Fewer Jobs May Be Cut
The Associated Press
Tuesday, July 9, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46065-2002Jul9?language=printer
PIKETON, Ohio -- USEC Inc. on Tuesday reduced the number of shipping jobs that may be eliminated at its idled uranium enrichment plant in southern Ohio from 440 to 140.
But the company said the reduction at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant is dependent upon the Department of Energy securing Congressional funding.
"This is very, very positive news, obviously, for the Portsmouth site," USEC spokeswoman Elizabeth Stuckle said.
The jobs will be eliminated later this summer. As of May 31, there were approximately 1,300 workers at the plant.
Stuckle said the lower estimate is based on several factors, including a department project to keep the plant ready in case production needs to resume and a separate department project to decontaminate material at the shipping facility for 15 more months. Additionally, other workers may be able to transfer to other projects.
USEC announced it February that would eliminate the jobs as the company shifts that work to its other plant in Paducah, Ky.
USEC is the world's leading supplier of uranium fuel for commercial nuclear power plants.
-------- depleted uranium
US Dirty Bombs: Radioactive Shells Spiked with Plutonium
by John LaForge
Tuesday, July 9, 2002
CommonDreams.org
http://commondreams.org/views02/0709-07.htm
"Plutonium is a fuel that is toxic beyond human experience. It is demonstrably carcinogenic to animals in microgram quantities [one millionth of a gram]. The lung cancer risk is unknown to orders of magnitude. Present plutonium standards are certainly irrelevant." -- Dr. Donald P. Geesaman, health physicist, formerly of Lawrence Livermore Lab
The Bush White House fooled most of the world's press with its unverified claims of intercepting a "dirty bomb" attack against the U.S. On its front page, USA Today barked: "US: 'Dirty Bomb' Plot Foiled." Newspapers everywhere explained breathlessly what radioactive materials could do if dispersed in populated areas. As Alex Cockburn reports in The Nation, when the story faced some mild scrutiny, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz backed away from the propaganda saying, "I don't think there was actually a plot beyond some fairly loose talk."
Meanwhile, the real-time, worldwide use by the United States of radiological dirty bombs has moved well beyond the plotting and shooting stage, and has begun to produce dire consequences. Toxic, radioactive uranium-238 -- so-called depleted uranium -- used in munitions, missiles and tank armor may be responsible for deadly health consequences among U.S. and allied troops and populations in bombed areas, and has probably caused permanent radioactive contamination of large parts of Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo and perhaps Afghanistan. Depleted uranium "penetrators" as they are called burn on impact and up to 70 percent of the DU is released (aerosolized) as toxic and radioactive dust that can be inhaled and ingested and later trapped in the lungs or kidneys.
In January 2001, the world press finally discovered depleted uranium (DU) weapons(1), the super hard munitions made with waste U-238 -- an alpha emitter with a radioactive half-life of 4.5 billion years. Nine years of radiation-induced death, disease, and birth abnormalities in Iraq did not move major news organizations to investigate, but the deaths from leukemia of 15 Western Europeans -- after their participation in military missions in Bosnia and Kosovo -- prompted the major media, the European Parliament and 11 European governments to launch investigations into the health and environmental consequences of what Dr. Rosalie Bertell calls "shooting radioactive waste at your enemy."
DU is left after uranium ore has gone through the gaseous diffusion process that removes most of the fissionable isotope U-235. The refuse also of nuclear weapons and reactor fuel production, some 700,000 tons(2) are now left in the U.S. as "resource material" -- a legal definition that saves the Energy Department the cost of managing DU as radioactive waste.
Prized for its high density, DU is used in munitions for piercing armor plate. Shot from planes like the USAF A-10 Warthog, the DU shells are called "tank killers." But by building radioactive waste into armaments, the U.S. is, in effect using poisoned weapons as gene busters in war. At least five types of U.S. munitions contain DU, which is also used in casings for bombs, shielding on tanks, counter-weights for commercial jet aircraft, and "ground penetrators" on missiles. DU shells are made by Starmet Corporation in Concord, Mass., Aerojet Corp. in Sacramento, Calif. and others. Alliant Techsystems in Minneapolis (formerly Honeywell Corp.) assembled over 15 million DU shells for the Air Force in the 1990s.
Between 300 and 800 tons of DU munitions were blasted into Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait by U.S. forces in 1991.(3) The Pentagon says the U.S. fired about 10,800 DU rounds -- close to three tons -- into Bosnia in 1994 and 1995. More than 31,000 rounds, about 10 tons, were shot into Kosovo in 1999 according to NATO.(4)
A total of 24 soldiers from Europe have died of cancer since their 1994 and '95 service in Bosnia.(5) In response, Portugal's Prime Minister Antonio Guterres wrote to NATO's Robertson demanding an explanation of where and why DU munitions were used in Europe.
The Pentagon and the nuclear industry reacted typically to European politicians who in 2001 demanded health physics information from the Pentagon; after a laughable week-long, study NATO assured them that DU used in the Balkans can be "ruled out" as a significant health hazard.(6) And when Italy, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands and Norway and called for a moratorium on the use of DU, NATO ministers rejected the suggestion.(7)
NATO denials contradicted
Prominent scientists also worked to calm the uproar. Dr. John Boice, of the International Epidemiology Institute, told the New York Times, "To get leukemia you need to get the radiation to the bone marrow. The radiation does not go to the marrow. And Uranium 238 will not get to the bone marrow. I don't think it causes leukemia at all."(8) U.S. physicist Steve Fetter told the Times that uranium did not penetrate to bone and bone marrow where leukemia originates.
This slick obfuscation refers to external DU exposure and ignores the hazard from DU ingestion or inhalation. Jean Francois Lacronique, director of France's National Radiation Protection Agency, flatly contradicted NATO, saying, "U-238 has been found stored in bone, and if it gets into bone, it can reach the bone marrow."(9)
Dr. Frank von Hipple, author of a December 1999 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article on DU, told me, "Yes, it does get to the bone. We looked at that in our study." And the December 2000 Science for Democratic Action -- from the Institute for Environmental and Energy Research (IEER) -- reports that, "Some [DU] particles remain in the body where they can build up in lung [tissue], or enter the blood stream where it can accumulate in bone tissue." Internal exposure, the IEER article says, "increases the risk of leukemia and lung, bone and soft tissue cancers, particularly when inhaled or ingested."
At the height of the January 2001 media frenzy over cancers among peacekeeping troops deployed in Bosnia, a 17-year-old advisory bulletin from the Federal Aeronautics Administration (FAA) was leaked to the press.
Still in effect today, it puts the lie to industry, Pentagon, UK and NATO denials of health risks associated with DU exposure. The 1984 memo warns FAA crash site investigators that, "if particles are inhaled or ingested, they can be chemically toxic and cause a significant and long-lasting irradiation of internal tissue."(10)
More recently, the prestigious British Royal Society's second DU study found that troops who inhale or ingest "high levels" of DU could suffer kidney failure within days, and that children in DU-bombed areas face a long-term risk of cancer and heavy metal poisoning.(11) The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) warned in March 2002, that there is a danger of groundwater contamination from corroding DU ammunition at six sites in Serbia and Montenegro bombed in 1999. UNEP president Pekka Haavisto said he, "was surprised to find DU particles still in the air two years after the conflict's end."(12)
Canadian researchers have found "unequivocal evidence" of long-term DU contamination of Persian Gulf vets: they found that eight years after the bombing, Canadian veterans were still passing U-238 in urine.(13) Italy announced last August 5 that its soldiers -- afflicted with cancer after service in the Balkans and potential exposure to some of the three tons of DU exploded there by U.S. jets -- will be awarded medical compensation. British researcher Albrecht Schott has found that UK soldiers exposed to DU in wartime have suffered 10 times more genetic damage than the general population. Prof. Schott said of this study, "This level of genetic damage doesn't occur naturally."(14) And in the U.S., a Dept. of Veterans Affairs study recently found that children of veterans of the Persian Gulf bombardment are two to three times as likely as those of other vets to have birth defects. The U.S. vets also reported more miscarriages.(15)
In Iraq, government figures show an increase in cancer cases from 6,555 in 1989 to 10,931 in 1997 -- mostly in areas bombed by the U.S.-led coalition in 1996 -- and the number of reported cancer cases increased 12 fold between 1991 and 2001.(16)
Needing no further evidence of harm, the European Parliament, on Jan. 17, 2001, voted 394 to 60 in favor of a moratorium on the use of DU among its members. NATO commanders issued a one-page statement Feb. 13, 2001 dismissing concerns. But the Navy and Marines decided sometime before June to stop using DU. "We're not considering [DU] anymore because of the environmental problems associated with it.... We don't want to be in a position of having someone say, 'You can't bring your armor piercing rounds on the battlefield,'" said Col. Clayton Nans, head of the Marines' Advanced Amphibious Assault Vehicle program.(17)
As press coverage began to fade, and NATO felt it was bringing the DU "hysteria" under control, the weapon's contamination with highly radioactive plutonium was disclosed.
Plutonium contamination raises stakes
In Europe, a wildfire of publicity was lit anew by the United States' official admission that its DU contains plutonium and other reactor-borne fission products far more radioactive and carcinogenic than uranium-238.
The discovery of uranium-236 contamination in spent munitions used against Kosovo revealed that the DU was not obtained before the nuclear reaction process. The Pentagon, NATO and the British Ministry of Defense have always downplayed the danger of DU saying it was "less radioactive than uranium ore." But at least half of the DU (250,000 metric tons) is now known to have been left over from the reprocessing of irradiated reactor fuel (done to extract weapons-grade plutonium), leaving it salted with fission products.(18)
"If it has been through a reactor, it does change our idea on depleted uranium," says Dr. Michael Repacholi of the World Health Organization, which has demanded to know how much plutonium is in DU ammunition. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is still working on an answer to that question.
As early as January 2000, the DOE admitted that its DU munitions are spiked with plutonium, neptunium and americium - "transuranic" (heavier than uranium) fission wastes from inside nuclear reactors.(19) The health consequences here are fearsome: americium -- with a half-life of 7,300 years -- decays to plutonium-239, which is more radioactive than the original americium.
DU "contains a trace amount of plutonium," said the DOE's Assistant Secretary David Michaels, who wrote to the Military Toxics Project's Tara Thornton January 20, 2000. "Recycled uranium, which came straight from one of our production sites, e.g. Hanford [Reservation, in Richland, Washington], would routinely contain transuranics at a very low level...." Michaels wrote. "We have initiated a project to characterize the level of transuranics in the various depleted uranium inventories," he said.
Dr. Von Hippel says in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that plutonium-239 is 200,000 times more radioactive than U-238. Plutonium "is probably the most carcinogenic substance known," according to Dr. Arjun Makhijani, President of IEER, writing in his 1992 book Plutonium.
The government's bland assurances regarding material carcinogenic to animals in microgram quantities appear scientifically preposterous, yet the AP reported Feb. 3, 2001: "U.S. officials have said the shells contained mere traces of plutonium, not enough to cause harm." On Jan. 19, after a one-week "investigation," NATO officials said, "traces of highly radioactive elements such as plutonium and americium were not relevant to soldiers' health because of their minute quantities."(20) This public relations ploy failed to calm the furor raised across Europe, especially after the leak of a July 1, 1999, "hazard awareness" memo issued by the Pentagon. The memo warned military personnel entering Kosovo against touching spent ammunition, suggested the use or protective masks and skin covering while in contaminated areas, and recommended follow-up health assessments.(21) The warning was sent to defense ministries in Europe but it is not known to have been given to civilians or returning refugees.
Poison weapons illegal in any armed conflict
The U.S. Air Force's 1976 manual, "International Law: The Conduct of Armed Conflict and Air Operations" governs the actions of all USAF commanders and pilots, including the top guns shooting DU. "It is especially important," the Air Force manual says, "that treaties, having the force of law equal to laws enacted by the Congress on the United States, be scrupulously adhered to by the United States armed forces." The manual names treaties specifically recognized as binding, including the Hague Conventions of 1907, the Geneva Gas Protocol of 1925, and the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilians in Time of War, 1949.(22)
The Geneva Gas Protocol outlaws, " ... asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and all analogous liquids, materials or devices." The Hague Conventions explicitly outlaw poison saying, "It is especially forbidden: To employ poison or poisoned weapons."
Poison is defined by the Air Force manual as, "biological or chemical substances causing death or disability with permanent effects when, in even small quantities, they are ingested, enter the lungs or bloodstream, or touch the skin."
Although the law could not be clearer, NATO spokesman Francois Le Blevennec told Knight Ridder that depleted uranium, "has never been declared illegal by any war convention." However, the Air Force law manual says, "any weapons may be put to an unlawful use." The Air Force declares unequivocally that, "A weapons may be illegal per se if either international custom or treaty has forbidden its use under all circumstances. An example is poison to kill or injure a person."
Because the U.S. government has known since at least 1984 about the poisonous effects of its DU warfare, the commanders of its bombing raids over Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan may well hope the White House wins its fight for immunity in the International Criminal Court. If not, the Pentagon's dirty bomb contamination may move from the gene pool and the water table into the court room.
John LaForge is on the staff of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental action group in Wisconsin, and edits its quarterly newsletter The Pathfinder.
Notes:
1. "Alarm over NATO uranium deaths," BBC News, Jan 3, 2001; "UN raises alarm on toxic risk in Kosovo," Guardian Weekly, March 30 - April 5, 2000, p.5.
2. The New Nuclear Danger, by Helen Caldicott, The New Press, New York, 2002, p.146; The Nation, April 9, 2991, p.24; Dan Fahey uses the figure 505,000 tons in his chapter "Collateral Damage," in Metal of Dishonor: Depleted Uranium, Ed. by DU Education Project, New York, 1997, p.26.
3. The Nation, May 26, 1997.
4.Knight-Ridder, Jan.2, 2001.
5. New York Times, Feb. 14 & Jan. 29, 2001.
6. New York Times, Jan. 17 & 19, 2001.
7. Wis. State Journal, Jan. 1; New York Times, Jan. 11, 2001.
8. New York Times, Jan. 13, 2001.
9. New York Times, Jan. 29, 2001.
10. "Avoiding or Minimizing Encounters With Aircraft Equipped With Depleted Uranium Balance Weights During Accident Investigations," FAA Advisory Circular 20-123, by M.C. Beard, Dec. 20, 1984.
11. "The health hazards of depleted uranium munitions, Part II," The Royal Society, March 2002, p. ix.
12. United Nations Environment Program, Press Advisory, March 27, 2002.
13. BBC, Aug. 27, 1999.
14. The Express, UK, Dec. 24, 2001.
15. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Oct. 6; Chicago Tribune, Oct. 10, 2001.
16. Arabic News, Feb. 18, 2002.
17. USA Today, June 25, 2001.
18. Ibid.
19. New York Times, Feb. 14, 2001.
20. New York Times, Jan. 18, 2001.
21. New York Times, Jan. 9, 2001.
22. Department of the Air Force, "International Law -- The Conduct of Armed Conflict and Air Operations," Judge Advocate General Activities, Air Force Pamphlet 110-31, 19 Nov. 1976.
-------- japan
Japan set to rate nuclear plants for safety
REUTERS JAPAN:
July 9, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/16750/story.htm
TOKYO - Japan plans to rate its nuclear power plants for safety, a move that could improve monitoring of risk-prone plants, a government official said yesterday.
"We are now reviewing a way to inspect nuclear power plant safety. Under the current system (of inspections), nuclear plant operators are neglecting to look at the whole picture of plant safety," said an official of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI).
The official said plants are expected to be evaluated in terms of operating performance, including the number of failures of reactors. Details including when the new system will be implemented have not yet been decided.
Another METI official said reactors that are at the lower end of the rating scale will be monitored more closely, while those with higher ratings will have fewer inspections.
Energy-starved Japan operates 52 commercial nuclear reactors, which supply roughly one-third of its power.
But there have been numerous problems at power plants.
In May, radioactive water was found to be leaking at the Hamaoka power plant, some 150 km (90 miles) west of Tokyo, just a day after it had re-opened following similar leaks last year.
The nuclear industry has been criticised over a series of accidents, including one at a uranium processing plant in Tokaimura, north of Tokyo, in 1999 which killed two workers.
-------- russia
Donors Agree on Aid to Clean Nuke Waste in Russia
July 9, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-environment-eu-russia.html
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - International donors agreed on Tuesday to launch a $1.78 billion program to help clean up the environment in and around northern Russia, which faces a big threat from nuclear waste.
A one-day conference chaired by the European Union and Russia announced initial funds totaling about $110 million for the most urgent projects needed to reduce water and air pollution in the Baltic and Barents Sea regions.
The European Commission, the EU's executive body, pledged about $50 million. Six countries -- Russia, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden -- offered $10 million each.
``A number of other countries indicated that they may soon be able to come forward with additional contributions,'' the organizers said in a statement.
The start-up funds are to co-finance $1.78 billion worth of loans from international financial institutions such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development for more than a dozen clean-up projects already identified.
``Future generations will not understand if we do not act now to tackle the legacy of environmental degradation, and above all the legacy of dangerous nuclear material left in northern Europe,'' said EU External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten.
He said about $500 million is to be spent on tackling dangerous nuclear waste in northwestern Russia, which is mainly the legacy of the Cold War when the Soviet Union built hundreds of nuclear submarines.
The vessels are now being decommissioned, with many just rusting away in bases on the Barents Sea, and the spent radioactive material is stored in hazardous conditions.
``We must make sure that what is hazard today does not become a disaster tomorrow. There are hundreds of nuclear submarines and reactors to be dismantled and vast quantities of radioactive waste to take care of,'' Patten said.
-------- terrorism
Russian Arms Exporter Says Iran a Target Client
July 9, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-arms-russia.html
NIZHNY TAGIL, Russia (Reuters) - Russia's weapons export agency Rosoboronexport said Monday it would target potentially lucrative customers like Iran in its bid to re-establish Russia as a top arms exporter.
General Director General Andrei Beliyaninov, speaking on the fringes of Russia's top arms fair, said Rosoboronexport had already signed initial contracts with Tehran.
``We are working with Iran. After political decisions were taken, we began working on contracts and have been quite successful,'' Belyaninov told reporters in the Urals town of Nizhny Tagil, 800 miles east of Moscow.
``We have concluded contracts related to aviation technology, but not large contracts yet,'' Belyaninov said.
But no move to retie commercial knots, largely severed during the 1990s after the collapse of communism, would be taken in violation of international sanctions or decisions, he said.
``We are a commercial organization...but Rosoboronexport cannot ignore sanctions, decisions taken by the world community.''
Within the limits of sanctions, Russia has insisted it will do business with whichever customers it wishes regardless of criticism from the United States or other countries.
It has rejected U.S. calls to cease its military cooperation with Iran, branded a part of the ``axis of evil'' by President Bush, along with Iraq and North Korea.
The United States says Moscow's help in building a nuclear power station at Bushehr on the Gulf could be used by Tehran to acquire nuclear weapons. It also criticizes conventional arms deals as potentially upsetting to balances in the Middle East.
``Our main markets are China and India, but we are fighting to widen our markets beyond those left over from the Soviet Union. This is our strategic task,'' Beliyaninov said.
``And we are working on this. We are participating in a tender to sell military planes to Brazil. We are on the short list and this is already a success.''
Rosoboronexport officials said Angola and Nigeria were also likely to be targeted as fewer Soviet-era allies which kept Russia's military industrial complex afloat can spare funds for weapons purchases or modernization.
EXPORTS THIRIVING
Beliyaninov said Rosoboronexport saw exports rising in 2002 to above $4 billion. Agency officials put at $4.3 billion revenue from 2001 sales.
``We have just finished accounting for the results of Rosoboronexport's work for the first half of the year and the figures are rather good, with hard currency income worth $2 billion,'' he said. ``We have sales agreements in our portfolio to the value of $13.5 billion, with contracts maturing in years to come.''
Debt inherited from the agency's predecessor, Rosvooruzheniye, he said, had been repaid.
Russian arms exports bottomed out in 1997 but seem to have recovered some ground thanks largely to a booming international arms market and to key clients China and India.
Largely through fairs like Nizhny Tagil which feature ear-splitting demonstrations of tanks, firearms and fighter planes, Russia has improved its performance by marketing.
This year's third full-fledged exhibition has highlighted Russian tanks, including the locally produced T-72 M1 and the T-90 S, both sophisticated modifications of existing vehicles.
Experts estimate that modifications to the T-72 alone, with some 20,000 units existing in roughly 30 countries, would bring Russia between $5 billion and $6 billion in revenue.
But Beliyaninov said Russia had yet to achieve the dominant position the Soviet Union once held in the world arms market.
He said he doubted the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's ranking of Russia as the top arms exporter.
``I was surprised when they put Russia in first place,'' he said. ``This is too optimistic. I think we have third or fourth place, with the United States still the leader.''
-------- treaties
Powell Urges OK of Russia Arms Pact
By Barry Schweid
AP Diplomatic Writer
Tuesday, July 9, 2002; 11:52 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43945-2002Jul9?language=printer
WASHINGTON -- Secretary of State Colin Powell urged the Senate Tuesday to swiftly ratify a new strategic arms reduction agreement with Russia, saying it enhances the national security of both countries.
He said the treaty, signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Bush at their May summit in Moscow, marks a new era in relations between the two former Cold War enemies.
"I strongly recommend that the Senate advise and consent to its ratification at the earliest possible date," Powell said.
The agreement sets out "both countries' commitment to make deep strategic, offensive reductions" in their nuclear arsenals "in a flexible and legally binding way," he said in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The panel debates treaties before they are sent to the Senate for a vote. By tradition, the secretary of state is the first member of any administration to testify in support of treaties it submits to the Senate.
Powell said the treaty with Russia "facilitates the transition from strategic rivalry to a genuine strategic partnership ... which involves a broad array of cooperative efforts in political, economic and security areas."
The treaty calls for the United States and Russia to slash their long-range nuclear arsenals by two-thirds over the next decade, to between 1,700 and 2,200 deployed warheads each.
The committee chairman, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., D-Del. and a senior Republican, Sen. Dick Lugar of Indiana, called the treaty a good first step but said it fell short on several fronts, especially the lack of a provision requiring the destruction of nuclear warheads
But Powell said the United States and Russia would store the excess warheads and destroy many of them. He said there was no incentive for either side to put the warheads back on missile launchers and bombers.
"We believe the Russians will act in the same way we will," Powell said.
But Lugar said he shared the concerns and fears expressed by critics of the treaty and that "we must work with Russia to make sure that these dangerous weapons don't fall into the wrong hands."
Biden, meanwhile, said the Bush administration should have negotiated reductions in battlefield nuclear weapons at the same time. He said Russia now has 2,000 to 10,000 tactical nuclear weapons.
Powell said the treaty was different from Cold War arms control agreements because it does not call for exact equality in numbers of strategic nuclear warheads or contain any bans on categories of strategic forces.
Such previsions were necessary in previous agreements "when we needed to regulate the interaction of strategic forces of two hostile nations to reduce the structural incentives for beginning a nuclear war," he said. "Now we have nothing to go to war about."
Powell told the senators the treaty before them was "simple and flexible."
The treaty does not contain any verification provisions, he said, because U.S. security and the new strategic relationship with Russia does not require them.
Answering critics who said the treaty does not require the destruction of nuclear warheads, Powell said no previous arms control agreement called for warhead elimination.
He said that contrary to some reports, the Russians did not propose a program for verifiable warhead reduction during the negotiations.
"Given the uncertainties we face, and the fact that we, unlike Russia, do not manufacture new warheads, the United States needs the flexibility to maintain warheads removed from operational deployment to meet unforeseen future contingencies," Powell said.
He said some of these warheads will be used as spares, some will be stored and some will be destroyed.
"Economics, our new strategic relationship with Russia, obsolescence and the overall two-thirds cut in U.S. and Russian inventories mandated by the treaty will undoubtedly result in continued warhead elimination," Powell said.
He said the 10-year period over which the treaty is to be put into effect was necessary because reductions will involve careful planning and execution by both sides.
Powell said the treaty can be altered, extended or canceled at any time and "we feel the timeframe and the deadline are just what they should be."
----
Senate Panel Mulls Russia Arms Pact
July 9, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Russia.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Senior senators found fault Tuesday with President Bush's nuclear arms reduction agreement with Russia but did not challenge its ratification.
``It could turn out to be a great treaty,'' Chairman Joseph R. Biden of the Foreign Relations Committee declared.
The complaints ranged from not requiring the destruction of the warheads to be taken out of U.S. and Russian arsenals over the next 10 years to exempting battlefield nuclear weapons from the cutbacks.
But in the first round of the Senate's review of the agreement Bush reached with Russian President Vladimir Putin in May, only one of the four critics, Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., appeared on the verge of opposing the pact.
With Secretary of State Colin Powell in the witness chair, defending the treaty as a milestone in a new relationship with Russia, Feingold hotly questioned a provision that permits either side to abandon the accord with three-months notice and without explanation.
Arguing the Senate should be consulted first -- and should have been before Bush scrapped a 1972 treaty that banned national anti-missile defenses -- Feingold told Powell, ``The administration is not taking the Senate's role seriously.''
Challenging the administration from another direction, Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., said the cutbacks should have been much deeper than the planned reduction from about 6,000 warheads on each side to 1,700 to 2,200.
Kerry said ``the most glaring hole in this treaty'' was that the warheads would not be destroyed but could be kept in storage -- and easily put back on the launchers, bombers and submarines from which they were removed.
Kerry also said that keeping a stockpile of at least 1,700 warheads was in excess of the needs of the United States and Russia in their new relationship -- and too many to have around with terrorists on the prowl.
But Powell told the Committee he believed the two sides would destroy many of the warheads they set aside. ``There is no incentive to keep weapons we do not need,'' he said.
And yet, Powell disclosed the Bush administration was aiming for an arsenal of 4,600 long-range nuclear warheads, including some 2,000 warheads that are being held in reserve.
``This tells us the Bush administration wants to maintain flexibility and be able to double the size of the strategic arsenal under the treaty,'' Daryl Kimball, executive director of the private Arms Control Association, said.
He said the treaty was likely to pass but the Senate may be interested in adding ``constructive conditions that fill in many gaps in this very sparse and incomplete treaty.''
These, Kimball said, could require tougher provisions to ensure the terms are carried out and for the destruction of warheads.
Chairman Biden and a senior Republican, Sen. Dick Lugar of Indiana, called the treaty a good first step.
``I think this is a good treaty,'' Biden said. ``It could turn out to be a great treaty or it could turn out to be marginal one.''
Among the flaws Biden found in the pact was that it permits Russia to retain SS-18 multiple-warhead missiles that had been outlawed in the START II treaty that Bush's father, President George H.W. Bush, signed in January 1993.
Lugar called the treaty ``a tremendous step in the right direction,'' but he said he also was concerned about not requiring the destruction of warheads and said ``we must work with Russia to make sure they do not fall into the wrong hands.''
Lugar, who has sponsored legislation to help Russia eliminate part of its nuclear arsenal, urged Congress to help cut delays in dismantling nuclear weapons by dropping a requirement that the White House demonstrate that Russia is committed to the goals of arms control.
Powell endorsed the idea.
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Senate Panel Questions Russia Arms Treaty
July 9, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-arms-congress-powell.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic senators on Tuesday questioned whether President Bush's arms reduction treaty with Russia could backfire by making more nuclear weapons material available to rogue nations and extremists, though most said they supported the accord.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, urged the Senate to move quickly to ratify the accord Bush struck in May with Russian President Vladimir Putin to slash both nations' nuclear arsenals by some two-thirds over 10 years.
``By deeply reducing strategic nuclear warheads while preserving both Russia's and America's flexibility to meet unforeseen future contingencies, the Moscow treaty will enhance the national security of both countries,'' Powell said.
But Committee Chairman Sen. Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat, said since the treaty allows weapons to be stored instead of destroyed, it might give rogue nations access to more nuclear materials from Russia's poorly secured facilities.
Still, Biden said the treaty marked a major step in post Cold War U.S.-Russian relations that should be ratified.
Powell said he felt ``the Russians will act in the same way that we're going to act'' to store the weapons as securely as possible and to destroy many as it is costly to keep them.
He indicated the Pentagon may keep up to 4,600 warheads available from the current 6,000. But he said that was tentative and deferred on the issue to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who is to appear before the committee next week.
Republican and Democratic senators said the brief agreement to reduce each country's deployed strategic nuclear warheads to between 1,700 and 2,200 from about 6,000 left many questions unanswered, with no requirements to destroy weapons or to verify reductions, and no schedule to scale back arsenals.
``The gaping hole in this treaty is lack of verification and accountability,'' said Sen. John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat.
Despite the treaty, Kerry said ``the greater issue remains -- the question of Russia's ability to adequately maintain the materials that might take us into a confrontation with Iraq.''
Powell agreed there will be ``a continuing issue of where do the warheads go'' to keep Russian nuclear materials from falling into the hand of potential foes such as Iraq and Iran, but he said that would be dealt with in other forums.
He also said the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia would remain in force, with its verification measures.
``JURY IS OUT''
``I think this is a good treaty. It could lead to significant reductions, it could also be of marginal value. I think the jury is out,'' Biden said.
Biden also said the treaty lets Russia place multiple warheads on its intercontinental ballistic missiles, contrary to long-standing U.S. arms control goals, and it does not limit tactical nuclear weapons that are most susceptible to theft.
While Powell acknowledged the treaty did not address all of the nuclear weapons issues with Russia, he said it still contributing to reducing arsenals.
``We're going to be left with stockpiles of nuclear warheads for many, many years to come. I don't think the fact that we didn't try to deal with all of that in this treaty takes away from the importance of this treaty,'' he said.
Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana called the accord ``a tremendous step in the right direction,'' but said ``the treaty alone is insufficient to meet our security needs.''
Lugar said the key to implementing the arms treaty was continued work with Russia under the policy he developed with former Georgia Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn to control nuclear material that could be used in weapons of mass destruction.
Powell urged lawmakers to grant a permanent waiver from requirements that Bush must certify that Russia is committed to arms control goals to start new programs under Nunn-Lugar.
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-------- nevada
Senate Votes to Entomb Nuclear Waste in Nevada
July 9, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/jul2002/2002-07-09-01.asp
WASHINGTON, DC, The Senate has voted to move ahead with a repository for high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Voting 60 to 39 on a procedural matter this afternoon, the Senate signaled its determination to override the April veto of Nevada Governor Kenny Guinn.
The vote means the Bush administration's plan to bury 77,000 tons of radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas has surmounted its final legislative hurdle.
Without Yucca Mountain, the nuclear waste would have to remain in temporary storage at the nation's 103 operating nuclear power plants, decommissioned plants, and Department of Defense weapons production sites - 131 sites in 39 states.
The state of Nevada will now fight the Yucca Mountain repository in the federal courts and through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licensing process.
Governor Guinn said he is "disappointed the Senate did not uphold my veto of the Yucca Mountain project," but believes "we have made considerable headway in convincing others that Yucca Mountain is a bad idea."
Nevada Governor Kenny Guinn on Capitol Hill earlier this year. (Photo courtesy U.S. House of Representatives)
"A large number of senators now realize that by the time Yucca Mountain is filled to capacity, the nation's power plants will still be storing more than 90 percent of the nuclear waste they now have," said the Nevada governor.
"Now the process moves to the federal courts, where the playing field is level and Nevada's factual, scientific arguments will be heard by impartial judges. The Department of Energy and the nuclear industry will no longer be able to hide behind the political process and wield their influence to move the Yucca Mountain agenda," said Governor Guinn, who expressed confidence that "Nevada will prevail."
The Senate vote was a deep disappointment for Nevada Senators Harry Reid, a Democrat, and John Ensign, a Republican, who have both been working nonstop to persuade their colleagues to oppose the Yucca Mountain site.
Senator Harry Reid is Majority Whip, the second highest ranking Democrat in the U.S. Senate. (Photo courtesy Office of the Senator)
Senator Reid said, "To carry out President Bush's plan would require shipment of nuclear waste on 100,000 trucks or 20,000 rail cars through 43 states. The President has created 100,000 targets of opportunity for terrorists who have proven their capability of hitting targets far less vulnerable than a truck on the open highway."
The Nevada senators were hoping to persuade their counterparts in neighboring Utah to vote against Yucca Mountain, since nearly all of the waste shipments would pass through populated regions of Utah on their way to the Nevada waste dump, but the Bush administration trumped Nevada's hand.
After a meeting Monday with Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, Utah Senators Orrin Hatch and Robert Bennett, both Republicans, decided it is in their best interest if the nuclear waste goes to Nevada rather than being stored in Utah on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian reservation.
Secretary Abraham told the Utah senators that the federal government would not reimburse the nuclear industry for storing nuclear waste temporarily at a privately run site on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian reservation until a permanent repository is ready.
Senator Hatch said, "This policy statement by the Secretary of Energy combined with strong assurances of an enhanced and updated transportation plan, lead me to conclude that I should not stand in the way of sending this waste to its permanent resting place in Yucca Mountain."
Utah Senator Orrin Hatch (Photo courtesy Office of the Senator)
Senator Hatch said he is concerned that the Skull Valley facility "would pose a serious threat to the nearby Utah Test and Training Range, which is one of the most important bombing ranges available to our military." He also questioned the "legitimacy of the current tribal leadership of this small band of Goshutes."
Energy Secretary Abraham praised the U.S. Senate for its "overwhelming bipartisan support" of Yucca Mountain as America's first nuclear waste repository. "After more than 20 years of debate, the Senate has rightfully chosen to allow the process of developing a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain to proceed to the next step, recognizing that the independent experts at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission deserve the right to review the 24 years of scientific study of Yucca Mountain and to consider the site for a license."
Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, a Democrat, voted against the proposed override of Nevada's veto because of the risks to New Yorkers from nuclear waste transport. "Approval of the site would mean hundreds of shipments of nuclear waste through New York," Clinton said. "In the wake of 9/11 and in light of continued administration warnings of terrorism on our soil, now is not the time to approve a measure that would put large quantities of toxic nuclear materials on our highways, waterways and rail tracks, many of which are in need of substantial maintenance and repair."
Some Democratic senators voted for the Republican administration's Yucca Mountain project. On of them is Illinois Senator Dick Durbin. Saying, "It is time to move the nuclear waste of Illinois to a place where it can be safely stored," Durbin said his concerns about radiation and groundwater contamination problems at Yucca Mountain have been addressed, but "he still feels the nation lacks a comprehensive safety program for nuclear waste transportation."
Durbin will introduce a separate bill that would direct the federal government to develop a comprehensive safety program for nuclear waste transportation, a serious matter in Illinois where the radioactive waste could be routed over 10 roads and rail lines.
"This legislation would require the waste containment casks to be tested to ensure they could withstand intense fires, high speed collisions and other threats that may occur during transport," said Durbin.
Charles Laws, Green Party of Nevada candidate for governor, warns that, "Terrorists will be directly provided with greater access to the wastes. They will be given opportunity for enormous civil disruption. Each shipment will have to be a fully armed military operation. War has been declared," he said. "This one to be fought on American soil against American people."
Environmental groups view the Senate vote as a dangerous mistake. "Americans don't want convoys of nuclear waste on their roads and rails," said the Sierra Club's executive director Carl Pope. "These shipments will thunder right next to our homes, schools, and playgrounds."
"When it recommended Yucca, the Bush administration ignored more than 250 significant unresolved technical issues with the Yucca Mountain site," Pope said, "including how quickly the waste containers will leak radioactive waste into the aquifer beneath Yucca and the likelihood of seismic activity."
Yucca Mountain is located in an earthquake zone and volcanic cones are found near the repository site.
Pierre Sadik, staff attorney for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, said the Senate approved Yucca Mountain over the objections of a broad coalition of national groups including the National Education Association, the National Parent Teachers Association and the League of Women Voters. "Industry executives spent lavishly to woo senators to support this irresponsible scheme," he said.
After four years of heating more than 20,000 cubic meters of rock to the boiling point of water,scientists at the Yucca Mountain Project turned off the heaters on January 14, 2002. They are now studying what happens to this rock as it cools. (Photo courtesy DOE)
Serious technical concerns with the site have been glossed over, Sadik said. "Yucca Mountain itself is in a zone intersected by 33 earthquake faults and is likely to leak. It is situated above an aquifer, which provides the only source of drinking water for a nearby community."
And at the Natural Resources Defense Council, nuclear program staff attorney Geoffrey Fettus said, "Today's Senate vote to override Nevada Governor Kenny Guinn's veto of the Yucca Mountain project is the culmination of years of political maneuvering at the expense of sound science."
"Unfortunately," Fettus predicted, "Yucca Mountain is not the end of America's nuclear waste storage problem; it's the beginning of a host of new problems."
To find out more about the Yucca Mountain Project log on to: http://www.ymp.gov
----
What's Ahead for Yucca Mountain
July 9, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Yucca-Chronology.html
What's ahead for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada now that Congress has approved the project.
2002: The Energy Department continues to work on unresolved scientific issues as it prepares an application for a construction permit from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
2003: Energy Department completes a detailed transportation plan, working with 43 states on routing and security, and with the NRC on waste canister designs and safeguards.
2003: Courts likely to rule on first of five lawsuits already filed by Nevada challenging the Yucca project.
2004: Energy Department plans to apply for construction permit. Licensing process before the NRC likely to take three to four years.
2007: Construction expected to begin.
2010-2034: Shipments of 3,200 tons of waste a year to arrive at the Yucca site. Initial capacity is 77,000 tons, but with congressional approval it could be expanded to 120,000 tons, to be filled by 2048.
2035 and beyond: Waste site to remain open for 100 to 300 years, after which it would be shut in. Some isotopes in the waste will remain highly radioactive for thousands of years.
Source: Energy Department.
---
Yucca Mountain Controversy Chronology
The Associated Press
Tuesday, July 9, 2002; 7:16 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46175-2002Jul9?language=printer
What's ahead for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada now that Congress has approved the project.
2002: The Energy Department continues to work on unresolved scientific issues as it prepares an application for a construction permit from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
2003: Energy Department completes a detailed transportation plan, working with 43 states on routing and security, and with the NRC on waste canister designs and safeguards.
2003: Courts likely to rule on first of six lawsuits already filed by Nevada challenging the Yucca project.
2004: Energy Department plans to apply for construction permit. Licensing process before the NRC likely to take three to four years.
2007: Construction expected to begin.
2010-2034: Shipments of 3,200 tons of waste a year to arrive at the Yucca site. Initial capacity is 77,000 tons, but with congressional approval it could be expanded to 120,000 tons, to be filled by 2048.
2035 and beyond: Waste site to remain open for 100 to 300 years, after which it would be shut in. Some isotopes in the waste will remain highly radioactive for thousands of years.
Source: Energy Department.
---
Senators Declare Support for Waste Site
New York Times
July 9, 2002
By ALISON MITCHELL and MATTHEW L. WALD
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/09/national/09YUCC.html
WASHINGTON, July 8 - Several wavering senators from both parties rallied today to support President Bush's call for a nuclear waste disposal site at Yucca Mountain, prompting Republican aides to predict that Congress will give final passage this week to the plan to bury the nation's atomic waste in the Nevada desert.
"We have a majority," said one senior Republican aide, expressing confidence about the outcome. It would cap a struggle of more than 20 years to designate a site to store thousands of tons of high-level radioactive waste from commercial reactors and nuclear weapons plants.
On the eve of an expected Senate showdown on the issue, two previously undecided Republican senators from Utah, Robert F. Bennett and Orrin G. Hatch, said late today that they would support the disposal site after a White House meeting this afternoon that included Spencer Abraham, the secretary of energy.
"Those of us from Utah are faced with a choice of either having this material go through our state or stop and come to our state," said Mr. Bennett. For that reason, he and Mr. Hatch said, they would vote for the disposal site.
The issue of how to dispose of spent nuclear fuel from power plants had raised particular concerns in Utah because several utility companies, fearful that Yucca might not open, have been negotiating with an Indian tribe with a reservation 70 miles west of Salt Lake City for permission to store waste there on an interim basis.
Disappointing Democrats and environmentalists, Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, was expected to announce on Tuesday his support for building the repository at Yucca Mountain. An aide said that while the senator still had concerns about the transport of radioactive material across the country, he planned to introduce legislation to address those concerns.
Critics of the disposal site contend that the site and the rules that Congress set up to select it do not take science into account and say that there is still danger of contamination from the site. One lawsuit pending in federal district court here, for examples, argues that the Environmental Protection Agency drew the limits within which water pollution would be allowed, to permit excessive leakage from the repository into underground water supplies.
The Senate action on the issue will have major implications for the future of the nation's nuclear power industry. As a result, it has been the subject of a fierce lobbying campaign, with environmentalists and major business groups sparring on the airwaves and in grass-roots lobbying state by state.
Opponents of the plan to consolidate much of nation's spent nuclear waste at the site have long acknowledged that the odds were against their success. But they were hoping to block a Republican effort expected on Tuesday to bring the Yucca Mountain issue up for debate. Unlike most issues before the Senate, this one cannot be filibustered.
"I haven't given up," Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the assistant majority leader, who has tried to keep the site from being placed in his state, said tonight.
Mr. Reid and the Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle, sharply accused the Republicans and the Bush administration of favoring special interests like the nuclear power industry in promoting the Nevada site.
Supporters of using Yucca said that the Bush administration was taking no chances and that they expected Vice President Dick Cheney to preside in the Senate on Tuesday in case his vote would be needed to break a tie to initiate the debate.
Nevada has battled the waste site for 20 years. In 1982, setting a highly unusual procedure, Congress gave Nevada the power to veto any presidential decision about Yucca Mountain, then established a set of procedures for overturning such a veto.
The issue became joined in Congress after Gov. Kenny Guinn of Nevada, a Republican, in April exercised that veto over President Bush's decision to build the repository in Nevada. A resolution to overturn Mr. Guinn's veto passed the Republican-run House in May on a bipartisan vote of 306-117. The Democratic-run Senate now has the final say, though it must take action by July 26.
The last-ditch sparring was intense, with both sides trying to buttonhole a dwindling list of undecided lawmakers.
Proponents of nuclear power regard the Yucca Mountain site as vital to the industry. Backers of new reactors say that the establishment of a repository is an essential step for the construction of new reactors. Without Yucca, they say, the industry seems well on its way to extinction, with all the reactors ordered after 1973 having been canceled.
Indeed, California and Connecticut have prohibited construction of new reactors pending resolution of the waste problem. Thus, the politics of Yucca have become tangled with those of the nation's energy future.
Critics contend that science has been left behind in the search for a site, and question whether Yucca is even adequate, and whether the engineered protections - as opposed to the natural geology of the mountain - have been sufficiently thought out.
The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 first had the Energy Department "characterize" three candidate sites in the western United States and choose the best, but Congress - concerned about the schedule and cost, both of which were running over initial estimates - came back in 1987 with an amendment that picked one of the sites: Yucca Mountain.
Planners originally contemplated repeating the procedure to find a second repository in the eastern United States, but as nuclear waste became more controversial, that idea died.
"The politics won out," said Allison Macfarlane of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Yucca Mountain Project. "The weakest state, politically, that was under consideration, got stuck with it."
In recent weeks, opponents made their best gains by raising questions about the safety of transporting nuclear waste across the country. Senator Reid, Democrats say, has been using all his influence in search of votes - including his power as chairman of a key appropriations subcommittee to support projects.
He has won some converts, with two first-term Democratic senators, Jean Carnahan of Missouri and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, declaring their opposition to the repository in recent days. Ms. Stabenow had supported the Yucca Mountain site when she served in the House, but aides said she was now particularly troubled by plans to transport waste by barge across Lake Michigan.
In addition, Senator James M. Jeffords, the Vermont independent who owes his chairmanship of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee to Mr. Reid's decision to step aside for him, indicates he is undecided even though he has backed the repository. Erik Smulson, Mr. Jeffords's press secretary, attributed the senator's new doubts not to Mr. Reid but to concerns "about the viability of the Yucca plant."
Still, many pro-business Democrats from conservative states were expected to vote with the Republicans, making passage seem assured.
Even if the Senate gives its approval, the Yucca project faces numerous technical and legal challenges. The Energy Department has only 90 days to file an application after the Senate acts, but even Yucca's supporters say that the department will not be ready; it may not file for two years, according to some experts. The department has yet to make some basic decisions about the design of the repository.
And after the Energy Department makes its filings, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is supposed to decide on a license by applying rules written by the E.P.A. But those rules are being challenged by Nevada and by the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.
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USEC Says Fewer Jobs May Be Cut
July 9, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Uranium-Workers.html
PIKETON, Ohio (AP) -- USEC Inc. on Tuesday reduced the number of shipping jobs that may be eliminated at its idled uranium enrichment plant in southern Ohio from 440 to 140.
But the company said the reduction at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant is dependent upon the Department of Energy securing Congressional funding.
``This is very, very positive news, obviously, for the Portsmouth site,'' USEC spokeswoman Elizabeth Stuckle said.
The jobs will be eliminated later this summer. As of May 31, there were approximately 1,300 workers at the plant.
Stuckle said the lower estimate is based on several factors, including a department project to keep the plant ready in case production needs to resume and a separate department project to decontaminate material at the shipping facility for 15 more months. Additionally, other workers may be able to transfer to other projects.
USEC announced it February that would eliminate the jobs as the company shifts that work to its other plant in Paducah, Ky.
USEC is the world's leading supplier of uranium fuel for commercial nuclear power plants.
-------- us nuc waste
Congress Approves Yucca Nuclear Waste Dump
By REUTERS
July 9, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-energy-congress-yucca.html or
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20020709/ts_nm/energy_congress_yucca_dc_14
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Senate gave final congressional approval on Tuesday to President Bush's decision to bury deadly nuclear waste from across the nation in Nevada's Yucca Mountain, setting aside state safety concerns already being argued in federal court challenges.
Senators approved a resolution to override Nevada's veto of the administration's plan to put the country's first permanent nuclear waste repository in the Nevada desert, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The U.S. House of Representatives approved it in May.
The Senate vote effectively clears the way for the U.S. Energy Department to apply to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to license the $58 billion project. The facility is scheduled to open in 2010 and hold 77,000 tons of radioactive material that the Environmental Protection Agency says must be isolated for 10,000 years.
The resolution passed the Senate on a voice vote after clearing a procedural hurdle, 60-39.
Fifteen Democrats joined 45 Republicans in approving a pivotal motion to consider the resolution. Three Republicans and one independent joined 35 Democrats in opposing it.
There are about 100 nuclear power plants across the country. Spent fuel from these plants is highly radioactive and is stored at 131 sites in 39 states. Many storage tanks are nearly full and the government has faced lawsuits for failing to meet a 1998 deadline to open a permanent storage site.
``Now more than ever, we need Yucca Mountain,'' declared Sen. Frank Murkowski, an Alaskan Republican.
NOT IN MY STATE
Nevada filed federal lawsuits to try to stop the project before and after Bush accepted a recommendation by U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham in February to build the facility in the state.
Abraham says $4 billion in studies over the past 20 years have found Yucca Mountain to be a safe site.
``We need to move ahead,'' he said after Tuesday's vote. ``We need nuclear energy to supply America with energy security -- 20 percent of our electricity is generated by nuclear power.''
Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn declared in a statement on Tuesday, ``Now the process moves to the federal courts where the playing field is level and Nevada's factual, scientific arguments will be heard by impartial judges. .... We are highly confident.''
Guinn in April vetoed Bush's decision to put the nuclear dump in his state. Under the 1982 nuclear law, a governor may veto a president's decision to put a nuclear waste repository in his or her state. But the veto can be overridden by Congress with a majority vote in each chamber.
Opponents, including a number of environmental groups, argue Yucca Mountain and shipments of nuclear waste to it would provide an inviting target for terrorists.
But backers, who include many of the nation's top businesses, contend it would be safer to have the waste in one site rather than scattered at facilities nationwide.
Some senators who voted for the project admitted they did so because they feared that if it was killed, nuclear waste would be sent or left in their states.
As Sen. Robert Bennett, a Utah Republican, put it: ``Given the choice. ... I would rather have the waste go through Utah than to Utah.''
NOT DEFEATED YET
Senate Democratic Whip Harry Reid of Nevada, who has helped lead the charge against the project, refused to concede defeat.
``If they think this is the end they are sadly mistaken,'' said Reid, noting he could still oppose funding and planned to assist in his state's lawsuits.
Leading proponents argued Congress needed to approve Yucca Mountain or begin all over again with what has been more than a two-decade-old process to find a site.
Such a delay would be a big blow to the nuclear industry, which has long sought a permanent disposal facility, as well as the federal government, which has promised to deliver one.
``If not now, when in the world are we going to do it? ... And if not in this place, where?'' Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican, asked in urging approval.
--------
Senate Gives Final Approval to Nevada Nuclear Waste Site
New York Times
July 9, 2002
By ALISON MITCHELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/09/politics/09CND-YUCCA.html
WASHINGTON, July 9 - The Senate gave final Congressional approval today to a nuclear waste repository deep inside Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert, marking a pivotal moment in the 20-year search for a home for the radioactive byproducts of the nation's nuclear reactors.
The action, coming after years of fierce lobbying and a recent blitz by environmentalists and business groups alike, was a victory for President Bush. It overrode a veto of the site by Nevada's Republican governor, Kenny Guinn, and cleared the way for the Energy Department to apply to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to license the waste repository, to be located 1,000 feet below Yucca Mountain 90 miles from Las Vegas.
The opponents of the site, led by Nevada's two senators, knew they had lost when the Senate voted 60 to 39 to consider a resolution to override Nevada's veto. All sides had said that vote would be the critical test of support. After that, the Senate approved the resolution by a voice vote, instead of a formal roll-call vote. Opponents conceded that they might have lost a roll-call vote by an even larger margin.
The House of Representatives passed a comparable resolution by a 306-to-117 vote in May.
Under the Energy Department plan, endorsed by President Bush earlier this year, the site is to receive high-level radioactive waste shipments of up to 77,000 tons from 103 nuclear reactors around the country over the next quarter century.
The site is envisioned to open in 2010 - though it still faces numerous regulatory and legal hurdles. The nuclear waste, which stays radioactive for thousands of years, is currently stored at local plant sites, making many lawmakers from many states eager for a permanent storage site somewhere far from their own borders.
Many critics of the plan objected, however, to transporting all that waste to the Yucca site from plants across the country.
"Concerns are going to mount, and we are going to rue the day we allowed the waste through that many streets and neighborhoods," said Tom Daschle, the Senate majority leader.
Senator Daschle, a South Dakota Democrat, had fiercely opposed the site, as had his assistant majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, and the two made one last plea to fellow Democrats at a closed-door party lunch. But they were unable to keep their party completely in line, as 15 Democrats joined most of the Republicans to vote to consider the Yucca Mountain resolution.
Senator John Ensign of Nevada was joined by only two other Republicans - Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado - in voting to block the resolution. Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, did not vote.
Both sides vyed for votes until the final minutes, with Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham appearing at a closed-door Republican caucus. In defeat, the Democrats tried to use the vote to further Democratic campaign charges that Republicans are beholden to big business. "A lot of special interests are behind this," said Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, who protested that the Yucca Mountain site risked contaminating California's drinking water. "Who are we fighting for here? Who are we fighting for here?"
Supporters of the nuclear waste repository called it critical for the future of the nation's nuclear power industry, saying the plants were not viable without a disposal site. Indeed two states, California and Connecticut, have prohibited new reactors pending some solution to the waste problem.
"Nuclear power is a clean, efficient source," said Trent Lott, the Senate minority leader. "We need to deal with nuclear waste."
Senator Lott, a Mississippi Republican, dismissed opponents of the nuclear power as unrealistic. "There are people in America that don't want nuclear power," he said. "They don't want hydropower, they don't want oil."
Opponents of the Yucca Mountain site raised an array of safety questions, from whether the repository's design would prevent groundwater contamination to whether it would be safe to transport 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste across the country, particularly at a time of terrorist threats.
Mr. Abraham, the energy secretary, today dismissed such concerns. "We've been transporting the same kind of waste for 30 years and there hasn't been one harmful exposure," he told reporters. "We will take every precaution to maximize safety. If we didn't go forward with Yucca, there would be alternative schemes."
-------- us politics
GOP Moves to Force Nuke Waste Vote
By H. Josef Hebert
Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, July 9, 2002; 11:22 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43755-2002Jul9?language=printer
WASHINGTON -- Over the objections of Democratic leaders, Senate Republicans on Tuesday moved to force a vote on a proposal to send thousands of tons of nuclear waste for burial in the Nevada desert.
Democrats immediately objected, setting up a pair of votes later in the day on whether to consider and approve a resolution overriding Nevada's veto of the proposed waste site at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
President Bush gave the Yucca project the green light in February, but Nevada filed a formal protest - as was its right under a 1982 nuclear waste law - leaving it for Congress to make a final decision. The House approved the resolution overriding Nevada's objections in May.
Senate action, under a special fast-track procedure required by the 1982 law, would end decades of political debate over where to put the nation's nuclear waste that is building up at commercial power plants and at defense sites in 39 states. The waste, mostly used reactor fuel, will remain dangerously radioactive for tens of thousands of years.
Bush's plan would bury 77,000 tons of waste beneath Yucca Mountain, a volcanic ridge adjacent to the Nevada Test Site where the government detonated scores of nuclear bombs during the Cold War. While supporters of the site said the waste would be most secure buried at a central location, critics argued that sending thousands of shipments of waste on the nation's highways and rail lines would pose its own security and safety problems.
The government has spent nearly $7 billion in search of a waste site, including $4.5 billion since 1978 studying Yucca Mountain. Congress in 1987 directed that the Nevada site be the only one considered.
Republicans had accused Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., of blocking consideration of the Yucca resolution. Daschle asked Bush in a letter Monday to hold off on Yucca Mountain until after completion of a bill addressing recent corporate accounting scandals.
----
Russia says US must learn to act with others
Story by Ron Popeski
REUTERS RUSSIA:
July 9, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/16751/story.htm
MOSCOW - Russia's foreign minister said on the weekend that the international community's main task was to persuade the United States to stop acting on its own.
Igor Ivanov, interviewed on ORT public television, said Russia had been motivated by a desire to draw Washington into international consultation when it pressed for signature of a new treaty reducing strategic nuclear arsenals at a May summit.
He said the problem of Washington acting alone had begun long before U.S. moves last week to restrict the scope of the new International Criminal Court, which is backed by Washington's allies in western Europe.
"This is a reflection of a certain section of the elite of the United States which believes that today the United States can act in any way it wishes without taking into consideration its international obligations," Ivanov told a discussion panel on a weekly programme called Vremena.
"The task of Russian diplomacy and the international community - because the vast majority of countries share our position - is to persuade the political elite of the United States that it is in their own interests to take part collectively and in solidarity in solving current problems."
Although President Vladimir Putin has re-oriented Russian foreign policy behind Washington and the West since last year's suicide attacks on the United States, differences do remain.
These focus mainly on Russia maintaining good relations with Iran, where it is helping build a nuclear power plant, keeping open diplomatic links with Iraq and pursuing closer ties with North Korea - the three countries cited by President George W. Bush as an "axis of evil".
NEW LOW
Relations between the United States and western Europe hit new difficulties last week with U.S. bids to seek immunity for its soldiers from the new international court and to link the issue to prolonging a U.N. police mission in Bosnia.
Other recent strains have focused on Bush's Middle East peace proposals, which include a call for Palestinian President Yasser Arafat to be replaced.
Ivanov said experts could not have been surprised by trends in the Bush administration, given its refusal to honour the Kyoto protocol on environmental protection, its pullout from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and other decisions.
"...Why was it important during Bush's visit to Moscow to sign the agreement on reducing strategic nuclear weapons?" Ivanov asked, referring to a treaty in which Moscow was perceived as making major concessions to Washington.
"Because it was the first document signed by the United States in the current dangerous situation...(while) they were going in a different direction."
Ivanov dismissed suggestions that Russia might have its own objections to the new international court on grounds that it had been subject to Western criticism of its campaign against Chechen separatists.
He said the court had no retroactive powers and Moscow supported its creation. "What happens in future depends on circumstances," he said.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
'Friendly fire' came amid hunt for Taliban
July 9, 2002
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020709-79741000.htm
U.S. special operations units were hunting a senior Taliban military leader last week during the operation that led to the accidental deaths of Afghan civilians when an AC-130 gunship fired on anti-aircraft sites.
In this newly disclosed detail of events on July 1, two senior U.S. officials said the Taliban leader had eluded the joint American-Afghan forces for weeks.
The fugitive, who has not been identified, and his men remain at large today somewhere in Uruzgan province, site of the "friendly fire" incident.
Uruzgan is the home province of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, but the sources said the team did not have him in its sights at the time. Omar is believed to move in and out of the province, north of Kandahar.
This knowledge of a top Taliban military officer's presence in Uruzgan helps explain why a large force of 400, backed by U.S. aircraft, stayed on the move in the province for weeks before July 1.
The new information also illustrates the difficulty of operations in post-Taliban Afghanistan, where the targets are often small bands of Taliban or al Qaeda easily hidden amid caves and friendly villages. The U.S. mission is to wipe out these pockets before they can organize and attack the new government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
"There was sufficient intelligence to believe that there were some what we would call 'high-value individuals' that might be operating in the area," Marine Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon yesterday. "We have known from intelligence of multiple sources that there were viable targets in the area, this locale within Uruzgan."
Gen. Newbold declined to identify these 'high-value' people, but two sources said one of them is the unnamed senior Taliban officer.
U.S. intelligence agencies believe Omar remains in the caves and villages of south-central Afghanistan, where strong pockets of sympathy exist for his failed Islamic state.
His top ally and supporter, Osama bin Laden, is believed to be moving among friendly areas of western Pakistan, if he is still alive.
"They never were close associates," said a U.S. official. "They moved their own way after the war started. They have their own areas."
U.S. intelligence has not picked up confirmed intelligence on bin Laden's whereabouts since December. Then, his al Qaeda terrorist network released a video of a thin and stressed-looking bin Laden. His voice was detected by U.S. officials on a short-range radio in Tora Bora that same month, shortly before the al Qaeda stronghold was overrun by U.S. and Afghan troops.
President Bush said yesterday he does not know whether bin Laden, the world's most-wanted man for orchestrating the September 11 attacks, is alive.
"He may be alive," Mr. Bush said at a White House news conference. "If he is, we'll get him. If he's not alive, we got him."
The military acknowledged that civilians died July 1 as the result of nighttime AC-130 cannon fire against anti-aircraft sites stationed amid civilians, including a wedding party in the village of Kakarak.
"We struck people we didn't intend to," Gen. Newbold said.
Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said a team of about 15, headed by an Air Force one-star general, will arrive in Afghanistan this week to begin a formal investigation. A team of U.S. and Afghan officials initially visited the area and filed a report on Saturday with Lt. Gen. Dan O'Neill, who commands some 7,000 American troops in Afghanistan.
Local Afghans say 48 civilians were killed by U.S. fire. The Pentagon says it cannot confirm that number.
"The preliminary team was not shown that many graves," Mrs. Clarke said. "But again, any civilian that is hurt, any civilian that is killed is not acceptable, as far as we're concerned."
As a result of the accident, Gen. O'Neill has decided he needs a larger military presence in the province to aid villages and rebuild trust. He will dispatch humanitarian and civil affairs officers to Uruzgan, as well as some security forces.
Gen. Newbold said that on the night of the attack, small teams of American commandos were working in "concentric rings" as they zeroed in on their Taliban targets.
It was at this point that troops on the ground and the AC-130 were shot at. A spokesman for the preliminary investigative team said some of the anti-aircraft fire came from a battery within Kakarak where the wedding party celebrated.
The investigative team found no artillery piece inside the compound.
"It is a huge area that we're talking about filled with caves, and it is not difficult to hide an [anti-aircraft artillery] weapon," Gen. Newbold said.
Gen. Newbold reaffirmed the Pentagon's position that the Air Force AC-130 crew fired in self-defense. "I don't think there's any question that our aircraft and our forces on the ground were fired at," he said. He added that the enemy volleys were substantial and not merely celebratory small-arms fire from a wedding party, as is the Pashtun tribal custom.
The lumbering gunships operate almost exclusively at night in Afghanistan. Each firing is videotaped by infrared gun cameras that could capture any anti-aircraft volleys. Mrs. Clarke said the Pentagon is considering releasing the tapes.
-------- africa
Bumpy Start for New Pan - African Body
July 9, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-africa-summit.html
DURBAN, South Africa - South Africa took command of Africa's new political union Tuesday, but it was an unexpectedly bumpy launch.
Libya's maverick leader Muammar Gaddafi grabbed center stage and confusion reigned about where and when the 53-nation African Union would hold its next summit.
At least 40 presidents and monarchs were in the port city of Durban to launch the African Union (AU) with South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki as chairman for its first year.
``Through our actions let us proclaim to the world that this is a continent on the rise,'' Mbeki told dignitaries and 20,000 spectators in a sports stadium.
After an airforce fly-past, South African musicians, Zulu warriors and bare-breasted female dancers celebrated the start of what many hope is the dawn of a new era.
The AU replaces the ineffectual Organization of African Unity (OAU), metaphorically buried Monday aged 39, but the new arrival was quickly involved in controversy.
It upheld a controversial OAU policy on Madagascar, refusing to recognize millionaire businessman Marc Ravalomanana as president, saying his administration took power unconstitutionally and calling for fresh elections.
Ex-president Didier Ratsiraka, now in Paris, had held power for more than two decades on the giant Indian Ocean island of 16 million people. Ratsiraka fled to France last week after the United States and then France, Germany and China announced they would work with Ravalomanana.
SPECIAL SUMMIT
Mbeki called a special or ``extraordinary'' AU summit to debate radical amendments to the AU's founding charter proposed in Durban by Gaddafi, known at home as ``The Guide.''
Gaddafi wants Africa to be a single state with one army and believes the serving AU chairman, Mbeki, should move to the body's headquarters in Ethiopia.
South African officials said there was broad support for Mbeki's move to convene an interim meeting on the Libyan amendments and other unfinished business before the AU's next planned summit in Mozambique in 12 months' time.
``That has been sorted out. It will be held within six months,'' Mbeki's spokesman said.
But a summit communique Tuesday night by the OAU/AU secretariat made no mention of the meeting.
``There has been no decision about an extraordinary summit. The South Africans may be saying that but they are only one country out of 53,'' one senior secretariat official told Reuters.
Libyan sources said Gaddafi, who claims ownership of the AU vision, hoped to host the special summit.
Gaddafi, who took power in a 1969 coup and has bad relations with the United States and most other Western states, has taken a prominent role at the summit. Delegates and analysts believe South Africa has sought to placate the volatile Libyan leader.
Gaddafi was in the thick of the action Tuesday, making an unscheduled address at the stadium.
``Africa for the Africans! The land is ours! You are the masters of your continent! You are marching to glory!'' he said in fractured English.
``Forgive the whites! They are now poor. We are bigger than them,'' he said to roars of approval.
At their meetings Monday, the heads of state approved the creation of a Peace and Security Council that will have greater powers to tackle conflicts than its predecessor in the OAU.
Top-level talks continued into the early hours Wednesday to try to resolve one of Africa's worst conflicts.
Mbeki, his deputy president Jacob Zuma and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan held a meeting between presidents Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Paul Kagame of Rwanda to try to end the many-sided war in the DRC.
About two million people have died in the four-year-old conflict, mainly from war-related starvation and disease.
Amara Essy, the outgoing secretary general of the OAU, was appointed interim chairman of the AU commission, but the job will be on the table if there is a special summit, delegates said.
The summit endorsed the New Partnership for Africa's Development, a blueprint to transform the continent's economy and political governance.
--------
Key Principles of the African Union
July 9, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-African-Union-Glance.html
The African Union inaugurated Tuesday is envisaged as a strong organization, binding African nations together to help lift the continent from poverty and instability. It aims to develop the continent through good governance and a commitment to human rights. Here are some key details of the new organization.
Main Principles:
-- Working to achieve greater unity among Africa's nations.
-- Accelerating the political and economic integration of the continent.
-- Promoting peace, security and stability.
-- Promoting democratic principles and good governance.
-- Protecting human rights.
-- Working for sustainable development to raise living standards across Africa.
Key Institutions:
-- A Peace and Security Council, which would be able to intervene to prevent crimes against humanity in African countries.
-- A Pan African Parliament, which would consist of elected representatives from every member nation that can make recommendations but not laws.
-- A Court of Justice, which would have jurisdiction over member states.
-- A Central Bank, which aims to coordinate a single African economic policy.
-- An Economic, Social, and Cultural Council, which would give civil society a voice in the union.
-------- arms sales
IRA uses Colombia to test new weapons
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
July 9, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020709-31490290.htm
The Irish Republican Army, despite steadfastly denying involvement with Marxist rebels in Colombia, is using that South American country to develop new weapons that include advanced bombs, a newly released British intelligence report says.
"The PIRA have been using Colombia as a training ground to carry out tests with their engineering department as they are no longer able to use the Irish Republic due to the current political climate," the report said, referring to the Provisional IRA, the formal name of the IRA.
The report, made public by the British Broadcasting Corp., said IRA involvement in Colombia allowed the organization "free range to explore the new prototype of devices." Three IRA members - two of whom were members of the IRA's engineering department - have since been arrested in Colombia.
The three, James Monaghan, Neil Connolly and John McCauley, were arrested in August 2001 in Bogota and accused of training guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the nation's dominant Marxist rebel group.
Their trial is scheduled to begin this summer.
British intelligence officials said the IRA's move to Colombia marked an attempt to keep the organization - especially its engineering department - intact and functional in case Northern Ireland's peace process falters and fighting resumes.
Mr. Monaghan, 55, led the IRA's engineering department and has been identified by British authorities as the designer of the sophisticated Mark 1B long-range mortar known as the "barracks buster."
He is a former member of the Sinn Fein Executive Council and was convicted in 1971 for possession of explosives and served three years in prison.
Mr. McCauley, 38, is the former second-in-command of the IRA's engineering department. He is an expert in using and producing weapons and mortars and served two years in prison after his conviction in 1985 for the illegal possession of weapons.
Connolly, 36, also is a weapons expert and is believed to have first made contact with the FARC five years ago through ETA, the Basque terrorist group that specializes in bombings and assassinations of Spanish government officials.
The Washington Times reported last month that members of the FARC have met with more than a dozen IRA leaders during the past three years, including a confidant of Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams.
Colombian military and police officials, British intelligence officers and U.S. House investigators said the meetings were part of an effort by the FARC to upgrade its weaponry and escalate its ability to wage urban terrorism.
Among the IRA leaders believed to have been at the meetings was Padraig Wilson, 44, a convicted bomber and former commander of IRA inmates at the Maze prison, near Belfast.
Wilson, a longtime confidant of Mr. Adams, was freed in December 1999 after serving eight years of a 24-year sentence. His release came as part of the Belfast Agreement, an April 1998 initiative informally known as the Good Friday Accord, which was intended to bring peace to Northern Ireland.
He was sentenced to prison after British authorities caught him making a booby-trapped bomb. He is also a weapons and explosives specialist.
Since his release, Wilson has played a key public role in persuading IRA members to support the peace process. Last year, he was given temporary parole to attend with Mr. Adams a special meeting of Sinn Fein's ruling council in Dublin to discuss ratifying the Belfast Agreement.
But the sources say Wilson is believed to have been among as many as 15 IRA members who traveled to Colombia during the past three years to meet with FARC leaders, who have since escalated their terrorist campaign against the Colombian government.
A report by the General Command of the Colombian military forces said IRA members were escorted to FARC-controlled areas of the country to train the rebels in "terrorism, explosives and military tactics." The report said terrorist tactics used by the FARC "were taught by members of the IRA."
House investigators said the IRA was paid $2 million for members of its engineering department to teach the FARC how to build booby-trapped bombs and to produce a version of the IRA's "barracks buster" mortar.
Mr. Adams, president of Sinn Fein, a political party allied with the IRA, has denied involvement by the IRA in training FARC guerrillas. He recently told the Irish Times "with certainty" that the three men arrested in Colombia did not represent Sinn Fein and that he did not authorize them to be in Colombia in connection with the party.
In testimony last month before the House International Relations Committee, Gen. Fernando Tapias, chairman of Colombia's joint chiefs of staff, attributed an "onslaught of terrorist acts" during the past 18 months to IRA training.
Gen. Tapias, who said the bombings killed 400 police and military officers, told the committee that he did not know whether the IRA members were in Colombia at the order of the organization's leadership but that there was no doubt they had trained the FARC in using explosives and other weapons.
----
Britain approves export of jet parts destined for Israel
By Reuters
Tuesday, July 09, 2002 Tamuz 29, 5762
Ha'aretz
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=184537&contrassID=1&subContrassID=0&sbSubContrassID=0
LONDON - Britain gave the go-ahead on Monday for the export to the United States of fighter jet components destined for Israel, despite protests that it was violating its own guidelines on "ethical" arms sales.
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the navigation and targeting equipment - known as head up display units - would be shipped to the United States where it would be built into F-16 jets due to be delivered to Israel next year.
Straw said Britain, which has pledged to meet tough export rules preventing sales of weapons for external aggression or internal repression, was seriously concerned about violence in Israeli-occupied areas in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Israel has on several occasions fired missiles from F-16s against Palestinian targets during the 22-month intifada.
But he told parliament that Britain had to balance its concerns with the need to maintain its multi-billion-dollar arms export industry and to keep a "strong and dynamic defence relationship with the United States."
"This relationship is fundamental to the UK's national security as well as to our ability to play a strong and effective role in the world," Straw said.
Anti-arms trade activists have denounced the government decision, which was leaked over the weekend, saying it allowed the interests of arms manufacturers to ride rough-shod over ethical concerns.
"They have been arming India and Pakistan, even while they stood on the brink of nuclear war, and now they are choosing to contribute directly to death and destruction in the Middle East," said the pressure group Campaign Against Arms Trade.
"I am very disappointed that we are aiding and abetting the Americans to attack the Palestinians," said Brian Iddon, a member of Prime Minister Tony Blair's ruling Labour Party and chairman of parliament's all-party Palestinian Group.
The head up cockpit displays are made by BAE Systems Plc for export to U.S. firm Lockheed Martin Corp which builds the F-16 fighters, government officials said.
Straw said the case of the F-16 parts showed the problems of regulating sales of arms assembled in more than one country. In those cases Britain would stick by existing criteria but would also take into consideration factors including export controls in the country where the parts were being assembled and Britain's defence ties with that country.
It would also consider the ease with which the British components could be removed from the end product, and the "standing of the entity to which the goods are to be exported."
Opposition Liberal Democrat Menzies Campbell accused the government of rushing in changes which gave it "maximum flexibility and minimum accountability."
"Who on earth believes that the hopes of peace in the Middle East will be helped one bit by this decision, and just exactly what would we refuse to export to areas of tension like India and Pakistan?" Campbell said.
Britain said in April it had tightened controls on exports to Israel after it discovered parts of British-built tanks had been used in armoured personnel carriers deployed in the occupied territories.
--------
The international dealers in death
The world is awash with guns - at least 550 million of them. An endless cheap supply of small arms has spawned an epidemic of killing. In a three-part series, Guardian writers hunt down the dealers, talk to the victims and ask what can be done to stop the trade. Today: The gunrunner
Ian Traynor in Odessa
Monday July 9, 2001
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/armstrade/story/0,10674,519661,00.html
Special report: the arms trade http://www.guardian.co.uk/armstrade/story/www.guardian.co.uk/armstrade
Leonid Minin was celebrating in room 341 of the Hotel Europa he owned in Cinisello Balsamo outside Milan. There was plenty to toast that balmy Saturday night last August. There was the fact that there were four prostitutes and 20 grammes of cocaine to get the party off with a bang. And there was the fact that the millionaire gunrunner had just delivered 113 tonnes of small arms to west Africa from his native Ukraine.
At 3am, as the party was in full swing, an Italian vice squad patrol chanced to stumble onto it. "The arrest was absolutely a piece of luck," a source in the Italian judiciary said. Italian special branch officers were called in, which is when they got even luckier.
Among Minin's belongings they found, apart from the cocaine, $150,000 in cash and half a million dollars worth of African diamonds. There was also a cache of 1,500 documents detailing Minin's dealings in oil, timber, gems and - most telling of all - guns.
The trade in East European small arms of which Minin was a central part has become the scourge of sub-Saharan Africa. It entrenches unscrupulous regimes in power, arms the legions of child soldiers now estimated at 120,000 and fuels the insurrections and civil wars that are laying large tracts of the continent waste. Africa-watchers saying it could rank alongside the Aids epidemic or debt as one of the most debilitating factors hampering Africa's development.
The first concerted attempt to get to grips with this pernicious trade opens today in New York where experts, police officers, analysts and diplomats gather for a two-week conference called by the United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan. The event is aimed at reducing the carnage caused by the worldwide stockpile of 550m small arms. The ambition to tighten regulations on the trade is strongly backed by the European Union. And yet it looks doomed to failure, thwarted by a US-led opposition.
If the UN conference fails to make headway, more Leonid Minins are likely to take advantage. He is one of a new breed of east European racketeers, some of whom are well-connected KGB veterans, who thrive on keeping Africans killing one another.
They buy up the large surplus armouries generated by the post-Soviet meltdown and profit handsomely by ferrying the weaponry into the war zones of some of the most vulnerable societies on earth. Minin and his ilk are the middlemen operating between the corrupt arms industries of the old eastern bloc and the warlords of Sierra Leone, Eritrea, Liberia, Angola - the list goes on.
The Soviet-designed AK-47 machine gun or Kalashnikov is the weapon of choice for the legions of killers of sub-Saharan Africa. The portable rocket-propelled grenade, or RPG, is also popular.
It is these small arms, rather than the hi-tech wizardry of Hollywood action movies, that are the real scourge. Across the former Soviet bloc where the disciplines and the controls of the cold war have given way to a corrupt free-for-all, the small arms market is a buyer's one.
A couple of weeks before he was arrested, according to Italian magistrates, Minin chartered an Antonov-124 transport aircraft in Moscow, had it flown to Kiev in Ukraine where it was loaded with 113 tons of Kalashnikovs, RPGs, and ammunition, and then directed it to Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast in west Africa.
Middlemen
Minin was the middleman, the Italians say, organising the contract with General Robert Guei, the Ivorian dictator who was overthrown last October. The weapons were supplied and transported by a Moscow-based air cargo firm called Aviatrend, run by a former Soviet test pilot called Valery Cherny, a longtime associate of Minin.
Documents seen by the Guardian show Aviatrend promising to supply 5m rounds of ammunition. A certificate of purchase to Cherny bearing the signature of Gen Guei ordered the 5m rounds, as well as 10,500 AK-47s, 330 grenade launchers, sniper rifles, night vision equipment, and assorted munitions.
Sixteen months earlier, another Antonov aircraft left Ukraine with 68 tons of small arms and ammunition for Burkina Faso, staging post for supplying Charles Taylor's regime in Liberia and the Revolutionary United Front rebels in Sierra Leone.
The Ukrainian government, which licensed the shipment, protested that the end user certificates for the arms were for Burkina Faso (whose military does not use ex-Warsaw Pact weaponry) and that the arms deal was legal. Yet Minin's private jet was used to fly the cargo from Ouagadougou to Monrovia in Liberia for on-shipment by lorry to the RUF in Sierra Leone in contravention of a UN arms embargo. A central question for the prosecution is whether Minin knew the plane was being used for this illegal purpose.
Last year Minin was handed down a two-year sentence for drugs possession. Two weeks ago he was charged with illegal gunrunning. He denies the accusation.
The Minin saga begins in his native Odessa. He emigrated to Israel in the 70s as part of a large local exodus but when he went into business in the slipstream of the Soviet Union's collapse, making his first millions from trading oil out of Russia, he used his Odessa contacts.
Minin was an associate of Alexander Angert, nicknamed The Angel, a notoriously violent Odessa godfather who now lives in London. Angert helped run the port's lucrative oil business and extortion rackets and served 12 years of a 15-year term for murder. "Angert was in control. The politicians depended on him," the city police chief, Vladimir Zhurakovsky, says.
By 1993, Minin was based in Italy before establishing a timber business registered in Zug in Switzerland and opening offices in Monrovia and Tel Aviv. By 1998 he was immersed in the guns and gems trade.
Ukraine is not the sole, perhaps not even the main culprit in the provision of guns to areas under UN arms embargoes such as Yugoslavia, Liberia, Sierra Leone or Eritrea. Russia, Belarus and Bulgaria are all quoted by international analysts as at least equally culpable.
In early May an Ilyushin-76 cargo aircraft was intercepted as it sat on the runway at the Black Sea port of Burgas with a load of Kalashnikovs, ammunition, cannon, and uniforms worth $250,000. The machine guns were Czech-made, the air company was Ukrainian, the port was Bulgarian. The weapons were destined for Eritrea, though the bill of lading stipulated Georgia as the buyer.
But if Ukraine is not unique, the saga of its arms industry since independence reveals how the supply side of the small arms trade is generated. In the Soviet era Ukraine was a Red Army bulwark, with the military numbering 800,000, almost triple the size of the current army. Ukraine had a third of the USSR's defence industries which contributed as much as 45% of the republic's gross national product. It was producing enough hardware to equip five war fronts, according to Oleg Belosludtsev, a Moscow analyst of the post-Soviet military. As Ukraine plunged into its ongoing economic crisis, defence spending covered only about 17% of costs and the freelance arms merchants took over in cahoots with army officers, plundering the vast surplus stocks and selling wherever clients could be found. The government denies persistent reports of weaponry also going to Colonel Gadafy's Libya and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
"The arms and military goods sold off as a result of the cuts did not go through official structures only, but through the shadow economy which controlled a significant part of Ukrainian arms supplies abroad," Mr Belosudtsev noted. He calculates that 80% of arms export deals were in the hands of these "shadow structures".
By the late 90s chaos reigned in Ukraine's arms industry, a confusion that critics say was deliberately fomented by the profiteers. The government came under western pressure to clean up the sector and control the arms traders.
In response, the now discredited but still powerful regime of President Leonid Kuchma ordered a parliamentary commission to investigate allegations of illicit arms trading. It reached the sensational conclusion that Ukraine's military stocks were worth $89bn in 1992 and that in the course of the following six years $32bn worth of arms, equipment, and military property were stolen, much of it resold.
What happened next will provide a cautionary tale for anyone at this week's UN conference planning to tackle the world's illicit small arms dealers: the investigation was suddenly closed down, 17 volumes of its work vanished, and its members were cowed into silence.
The inquiry into "possible cases of unsanctioned arms trading" was headed by an MP and former deputy defence minister, Lieutenant-General Oleksandr Ignatenko. He was hauled before a court martial and stripped of his rank. He now fears for the lives of his three children.
Oleksandr Malevsky, a communist MP who was secretary to the commission, is one of the few involved willing to talk publicly: "We prepared the report for parliament. Ignatenko was under great pressure and very frightened."
Frustrated by the high-level blocking of his work, Gen Ignatenko leaked some of his findings to Serhy Odarych, then the publisher of a small-circulation Kiev newsletter. At midnight one Saturday night in July 1998, Mr Odarych was accosted by two men at the entrance to his block of flats. "Stop getting mixed up in politics," he was told. "If you don't stop interfering, we'll eliminate you."
To underline the point, one of the men shot him in the leg.
"Of course, no one was ever found," Mr Odarych said. "The police said I shot myself to grab attention."
Significantly, the Ignatenko commission in Kiev was the sole attempt through the 1990s to investigate the arms trade out of Ukraine. Its outcome speaks volumes about the challenges facing the UN and other international agencies wanting to confront the arms to Africa flow.
The current consensus is that the Kiev government has tightened controls over the small arms trade in recent months. But there remains ample scope for the middlemen and traders.
Minin apparently enjoys a close relationship with the Liberian leader, Charles Taylor, whose vicious regime is believed to control the trade in "conflict diamonds" and supply the RUF in Sierra Leone. Investigators are trying to establish whether the gems found in Minin's room were part of his pay-off for the guns.
His chance arrest and the discovered paper trail may be a boon to the agencies and activists working to curb the flow of weapons. But the lack of regulation, porous borders, poor infrastructure and toothlessness of UN arms embargoes all work against attempts to clamp down on the supply of small arms to Africa.
Minin now sits in jail in the Milan suburb of Monza and he is also wanted for questioning in Belgium, Switzerland and Paris. It will be December at the earliest before he goes on trial. Others are no doubt already lining up to take his place as profiteers in this deadly trade.
-------- colombia
Colombian U'wa Indians brace for new battle
Tuesday, July 09, 2002
By Ibon Villelabeitia,
Reuters
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2002/07/07092002/reu_47769.asp
CUBARA, Colombia - Roberto Perez chews a cluster of dry coca leaves as he stands near a precipice overlooking a valley of rainforest and swift rivers.
Legend has it that Perez's U'wa Indian ancestors jumped to their deaths from a similar ridge 500 years ago to avoid enslavement by Spanish conquistadors.
Perez, a shy and mild-mannered U'wa leader, says his people will not commit mass suicide this time but warns they will do whatever it takes to defend their land from the latest "intrusion" - a planned U.S. aid package to train an army battalion.
The $98 million in aid is aimed at preparing Colombian forces to protect an oil pipeline that runs near U'wa territory from attacks by Marxist rebels, but tribal leaders fear it will spread Colombia's 38-year-old war across their land.
The U'wa, an impoverished, seminomadic indigenous group in northeastern Colombia, gained international attention two years ago when they fought a protracted battle against Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum that sought to drill next to their reservation.
Occidental withdrew from the project this year after failing to find commercially viable oil deposits. The controversy had been a public relations nightmare for the U.S. company as vociferous international environmental organizations cast the dispute as a David-versus-Goliath struggle between indigenous groups and corporate power.
Now U'wa leaders fear Washington's plan, which is being discussed in the U.S. Congress, could drag them into a military conflict that kills thousands of people every year. "We have our own law. The army and the rebels should respect us. We don't want them on our land," said Roberto Cobaria, an U'wa leader with a wispy mustache.
International green groups are bracing for a new battle. "Our campaign is not over. We campaign for the indigenous groups' right to self-determination, be that against oil or U.S. military aid," said Kevin Koenig, a spokesman for Amazon Watch, a group based in Oakland, Calif., that has taken up the U'wa cause.
'THINKING PEOPLE' SUFFER DISCRIMINATION
The U'wa, which means "the thinking people" in their language, are one of Colombia's 80 indigenous ethnic groups. For centuries they have suffered oppression and discrimination at the hands of Spanish colonizers and Colombian government. Their numbers have dwindled dramatically to 5,000 from 20,000 in 1940. They live in remote, mist-shrouded mountains, having lost large parts of their ancestral land to government expropriations and incursions by displaced peasants fleeing the violence of the country's largely rural war.
Near Cubara, the main town on the tribe's reservation, children with stomachs swollen from malnutrition sat in the dirt in one settlement of mud huts. There is no electricity or running water.
One girl, barely 15, breast-fed two babies as scrawny chickens pecked around pools of rain water. Inside a smoky hut, elders gathered around a wood fire and drank "chicha," a traditional beer made of fermented maize. Most didn't speak Spanish and seemed suspicious of foreigners.
The lifestyle of most U'wa has changed little in 500 years, although tribe leaders have set up a campaign office in Cubara equipped with telephones and fax machines. The leaders live in the town and dress in the same shirts and trousers as other country Colombians.
WRATH OF GOD
The U'wa, a firmly religious people, believe that exploiting their sacred rivers and forests would unleash the wrath of Sira (God). They regard oil as the "blood of Mother Earth" and say drilling is like "stabbing a knife into your stomach." They carry coca leaves - the raw material for cocaine - in gourds around their necks and chew them to "gain strength and wisdom."
The land dispute with Occidental entered the U.S. presidential election in 2000 as environmental groups criticized Democratic candidate Al Gore for owning company shares. When Occidental won a court order to sink a test well after a seven-year legal wrangle, Colombian soldiers were deployed near the reservation and military helicopters hovered in the skies to prevent protesters from blocking the drilling.
Word that the U'wa were considering walking off the 1,400-foot "Cliff of Death" to fight the "invaders" as they did against the Spanish caused a media frenzy, even though the U'wa later ruled out such drastic action. "The collective suicide was something our ancestors did 500 years ago to avoid becoming slaves. We are going to fight until the end to defend our land, but we are not thinking of jumping off the cliff," said Perez, 60, who has 10 children.
OIL IS TROUBLE
History of Colombia shows that oil means trouble. Discoveries of oil - the country's main export - have brought violence from all sides fighting in Colombia's war and have done little in the way of lifting the people from poverty. After the Cano Limon pipeline opened in the 1980s, the two Marxist rebel groups that operate in the area grew fat by extorting private companies servicing the pipeline. Right-wing paramilitary outlaws have also moved into the area.
In 1999, the rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) kidnapped and killed three U.S. Indian activists who were visiting U'wa territory. When the oil controversy faded away, the television cameras went home and the U'wa were left to their poverty and mud huts. Tall grass is overtaking the old drilling site, and the sound of the rushing waters fills the air. The U'wa said they want the government to invest in hospitals and schools, not oil or war.
After the White House announced the new aid package earlier this year, U.S.-based environmental groups began mobilizing a new campaign and U'wa leaders were back in the spotlight.
U'wa leaders say they appreciate the solidarity received from international groups. Occidental and government officials say the Indians have been manipulated by outsiders. U'wa leaders have flown to Los Angeles, Washington and many European capitals - their tickets paid by foreign support groups - to promote the U'wa plight at anti-globalization forums.
"These are groups that depend on fundraising to survive and are always looking for causes in developing countries to raise their profile," an Occidental spokesman said. "They don't seem to have a problem when they fly the U'wa leaders around the world burning the 'blood of Mother Earth.'"
U'wa support groups say such claims are ridiculous and accuse big oil companies of trying to silence the voice of the indigenous community. Amazon Watch spokesman Koenig, who has never been to Colombia, said his group's job is "to shed the media spotlight so that the voices of the U'wa can be heard."
-------- drug war
Britain to Relax Laws for Millions of Dope Smokers
July 9, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-britain-drugs.html
LONDON - Britain will respond this week to a dramatic surge in cannabis use by easing laws and allowing millions of dope fans to smoke without fear of arrest.
Pressure from police, medical experts and politicians for Britain to take a less punitive approach has swayed Home Secretary David Blunkett, who is expected Wednesday to downgrade it to a low risk category C drug.
The downgrade -- making cannabis a Class C rather than Class B drug -- will put the drug in the same category as anabolic steroids and growth hormones and make possessing small amounts of it or smoking it in private a non-arrestable offence.
A report published late last year showed cannabis is the most commonly used illicit drug in the European Union, with at least one in 10 adults in the 15-nation group having used it.
The proportion of adults who had used cannabis ranged from 10 percent in Finland to 20-25 percent in Britain, Denmark, France, Ireland, the Netherlands and Spain.
But Blunkett, already in trouble over spiraling crime figures and bitter disputes over police reform, is keen to dress the move up not as an inevitable softening of attitudes but as a refocusing of resources onto harder drugs and onto dealers.
Alongside his announcement to downgrade cannabis, he is also expected to stress that the drug has not and will not be legalized, and announce plans to double the maximum sentence for dealing in the drug from five to 10 years.
But his ``carrot and stick'' approach has already run up against criticism and drawn accusations of ``mixed messages.''
Oliver Letwin, the opposition Conservative home affairs spokesman, mocked the supposed tougher sentencing, saying that since cannabis was being downgraded from Class B, which has a maximum 14 year sentence, to Class A, which has a five-year maximum sentence, the effect would be a reduction anyway.
``Will he explain ... how a move from a 14-year maximum sentence to a 10-year maximum sentence constitutes doubling sentences for cannabis dealer?'' Letwin asked Blunkett in parliament Monday.
For others, the cannabis downgrade is not enough.
A recent parliamentary committee report urged the government to radically reshape drugs policy and move toward a Dutch-style approach by downgrading cannabis, relaxing rules on ecstasy and offering heroin addicts free fixes in injecting rooms.
``Drugs policy in this country has been failing for decades,'' David Cameron, an opposition Conservative member of the committee said when the report was published.
A home office spokeswoman said Blunkett's statement would be ``a full response'' to the committee's report, although Blunkett has already dismissed their suggestion that the clubbers' drug ecstasy should be downgraded from Class A to Class B drug.
An estimated 5 million people in Britain regularly use cannabis and government data show its use has risen sharply over the past two decades.
Long-term use of the drug among people aged between 20 to 24 in England and Wales rose from 12 percent in 1981 to 52 percent in 2000.
Researchers said in March that relaxing cannabis laws could save Britain around 50 million pounds ($77.1 million) a year and free up the equivalent of 500 police officers.
A study by South Bank University's Criminal Policy Research Unit found that around 69,000 people were cautioned or convicted for cannabis possession in 1999, with police spending an average of four hours on each offence.
--------
Nev. to Vote on Legalizing Marijuana
July 9, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Legal-Marijuana.html
CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) -- Voters in Nevada, which up until last year had the nation's strictest marijuana law, will decide in November whether to let adults legally possess small amounts of pot.
State officials said Tuesday that a petition drive to put the measure on the ballot had narrowly succeeded with about 75,000 valid signatures.
Under the proposal, marijuana would be sold in state-licensed shops and taxed like cigarettes and other tobacco products. A distribution system would also be set up to provide low-cost pot for medical uses.
To become law, the change needs voter approval this year and in 2004. But whether it could ever actually take effect is unclear. Federal law bans marijuana possession, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that states cannot make exceptions for medical use.
The new proposal would let adults have up to three ounces of marijuana. Driving under the influence would still be illegal, as would using marijuana in public places.
``The success of our petition drive provides solid evidence that most Nevadans think it's a waste of their tax dollars to arrest people for small amounts of marijuana,'' said Billy Rogers of Nevadans for Responsible Law Enforcement.
Law enforcement groups in Nevada are expected to oppose the ballot measure.
``Three ounces is quite a bit,'' said Lt. Stan Olsen, lobbyist for the Las Vegas police. ``If we legalize it, what is next? A lot of people don't use drugs now because they are illegal and they stand to lose in their personal or professional lives if they use.''
Until last year, puffing on a single marijuana cigarette in Nevada was a felony punishable by a year or more behind bars. But the stiff penalties were rarely imposed. Lawmakers have since made possession of less than an ounce a misdemeanor.
In 2000, Nevada voters approved the use of medical marijuana.
--------
Russia: Boost Anti - Drug Effort
July 9, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Afghan-Drugs.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- Cutting the cultivation of drugs in Afghanistan is the only effective way to halt the growing tide of narcotics that flows into Russia and beyond, the chief of Russia's border guards said Tuesday.
Lt. Gen. Konstantin Totsky said that the 10,700-strong Russian border guard unit on the border between Afghanistan and the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan had seized six tons of drugs, about 42 percent of it heroin, last year. In the first six months of 2002, they have seized about 3,800 pounds -- almost 60 percent of it heroin, he said.
Usually, more drugs are confiscated during the second half of the year, after the poppy harvest.
Far more drugs get through. According to internationally accepted estimates, the amount of narcotics seized in any country accounts for just one-tenth of the true flow, Totsky said in an interview with The Associated Press. About 20-25 percent of the heroin that arrives in Russia is headed for Europe, Russian officials warn.
``If Europe, the international community, wants to strengthen its borders ... it's our conviction that the pressure has to be applied before the bow leaves the arrow,'' Totsky said. ``Once the arrow has flown, it's very hard to catch.''
The Russian border guards, the majority of them conscripts and contract soldiers from Tajikistan, are stationed on the Afghan border to try to catch drugs and weapons before they reach Russia. More than 10,000 Russian soldiers are also stationed in the Central Asian nation to help the impoverished Tajik government to protect its nation's borders.
Russia and Tajikistan have been at the forefront of efforts to construct a so-called security belt around Afghanistan -- strengthening border controls to stem the flow of drugs being smuggled out of the nation on foot or by donkey. By the time they get out of Afghanistan, the drugs enter a huge transport network of trucks, trains, airplanes and ships that are virtually impossible to monitor completely, Totsky said.
Russian officials had hoped that the U.S.-led anti-terrorist forces in Afghanistan would target the drug trade as well. The trade was interrupted for about a month last fall, but it has picked up again -- and Russia has yet to feel the effects of the Afghan government's attempts to end poppy cultivation.
While Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government has banned poppy growing and is trying to find farmers alternative crops, drug experts around the world fear widespread resistance. Afghanistan became the world's leading opium producer during the 1990s, including the years ruled by the same warlords who are again in power.
Totsky said the warlords could make an easy $3,000 an acre with each poppy harvest.
``If we don't overcome the resistance of these field commanders, then Russia is always going to have heroin, and Europe will, and America will,'' he said.
The guards on the rugged Tajik-Afghan border are ill-equipped to fight drug traffickers, Totsky said. They have too few dogs and intelligence officers, and lack basic equipment such as radios, night-vision goggles, cars and gasoline.
This year, for the first time, they will be getting five thermal imagers, used to detect heat sources. But they would need hundreds to monitor the mountainous border that passes through the marshy Pyandzh River, Totsky said.
But he also urged that more be done on the ground in Afghanistan, including foreign donations of seed grain to Afghan farmers instead of ready-made flour.
``The world can buy them flour for decades, and they'll keep sending heroin in return,'' Totsky said.
-------- iraq
Iraq 'ready for war'
Tuesday, 9 July, 2002
BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/middle_east/newsid_2117000/2117569.stm
Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz has said his country was ready to defend itself, as US President George W Bush stepped up expectations of a military attack to topple Saddam Hussein.
"President Bush and his government did not bring the Iraqi leadership to power, therefore they cannot remove the Iraqi leadership," he said after a visit to South Africa.
"We are very well prepared to defend the country against any kind of aggression."
He spoke after Mr Bush said that he would use "all tools" at his disposal to oust Saddam Hussein.
"It's a stated policy of this government to have a regime change. And it hasn't changed," he told a news conference on Monday.
Mr Bush has accused Saddam Hussein of developing biological and chemical weapons and described Iraq, along with Iran and North Korea, as belonging to an "axis of evil."
Last month, he was reported to have given the Central Intelligence Agency extra powers to conduct covert operations against the Iraqi leader, including the possible use of special forces teams inside Iraq.
Speculation of US action against the Baghdad government has been growing since the 11 September attacks on the US.
Hawkish sections of the Bush administration have done little to disguise their belief that Iraq will at some point be included in its war on terrorism.
Allies' fears
However, concern has been growing among US allies at Mr Bush's unilateralist approach.
Such concerns grew more acute last week when talks aimed at putting United Nations weapons inspectors back into Iraq broke down.
Accounting for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is key to suspending 12-year-old UN sanctions, imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990.
Mr Bush declined on Monday to comment on a New York Times report about a draft military plan for an invasion of Iraq.
The report said an attack would involve tens of thousands of US Marines and soldiers, probably invading from Kuwait.
He said: "Listen, I recognise there's speculation out there, but people shouldn't speculate about the desire of the government to have a regime change," Bush said. "And there's different ways to do it."
The United States has frequently clashed militarily with the Iraqi leader since leading a coalition force in 1991 to expel him from Kuwait.
US and UK jets monitoring air exclusion zones imposed on Iraq in the north and south of the country, have launched several attacks on Iraqi missile sites after being targeted by those sites.
The no-fly zones were set up in 1992 to protect Iraq's Shi'ite Muslims, who are based mainly south of Baghdad and its Kurdish community in the north.
----
Iraq says Farrakhan tells of U.S. Muslims' support
July 9, 2002
By Thanaa Imam
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020709-84254786.htm
DAMASCUS, Syria - Iraq's state-run media has quoted Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as saying during a visit to Baghdad that American Muslims are praying for an Iraqi victory in a war with the United States.
A State Department official in Washington said he was aware of the report on the official Iraqi News Agency, INA, but was not prepared to comment.
Mr. Farrakhan held meetings during the weekend with Iraqi officials on a "solidarity" trip billed as an effort to avoid a U.S. military campaign against Saddam Hussein.
Mr. Farrakhan held talks with Islamic Affairs Minister Abdul Munem Saleh on "ways to confront the American threats against Iraq," INA reported.
The agency quoted the black Muslim leader as saying "the Muslim American people are praying to the almighty God to grant victory to Iraq."
Mr. Saleh was quoted by INA as urging a common effort among the Muslims of the world to "expose the American and Zionist crimes toward the people of Iraq and Palestine."
The Bush administration has repeatedly said it is committed to "regime change" in Iraq and has made clear that it is considering military action to oust Saddam.
The New York Times reported on Friday that a military plan has been prepared to attack Iraq from the north, south and west with air, ground and naval forces. Quoting unnamed sources, the daily said the plan envisions the use of thousands of Marines and ground troops, perhaps from Kuwait.
Mr. Farrakhan, heading a Nation of Islam delegation, also met with Health Minister Omeed Mubarak, who briefed him on the "effects of the sanctions on Iraq and the health reality represented by the death of 1.6 million people a year because of food and medical shortages," INA said.
Iraq has been living under economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations since its invasion of Kuwait in August 1990.
The health minister sharply criticized Security Council Resolution 1409, which amended the Iraq-U.N. oil-for-food deal, in which Iraq exports oil in return for badly needed food and medicine under U.N. supervision.
Mr. Mubarak described the resolution as "arbitrary" and said it "further complicates the import of medicine and medical equipment to Iraq." He said the total lifting of sanctions was "the only way to end the suffering of the Iraqi people."
This is the second visit to Baghdad for Mr. Farrakhan, who arrived from Damascus on Friday as part of a regional tour. He first visited Iraq in 1997.
On Saturday, he visited hospitals in the Iraqi capital, as well as the Ameriya Shelter, which was bombed by U.S.-led allied forces during the 1991 Gulf war, reportedly killing about 500 people.
He said in Baghdad that he wanted to "see what we can do to stop the possibility of war."
French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, visiting Syria during the weekend, dismissed the media reports of an imminent attack on Iraq as "rumors." Mr. Villepin is visiting the region in an effort to restart Middle East peace talks.
Speaking at a joint press conference Saturday with Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Sharaa, Mr. Villepin said talks between French officials and President Bush and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell made clear "there is no military plan today against Iraq."
The French foreign minister also encouraged U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to pursue his efforts with Iraq and said the return of the U.N. inspectors to Baghdad "is a necessity for the stability of the region, and we hope that Iraq will facilitate such a return."
Syria's Mr. Sharaa, for his part, told reporters that Arab countries unanimously support lifting the U.N. sanctions.
He said Iraq was ready to allow the U.N. arms inspectors back if sanctions are lifted, but not before.
-------- israel / palestine
Israelis, Palestinians See Rare Glimmer of Hope
July 9, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-mideast.html
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israelis and Palestinians voiced a hope their first round of high-level talks in many months would help to ease 21 months of violence and eventually clear the way for making Middle East peace.
While peace ``looks distant at this time, it seems to me that maybe some type of window has been opened,'' Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said after his foreign minister, Shimon Peres, launched the high-level talks with Palestinians.
Both sides said two days of meetings between the dovish Peres and Palestinian officials, including new Interior Minister Abdel-Razak al-Yehiyeh, were not peace negotiations and brought no major breakthroughs.
But they agreed to continue their meetings to try to end the bloodshed. Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said their talks covered a broad range of topics, including political, economic and security issues.
``We hope that the ultimate end result is not just the mere fact that we are meeting but that we can do something...that we can revive the peace process,'' Erekat said after meeting Peres in Jerusalem.
``The meeting was good. Both sides recognized the importance of continuing to talk,'' Peres' office said.
Underscoring the hardships, a Palestinian gunman fired at Israeli police in Jerusalem, wounding one officer and killing a Palestinian bystander in an ensuing shootout. Police said they later caught the assailant.
Palestinian sources said Israeli forces killed a West Bank militant, but Israel denied any knowledge of the incident.
BUSH CALLS SHARON, SAUDI
Sharon's government has called for the removal of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and previously cut off ties to the Palestinian Authority after a wave of suicide bombings.
But the right-wing Israeli leader agreed to resume contacts with two new Palestinian cabinet ministers appointed by Arafat as part of an overhaul of his Authority urged by the United States.
The White House on Tuesday said President Bush had spoken by telephone to Sharon and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, whose country has offered a regional peace blueprint, and urged them both to pursue peace, but gave no details.
Political sources said Israel had agreed to set up a committee to discuss the matters raised during the talks and that it would study the possibility of releasing Palestinian funds held in Israeli state coffers since the violence began.
Such a move would be part of measures to ease the hardships to Palestinians from Israeli army blockades, curfews and the military reoccupation of Palestinian-ruled cities in the West Bank which Israel says is needed to block suicide bombers.
Israel swore in a new army chief of staff, Moshe Yaalon. But no change of direction was expected in Israel's tough army tactics to quell the Palestinian uprising that erupted against Israel's occupation in September 2000.
Israel reoccupied seven of the eight Palestinian-ruled cities in the West Bank after two Palestinian suicide bombings killed 26 Israelis in Jerusalem last month.
The Palestinian death toll has been risen in a series of violent incidents. But there has not been a suicide bombing in Israel for more than two weeks.
At least 1,437 Palestinians and 548 Israelis have been killed since the uprising flared after peace talks froze.
-------- puerto rico
Letter from Congressman Michael McNulty of New York to President Bush, requesting an executive order on Vieques, Puerto Rico
From: "Cumpiano, Flavio" cumpiano@hugheshubbard.com
http://www.ViequesLibre.org
July 9, 2002
President George W. Bush
The White House
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President:
I am writing to you on an issue of utmost importance to the lives and well-being of the nearly 10,000 U.S. Citizens that reside on the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico. Though you have made general verbal statements concerning the U.S. Navy's departure from Vieques by May 2003, this issue deserves a written mandate that guarantees the Navy's departure from Vieques at a date certain.
Since World War II, the people of Vieques have lived in fear of the bombing that takes place only eight miles from their homes while enduring the social, environmental, economic and health impacts of these military exercises. The Navy has bombed Vieques with everything from conventional weapons to napalm and depleted uranium. This must end now. The Navy has already demonstrated in practice that its training needs can be satisfied through other sites and means. In fact, Adm. Robert J. Natter, Commander in Chief of the Atlantic Fleet has recently said that Vieques is too small for practicing with long-range, precision guided weapons, particularly against moving targets, and that an array of ranges in Florida, the Carolinas and Georgia are better for "smart" bombs and other high- tech weapons.
In light of these facts, I urge you to issue an Executive Order for the immediate and permanent cessation of bombing and all military activities on the island of Vieques. An Executive Order such as this follows the procedures used under President Ford in terminating training on the island of Culebra, Puerto Rico in 1975 and President Bush Sr. in ending bombing practices in Kaho'olawe, Hawaii in 1990. The reasons for the cessation are clear and well known by the U.S. Navy and the Department of Defense. We would never allow this nor tolerate this situation in our states and we owe no less to the U.S. citizens that reside in Vieques. Your action on this matter will help to finally heal an island that has borne disproportionately the negative impacts of military training.
As you may know, in 1980-81, former Congressman Ronald Dellums, then a high-ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, chaired a House Armed Services Committee "Panel to Review the Status of Navy Training Activities on the Island of Vieques". The Panel concluded that the Navy should leave Vieques and find an alternative site. Twenty years later, the Navy remains in Vieques. This situation prompted Congressman Dellums to write a public letter to President Clinton on December 21, 2000 stating: "As someone who was deeply involved in the issue, I tell you with no hesitancy or doubt that if you don't issue an Executive Order ordering the immediate and permanent cease and desist of all bombings and of all military activities in Vieques, the Navy will have no incentive to find an alternative site to Vieques and will do all within its power to remain there indefinitely. History has proven this." I echo these sentiments, and therefore respectfully urge you to issue that Executive Order.
I appreciate your consideration of this request.
Sincerely,
Michael R. McNulty Member of Congress New York, 21st District
(Note: Congressman McNulty joins other elected officials who have publicly requested from President Bush that he issue an Executive Order to ensure the U.S. Navy's departure from Vieques. Other Members of Congress who have recently sent similar letters include Congressmen Charles Rangel and Eliot Engel of New York, Joe Baca and Bob Filner of California, Bill Pascrell, Jr. of New Jersey, Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, John Olver of Massachusetts, and Sanford Bishop of Georgia. -- Flavio Cumpiano)
-------- spy agencies
Shackles loosened on U.S. intelligence
By John Diamond,
USA TODAY
07/08/2002
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/2002/07/09/intelligence.htm
WASHINGTON - One by one, barriers erected in the post-Watergate era to prevent abuses and excesses by U.S. intelligence agencies are yielding to pressure to protect the nation from another terrorist attack.
Spying on Americans, toppling adversary regimes, even eliminating certain foreign leaders - all actions long regarded as forbidden for the CIA and other agencies - are back as policy options in the wake of Sept. 11. The shift has taken place with little public debate or formal government action.
Many of the restrictions being eased today were imposed in the wake of the so-called Church Committee investigations of the 1970s. Named after Idaho Sen. Frank Church, a special Senate committee and a House counterpart investigated disclosures in 1975 and 1976 about CIA and NSA bugging of anti-war activists, assassination plots against Cuba's Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders, routine surveillance of civilian telegraph cables, and the agencies' failure to keep Congress informed. The limits set after the committee's investigation include an executive order barring assassination as a tool of foreign policy.
Now the Bush administration is using classified intelligence findings and other below-the-radar actions to empower the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency and other agencies. (An intelligence finding is essentially a presidential authorization to carry out a secret operation.) To sidestep legal protections that might benefit terror suspects, the Pentagon and Justice Department have developed rules of detention and trial separate from the U.S. court system.
One of the few publicly debated changes, the USA-Patriot Act, makes it easier for law enforcement to spy on Americans for counterterrorism purposes. The bill passed, with limited floor debate and overwhelming support, in the weeks following Sept. 11.
Among the indications of the easing of restrictions on U.S. intelligence and law enforcement:
Though assassinations remain forbidden, President Bush has asked the CIA to develop clandestine plans against Iraq that could involve killing Saddam Hussein in battle, according to national security officials. CIA operatives have direct launch control of Hellfire missiles mounted on unmanned aerial vehicles patrolling Afghanistan for signs of al-Qaeda terrorists. It's the first time the CIA has been given operational control of a weapon. The president must formally authorize all CIA covert operations in secret findings, and Congress must be informed, a legacy of the Church Committee. But the political dynamic has changed. Lawmakers used to routinely question why CIA did so much. Now the pressure is on the agency to do more. The administration is targeting specific adversary regimes, an approach not seen since President Reagan's efforts against leftist Latin American governments and the elder President Bush's invasion of Panama in the 1980s. The Afghan Taliban regime was first to fall to this new policy. Iraq is next on the administration's list.
CIA spokesman Bill Harlow says the agency strictly abides by procedures in place for decades governing covert operations. What has changed is the national mood and the political support in Washington for more aggressive action. The result is that the CIA is doing more, though staying within the rules.
"We've been given added authorities to allow us to go after the terrorist target around the world, to go into what was a sanctuary in Afghanistan and help root them out," Harlow says. "We've been at war with terrorism since long before Sept. 11, but now we've got increased authorities, increased funding, increased capabilities to do a better job."
Former Colorado senator Gary Hart, who was a member of the Church committee, said it found "widespread abuses of constitutional rights, civil liberties, on the grounds that we needed to do this to prosecute the Cold War."
"There's certainly a pendulum swing back, which is pretty typical for our country in time of stress," says Hart, who was a member of a blue-ribbon panel that last year recommended creation of a department of homeland security. In the tug between security and individual liberty, "we're probably going to err on the side of security," especially if there are more attacks.
One of the most enduring legacies of the Church Committee was the creation of the House and Senate intelligence committees to oversee the CIA and other intelligence agencies. Today, some lawmakers question the ability of those panels to adequately investigate intelligence lapses before Sept. 11. They say the committees are too politicized to review the facts impartially.
-------- us
Probe of U.S. Weapons Tests Expanded
July 9, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Chemical-Weapons.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Pentagon officials are expanding their investigation of 1960s tests that included spraying chemical and biological weapons on U.S. ships.
A team of investigators will visit the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah next month to review more records from the chemical and biological weapons vulnerability testing program, which ran from 1963 to 1969, a Pentagon statement said Tuesday.
The Defense Department admitted for the first time in May that some of the tests used real nerve and biological agents. Any soldiers harmed by the tests could be eligible for health benefits, according to military and Department of Veterans Affairs officials.
The VA has begun mailing letters to about 2,800 veterans who may have been involved in the tests.
Tests on ships in the Pacific used the nerve agents sarin and VX and a biological toxin that causes flu-like symptoms. They were part of the Shipboard Hazard and Defense program, which was overseen by the Deseret Test Center at Dugway.
Dr. William Winkenwerder, the Pentagon's top health official, has said the Defense Department has not found evidence any soldiers were seriously harmed by the tests. Those involved in the tests used gas masks and other protective gear, he said.
Other classified tests overseen by the Deseret center included Marine Corps and Air Force aircraft, the Pentagon statement said. Investigators hope to publish fact sheets on another 17 tests by this fall.
The Pentagon statement said the investigation next month in Utah should finish the probe of all tests performed as part of Project 112, which included the SHAD tests.
Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga., has said a Senate Armed Services subcommittee will investigate the chemical and biological weapons tests.
On the Net:
Descriptions of some of the tests:
http://deploymentlink.osd.mil/current--issues/shad/shad--intro.shtml
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS
FBI uneasy about plan to deregulate fast Net
By Paul Davidson,
USA TODAY
07/09/2002
http://www.usatoday.com/money/tech/2002-07-09-wiretap-broadband.htm
A federal plan to deregulate high-speed Internet access might have an unintended consequence: The FBI is worried it could hamper the fight against terrorism.
The FBI and Justice Department are concerned that the Federal Communications Commission's decision to classify broadband as an "information" service could disrupt their ability to trace the e-mail and Internet activity of terrorists and other criminals.
Only "telecommunications" services are required by law to design their networks so that the government can easily tap into suspects' communications.
If phone company DSL and cable-modem providers read the law literally, authorities "may be hobbled in their ability to enforce the laws and protect national security," the FBI wrote to the FCC.
The agencies do not oppose the FCC proposal. They want the FCC to say that electronic-surveillance access rules also apply to the broadband information offerings of phone and cable companies.
The controversy centers on the collision of two ostensibly unrelated federal laws. Earlier this year, the FCC tentatively concluded that DSL and cable-modem services are information rather than telecommunications services, because they mainly entail storing and generating data rather than transmitting it.
As a result, analysts expect that the FCC will rule that they need not open their networks to rivals. Consumer advocates say that will drive up prices.
The Telecommunications Act currently forces the regional Bells to open their DSL networks to rivals; cable operators are under no such obligation.
The mandate on industry to design networks that can be wiretapped, however, is in the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA).
Such a design can cost several hundred million dollars. Without it, wiretaps are difficult, FBI officials say.
That law, however, applies only to telecommunications, not information services. The FBI argues, however, that it includes "joint-use" services, such as broadband, that have information and telecommunications pieces.
Critics of deregulation are skeptical. "They can't have their cake and eat it, too," says Jonathan Askin, general counsel for the Association for Local Telecommunications Services, which represent Bell rivals.
In other words, Askin believes that if the FCC upholds CALEA requirements with regard to wiretaps, at least on DSL companies, that could give open-access proponents such as his group ammunition for a possible court battle on its issue.
CALEA now applies to DSL, but not cable-modem service, FCC officials say. They would not comment on the FBI's petitions, which say CALEA covers both.
The United States Telecom Association, which represents Bells and other local phone monopolies, would not comment.
Verizon Communications, the largest Bell, believes its DSL still would be subject to CALEA, according to assistant general counsel John Goodman.
----
N.J. Won't Release Detainees Names
July 9, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Detainees.html
NEWARK, N.J. (AP) -- The New Jersey Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected an ACLU request to force the government to release the names of Muslims and Arabs being held in jail as part of the terrorism investigation.
The court denied the request without comment.
The American Civil Liberties Union said it may go to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Civil liberties advocates have been seeking names of detainees since the fall in an attempt to monitor their treatment in custody and ensure they have adequate legal representation.
The ACLU sued Passaic and Hudson counties in January, claiming the names of people arrested and held in New Jersey are public information under the state's right-to-know law.
Last month, a state appeals court ruled that the federal government can keep the names secret. The panel ruled that releasing the information could jeopardize the safety of the detainees and hurt criminal investigations.
Spokeswoman Barbara Comstock said Tuesday's ruling vindicated the Justice Department's efforts ``to prevent, detect, disrupt and dismantle terrorism while preserving our constitutional liberties.''
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the federal government has detained more than 1,100 non-citizens, mostly Arab or Muslim men.
According to the most recent Justice Department figures, 104 post-Sept. 11 detainees remain in custody, most of them in New Jersey jails.
-------- death penalty
New Penalty for N.Y. Death Row Inmate
July 9, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-NY-Death-Penalty.html
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) -- The first man condemned under the state's 1995 capital punishment law cannot be executed because the law was unconstitutional at the time his case was tried, New York's highest court ruled Tuesday.
The Court of Appeals ruled 6-1 that the law at the time of Darrel Harris' trial violated his constitutional right to a trial by jury by offering him an incentive -- avoiding death -- if he pleaded guilty and accepted a sentence of life without parole.
Harris, who chose to go to trial, was ordered re-sentenced to 20 years-to-life, 25 years to life or life without parole. The judges said there was no doubt about his guilt or the fairness of his conviction.
The court has said the law is coercive because an innocent man, threatened with death, might be tempted to plead guilty to save his life. It has also said the law was unconstitutional because a person who sought a jury trial faced extra punishment -- death -- merely for asserting his right to a trial.
The former New York City jail guard, now 44, was convicted by a jury of shooting two patrons to death in a Brooklyn club and fatally stabbing a third in 1996.
His trial took place before a 1998 Court of Appeals ruling that threw out the part of the death penalty law that allowed a guilty plea to avoid a death sentence.
``All of us agree that the statute at the time of defendant's trial impermissibly discouraged defendant's assertion of his Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights,'' Judge Richard Wesley wrote for the majority in Tuesday's ruling. ``Accordingly, the trial court could not constitutionally impose the sentence of death on this defendant.''
The five other condemned inmates in New York all have appeals pending before the Court of Appeals. One, Angel Mateo, was tried and convicted before the 1998 ruling but sentenced after the decision. The other four death row inmates were tried and convicted after the 1998 ruling.
Harris was the first person condemned to die under death penalty legislation enacted by Gov. George Pataki.
The Republican's predecessors, Democrats Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo, had vetoed capital punishment bills for the previous 18 years. Pataki's pledge to restore capital punishment was one of the decisive factors in his defeat of Cuomo in 1994.
The last execution in New York was in 1963.
On the Net:
Court of Appeals' rulings:
http://www.courts.state.ny.us/ctapps/
-------- terrorism
See no evil?
July 9, 2002
Washington Times
Frank J. Gaffney Jr.
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20020709-2375822.htm
The FBI's depiction of the murderous Fourth of July attack at Los Angeles International must have struck most Americans as utterly bizarre. After all, it occurred on a day when the entire country was on alert for terrorist attacks; it was conducted by an Egyptian immigrant, Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, armed with two handguns and a knife; and, but for the rapid and effective action of an El Al security guard, Hadayet's premeditated assault would have succeeded in killing far more than the two innocent civilians whose lives he brutally cut short.
This would, on its face, seem to fit the profile - pardon the politically incorrect term - of terrorism perpetrated by Arabs against Israelis and Americans with which the world has become all too familiar inrecent years.
Yet the FBI has repeatedly declined to describe this incident as an act of terrorism. Its spokesmen insisted that Hadayet could not be classified as a terrorist because, as one put it to the Los Angeles Times, the bureau "does not use the term to describe every violent act an individual commits against a state entity or racial group." Others argued that the LAX shooter did not qualify because he appeared to have acted alone and was not on any of the U.S. government's "watch lists" for individuals associated with terror organizations. The same could have been said of Timothy McVeigh.
Interestingly, the LA Times reported on Saturday that, in so doing, "the FBI seemed to ignore its own definition of terrorism in favor of a more limited State Department definition. That meaning holds that terrorism is perpetrated 'by subnational groups or clandestine agents.' FBI officials repeatedly emphasized that Hadayet had no known connection with Islamic terrorist organizations."
This seems suspicious on two grounds:
First, there is evidence that Hadayet was connected to al Qaeda. On Sunday, the Arabic London-based Al Hayat reported that the shooter was a member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and that he had met Dr. Ayman Zuwahri, the Islamic Jihad leader who became Osama bin Laden's deputy, in California - not once but twice in California, in 1995 and again in 1998.
Taken together with other aspects of Hadayet's background - notably that he reportedly had worked at LAX for five years in the employ of a ground service company until he aroused El Al's suspicions and that he then left to run a limousine service that afforded him continued, regular access to airport terminals - raises suspicions that the gunman might have been a sleeper agent for al Qaeda. We are in serious trouble if, in light of the distinct possibility that there may be many such unidentified sleepers in this country, the FBI is not fully alert to this danger.
Second, there are other grounds for concern that more than State Department politicization is compromising the bureau's vigilance toward Islamists in this country, fanatics who interpret Mohammed's teachings to justify violent holy war (jihad) against non-Muslims. On June 28, FBI Director Robert Mueller dignified the American Muslim Council, a group long associated with Islamist causes and known terrorist groups, by addressing its annual convention in Washington. In the face of intense criticism over such legitimation, Mr. Mueller felt compelled to acknowledge that "persons associated with this organization have in the past made statements that indicate support for terrorism and for terrorist organizations." This statement could only be true if, as the FBI's recent mischaracterization of Hadayet's actions suggests, the official definition of terrorism is being altered significantly. The American Muslim Council continues to associate with individuals and groups - some of whom actually appeared on the same stage as Mr. Mueller - who support terrorist organizations like Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad.
This is, in short, not simply a matter of semantics. It is a question of whether our top law enforcement agency - and, for that matter, the Bush Administration more generally - comprehend the true character of the threat posed by Islamist terrorism.
Concerns on this score can only be heightened as administration officials meet this week with a self-described "goodwill" delegation sponsored by the Muslim World League. The MWL is an organization founded in 1962 in Saudi Arabia to spread the Wahhabist strain of Islamism throughout the world. The one-time head of its Pakistan office, Wa'il Jalaidan, was a co-founder with bin Laden of al Qaeda. The MWL's office in Northern Virginia was among those raided by federal agents in March on suspicion of ties to terrorism.
This delegation purportedly represents a cross section of the "scholars, leaders and jurists from the Muslim world" and is to visit four U.S. cities, starting with Washington. Yet, it is led by Abdullah al-Turki, the head of the Muslim World League and formerly Saudi minister of Islamic affairs. In both capacities, he has been a driving force behind Wahhabi proselytizing worldwide (including the Saudi-financed construction of some 1,500 mosques since 1950, school buildings and "research" entities) and assuring the uniformity and "purity" of the materials distributed throughout the Muslim and non-Muslim world. It is unlikely that moderate Muslims or their views are going to be much in evidence in any delegation he sponsors.
Worse yet, the "scholars" that Mr. al-Turki will be trotting around the United States presumably share the view expressed by a six-day conference of such folks held in January in Mecca. While the conferees sponsored by the MWL's Islamic Fiqh (Jurisprudence) Academy duly condemned "terrorism," they made clear that they, too, have their own definition - one that excludes holy wars: "Jihad is meant for upholding right, ending injustice, ensuring peace and security, and establishing mercy. Terrorism and violence committed by the aggressor who usurp the land, desecrate holy sanctuaries and loot wealth cannot be compared to the practice [of] the right of legitimate defense as used by the oppressed seeking to gain their legitimate rights to self-determination."
Clearly, such a definition of terrorism fits the Wahhabists and other Islamists' interests. But it certainly is not compatible with ours and must not be allowed to color our understanding of the evil we now confront in many forms and guises.
Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is the president of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for The Washington Times.
--------
Al Qaeda Says It Will Hit U.S., Jewish Targets Soon
July 9, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-attack-qaeda.html
ALGIERS (Reuters) - The al Qaeda network will strike U.S. targets in America and around the world soon, an al Qaeda spokesman said in an interview published Tuesday.
``Our military and intelligence networks are assessing and monitoring new U.S. targets that we will strike in a period of time which is not long,'' spokesman Sulaiman bu Ghaith told the Algerian Arabic daily newspaper El Youm.
The United States blames Saudi-born Islamic militant Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda for the Sept. 11 hijacked plane attacks on New York and Washington that killed more than 3,000 people.
``Our suicide militants are ready and impatient to carry out attacks against U.S. and Jewish targets inside (America) and abroad,'' the spokesman added.
El Youm director told Reuters the newspaper received on Monday by e-mail taped answers to questions that had been sent Sunday to al Qaeda's Internet Web site. Bu Ghaith warned America to ``fasten its seat belts'' because his organization ``will hit, with God's willing, from where they will not expect.''
``America knows we are men of action and not men of words,'' he went on, saying that attacks were also being planned against the ``puppet government'' of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Bu Ghaith, in a tape aired last month by Qatar-based al Jazeera television, said al Qaeda was behind a suicide attack on a Tunisian synagogue in April that killed 21 people, including 14 German tourists.
He told El Youm that Washington's war on terrorism since Sept. 11 had not affected al Qaeda's military, intelligence, economic and information infrastructures and reiterated that bin Laden was going about his work.
A spokesman for international forces hunting al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan has dismissed as ``wishful thinking'' such claims that the network is still virtually intact.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
EU to miss its target on boosting renewables - study
REUTERS BELGIUM:
July 9, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/16752/story.htm
BRUSSELS - The European Union will miss its target to double the amount of electricity it generates from renewable sources such as wind and solar power, according to a report prepared for the European Commission.
The EU wants to increase to 22 percent the proportion of energy it gets from renewables - the alternative to fossil fuels and nuclear power - by 2010, but the study obtained by Reuters last week said it would only achieve a 50 percent rise.
"Without additional policies (the EU target) is not likely to be met," said the report, which was written by Dutch green energy institute Ecofys and has yet to be published.
All 15 EU countries have non-binding targets for increasing their share of renewables, but only four will reach them, the report said.
The study, carried out for the European Commission's energy department, predicted that wind and biomass would increase substantially, but not enough to fulfil the targets.
"There is not sufficient policy to support it," Kornelis Blok, Ecofis director and professor at Utrecht University told Reuters.
"Feed in" policies, which guarantee premium prices for power generators putting electricity on the grid and tax breaks were the most effective policies that would ensure rapid take-up of renewables, Blok said.
Countries with these types of policy were set to meet their targets, the report said. Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands and Luxembourg were on track. Germany, which has a strong feed-in law, would just miss its target.
All other EU countries would miss their targets, the report said.
Britain's aim to boost renewables to 10 percent from just two percent will fail, it said.
The study predicts that with current policies the share of green power will double to four percent.
----
Paperwork, costs cloud Spain's solar potential
Story by Julia Hayley
REUTERS SPAIN:
July 9, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/16749/story.htm
MADRID - Spain's guaranteed sunshine draws in 10 million German tourists a year, so how come sun-starved Germany has eight times more solar panels installed than Spain? Ignorance, excessive bureaucracy and inadequate subsidies are preventing the Mediterranean country from tapping the energy potential of what is arguably its biggest natural resource, industry sources and environmentalists say.
Increasing use of solar and other renewable energies may be vital to help Spain meet its target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto treaty on global warming.
Currently, it is the worst performer among European Union states, falling behind its Kyoto targets. A square metre (10.76 square feet) of rooftop in Madrid could generate double the amount of solar power produced by the equivalent roof in Frankfurt, the sources say.
Lack of technology is not the problem.
A privately-owned Spanish company, Isofoton, is the biggest European manufacturer of solar panels but it exports 80 percent of its production.
U.S. energy company Astropower has a Spanish subsidiary Atersa, which manufactures in Spain and similarly exports four-fifths of its product.
Spain is in theory committed to producing 12 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2010 and within this the government has set a target of producing 135 megawatts of solar power a year.
To date Spain produces just 12 megawatts and most panels are small installations for isolated buildings rather than larger ones connected to the national grid.
"One of the biggest problems is lack of information. There is much greater environmental awareness in Germany than in Spain," says Ernesto Macias, commercial and marketing director of Isofoton. "We need a publicity campaign directed at opinion formers."
Carmen Becerril, the government's director-general of energy policy, defends Spain's track record on renewable energies, of which solar energy is a part.
"Production of renewable energies in Spain continues to increase and to carry more weight in the energy balance... Renewable energies account for 22.9 percent of electricity generation, quite a significant contribution," she said.
BUREAUCRATIC NIGHTMARE
But environmentally conscious householders who would like to install a solar panel on their roof are put off by the amount of paperwork involved in obtaining a subsidy.
The process is "terrifying", one industry source said, citing 200 pages of documentation.
That alone should not be enough to deter many Spaniards, who have a long and proud tradition of bureaucracy and are skilled at finding the shortest way around it.
Another drawback is cost.
"Solar power is more expensive if you measure it by conventional means, although if you use long-term and environmental yardsticks it's cheaper," says Jose Luis Garcia Ortega of the environmental group Greenpeace.
Subsidies need to be higher, industry sources say.
Only 50 solar generating units were installed and connected to the electricity grid during 2000, government statistics show.
"They are not profitable to begin with and as this is just starting up people don't know how long it will take to cover their costs," said Atersa's commercial director Enrique Alcor.
It takes between eight and 14 years to amortise the cost of a solar panel, depending on the level of subsidies, another industry source said. Smaller installations, of less than five kilowatts, receive double the price for their electricity than bigger ones.
"People are not prepared to take on an investment that takes so long to become profitable," Alcor said.
PLANTS IN THE WORKS
To date there are only two small solar power stations in Spain, generating one and two megawatts of power respectively, but there are at least two big projects in the works.
Atersa and others have plans to build a 12 megawatt plant in the parched southeast of the country, which if it goes ahead would be the biggest in Europe. The partners are looking for financing.
"If there's no help, the numbers don't add up," Alcor said.
Isofoton says it and other investors, including the regional government of Castilla La Mancha, are planning a 10 megawatt plant in the sparsely populated central province of Ciudad Real.
"In Spain we are lucky. We have not only the sun, we also have a lot of space," Macias said.
Rafa Montes, a member of the environmental group Ecologists in Action, agrees with Macias that a publicity campaign is needed and says his group is working with local authorities to encourage them to install solar power.
He believes there are political forces at play too.
"Personally I believe the government is under pressure from the big electricity companies," he said. "Solar and wind energy cannot be monopolised."
The two big power companies, Endesa and Iberdrola, still dominate the market and exercise considerable political clout.
It will be some time then before Spain exploits its sunshine for more than attracting millions of sun-seeking northern European holidaymakers.
And the more environmentally aware northerners may meanwhile steal the initiative.
"Germans are talking to us about coming to Spain to set up solar power plants," Isofoton's Macias said.
-------- environment
GAO Reports on Environment, Military
July 9, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Military-Environment.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Congressional auditors found little evidence to support Bush administration claims that military training is hampered by laws that protect endangered species and migratory birds.
The administration asked Congress this year to exempt the military from some major environmental laws. Two of the proposals, affecting the 1973 Endangered Species Act and the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act, are included in the Republican House version of the defense bill.
The General Accounting Office, in a report that surfaced at a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing Tuesday, found in May that the Defense Department had little evidence to support its contention that environmental ``encroachment'' on training bases has hurt training.
``In fact, most reports show that units have a high state of readiness, and they are largely silent on the issue of encroachment,'' said the GAO, Congress' investigative arm.
The Navy's No. 2 officer, Adm. William J. Fallon, said environmental litigation has resulted in restrictions in training. He also environmental groups try to use the Migratory Bird Treaty Act as ``a vehicle for regulating a wide range of activities that affect nearly every species of bird.''
Environmental groups have filed lawsuits forcing the military to protect species and habitats. One federal case nearly brought a permanent halt in June to Navy live-fire training on the tiny and uninhabited Western Pacific island of Farallon de Medinilla, home to a variety of protected birds.
``We've got to determine where we can make modifications to environmental laws, but not make precedent,'' Sen. John Warner, R-Va., the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said Tuesday. ``In no way are we trying to run roughshod over this body of environmental laws ... in the name of national security.''
Opponents of revising the environmental laws said they recognize the importance of military readiness, but too much has been made of a single case, the fight over Farallon de Medinilla.
``Unfortunately, at the highest levels of this administration, efforts are under way to give the Defense Department an unwarranted free pass from complying with the nation's environmental laws,'' said Jamie Rappaport Clark, the National Wildlife Federation's senior vice president for conservation programs, who directed the Fish and Wildlife Service in the Clinton administration
Senior military officials, testifying before the environment committee, cited some examples Tuesday of how environmental laws are affecting military activities.
Protecting the 4-inch gnat-catcher bird threatens the continued use of a weapons station at the Navy's San Clemente Island Range Complex off the coast of southern California, the officials said. Managing 14 ``critical habitats'' for various species is limiting the places where soldiers can camp, fire weapons and dig at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, they said.
``It is true we have not documented any environmental degradation'' of the military's ability to train, said Gen. John M. Keane, the Army's second-in-command, ``but we all know it's true.''
Keane said military officials have learned over time to be good environmental stewards but admitted they were ``downright polluters'' in the past.
The GAO recommended that the Defense Department form a plan to better document the problem of environmental encroachment on military training ranges.
On the Net:
General Accounting Office: http://www.gao.gov
Senate environment committee: http://www.senate.gov/(tilde)epw
Defense Department: http://www.acq.osd.mil/ie/environment.htm
-------- health
Thailand to Host HIV Vaccine Trial
July 9, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-AIDS-Vaccine.html
BARCELONA, Spain (AP) -- Thailand plans to host the world's largest HIV vaccine trial this year, using two separate vaccines in an approach designed to deliver a double punch to the AIDS virus.
The experiment, which is not the first of its kind but the largest, is expected to take five years and would be conducted by the U.S. government, provided the trial is approved by U.S. and Thai authorities.
The trial would be a ``milestone'' in the journey toward an AIDS vaccine, said Dr. Deborah Birx, director of the U.S. Military HIV Research Program, which is conducting the experiment.
Although most scientists are confident that a vaccine is possible, they are uncertain of what exactly to put in it.
For that reason, more than a dozen candidate vaccines are at various stages of testing worldwide, in the hope that at least one of them will work. Results will not be available for many years, experts say.
Research presented this week at the 14th International AIDS Conference, where the Thai trial was announced, gave deeper insight into how crafty HIV is and dampened prospects that vaccines will be able to prevent infection.
Vaccine specialists said discussions at the high-profile conference have delivered a reality check and that recent findings about how slippery the virus is have forced a reassessment of expectations.
While the ultimate hope still is to develop a vaccine that prevents infection, experts now say that even a vaccine that merely blunts infection, giving the body's immune system a better chance of fighting off the virus, would be a major advance.
The Thai experiment, which hopes to recruit 16,000 healthy volunteers, would use two vaccines in an approach called prime-boost. Both the vaccines have been tested in thousands of people worldwide and have generated no serious safety concerns.
The first shot involves using an animal pox virus with HIV genes inserted and is designed to stimulate the immune system by activating cells that recognize and kill cells infected with HIV.
The second shot, which specifically targets HIV strains prevalent in Thailand, is made from genetically engineered proteins, not the actual virus. It is designed to stimulate the immune system to produce antibodies, which theoretically would block HIV from entering cells.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Nevada Vows to Continue Nukes Fight
July 9, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Yucca-Mountain-Reax.html
LAS VEGAS (AP) -- After a 20-year losing battle to stop the government from burying the nation's nuclear waste in Nevada, opponents of the Yucca Mountain project promised Tuesday to press on. Others said it was time to give up and bargain.
Gov. Kenny Guinn, whose veto of the project was overruled by the Senate on Tuesday and by the House in May, promised to continue the challenge in the courts, where the state has five lawsuits pending.
``Despite flawed science, the lack of transportation planning and now the lack of a clear consensus from the Senate, the Yucca Mountain project has barely survived another round,'' Guinn said in a statement.
But, he added, ``we have made considerable headway convincing others that Yucca Mountain is a bad idea.''
Some who have fought the Yucca Mountain plan since Congress began in 1982 looking for a permanent disposal site expressed bitterness.
``They've chosen the nuclear industry over the people,'' said Judy Treichel, director of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force.
Former Gov. Robert List, one of the project's highest-profile backers in Nevada, said the state should start negotiating for benefits.
``The politics of it have not played out the way we would have liked,'' List said, ``so we have to make lemonade out of the lemons.''
He said the state will benefit from jobs and money spent building the site and from goods and services provided to it.
``Sixty billion dollars is a huge amount of money,'' List said, rounding up federal estimates of the $57 billion expected to be spent on the site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The Energy Department must obtain a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission before it can begin entombing high-level radioactive waste in metal alloy containers in tunnels 1,000 feet deep.
The first shipments from 39 states are due to begin arriving in 2010. The site is being designed to house 77,000 tons of spent commercial, industrial and military nuclear fuel. The material will remain radioactive for tens of thousands of years.
Four of Nevada's lawsuits challenge licensing standards or the criteria on which President Bush and the Energy Department decided in favor of Yucca Mountain. The fifth seeks to cut off water to the site.
``They've got to win them all,'' said Bob Loux, director of the state Nuclear Projects Office. ``We only have to win one. Any of them are potentially fatal to the project.''
------
Yucca vote, 60-39, release, vote list
Date: Tue, 09 Jul 2002
From: Michael Mariotte <nirsnet@nirs.org>
NIRS press release on today's Yucca Mountain vote, 60-39. This press release is available in a formatted (.doc) version upon request. Vote list follows the release.
Thank you for all your help! Please call the Senators who voted with us and thank them.
Michael Mariotte NIRS
NEWS RELEASE
Nuclear Information and Resource Service 1424 16th Street NW, #404, Washington, DC 20036 202.328.0002; f: 202.462.2183; www.nirs.org; nirsnet@nirs.org
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 9, 2002
Contact:
Kevin Kamps, 202.328.0002 cell: 202.262.9518
Michael Mariotte, 202.328.0002 Home: 301.277.3481
SENATE VOTE DOES NOT MEAN END TO YUCCA MOUNTAIN FIGHT; MORE CONGRESSIONAL ACTION, LEGAL SUITS, PROTESTS AND BLOCKADES WILL FOLLOW
Today's outrageous 60-39 U.S. Senate vote to override Nevada's veto of the proposed Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear waste dump does not mean Yucca Mountain ever will open. Instead, it simply sets the stage for years of courtroom activity, Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licensing proceedings, continued Congressional action, and an increased likelihood of large protests and blockades of highways and railways.
"Today's Senate vote accomplished only one thing," said Michael Mariotte, executive director of Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS). "It proved that 60 members of the U.S. Senate caved in to the nuclear power industry and put those interests above the interests of the American people. By approving this project, the Senate has assured that this multi-billion dollar waste of taxpayer and ratepayer money will continue for now. But that doesn't mean Yucca is a done deal."
"The increased opposition to Yucca Mountain from previous votes should be a clear warning to the NRC and future Congresses that there is a great deal of doubt about Yucca Mountain, and they must be prepared to stop this project at anytime," said Kevin Kamps of NIRS' Radioactive Waste Project.
"The State of Nevada and environmental groups will be continuing to mount lawsuits against the project, on numerous grounds, including the failure of the project to meet the environmental regulations established to protect the public. Instead, the Department of Energy, NRC and Environmental Protection Agency all have weakened public protection standards in recent years to accommodate the ill-chosen site, rather than rejecting the site as should have been done," said Kamps.
NIRS expressed no confidence in the NRC to conduct a fair licensing process. "The NRC may be an 'independent' agency, but it is staffed entirely by nuclear advocates who want to see a new future for this obsolete technology," explained Mariotte. "Since its establishment in 1975, the NRC has rejected only two license applications of the thousands of it has received, and one of those, at the Byron nuclear complex in Illinois, was overturned on appeal. Only a 1996 decision by an Atomic Safety Licensing Board, which rejected on environmental racism grounds a uranium enrichment plant proposed by a company called Louisiana Energy Services (LES), ever stood. And the NRC then took steps to limit the public's right in such licensing hearings, to be sure that never happens again. Indeed, LES is on the verge of announcing a new effort to build such a plant."
NIRS pointed out that Yucca Mountain does little to solve the nation's growing radioactive waste problem. "Yucca Mountain is legally limited in how much high-level atomic waste it can accept," said Kamps. "Even if it opened, it would only be able to accept about half the waste expected to be generated by the nation's nuclear reactors. The rest will remain where it is now, on-site at every nuclear reactor in the country, and the Energy Department will be out there looking for another politically-weak state to dump the waste on."
"Meanwhile, the DOE is encouraging the construction of still more nuclear reactors that will have no place to store their lethal waste," said Mariotte. "Just two weeks ago, Secretary Abraham announced that he will give $17 million of taxpayer money to three wealthy nuclear utilities to begin the process of licensing new reactors. This is not only an unacceptable use of tax money, it gives the lie to any belief that DOE even cares about the nuclear waste problem. Where does Abraham propose this waste will go-under the DOE's Forrestal Building in downtown Washington, DC?"
"Yucca Mountain already is projected to cost some $58 Billion, and the costs seem to rise daily," said Mariotte. "And if Abraham and the nuclear utilities get their way, we're going to have to start this process all over again, with a new site, and tens of billions more dollars spent to support this unnecessary and dangerous source of electricity. It simply boggles the mind that any public official could propose such a plan. It is past time to aggressively promote sustainable energy technologies-that's where we should be spending our money, not on more nuclear power."
Mariotte said NIRS would now step up its preparations for large protests and blockades of highways and railways if the transport of high-level waste actually begins in the U.S. NIRS and grassroots environmental organizations have been training people in non-violent resistance to such shipments since 1997, and has sent activists to Germany to learn from the massive protests there in the past few years.
"Germany has made six shipments of nuclear waste casks since 1995," said Kamps, who was in Germany earlier this year to view a shipment. "It now requires some 30,000 police and $100 million to move a cask just 250 miles, disrupts the transportation network of much of the country, and requires a police state in large parts of northern Germany. The U.S. is talking about thousands of shipments, averaging 2,000 miles. There will be thousands of protestors along these routes," he predicted.
Mariotte also warned that some members of Congress may again attempt to open an "interim" storage site at Yucca Mountain next session, and begin the transportation of radioactive waste as soon as possible. "We expect Congress would reject such an attempt," he said, "but we will be ready if it does not."
Akaka, D-HI N
Allard, R-CO Y
Allen, R-VA Y
Baucus, D-MT N
Bayh, D-IN N
Bennett, R-UT Y
Biden, D-DE N
Bingaman, D-NM Y
Bond, R-MO Y
Boxer, D-CA N
Breaux, D-LA N
Brownback, R-KS Y
Bunning, R-KY Y
Burns, R-MT Y
Byrd, D-WV N
Campbell, R-CO N
Cantwell, D-WA N
Carnahan, D-MO N
Carper, D-DE N
Chafee, R-RI N
Cleland, D-GA Y
Clinton, D-NY N
Cochran, R-MS Y
Collins, R-ME Y
Conrad, D-ND N
Corzine, D-NJ N
Craig, R-ID Y
Crapo, R-ID Y
Daschle, D-SD N
Dayton, D-MN N
DeWine, R-OH Y
Dodd, D-CT N
Domenici, R-NM Y
Dorgan, D-ND N
Durbin, D-IL Y
Edwards, D-NC Y
Ensign, R-NV N
Enzi, R-WY Y
Feingold, D-WI N
Feinstein, D-CA N
Fitzgerald, R-IL Y
Frist, R-TN Y
Graham, D-FL Y
Gramm, R-TX Y
Grassley, R-IA Y
Gregg, R-NH Y
Hagel, R-NE Y
Harkin, D-IA N
Hatch, R-UT Y
Helms, R-NC NV
Hollings, D-SC Y
Hutchinson, R-AR Y
Hutchison, R-TX Y
Inhofe, R-OK Y
Inouye, D-HI N
Jeffords, I-VT N
Johnson, D-SD N
Kennedy, D-MA N
Kerry, D-MA N
Kohl, D-WI Y
Kyl, R-AZ Y
Landrieu, D-LA Y
Leahy, D-VT Y
Levin, D-MI Y
Lieberman, D-CT N
Lincoln, D-AR Y
Lott, R-MS Y
Lugar, R-IN Y
McCain, R-AZ Y
McConnell, R-KY Y
Mikulski, D-MD N
Miller, D-GA Y
Murkowski, R-AK Y
Murray, D-WA Y
Nelson, D-NE Y
Nelson, D-FL Y
Nickles, R-OK Y
Reed, D-RI N
Reid, D-NV N
Roberts, R-KS Y
Rockefeller, D-WV N
Santorum, R-PA Y
Sarbanes, D-MD N
Schumer, D-NY N
Sessions, R-AL Y
Shelby, R-AL Y
Smith, R-OR Y
Smith, R-NH Y
Snowe, R-ME Y
Specter, R-PA Y
Stabenow, D-MI N
Stevens, R-AK Y
Thomas, R-WY Y
Thompson, R-TN Y
Thurmond, R-SC Y
Torricelli, D-NJ N
Voinovich, R-OH Y
Warner, R-VA Y
Wellstone, D-MN N
Wyden, D-OR N
----
Banned Falun Gong Movement Jammed Chinese Satellite Signal
By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 9, 2002; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41297-2002Jul8?language=printer
BEIJING, July 8 -- The banned Falun Gong spiritual movement jammed one of China's main television satellites for eight days and briefly beamed a video into millions of homes during last month's World Cup soccer finals, the government said today.
The hijacking of the government's Sinosat-1 satellite disrupted TV transmissions from June 23 to 30 and scratched plans for a live broadcast of a speech by President Jiang Zemin. It was the latest act of defiance by a group that has survived a three-year campaign of repression; it also marked the most sophisticated challenge so far to the Communist Party's control of the media.
Chinese officials said Falun Gong members began bombarding the satellite with illegal signals shortly after 7 p.m. on June 23, interrupting transmission of nine national channels and 10 provincial stations to rural areas without access to regular TV broadcasts. Television screens went blank for several minutes, then began playing a Falun Gong video with images of followers meditating in a stadium and then a plaza. Officials said the video was cut off after only 20 seconds, replaced by a blank screen again.
Chinese officials declined to say how many people were affected, but Sinosat-1 is central to a project launched in 1998 to expand TV access to the nation's most remote regions. More than 70 million people in 100,000 villages rely on it, according to the government.
The government said frequent interference with its broadcasts continued until June 30, but offered no other details. A Hong Kong-based human rights group reported that Falun Gong managed to transmit its material into Chinese homes at least one more time, on June 25, with viewers in some parts of China seeing 15 minutes of its propaganda.
Falun Gong members have interrupted Chinese broadcasts before, hacking into cable systems in several cities this year. But taking over a satellite signal is much more complicated -- and much more difficult for the government to track down and stop.
Countries have jammed satellite transmissions for political reasons, but it is unusual for an independent group to do so, and rare if not unprecedented for anyone to hijack a satellite signal, said Roger Smith, an official with the Geneva-based international organization that regulates satellite communications.
"This is extremely despicable and represents yet another crime committed by the Falun Gong cult organization," said Liu Lihua, a top broadcast official in the Ministry of Information Industry. "We call on the international community to jointly condemn this mean act."
Liu said the government had evidence implicating "overseas-based Falun Gong cult organizations manipulated and directed by Li Hongzhi," the leader of the Buddhist-like sect who lives in New York. But Liu declined to present the evidence and acknowledged that the government was still trying to trace the source of the signals.
Levi Browde, a Falun Gong spokesman, denied Li organized the satellite hijacking, and described it as a grass-roots attempt to fight government propaganda. "The state-run media is one of the strongest weapons the government uses to persecute people and incite hatred," he said. "These people are trying to get the truth out."
Christian Lyngemark, who runs a clearinghouse for technical data on satellite channels, said the Falun Gong members appeared to have overpowered the government's signal with their own, which would require a large satellite dish and expensive equipment.
He said they must have been transmitting from within China or one of its neighbors to reach Sinosat-1, possibly with a mobile apparatus to make it more difficult to track them down. As they moved farther from China, he said, they would need larger satellite dishes and more powerful equipment.
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