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NUCLEAR
Nonessential Nukes
UK says no decision yet on Brit Energy
If we go to war with Iraq ...
Palaces Subject to Search, Blix Says
U.N. Monitor Says Iraqis Are Denying Having Arms Cache
Glance at Possible Iraq Inspection Sites
EU Secures Missile Pact, Key Players Stay Away
Powell Says Pakistan Warned on N. Korean Ties
In an age of biowarfare, US sees new role for nukes
Markey letter on Modern Pit Facility
Senators Question Yucca Mountain Science
MILITARY
Top officials knew of arms sales
China Denies Transfer of Radar Systems
Israel Seeks $4 Billion In New Military Aid
Israel Seeks More U.S. Military Aid
Germany to Give Israel Patriot Missiles
Rockets, Napalm, Torpedoes & Lies
Unmanned Predators Now Living Up to Name
Putin Vetoes Curb on News of Terrorism
Critics Say Government Deleted Web Site Material to Push Abstinence
Iraq Inspectors Don't Want Journalists
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Embracing Big Brother
Homeland Security Moves to Begin March 1
Cops Sued Over Homeless
Trading drugs
Navy Secretary Is Nominated for No. 2 Post
Analysis: Al Qaida chief in U.S. custody
ENERGY AND OTHER
Alternative Energy Poll
California ethanol switch to boost gas prices, refiner profits
U.S. Fails to Curb Its Saudi Oil Habit, Experts Say
Defunct Defense Sites Littered With Problems
States seek tougher 'right to know' on toxics
Doctor Claims Cloned Baby Due in Jan.
ACTIVISTS
The ACLU's beef
Indian police arrest 100 in Bhopal disaster protest
Police stop Greenpeace activists
Iran Forbids Demonstrations Defending a Reformist Scholar
Student Leaders Arrested in Iran After Protests
Petaluma suspends 50 student protesters
Release of Chinese Net Activists Sought
Occupational Exposure to Beryllium
-------- NUCLEAR
Nonessential Nukes
'Peaceful' fuels are potential deadly weapons.
By Edwin S. Lyman and Paul L. Leventhal
Tuesday, November 26, 2002
Washington Post; Page A29
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39212-2002Nov25?language=printer
There is growing alarm over a gathering storm of nuclear dangers: terrorists pursuing homemade atomic bombs, Iraq capable of going nuclear as soon as it acquires smuggled nuclear material, India and Pakistan embarked on a nuclear arms race, North Korea acknowledging a new nuclear weapons program, Japanese political leaders openly boasting of nuclear weapons capability as Japan prepares to open a huge plutonium plant.
These threats have a common thread. Each reflects the outcome of a long history of missed opportunities by the United States and other nuclear suppliers to halt commercial production and use of explosive nuclear materials. These materials are "peaceful" fuels for nuclear reactors, but they are also suitable for making nuclear weapons. Access to them or to the technologies for producing them provides the wherewithal for nations and groups to go nuclear.
Today the amount of plutonium in civilian nuclear power programs rivals that in nuclear arsenals, and bomb-grade uranium remains the fuel of choice for operators of research reactors. The ability of international inspections and national physical protection measures to keep these fuels from being diverted or stolen is problematic at best. Even if these were essential fuels, needed to keep the lights on, factories running and medical science advancing, they would be too dangerous to use. But they aren't essential: Nuclear power and research needs can be met without the weapons-suitable fuels, because low-enriched uranium fuels, unsuitable for weapons, are readily available or under active development.
The current generation of nuclear power reactors already operates on low-enriched or natural uranium. Plutonium fuels are being introduced simply to draw down surpluses that never should have been created in the first place. Development of the plutonium-fueled breeder reactor provided the original rationale for producing civilian plutonium, but the breeder has caused enormous cost and safety problems everywhere it has been tried, and it should be abandoned. Continuing efforts to convert research reactors from bomb-grade to low-enriched uranium fuels should be accelerated and completed. Of equal importance is the need to get rid of the explosive fuels already produced. This can be accomplished by denaturing bomb-grade uranium into low-enriched fuel for power reactors -- something already being done with 500 tons of surplus Russian weapons uranium -- and by disposing of plutonium (which cannot be denatured) in highly radioactive or highly diluted waste.
But two great obstacles stand in the way of eliminating the commercial use of explosive nuclear materials. First is the average citizen's unwillingness to dwell on the dangers of nuclear explosives going astray. Who, after all, wants to contemplate his own nuclear annihilation? Yet unless there is a popular push on governments to adopt available solutions, there can be little hope of stemming the flows of these city-busting explosives.
Second is the reluctance of nuclear experts and policymakers to acknowledge and deal aggressively with a global cancer of their own making. Diplomatic efforts begun by the Ford and Carter administrations to steer the world clear of civilian use of plutonium and bomb-grade uranium were mostly abandoned after they met fierce resistance from the nuclear industry and bureaucracy both at home and abroad. Having failed to prevent the unnecessary spread of explosive nuclear fuels, policymakers now seek to make a virtue out of managing them. But as the situation with India and Pakistan suggests, controlling nuclear weapons made from civilian fuels could be an exercise in managing the unmanageable, with horrific consequences. Managing these fuels once they are obtained by Saddam Hussein or by terrorists is out of the question.
The United States and Russia are ideally positioned to lead the way as they prepare to dispose of tons of surplus weapons plutonium. But their nuclear bureaucracies share a devotion to plutonium, and they now plan to introduce weapons plutonium as fuel in their commercial power plants. Moreover, a program to convert all research reactors in the world to low-enriched fuel is now threatened by a plan to import Russian weapons uranium for use in some U.S. research reactors instead of having it denatured. These are precisely the wrong examples for the world and raise risks of nuclear terrorism in both countries.
The situation has the makings of what the late historian Barbara Tuchman described in "The March of Folly": the pursuit of disastrous policies contrary to self-interest. To qualify as folly, she wrote, "a policy must have been seen as counter-productive in its own time" and "a feasible alternative course of action must have been available."
Calamitous nuclear folly on a global scale can still be averted. Alternatives to explosive nuclear fuels are readily available. If we are to avoid a world awash in nuclear weapons, we must stop the folly and pursue the alternatives.
Edwin S. Lyman is president of the Nuclear Control Institute. Paul L. Leventhal is the institute's president emeritus and co-editor of the book "Nuclear Power and the Spread of Nuclear Weapons."
-------- britain
UK says no decision yet on Brit Energy
Story by Daniel Morrissey,
REUTERS UK:
November 26, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/18785/story.htm
MANCHESTER, England - The UK government has yet to decide what to do about financially stricken nuclear generator British Energy Plc just days before an emergency state loan expires, a senior minister said yesterday.
The near-collapse of the provider of a fifth of Britain's electricity has created a major headache for the government, Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt told UK business leaders in Manchester. British Energy ran into trouble this year when power prices fell below its cost of production.
"We have a very difficult situation at British Energy with that loan expiring on Friday," Hewitt told the Confederation of British Industry's annual conference.
Hewitt said she would make a statement on the issue before this Friday's deadline for repayment of the 650 million pound ($1.02 billion) loan. She later told Reuters the government remained undecided on the issue.
"No decisions have been made yet, but when they are made, I will announce it to parliament," she said. "These are highly market-sensitive issues."
British Energy went to the government for a bailout in September. The current loan, already extended once, expires on Friday November 29. The government has refused to rule out putting the company into administration but talks are continuing about a financial restructuring and possible adjustments to the power market that could make life easier for the company.
Hewitt's comments are the clearest indication yet that the web of energy, environment and industrial policy issues the crisis has thrown up will drag the problem into next year.
STATEMENT BEFORE FRIDAY
Environmental campaigners and some competitors suffering in an oversupplied market say the aid is unfair, but the government has said it must support the nuclear industry for reasons of safety and security of supply.
Industry and government sources have told Reuters that a debt-for-equity restructuring package and a possible renegotiation of contracts with state nuclear fuels group BNFL are among actions being discussed.
British Energy is also in talks to sell its majority holding in Canadian nuclear project Bruce Power.
(additional reporting by Andrew Callus).
-------- depleted uranium
If we go to war with Iraq ...
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002
Subject: [du-list] Fwd from Len Dietz on DU
Reply-To: "Military Toxics Project" mtp@miltoxproj.org
About two weeks ago I was contacted by Larry Johnson, Foreign Desk Editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligence newspaper. He is writing a comprehensive article on the use of DU munitions. He plans to publish it next Tuesday in the Post-Intelligence. It will be on a wire service available to other newspapers, like the NY Times. It will be interesting to see if they use any of it....
Dr. Durakovic and his associates are preparing one or two more papers for publication. Not enough details yet to pass on. Unfortunately, our work in measuring the concentration of DU in their 24 hr urine samples is not going to define Gulf War illness or heal them. However, the medical and scientific information resulting from the investigation will add to the evidence why DU is dangerous to health. These weapons must be banned by international treaties.
Please let me know if you received this information.
Regards,
Len Dietz
Published in Letters to the Editor on November 8, 2002 in the Daily Gazette newspaper, Schenectady, NY.
If we go to war with Iraq, large quantities of depleted uranium (DU) munitions will be used in metal uranium penetrators in cannon rounds and deep earth penetrating bombs (bunker busters). But this time fighting will be in urban areas, not in the desert as before. Large numbers of soldiers and civilians will be exposed to concentrated fallout of radioactively and chemically poisonous aerosol particles of ceramic DU oxide that will be inhaled and become trapped in the lungs. Gulf War illness again will be experienced by American soldiers and allied forces, and by local civilians.
More than 100,000 American veterans of the Gulf War suffer from Gulf War illness: about one in seven. Exposure to DU may be a contributing factor. Even though inhalation is the most likely pathway for contamination, the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs have done no systematic medical investigation of the health effects of DU in veteransâ€(tm) lungs. In an independent investigation, a small group of 27 ill British, Canadian and American Gulf War veterans have been tested for the presence of DU in their 24 hour urine samples collected 8-9 yeas after the war. Fourteen veterans tested positive for DU. This is reported in a research paper by A. Durakovic, P. Horan and L. Dietz in the peer-reviewed medical journal Military Medicine, August 2002 issue. This is a shocking result because it indicates that ceramic DU aerosol particles have a residence time of many years in the lungs. The highly insoluble nature of ceramic DU particles was investigated in 1985 by Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratories for the U.S. Army.
Saddam Hussein clearly is a bad guy, but a second war in Iraq will add immeasurably to the suffering of Iraqi civilians and add much more DU contamination to the environment. Depleted uranium contamination is permanent. For example, the former National Lead Industries DU processing plant in Colonie is being cleaned up for unrestricted use to a guideline of 35 picocuries of uranium-238 per gram of soil. This will leave more than 100 times as much loose uranium-238 contamination from DU in the soil as occurs there naturally.
World leaders must find a different way than war to resolve the Iraqi issue. If we go to war, wouldnâ€(tm)t it be ironic if future historians record that the DU super weapons of mass destruction that we used left much longer lasting health and environmental problems than any biological or chemical weapons?
Leonard A. Dietz
135 Glen Eddy Drive
Niskayuna, NY 12309
Tel.: 518-377-1735
-------- inspections
Palaces Subject to Search, Blix Says
U.N. Team Leader Plans to Move Quickly in Iraq
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 26, 2002; Page
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38882-2002Nov25?language=printer
UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 25 -- The U.N.'s chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, said today that he has informed Iraq that he will exercise his right to inspect President Saddam Hussein's presidential compounds and move swiftly to establish an outpost in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul to speed the pace of inspections.
Blix also revealed that in meetings with weapons inspectors last week, Iraq once again denied possessing weapons of mass destruction. He said such statements would have to be verified after Iraq makes a formal declaration about its weapons programs by Dec. 8.
"If the Iraqi side were to state -- as it still did at our meeting -- that there were no such programs, it would need to provide convincing documentary or other evidence," Blix told reporters after briefing the U.N. Security Council on his visit to Baghdad last week.
The remarks of the Swedish arms expert, issued in a closed door meeting of the Security Council, appeared calculated to assure the United States and other council members that he plans to move quickly to test Iraq's cooperation with the newest U.N. resolution on weapons inspections, approved unanimously on Nov. 8.
Blix, the executive chairman of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, also indicated that some potential points of friction had emerged during his visit to Baghdad. He noted that Iraq had insisted that inspections of presidential sites and government ministries -- where U.S. officials suspect Hussein could be hiding forbidden weapons -- could not be conducted in the same manner as other facilities.
"The Iraqi side assured us that Iraq intended to provide full cooperation . . . while expecting correct and professional conduct from inspecting organizations," Blix told the council, according to a copy of his statement. But he added that "the Iraqi side . . . remarked that entry into a presidential site and or a ministry was not exactly the same thing as entry into a factory."
Blix said that the "essential infrastructure" for resumed inspections is in place in Iraq and was being tested. He said that inspections would formally start Wednesday with a team of about 17 U.N. inspectors, who arrived in Baghdad today. The U.N. inspection program would quickly expand, reaching a total of at least 100 inspectors by the end of the year.
The rapid buildup has been accompanied by an intensification of media coverage in Iraq. Blix voiced concern that Iraq would permit scores of journalists to monitor the U.N. arms experts activities, saying that the inspections "could not be allowed to turn into some circus." He added, "The Iraqi side took note of this but explained that it might invite media to visit such sites after the inspectors had finished their work."
The resumption of inspections for the first time in four years comes just two weeks after the Security Council adopted a tough new inspection mandate that requires Iraq to grant U.N. inspectors immediate access to any location in the country or face "serious consequences."
Blix said that he had put Iraq on notice that he would exercise those rights, informing them that he would expand the U.N.'s headquarters building in Baghdad, send U.N. security guards to protect U.N. facilities and request a list of names of Iraqi officials associated with future and present Iraqi weapons programs.
At the same time, he expressed sympathy for Iraq's claim that it would not be able to fully comply with the Security Council's demand that it provide a complete declaration on its civilian and military chemical, biological and nuclear programs by the Dec. 8 deadline.
While denying they possess banned weapons, Iraqi officials told Blix that they were uncertain whether the Security Council's terms required that they declare every single item produced in its commercial chemical industry, citing plastic slippers as an example. Blix said that he and Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, lacked the authority to interpret the Security Council's mandate but advised the Iraqis to focus on assembling a complete picture of its past and present chemical, biological and nuclear programs. He also counseled the Iraqis to include a note in its declaration assuring the Security Council that it will "provide more detailed information" on its civilian chemical and biological industries later.
Russia's U.N. ambassador, Sergey Lavrov, seized on Blix's comments, saying that the Security Council should extend the deadline for Iraq to file its declaration, according to a council diplomat. But John D. Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said that the council should stick to the current deadline.
Following the meeting, the Security Council agreed to postpone for nine days a vote on a separate resolution that would allow Iraq to continue exporting oil under the terms of the U.N. oil-for-food program. The council typically renews Iraq's mandate to export oil every six months.
--------
THE INSPECTIONS
U.N. Monitor Says Iraqis Are Denying Having Arms Cache
November 26, 2002
New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/26/international/middleeast/26IRAQ.html
UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 25 - Iraqi officials have told United Nations inspectors in Baghdad that they have no weapons of mass destruction and expressed reservations about inspections of President Saddam Hussein's palaces, Hans Blix, one of the inspections chiefs, said here today.
Briefing the Security Council, Mr. Blix said Iraqi officials had pledged to cooperate fully with the inspections, but had also raised a host of skeptical questions about a declaration of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons due on Dec. 8.
Suggesting that the declaration was too broad to finish by that deadline, the Iraqis wondered if they had to include every detail of their civilian chemical industries, down to "the production of plastic slippers," Mr. Blix said.
He said he had responded with a curt warning that if Iraq was going to claim to be clean, it would have to provide convincing evidence.
The weapons chief gave a glimpse of his tough stance and Iraq's ambivalent reaction in his first report to the Council since he and Mohamed ElBaradei, the top nuclear inspector, traveled to Baghdad a week ago, beginning a new round of inspections after a four-year hiatus. The first contingent of 19 United Nations experts arrived in Baghdad today, saying they planned to conduct the first inspections on Wednesday.
On a day when many Council nations expected a show of unity to support the inspections, some diplomats were surprised that the United States wanted to add several items that it said could be used for military purposes to a list of restricted imports to Iraq.
When debate produced no accord on whether or how to revise the list, the Council voted tonight to extend the mandate for United Nations monitoring of Iraqi oil sales until Dec. 4. It was set to expire at midnight tonight.
The program, called oil for food, uses Iraqi oil revenues to buy food, medicine and other civilian goods for the population.
At the behest of the Pentagon, American officials said, the United States ambassador here, John D. Negroponte, insisted on adding several medical and communications items to the list of goods that must pass United Nations review. They included global positioning scanning devices, equipment to jam radio intercepts and special 7-inch injectors to administer the drug atropine, as well as the drug itself. It is used to resuscitate heart attack patients, but can also be a treatment for victims of attacks with chemical nerve agents.
The United States was also seeking to block large-scale imports of Cipro, a strong antibiotic that can be used to treat anthrax infection, administration officials said.
Mr. Negroponte said the United States believed that those goods "did not have a benign, civilian or purely humanitarian purpose." He said Washington insisted on extending the debate for nine days in order to set a timetable for revising the list of goods before it would approve renewing the oil-for-food program.
Other Council diplomats were frustrated that the United States insisted on the revisions to the list as the deadline approached. The list has been the subject of long and contentious debate in the past, and most Council nations were hoping to avoid getting into it again until sometime next year, to avoid undermining the weapons inspections.
"We would like to have a solution to this, and everybody must try to come together," Ambassador Peter Ole Kolby of Norway said in support of the program, with a diplomatic hint of frustration.
Mr. Blix said he had told Iraq to expect aggressive surprise inspections.
"The Council has authorized us to go anywhere anytime, and we intend to do so without telling anyone in advance," Mr. Blix said he had informed Iraq, in comments that were praised by American officials.
While saying they would do nothing to delay the inspections, the Iraqi officials, led by Gen. Amir Hammudi al-Saadi, also observed that entering "into a presidential site or a ministry was not exactly the same thing as entry into a factory."
Resolution 1441, adopted unanimously by the Council on Nov. 8 to give the inspectors a new, forceful mandate, authorizes them to inspect the vast compounds around Mr. Hussein's nine palaces.
Most Council nations were pleased by Mr. Blix's report, which was endorsed by Mr. ElBaradei, that the inspections were moving forward as planned in the resolution.
"So far so good," said the Chinese ambassador, Wang Yingfan, speaking for the 15-nation Council.
But differences among the Council powers surfaced in the discussion after Mr. Blix's briefing, diplomats said. The Russian ambassador, Sergey Lavrov, took issue with Mr. Blix's statement that "many governments" believed that there were still programs to build weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
"I can only think of a few," Mr. Lavrov said, according to diplomats in the session, making it clear that Russia was not one of them.
Mr. Blix noted that the inspections teams would begin their work 19 days after Resolution 1441 was passed, considerably faster than the 45 days the Security Council allowed. He said he and Mr. ElBaradei expected to provide a comprehensive report to the Council on their progress on Jan. 27.
He said the inspection chiefs had stressed that Iraq's Dec. 8 declaration had to be complete, disclosing any prohibited program. He said past declarations by Iraq "left it an open question whether some weapons remained."
Mr. Blix said today that the Iraqis acknowledged that there were some discrepancies and gaps about long-range missiles in documents they had already provided to the inspectors. Iraqi officials volunteered to correct the information soon.
Secretary General Kofi Annan received only today an 11-page letter Iraq sent to him on Saturday picking apart the Council resolution clause by clause, calling it a violation of international law and an excuse for the United States to go to war.
Speaking in Paris, Mr. Annan said Iraq should cooperate with the inspections. "That is the only way to avoid conflict in the region," he said.
Melissa Fleming, spokeswoman for the nuclear inspectors, said in Baghdad that they would carry out the inspections with "suspicious minds," on the lookout for Iraqi deception.
Mr. ElBaradei, in Cairo, reminded Baghdad that if the inspectors gave a positive report, their work could be "an alternative to war, not a precursor to war."
Support From Britain
LONDON, Nov. 25 (AP) - Britain's Parliament declared its support today for the United Nations Security Council resolution on Iraq, despite rumblings of dissent over the manner in which military action would be decided.
The decision came after Prime Minister Tony Blair warned that President Hussein would face "serious consequences" if he denied that Iraq possessed banned weapons.
"We have no doubt he does have weapons of mass destruction," Mr. Blair said at a news conference. "So let's wait and see what he actually says."
After five hours of debate in the House of Commons, a motion by Mr. Blair's government in favor of United Nations Resolution 1441 was approved without a vote when the legislators called out their approval with a shout of "Aye."
Shortly before, an amendment requiring parliamentary approval for any use of British troops - and urging a new Security Council mandate for military action to enforce Resolution 1441 - was defeated by a vote of 452 to 85.
The supporters of the amendment, proposed by the opposition Liberal Democrats, included 32 members of Mr. Blair's Labor Party.
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told the Commons that it would be "utterly irresponsible" to offer legislators a vote to pre-approve military action if it would put lives of British forces at risk.
--------
Glance at Possible Iraq Inspection Sites
November 26, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Sites.html
Some previously inspected and ``neutralized'' sites in Iraq that U.N. weapons monitors are expected to revisit, as they follow up on their work broken off in 1998:
AL-FURAT
Key to Iraq's old nuclear weapons program, 18 miles south of Baghdad. International inspectors in the 1990s destroyed equipment assembled for ``enriching'' uranium to bomb-grade level. Rebuilding at the site raises questions about a possible resumption of weapons development. Advertisement
AL-FALLUJAH
Rebuilding is reported at this site, 30 miles west of Baghdad, formerly associated with Iraq's chemical weapons program. The U.S. government has raised questions about a chlorine plant, whose product has many civilian uses but also can serve as a component of chemical weapons.
AMARIYAH SERUM AND VACCINE INSTITUTE
Just outside Baghdad at Abu Ghraib, site of biological weapons-related research in the 1980s. It is reported to have expanded its storage capacity, to an extent the U.S. government says exceeds Iraq's needs. Iraq contends the facility only makes and stores human vaccines.
AL-RAFAH
Satellite photos show a new missile test facility at this site, 30 miles southwest of Baghdad, that the U.S. government says must be for prohibited longer-range missiles. The Iraqis counter that the structure can be used only for permitted shorter-range missile engines.
-------- missile defense
EU Secures Missile Pact, Key Players Stay Away
November 26, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-dutch-ballistic.html
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Ninety-three countries met in the Netherlands Tuesday in an attempt to limit the spread of ballistic missiles, but several key states stayed away.
North Korea, Iran, India, Pakistan, China and Israel were among the countries that chose not to sign the International Code of Conduct against Ballistic Missile Proliferation while Iraq was not invited to Monday's signing ceremony.
The European Union led the campaign for the voluntary code which calls for restraint in the development, testing and use of ballistic missiles and asks countries to give notice of any missile launches to reduce mistrust between member states.
Missile build-ups in North Korea and Iran, nuclear rivalry between India and Pakistan and a U.S. drive for a missile defense system have turned the spotlight on ballistic missile proliferation around the world.
The United States signed the code but said Monday it reserved the right to a flexible interpretation of its provisions.
Russia, France, Britain, Germany, Japan, Jordan, Turkey, Belarus, Libya and Ukraine were among the signatories.
Tuesday's talks focused on implementing the code.
DUTCH REGRET
The Dutch government, which hosted the two-day conference in The Hague, said the new pact was modest but hoped more countries would eventually sign up.
``We want this code to grow. We want it to achieve universal adherence. And so, we regret not all countries have been able to sign up,'' Dutch Foreign Minister Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said.
Besides the world's main nuclear powers led by the United States and Russia, many states now have ballistic missiles.
India, Iran, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea have all produced or tested missiles capable of carrying warheads more than 600 miles.
The EU decided to exclude Iraq at a time when United Nations inspectors have returned to Baghdad to search for weapons of mass destruction.
``It was an EU decision since the very beginning to exclude Iraq because of its failure to comply with previous U.N. Security Council resolutions concerning their weapons,'' a Dutch Foreign Ministry spokesman said.
The United States has threatened military action against Iraq, accusing it of seeking nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in violation of U.N. resolutions. Iraq denies the charge.
All other U.N. members were invited to the conference.
The EU resolved in June last year to try to drum up support for the code. Meetings were held in Paris and Madrid this year to negotiate a draft.
-------- pakistan
Powell Says Pakistan Warned on N. Korean Ties
Musharraf Told He Will Face 'Consequences' if Nuclear Transfers Continue
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 26, 2002; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39256-2002Nov25?language=printer
MEXICO CITY, Nov. 25 -- Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said today Pakistan understands that "consequences" will apply if the United States discovers that the Pakistani government continues to make suspect nuclear transfers to North Korea.
Powell's statement, made to reporters while traveling here for a conference with Mexican officials, suggested a public hardening of the administration's stance toward its ally in the fight against terrorism. Previously, Powell had said that he had been assured by Pakistan that it is not currently engaging in such transactions, but he had not raised the possibility of U.S. action against Pakistan.
Powell has privately delivered this message to the Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, making it clear that the United States would be watching Pakistan's behavior closely.
"In my conversations with President Musharraf in recent months, I have made clear to him that any, any sort of contact between Pakistan and North Korea we believe would be improper, inappropriate and would have consequences," Powell said. "He has assured me on more than one occasion that there are no further contacts."
The administration has evidence that Pakistan continued to receive missile parts from North Korea in exchange for possible nuclear plans and materials as recently as three months ago, according to reports in Washington last week. Powell said today he could not discuss reports of recent transactions.
Since the administration confronted North Korea with evidence of its secret program to build nuclear weapons using enriched uranium, officials have sought to isolate the communist state until it agrees to dismantle the program. But officials have taken a much softer stance against Pakistan, despite increasing evidence that it played a key role in the development of the North Korean program. In large part, this is because officials believe it is essential to maintain Pakistan's cooperation in the war against terrorism.
"President Musharraf understands the seriousness of the issue," Powell said, adding that he has discussed it both "face-to-face" with Musharraf and on the phone, including several times in the past month. "Whenever he and I communicate with each other, I reinforce the point," Powell said.
Under U.S. law, a nation must face sanctions if it allows the transfer of uranium enrichment technology without international safeguards, unless the president issues a waiver. "There are laws that apply, and we will obey the laws," Powell said. He declined to specify exactly how Pakistan would be sanctioned if the illicit trade continues.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
In an age of biowarfare, US sees new role for nukes
Bush administration mulls resuming nuclear testing and developing tactical warheads to deal with threats like Iraq.
By Brad Knickerbocker
The Christian Science Monitor
November 26, 2002
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1126/p02s02-usmi.html
As United Nations inspectors fan out across Iraq - looking for evidence of Saddam Hussein's secret arsenal - the United States is rethinking the future of its own weapons of mass destruction.
Among the issues being discussed by US officials and the experts who advise them in this era of stateless terrorism and other forms of "unconventional warfare" are these: The resumption of nuclear weapons testing; ambivalence over controlling chemical and biological weapons at a time when advancing technology offers new opportunities to control the battlefield; and the possible development of tactical nuclear bombs to go after the kind of hardened targets that more than 70 countries - especially Iraq - now use to hide their most threatening weapons.
All of this would be happening even if the terrorist attacks of 9/11 had not occurred, even if war with Iraq were not as close as it is today. But the earthshaking events that have marked the beginning of the 21st century focus attention on the most intimidating military assets belonging to the world's lone superpower.
The US hasn't test-fired any nuclear devices since 1992. Officials figure it would take two to three years to be ready to resume testing. The administration wants to reduce that to a shorter period - not only to ensure that its aging stockpile of warheads is dependable, but also to allow the testing of any newly designed weapons.
The Pentagon's congressionally mandated Nuclear Posture Review calls for a "revitalized nuclear weapons complex that will ... be able, if directed, to design, develop, manufacture, and certify new warheads in response to new national requirements; and maintain readiness to resume underground nuclear testing if required."
More recently, a senior official urged reconsideration of the 10-year US moratorium on testing.
"We will need to refurbish several aging weapons systems," said defense undersecretary Edward Aldridge in an October memo to senior nuclear policymakers. "We must also be prepared to respond to new nuclear-weapon requirements in the future." Congress recently authorized the nation's nuclear weapons labs to weigh the benefits and costs of being able to test such weapons within six months.
While highly precise conventional arms - laser-guided bolts from the blue - made headlines in Afghanistan, many experts say they will never completely replace nuclear weapons.
"To ensure that enemy facilities or forces are knocked out and cannot be reconstituted, attacks with nuclear weapons may be necessary," the National Institute for Public Policy in Fairfax, Va., reported last year.
"The United States may need to field simple, low-yield, precision-guided nuclear weapons for possible use against select hardened targets such as underground biological weapons."
Several of that report's authors are now officials in the Bush administration, including Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and Defense Science Board chairman William Schneider.
One of the attractions of small nuclear weapons, in the eyes of some theorists, is that they can more effectively destroy biological or chemical stockpiles than can conventional explosives.
In Geneva recently, Stephen Rademaker. US assistant secretary of state for arms control, said he was "very pleased" with international adoption of measures to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention. He warned, however, that the 1972 treaty banning such weapons is "inherently unverifiable." This implies that the US needs to know as much as possible about any biological or chemical threats it may face.
The difficulty here is that even preparing to defend against such weapons requires research on the weapons themselves. In its examination of biomedical sciences and the pharmaceutical industry - both involved in Pentagon projects - the Federation of American Scientists reports that "an immense amount of time and money [is] being invested" in new technologies that could "significantly complicate the control of chemical and biological weapons."
Arms-control advocates also worry that defending against such weapons - especially those in underground bunkers - may increase the pressure to develop small,tactical nuclear weapons.
At this point, although official discussions have escalated, there is no rush to resume a nuclear arms race that had abated in recent years.
"Candidly, I cannot detect any plausible nuclear warfighting scenarios in the 'axis of evil' context," says John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, an analysis organization in Alexandria, Va., (referring to Bush's characterization of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea). "I am guessing that much of this is a discussion about [China]."
As is often the case with what could be a politically wrenching change in military strategy and doctrine, those in uniform tend to be more cautious than their civilian bosses. "In my experience, there is little to zero interest among military leaders in actually using nuclear weapons," says Larry Seaquist, a retired Navy warship captain and Pentagon strategist. "They recognize that nuclear employment, by breaking the half-century taboo since the two weapons used [on Japan] in 1945, would take us into a whole new world."
"They also recognize that the calculus of nuclear weapon use is totally different in these rogue-nation situations like Iraq than it was in the cold war," says Captain Seaquist. In other words, the old balance-of-terror nuclear regime of "mutual assured destruction" that kept the United States and the former Soviet Union from blowing each other up doesn't necessarily work with rogue states such as Iraq or with stateless terrorist organizations such as Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Markey letter on Modern Pit Facility
From: Tannenbaum, Benn [mailto:Benn.Tannenbaum@mail.house.gov]
Sent: Tuesday, November 26, 2002
Here is the letter my boss wrote, as well as the press release. Share and enjoy. Note that it's not yet up on our website, but will be early next week.
Benn Tannenbaum, Ph.D.
Congressional Science Fellow
2108 Rayburn Building
November 26, 2002
MARKEY QUESTIONS NEED FOR NEW NUCLEAR BOMB FACTORY
Facility is inconsistent with nuclear treaties, nonproliferation goals
Washington, DC: Representative Edward J. Markey (D-MA), a senior Member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and co-chairman of the Bipartisan Task Force on Nonproliferation, today released a letter to Spencer Abraham, Secretary of the Department of Energy (DOE), asking for information related to DOE's proposal to build the Modern Pit Facility, a new multi-billion dollar facility that would be used to manufacture plutonium pits for nuclear warheads.
"The Bush Administration claims to be committed to nuclear non-proliferation, and has promised to reduce the number of nuclear weapons, yet it also wants to build a new bomb factory" said Rep. Markey. "This inconsistent policy can only undermine U.S. efforts to convince other nations to abide by their non-proliferation obligations. Further, DOE can't find anything wrong with the 10,000 warheads that are already deployed, or the 5,000 warheads that could easily be re-deployed, or the 7,000 pits left over from dismantled warheads. I just don't see a need for this costly new facility."
Press releases from the Department of Energy claim that the United States does not have, but needs, a new facility to produce hundred of new pits per year. The facility would not come on-line until 2018, a time when the Bush Administration projects 1,700 to 2,200 deployed warheads. However, a facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory has built 11 test pits and will be able to make certified pits by April 2003; this facility will be able to produce 20 pits per year.
Rep. Markey's letter asked for the following information from the Department of Energy:
· How long does it take to replace the existing stockpile of nuclear warheads with existing, or soon to be completed, facilities? How often does the stockpile need to be replaced? Can either of these questions be answered, prior to the completion of the current experiments at Los Alamos?
· What affect will this facility have on the nonproliferation agreements signed by the United States?
Copies of all correspondence can be found at http://www.house.gov/markey/http://www.house.gov/markey/
The Honorable Edward Markey US House Of Representatives Washington, DC 20515 202-225-2836 7th District, Massachusetts
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Benn Tannenbaum or Israel Klein (202) 225-2836
-------- nevada
Senators Question Yucca Mountain Science
November 26, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/nov2002/2002-11-26-09.asp#anchor1
WASHINGTON, DC - Citing evidence of fraud and abuse, Nevada's U.S. senators have asked for a federal investigation into defects in the scientific process within the Yucca Mountain project.
Senators Harry Reid, a Democrat, and John Ensign, a Republican, referred to a recent story in the "Las Vegas Review Journal" which raised allegations of mistreatment of quality assurance personnel who identified technical deficiencies in the project. According to the article, two quality assurance personnel were removed from their jobs with the Yucca Mountain project because they were aggressive in identifying technical deficiencies in the project.
"These workers were removed because they were doing the right thing," Senator Reid said. "Their job was to monitor the quality of the work being done at Yucca Mountain and once they came forward and identified defects with the science, they were either terminated or relocated. Apparently, these employees were used as an example keep your mouth shut or you'll be removed. I can't help but wonder how many other employees have damaging information and are afraid to come forward."
Earlier this year, Congress voted to approve the Yucca Mountain site, located about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a permanent repository for some 77,000 tons of high level radioactive wastes, including spent fuel from nuclear reactors. The controversial decision overrode objections from Nevada's Congressional delegation, state government and much of the state's population.
The news that some workers at the massive underground construction site have questioned the site's safety raised new concerns among critics of the project.
"We have project workers who are trying to warn the public about the possible dangers at Yucca Mountain," said Senator Ensign. "Now it appears that someone at the Department of Energy may be trying to silence those voices. No one should be intimidated, belittled, or fired for doing their job."
In a letter sent Monday, Reid and Ensign asked the General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, to investigate the quality assurance problems raised by the Yucca Mountain contractors. The letter also asks the GAO to look at allegations stemming from an anonymous whistleblower letter that there are problems managing the vast amounts of data that will be used to make a licensing determination from the project.
"After receiving this letter, we learned that the Department of Energy had issued a notification of potential catastrophic loss of data stored in antiquated storage systems," the senators wrote. "This information is crucial to the accurate modeling of the Yucca Mountain site."
The federal government has spent almost $8 billion dollars so far to identify and test the Yucca Mountain site as potential nuclear repository. The planned site is projected to cost at least $80 billion more to complete, the senators noted.
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms sales
Top officials knew of arms sales
November 26, 2002
WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20021126-83181578.htm
Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica and top officials must have been aware of the country's arms sales to Iraq but did nothing to prevent them, a leading think tank says in an upcoming report.
The Belgrade, Yugoslavia, newspaper Danas quotes from an unpublished report by the International Crisis Group (ICG):
"At stake is an extensively ramified and highly organized network and it was necessary for many players to be involved in operation code named Zora [Dawn] in the army and, by all accounts, among Yugoslav and Serbian politicians."
The list of those potentially implicated in the arms trade with Iraq includes Mr. Kostunica, federal Prime Minister Dragisa Pesic, federal ministers of Defense and the Interior Velimir Radojevic and Zoran Zivkovic, Serbia's Police Minister Dusan Mihajlovic and the head of the army counterintelligence service, Gen. Aca Tomic, Danas said.
The officials failed to stop the arms sales despite the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry warning the sales were a breach of a United Nations embargo, the newspaper said.
The U.S. government officially warned Yugoslavia of the illicit trade in July 2001, the ICG is said to have pointed out, and indicated that individual officials and companies connected with Mr. Kostunica's Democratic Party of Serbia, known locally as the DSS; Mr. Pesic's Socialist People's Party in Montenegro; Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic's Democratic Party; the New Democracy party headed by Mr. Mihajlovic might also have been embroiled.
The ICG report said the Foreign Ministry reminded the federal government in a document presented to it last January that the United States had sent a note to the government on the matter and warned that continuing trade with Iraq might endanger Yugoslavia's effort to reintegrate with international institutions and seriously affect its relations with Washington.
The document argued for an improvement in these relations, especially in the war against terrorism, the ICG report added. The ministry, it said, urged that the highest government bodies pay special attention to the arms-sales problem so as to facilitate attaining the objectives of membership in NATO's Partnership for Peace program and the Council of Europe as preconditions for reaching an agreement with the European Union on affiliation with it.
The Foreign Ministry document was endorsed by the government in January. However, relevant federal ministries failed to act on the recommendations, the report said.
On Aug. 16, the Foreign Ministry sent a letter to the Defense Ministry, the Customs Service, top army leaders and Serbian and Montenegrin police ministries reminding them that Yugoslavia is a U.N. member and as such prohibited from trading with Iraq and other countries under the U.N. embargo.
According to the ICG, Jugoimport, the Yugoslav company in charge of all deals with Iraq , was the main arms exporter to Iraq.
Jugoimport is controlled by the federal government. Mr. Mihajlovic is chairman of the board, whose members include Mr. Zivkovic, Mr. Radojevic and former federal Economics Minister Jovan Rankovic, who is close to Mr. Kostunica.
-------- china
China Denies Transfer of Radar Systems
November 26, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-China-Ukraine-Iraq.html
BEIJING (AP) -- China denied involvement Tuesday in an alleged transfer of sophisticated radar systems from Ukraine to Iraq, responding to U.S. and British investigators who cited a ``credible possibility'' that a transaction took place through an intermediary.
The sale of the Kolchuha radar systems, which can be used to track Western aircraft in Baghdad's no-fly zones, would violate U.N. sanctions imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.
``There is no such question of China transferring radar systems to Iraq,'' Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan told reporters at a regularly scheduled briefing. ``The Chinese government has strictly implemented the relevant sanctions by the U.N. on Iraq.''
Kong added that cooperation between China and Ukraine in various areas -- including the military -- is in accord with international conventions.
The United States has not said which country it believes acted as an intermediary in the alleged weapons transfer.
But the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Carlos Pascual, said Tuesday that China was of ``special concern'' to the investigators.
Ukrainian officials told the investigators that they sold four Kolchuha radar systems to China and, at the request of the Chinese, modified a standard clause prohibiting third-party transfers.
Ukraine declined to provide a copy of the Chinese sales contract or other documents that might confirm whether the systems remain in China, according to the inspectors' report.
Kong declined to say whether China in fact bought the radar systems, and Ukraine has sought to downplay the entire issue.
``Don't make an elephant out of a fly,'' Ukraine foreign ministry spokesman Serhiy Borodenkov said. ``We are totally open.''
Pascual said the United States has provided the U.N. Security Council's Iraq sanctions committee with a copy of a report by the team of 13 American and British experts. The report was released Monday by the U.S. Embassy in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev.
In the report, the investigators said they were unable to prove Ukraine transferred radar systems to Iraq ``under openly declared contracts,'' but said that ``covert or illegal arms transfers, particularly with the complicity of third parties, remain a credible possibility.''
The investigators spent a week in Ukraine last month looking into whether the country sent any Kolchuha radar systems to Baghdad in violation of U.N. sanctions.
The investigation came after the U.S. State Department said it had verified the authenticity of a July 2000 recording in which Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma is allegedly heard approving the sale of a Kolchuha system to Iraq for $100 million. Kuchma has denied the allegations.
-------- israel / palestine
Israel Seeks $4 Billion In New Military Aid
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 26, 2002; Page
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38823-2002Nov25?language=printer
Israel has asked the United States for $4 billion in new military assistance to defray the costs of fighting terrorism and the potential expense of preparing for a U.S. war in Iraq, along with $10 billion in loan guarantees to bolster its struggling economy, Bush administration officials said.
The request was presented by Dov Weisglass, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's chief of staff, and the director of Israel's finance ministry at a White House meeting yesterday with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, officials said.
Israel receives more U.S. military aid than any other country, in amounts governed by a bilateral agreement that annually increases military payments while reducing economic assistance. The State Department announced last week that it intended to ask Congress for $2.16 billion in military assistance to Israel for fiscal 2004, up from $2.1 billion requested for 2003 and $2.04 billion allocated in 2002. The payments requested yesterday would be in addition to those amounts.
In yesterday's meeting, the Israelis presented a detailed description of the country's economic woes -- a combination of rising military costs, a growing deficit and increased unemployment along with falling income from taxes and tourism, according to an Israeli official. The official said Israel believed that several countries, including Turkey and Jordan, had discussed increased U.S. assistance in exchange for expenses they might incur during a war with Iraq, and felt that Israel could make the same case.
Rice made no commitment, according to administration officials, but said the request would be taken under consideration. Subjects of further discussion, officials said, included the time period over which such a sum could be paid, and whether to consider just the aid request, the loan guarantee, or both.
One administration official said the $4 billion figure included $800 million that Israel said the Clinton administration had agreed to as compensation for its May 2000 military withdrawal from southern Lebanon, which the Bush administration declined to honor. Also cited were ongoing costs to combat Palestinian attacks and for the continued occupation of parts of the West Bank; contributions to the global anti-terrorism campaign and what the official called "a payoff for not responding to Iraq."
The United States persuaded Israel, whose arsenal is the most powerful in the Middle East and isbelieved to include a substantial nuclear stockpile, not to respond to Iraqi missile attacks during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Similar requests have been made by the Bush administration in anticipation of another potential war with Iraq, although the Sharon government has said it would retaliate against a direct attack.
--------
Israel Seeks More U.S. Military Aid
November 26, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Mideast.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Israel is asking the Bush administration for about $4 billion in new military aid and $8 billion to $10 billion in loan guarantees to bolster its economy, a U.S. official said Tuesday.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's chief of staff, Dov Weisglass, and the director general of Israel's finance ministry, Ohad Marani, made the request at a meeting Monday with Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser.
The Israeli Embassy declined to disclose how much help was requested, but said the Israelis were promised a prompt reply. An administration official provided the price tag on condition of anonymity.
Marani presented an account of the economic situation in Israel and he and Weisglass had a detailed discussion with Rice, the embassy said in a statement.
A 26-month conflict with the Palestinians has strained Israel's defense budget while the violence has sharply reduced foreign investment and tourism.
Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. loans and grants, which amount to $2.9 billion.
The State Department said last week it would ask Congress for $2.16 billion in military aid for Israel for fiscal year 2004, which begins next September. That is an increase of $120 million from a request for $2.04 billion for this year.
Israel relies on loan guarantees to borrow at lower interest rates. There is no cost to the United States if the loans are repaid, and Israel never has defaulted on a loan.
``Israel has never defaulted on a loan, or on the interest of a loan,'' Mark Regev, spokesman at the Israeli Embassy, said.
Israel's role, if any, in a U.S. war with Iraq is not clear.
Sharon has said Israel reserves the right to respond if attacked. In the 1991 Persian Gulf war, even while under Iraqi missile fire, Israel complied with U.S. requests and did not respond.
In any event, preparations for a possible war are contributing to Israel's military expenses.
--------
Germany to Give Israel Patriot Missiles
November 26, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Germany-Israel-Missiles.html
BERLIN (AP) -- Germany has a ``moral duty'' to protect Israel and will provide Patriot anti-missile systems to help its defense against Iraq if war erupts in the Middle East, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said.
``The security of the state of Israel and its citizens is extraordinarily important to us,'' Schroeder said in an interview Tuesday with the weekly newspaper Die Zeit.
Earlier, the German Defense Ministry said it was examining an Israeli request to supply Patriot missiles. In Jerusalem, the Israeli defense ministry said it asked Germany for Patriot missiles more than a year ago and renewed the request during talks with the Germans last week.
``If Israel needs an increase in security, we will help -- and on time,'' Schroeder was quoted as saying. ``This is our historic and moral duty.''
The German air force has 30 Patriot missile systems in service. A report Tuesday in the German newspaper Die Welt said Israel is seeking the indefinite loan of an unspecified number of the missiles.
During the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq fired 39 Scud missiles into Israel. U.S.-provided Patriot missiles largely failed to stop them.
Germany is among some 50 countries discreetly contacted by President Bush to ask what they might contribute to military action against Iraq. Israel's request was separate from the U.S. move, the Defense Ministry said Tuesday.
Schroeder has recently softened his opposition to a war on Iraq after attempting to patch up relations with Bush at a NATO summit, making plain that Germany would serve as a staging area for U.S. forces in any invasion to oust Saddam Hussein.
But he still rules out active German involvement, a stand that helped him win re-election in September and soured ties with the Bush administration.
In Tuesday's interview with Die Zeit, to be published in the newspaper's Thursday edition, Schroeder emphasized that the Patriot missiles were defensive weapons.
German officials often stress that their country feels a special responsibility for Israel because of the Holocaust, an argument cited even by staunch anti-war members of Schroeder's governing center-left coalition.
Winfried Nachtwei, a lawmaker with Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer's Greens party, said Monday that ``we certainly could not just stand and watch if there were a danger to Israel's existence'' in a Mideast war.
--------
Rockets, Napalm, Torpedoes & Lies
Israel's Attack on the Liberty, Revisited
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
November 26, 2002
http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair1126.html
In early June of 1967, at the onset of the Six Day War, the Pentagon sent the USS Liberty from Spain into international waters off the coast of Gaza to monitor the progress of Israel's attack on the Arab states. The Liberty was a lightly armed surveillance ship.
Only hours after the Liberty arrived it was spotted by the Israeli military. The IDF sent out reconnaissance planes to identify the ship. They made eight trips over a period of three hours. The Liberty was flying a large US flag and was easily recognizable as an American vessel.
A few hours later more planes came. These were Israeli Mirage III fighters, armed with rockets and machine guns. As off-duty officers sunbathed on the deck, the fighters opened fire on the defenseless ship with rockets and machine guns.
A few minutes later a second wave of planes streaked overhead, French-built Mystere jets, which not only pelted the ship with gunfire but also with napalm bomblets, coating the deck with the flaming jelly. By now, the Liberty was on fire and dozens were wounded and killed, excluding several of the ship's top officers.
The Liberty's radio team tried to issue a distress call, but discovered the frequencies had been jammed by the Israeli planes with what one communications specialist called "a buzzsaw sound." Finally, an open channel was found and the Liberty got out a message it was under attack to the USS America, the Sixth Fleet's large aircraft carrier.
Two F-14 phantoms left the carrier to come to the Liberty's aid. Apparently, the jets were armed only with nuclear weapons. When word reached the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara became irate and ordered the jets to return. "Tell the Sixth Fleet to get those aircraft back immediately," he barked. McNamara's injunction was reiterated in saltier terms by Admiral David L. McDonald, the chief of Naval Operations: "You get those fucking airplanes back on deck, and you get them back down." The planes turned around. And the attack on the Liberty continued.
After the Israeli fighter jets had emptied their arsenal of rockets, three Israeli attack boats approached the Liberty. Two torpedoes were launched at the crippled ship, one tore a 40-foot wide hole in the hull, flooding the lower compartments, and killing more than a dozen American sailors.
As the Liberty listed in the choppy seas, its deck aflame, crew members dropped life rafts into the water and prepared to scuttle the ship. Given the number of wounded, this was going to be a dangerous operation. But it soon proved impossible, as the Israeli attack boats strafed the rafts with machine gun fire. No body was going to get out alive that way.
After more than two hours of unremitting assault, the Israelis finally halted their attack. One of the torpedo boats approached the Liberty. An officer asked in English over a bullhorn: "Do you need any help?"
The wounded commander of the Liberty, Lt. William McGonagle, instructed the quartermaster to respond emphatically: "Fuck you."
The Israeli boat turned and left.
A Soviet destroyer responded before the US Navy, even though a US submarine, on a covert mission, was apparently in the area and had monitored the attack. The Soviet ship reached the Liberty six hours before the USS Davis. The captain of the Soviet ship offered his aid, but the Liberty's conning officer refused.
Finally, 16 hours after the attack two US destroyers reached the Liberty. By that time, 34 US sailors were dead and 174 injured, many seriously. As the wounded were being evacuated, an officer with the Office of Naval Intelligence instructed the men not to talk about their ordeal with the press.
The following morning Israel launched a surprise invasion of Syria, breaching the new cease-fire agreement and seizing control of the Golan Heights.
Within three weeks, the Navy put out a 700-page report, exonerating the Israelis, claiming the attack had been accidental and that the Israelis had pulled back as soon as they realized their mistake. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara suggested the whole affair should be forgotten. "These errors do occur," McNamara concluded.
In Assault on the Liberty, a harrowing first-hand account by James Ennes Jr., McNamara's version of events is proven to be as big a sham as his concurrent lies about Vietnam. Ennes's book created a media storm when it was first published by Random House in 1980, including (predictably) charges that Ennes was a liar and an anti-Semite. Still, the book sold more than 40,000 copies, but was eventually allowed to go out of print. Now Ennes has published an updated version, which incorporates much new evidence that the Israeli attack was deliberate and that the US government went to extraordinary lengths to disguise the truth.
It's a story of Israel aggression, Pentagon incompetence, official lies, and a cover-up that persists to this day. The book gains much of its power from the immediacy of Ennes's first-hand account of the attack and the lies that followed.
Now, 35 years later, Ennes warns that the bloodbath on board the Liberty and its aftermath should serve as a tragic cautionary tale about the continuing ties between the US government and the government of Israel.
The Attack on the Liberty is the kind of book that makes your blood seethe. Ennes skillfully documents the life of the average sailor on one of the more peculiar vessels in the US Navy, with an attention for detail that reminds one of Dana or O'Brien. After all, the year was 1967 and most of the men on the Liberty were certainly glad to be on a non-combat ship in the middle of the Mediterranean, rather than in the Gulf of Tonkin or Mekong Delta.
But this isn't Two Years Before the Mast. In fact, Ennes's tour on the Liberty last only a few short weeks. He had scarcely settled into a routine before his new ship was shattered before his eyes.
Ennes joined the Liberty in May of 1967, as an Electronics Material Officer. Serving on a "spook ship", as the Liberty was known to Navy wives, was supposed to be a sure path to career enhancement. The Liberty's normal routine was to ply the African coast, tuning in its eavesdropping equipment on the electronic traffic in the region.
The Liberty had barely reached Africa when it received a flash message from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to sail from the Ivory Coast to the Mediterranean, where it was to re-deploy off the coast of the Sinai to monitor the Israeli attack on Egypt and the allied Arab nations.
As the war intensified, the Liberty sent a request to the fleet headquarters requesting an escort. It was denied by Admiral William Martin. The Liberty moved alone to a position in international waters about 13 miles from the shore at El Arish, then under furious siege by the IDF.
On June 6, the Joint Chiefs sent Admiral McCain, father of the senator from Arizona, an urgent message instructing him to move the Liberty out of the war zone to a position at least 100 miles off the Gaza Coast. McCain never forwarded the message to the ship.
A little after seven in the morning on June 8, Ennes entered the bridge of the Liberty to take the morning watch. Ennes was told that an hour earlier a "flying boxcar" (later identified as a twin-engine Nord 2501 Noratlas) had flown over the ship at a low level.
Ennes says he noticed that the ship's American flag had become stained with soot and ordered a new flag run up the mast. The morning was clear and calm, with a light breeze.
At 9 am, Ennes spotted another reconnaissance plane, which circled the Liberty. An hour later two Israeli fighter jets buzzed the ship. Over the next four hours, Israeli planes flew over the Liberty five more times.
When the first fighter jet struck, a little before two in the afternoon, Ennes was scanning the skies from the starboard side of the bridge, binoculars in his hands. A rocket hit the ship just below where Ennes was standing, the fragments shredded the men closest to him.
After the explosion, Ennes noticed that he was the only man left standing. But he also had been hit by more than 20 shards of shrapnel and the force of the blast had shattered his left leg. As he crawled into the pilothouse, a second fighter jet streaked above them and unleashed its payload on the hobbled Liberty.
At that point, Ennes says the crew of the Liberty had no idea who was attacking them or why. For a few moments, they suspected it might be the Soviets, after an officer mistakenly identified the fighters as MIG-15s. They knew that the Egyptian air force already had been decimated by the Israelis. The idea that the Israelis might be attacking them didn't occur to them until one of the crew spotted a Star of David on the wing of one of the French-built Mystere jets.
Ennes was finally taken below deck to a makeshift dressing station, with other wounded men. It was hardly a safe harbor. As Ennes worried that his fractured leg might slice through his femoral artery leaving him to bleed to death, the Liberty was pummeled by rockets, machine-gun fire and an Italian-made torpedo packed with 1,000-pounds of explosive.
After the attack ended, Ennes was approached by his friend Pat O'Malley, a junior officer, who had just sent a list of killed and wounded to the Bureau of Naval Personnel. He got an immediate message back. "They said, 'Wounded in what action? Killed in what action?'," O'Malley told Ennes. "They said it wasn't an 'action,' it was an accident. I'd like for them to come out here and see the difference between an action and an accident. Stupid bastards."
The cover-up had begun.
The Pentagon lied to the public about the attack on the Liberty from the very beginning. In a decision personally approved by the loathsome McNamara, the Pentagon denied to the press that the Liberty was an intelligence ship, referring to it instead as a Technical Research ship, as if it were little more than a military version of Jacques Cousteau's Calypso.
The military press corps on the USS America, where most of the wounded sailors had been taken, were placed under extreme restrictions. All of the stories filed from the carrier were first routed through the Pentagon for security clearance, objectionable material was removed with barely a bleat of protest from the reporters or their publications.
Predictably, Israel's first response was to blame the victim, a tactic that has served them so well in the Palestinian situation. First, the IDF alleged that it had asked the State Department and the Pentagon to identify any US ships in the area and was told that there were none. Then the Israeli government charged that the Liberty failed to fly its flag and didn't respond to calls for it to identify itself. The Israelis contended that they assumed the Liberty was an Egyptian supply ship called El Quseir, which, even though it was a rusting transport ship then docked in Alexandria, the IDF said it suspected of shelling Israeli troops from the sea. Under these circumstances, the Israeli's said they were justified in opening fire on the Liberty. The Israelis said that they halted the attack almost immediately, when they realized their mistake.
"The Liberty contributed decisively toward its identification as an enemy ship," the IDF report concluded. This was a blatant falsehood, since the Israelis had identified the Liberty at least six hours prior to the attack on the ship.
Even though the Pentagon knew better, it gave credence to the Israeli account by saying that perhaps the Liberty's flag had lain limp on the flagpole in a windless sea. The Pentagon also suggested that the attack might have lasted less than 20 minutes.
After the initial battery of misinformation, the Pentagon imposed a news blackout on the Liberty disaster until after the completion of a Court of Inquiry investigation.
The inquiry was headed by Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd. Kidd didn't have a free hand. He'd been instructed by Vice-Admiral McCain to limit the damage to the Pentagon and to protect the reputation of Israel.
The Kidd interviewed the crew on June 14 and 15. The questioning was extremely circumscribed. According to Ennes, the investigators "asked nothing that might be embarrassing to Israeland testimony that tended to embarrass Israel was covered with a 'Top Secret' label, if it was accepted at all."
Ennes notes that even testimony by the Liberty's communications officers about the jamming of the ship's radios was classified as "Top Secret." The reason? It proved that Israel knew it was attacking an American ship. "Here was strong evidence that the attack was planned in advance and that our ship's identity was known to the attackers (for it its practically impossible to jam the radio of a stranger), but this information was hushed up and no conclusions were drawn from it," Ennes writes.
Similarly, the Court of Inquiry deep-sixed testimony and affidavits regarding the flag-Ennes had ordered a crisp new one deployed early on the morning of the attack. The investigators buried intercepts of conversations between IDF pilots identifying the ship as flying an American flag.
It also refused to accept evidence about the IDF's use of napalm during the attacks and choose not to hear testimony regarding the duration of the attacks and the fact that the US Navy failed to send planes to defend the ship.
"No one came to help us," said Dr. Richard F. Kiepfer, the Liberty's physician. "We were promised help, but no help came. The Russians arrived before our own ships did. We asked for an escort before we ever came to the war zone and we were turned down."
None of this made its way into the 700-page Court of Inquiry report, which was completed within a couple of weeks and sent to Admiral McCain in London for review.
McCain approved the report over the objections of Captain Merlin Staring, the Navy legal officer assigned to the inquiry, who found the report to be flawed, incomplete and contrary to the evidence.
Staring sent a letter to the Judge Advocate General of the Navy disavowing himself from the report. The JAG seemed to take Staring's objections to heart. It prepared a summary for the Chief of Naval Operations that almost completely ignored the Kidd/McCain report. Instead, it concluded:
- that the Liberty was easily recognizable as an American naval vessel;
- that it's flag was fully deployed and flying in a moderate breeze;
- that Israeli planes made at least eight reconnaissance flights at close range;
- the ship came under a prolonged attack from Israeli fighter jets and torpedo boats.
This succinct and largely accurate report was stamped Top Secret by Navy brass and stayed locked up for many years. But it was seen by many in the Pentagon and some in the Oval Office. But here was enough grumbling about the way the Liberty incident had been handled that LBJ summoned that old Washington fixer Clark Clifford to do damage control. It didn't take Clifford long to come up with the official line: the Israelis simply had made a tragic mistake.
It turns out that the Admiral Kidd and Captain Ward Boston, the two investigating officers who prepared the original report for Admiral McCain, both believed that the Israeli attack was intentional and sustained. In other words, the IDF knew that they were striking an American spy ship and they wanted to sink it and kill as many sailors as possible. Why then did the Navy investigators produce a sham report that concluded it was an accident?
Twenty-five years later we've finally found out. In June of 2002, Captain Boston told the Navy Times: "Officers follow orders."
It gets worse. There's plenty of evidence that US intelligence agencies learned on June 7 that Israel intended to attack the Liberty on the following day and that the strike had been personally ordered by Moshe Dayan.
As the attacks were going on, conversations between Israeli pilots were overheard by US Air Force officers in an EC121 surveillance plane overhead. The spy plane was spotted by Israeli jets, which were given orders to shoot it down. The American plane narrowly avoided the IDF missiles.
Initial reports on the incident prepared by the CIA, Office of Naval Intelligence and the National Security Agency all reached similar conclusions.
A particularly damning report compiled by a CIA informant suggests that Israeli Defense minister Moshe Dayan personally ordered the attack and wanted it to proceed until the Liberty was sunk and all on board killed. A heavily redacted version of the report was released in 1977. It reads in part:
"[The source] said that Dayan personally ordered the attack on the ship and that one of his generals adamantly opposed the action and said, 'This is pure murder.' One of the admirals who was present also disapproved of the action, and it was he who ordered it stopped and not Dayan."
This amazing document generated little attention from the press and Dayan was never publicly questioned about his role in the attack.
The analyses by the intelligence agencies are collected in a 1967 investigation by the Defense Subcommittee on Appropriations. Two and half decades later that report remains classified. Why? A former committee staffer said: "So as not to embarrass Israel."
More proof has recently come to light from the Israeli side. A few years after Attack on the Liberty was originally published, Ennes got a call from Evan Toni, an Israeli pilot. Toni told Ennes that he had just read his book and wanted to tell him his story. Toni said that he was the pilot in the first Israeli Mirage fighter to reach the Liberty. He immediately recognized the ship to be a US Navy vessel. He radioed Israeli air command with this information and asked for instructions. Toni said he was ordered to "attack." He refused and flew back to the air base at Ashdod. When he arrived he was summarily arrested for disobeying orders.
How tightly does the Israeli lobby control the Hill? For the first time in history, an attack on an America ship was not subjected to a public investigation by Congress. In 1980, Adlai Stevenson and Barry Goldwater planned to open a senate hearing into the Liberty affair. Then Jimmy Carter intervened by brokering a deal with Menachem Begin, where Israel agreed to pony up $6 million to pay for damages to the ship. A State Department press release announced the payment said, "The book is now closed on the USS Liberty."
It certainly was the last chapter for Adlai Stevenson. He ran for governor of Illinois the following year, where his less than perfect record on Israel, and his unsettling questions about the Liberty affair, became an issue in the campaign. Big money flowed into the coffers of his Republican opponent, Big Jim Thompson, and Stevenson went down to a narrow defeat.
But the book wasn't closed for the sailors either, of course. After a Newsweek story exposed the gist of what really happened on that day in the Mediterranean, an enraged Admiral McCain placed all the sailors under a gag order. When one sailor told an officer that he was having problems living with the cover-up, he was told: "Forget about it, that's an order."
The Navy went to bizarre lengths to keep the crew of the Liberty from telling what they knew. When gag orders didn't work, they threatened sanctions. Ennes tells of the confinement and interrogation of two Liberty sailors that sounds like something right out of the CIA's MK-Ultra program.
"In an incredible abuse of authority, military officers held two young Liberty sailors against their will in a locked and heavily guarded psychiatric ward of the base hospital," Ennes writes. "For days these men were drugged and questioned about their recollections of the attack by a 'therapist' who admitted to being untrained in either psychiatry or psychology. At one point, they avoided electroshock only by bolting from the room and demanding to see the commanding officer."
Since coming home, the veterans who have tried to tell of their ordeal have been harassed relentlessly. They've been branded as drunks, bigots, liars and frauds. Often, it turns out, these slurs have been leaked by the Pentagon. And, oh yeah, they've also been painted as anti-Semites.
In a recent column, Charley Reese describes just how mean-spirited and petty this campaign became. "When a small town in Wisconsin decided to name its library in honor of the USS Liberty crewmen, a campaign claiming it was anti-Semitic was launched," writes Reese. "And when the town went ahead, the U.S. government ordered no Navy personnel to attend, and sent no messages. This little library was the first, and at the time the only, memorial to the men who died on the Liberty."
So why then did the Israelis attack the Liberty?
A few days before the Six Days War, Israel's Foreign Minister Abba Eban visited Washington to inform LBJ about the forthcoming invasion. Johnson cautioned Eban that the US could not support such an attack.
It's possible, then, that the IDF assumed that the Liberty was spying on the Israeli war plans. Possible, but not likely. Despite the official denials, as Andrew and Leslie Cockburn demonstrate in Dangerous Liaison, at the time of the Six Days War the US and Israel had developed a warm covert relationship. So closely were the two sides working that US intelligence aid certainly helped secure Israel's devastating and swift victory. In fact, it's possible that the Liberty had been sent to the region to spy for the IDF.
A somewhat more likely scenario holds that Moshe Dayan wanted to keep the lid on Israel's plan to breach the new cease-fire and invade into Syria to seize the Golan.
It has also been suggested that Dayan ordered the attack on the Liberty with the intent of pinning the blame on the Egyptians and thus swinging public and political opinion in the United States solidly behind the Israelis. Of course, for this plan to work, the Liberty had to be destroyed and its crew killed.
There's another factor. The Liberty was positioned just off the coast from the town of El Arish. In fact, Ennes and others had used town's mosque tower to fix the location of the ship along the otherwise featureless desert shoreline. The IDF had seized El Arish and had used the airport there as a prisoner of war camp. On the very day the Liberty was attacked, the IDF was in the process of executing as many as 1,000 Palestinian and Egyptian POWs, a war crime that they surely wanted to conceal from prying eyes. According to Gabriel Bron, now an Israeli reporter, who witnessed part of the massacre as a soldier: "The Egyptian prisoners of war were ordered to dig pits and then army police shot them to death."
The bigger question is why the US government would participate so enthusiastically in the cover-up of a war crime against its own sailors. Well, the Pentagon has never been slow to hide its own incompetence. And there's plenty of that in the Liberty affair: bungled communications, refusal to provide an escort, situating the defenseless Liberty too close to a raging battle, the inability to intervene in the attack and the inexcusably long time it took to reach the battered ship and its wounded.
That's but par for the course. But something else was going on that would only come to light later. Through most of the 1960s, the US congress had imposed a ban on the sale of arms to both Israel and Jordan. But at the time of the Liberty attack, the Pentagon (and its allies in the White House and on the Hill) was seeking to have this proscription overturned. The top brass certainly knew that any evidence of a deliberate attack on a US Navy ship by the IDF would scuttle their plans. So they hushed it up.
In January 1968, the arms embargo on Israel was lifted and the sale of American weapons began to flow. By 1971, Israel was buying $600 million of American-made weapons a year. Two years later the purchases topped $3 billion. Almost overnight, Israel had become the largest buyer of US-made arms and aircraft.
Perversely, then, the IDF's strike on the Liberty served to weld the US and Israel together, in a kind of political and military embrace. Now, every time the IDF attacks defenseless villages in Gaza and the West Bank with F-16s and Apache helicopters, the Palestinians quite rightly see the bloody assaults as a joint operation, with the Pentagon as a hidden partner.
Thus, does the legacy of Liberty live on, one raid after another.
-------- us
Unmanned Predators Now Living Up to Name
November 26, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Killer-Predator.html
SAN DIEGO (AP) -- The unmanned Predator aircraft is living up to its name as it evolves from an unarmed spy plane to a remote-controlled killer firing anti-tank missiles.
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. is shipping the Pentagon and the CIA a few dozen Predators -- all configured to launch Hellfire air-to-ground missiles.
The San Diego firm is also testing a next-generation Predator that can fly higher longer, faster and carry more weapons.
Predators, which can loiter surreptitiously over a battlefield, have been used to kill terror suspects in Afghanistan and Yemen. Earlier this month, a CIA-controlled Predator fired a Hellfire missile which slammed into a car in Yemen, killing six suspected al-Qaida members.
The sleek, 27-foot-long drones have also begun patrolling Iraq's southern no-fly zone within the past month, and have fired missiles against Iraqi mobile defense radars, according to Jane's Defence Weekly. Talks are underway to use the Predator to monitor suspected weapons sites in Iraq.
The Bush administration has ordered an additional 22 Predators and their associated ground stations at total a cost of about $160 million. Air Force squadrons based at Indian Springs, Nev., received about 20 of them and the CIA bought an undisclosed number.
``The word out there is it's extremely effective and very helpful to the commanders,'' Lt. Wes Ticer of the Air Force's Air Combat Command in Virginia.
A spokesman for General Atomics Aeronautical Systems declined to comment, referring all calls to the Air Force.
A Predator leaving Washington, D.C., can fly to Boston and lurk at 25,000 feet, transmitting live video and infrared images anywhere in the world for up to 22 hours. The military has lately begun piping video from Predators directly into AC-130 gunships that can then direct withering fire at targets.
``There are very few sensors that can stand over a battlefield and stare down on it the way a Predator can,'' said Bob Martinage, defense analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.
For an aircraft that came into being as a non-lethal spy plane, the Predator has undergone an unusually rapid transformation.
A year after its first test flight in 1994 -- before it had even finished its development phase -- the Predator was flying over Bosnia, providing real-time intelligence to U.S., United Nations and NATO forces.
In 2001, a modified Predator successfully test-fired a Hellfire missile. By the end of the year, the drones were firing missiles at cave complexes in Afghanistan. One of those attacks, a November operation that also included strikes by U.S. military aircraft, killed al-Qaida military head Mohammed Atef.
The military and Boeing Co. are developing the first unpiloted plane to be developed specifically to carry weapons into combat. The X-45, successfully tested at Edwards Air Force Base earlier this year, is scheduled to be deployed in 2008.
``The Predator, I think you can view it as a stepping stone to a future battlefield where unmanned systems figure more and more,'' Martinage said.
On the Net:
Air Force Predator fact sheet:
http://www.af.mil/news/factsheets/RQ--1--Predator--Unmanned--Aerial.html
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems:
http://www.gat.com/asi/aero.html
-------- propaganda wars
Putin Vetoes Curb on News of Terrorism
November 26, 2002
New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/26/international/europe/26RUSS.html
MOSCOW, Nov. 25 - President Vladimir V. Putin vetoed legislation today that would have sharply restricted news media coverage of security operations against terrorist acts like Chechen guerrillas' 57-hour siege of a theater here last month.
The legislation, which Parliament adopted overwhelmingly after the siege, was widely criticized here and abroad as an overly broad attack on press freedoms. Critics warned that it would be used not only to restrict coverage of operations against terrorists, but also to censor reporting of the war in Chechnya. Russian officials routinely describe that conflict as a "counterterrorism" operation.
Mr. Putin, whose aides have sharply criticized local and foreign coverage of the siege, announced his veto today at a meeting in the Kremlin with executives of the country's leading newspapers and television and radio stations. The executives, including those from state-controlled news organizations, made an unusual public appeal to Mr. Putin last week to veto the legislation.
Mr. Putin said the legislation had gone too far in restricting coverage, even as he again strongly rebuked some news organizations for reporting that he characterized as sensational and potentially dangerous.
"It is important that a balance be found between restrictions and informing society on the state's activities, so that the state should not regard itself as infallible," Mr. Putin said at the meeting.
The legislation would have forbidden the publication or broadcasting of terrorists' statements, as well as operations of security forces during terrorist acts. It would have also prohibited statements that could be construed by officials as justifying terrorist activities.
Had the law been in effect during the siege, critics warned, it could have restricted coverage of the guerrillas' demands, as well as the daring, but deadly commando raid. The toll from the siege continues to increase. Officials now say 129 hostages died in the rescue, most from the effects of a debilitating gas that the commandos used to subdue the guerrillas.
In addition to complaints from Russian journalists, the legislation drew rebukes from the United States and the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe. Despite his veto, Mr. Putin left open the possibility of a revised law, sending the legislation back to Parliament for revisions.
After the theater siege, several news organizations have reported harassment from the authorities. The Press Ministry complained to a radio station, Ekho Moskvy, after its Web site published an interview with a guerrilla. The government also blocked the signal of an independent television station, TVTs, while the police raided a weekly newspaper, Versiya.
Today, Mr. Putin singled out the coverage of one television station, saying it had broadcast commandos' movements moments before they stormed the theater. The broadcast, he said, "could have led to a terrible tragedy."
Although Mr. Putin did not name the station, the Kremlin has criticized NTV for its coverage that morning. The state-controlled energy company, Gazprom, took over the network last year in what was seen as a government effort to limit independent media outlets. But NTV continues to provide fairly critical coverage of the government.
Mr. Putin warned that journalists should exercise restraint and not exploit terrorism to enhance ratings.
"The main weapon of terrorists is not bullets, machine guns or grenades," he said. "It's the blackmail of citizens and the state, and the best means of such blackmail is to turn a terrorist act into a public show."
--------
Critics Say Government Deleted Web Site Material to Push Abstinence
November 26, 2002
New York Times
By ADAM CLYMER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/26/national/26ABST.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 25 - Information on condom use, the relation between abortion and breast cancer and ways to reduce sex among teenagers has been removed from government Web sites, prompting critics to accuse the Department of Health and Human Services of censoring medical information in order to promote a philosophy of sexual abstinence.
Over the last year, the department has quietly expunged information on how using condoms protects against AIDS, how abortion does not increase the risk of breast cancer and how to run programs proven to reduce teenage sexual activity. The posting that found no link between abortion and breast cancer was removed from the department's Web site last June, after Representative Christopher H. Smith, a New Jersey Republican who is co-chairman of the House Pro-Life Caucus, wrote a letter of protest to Secretary Tommy Thompson calling the research cited by the National Cancer Institute "scientifically inaccurate and misleading to the public."
The removal of the information has set off protests from other members of Congress, mainly Democrats, and has prompted a number of liberal health advocacy groups to accuse the department of bowing to pressure from social conservatives.
The controversy began drawing attention late last month, when Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat, and other members of Congress wrote to Mr. Thompson protesting the removal of the material. Bill Pierce, the department's deputy assistant secretary for media affairs, said that in all three cases the removals were made so that material could be rewritten with newer scientific information. He also said the decisions to remove material had been made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the National Institutes of Health without any urging from the department's headquarters.
But in one case - the removal of information about condoms from a C.D.C. Web site - he was contradicting a C.D.C. official. That official, Dr. Ron Valdiserri, deputy director of the center's program for H.I.V., S.T.D. and TB Prevention, said on Oct. 31, when questioned about the removal of Web site information at a news briefing on syphilis trends, that it was a joint C.D.C.-Health and Human Services decision. Asked about the contradiction, Mr. Pierce said it was a C.D.C. "decision to do it."
The department has previously been accused of subverting science to politics by purging advisory committees and choosing scientific experts with views on occupational health favorable to industry.
In an interview, Mr. Waxman said: "We're concerned that their decisions are being driven by ideology and not science, particularly those who want to stop sex education. It appears that those who want to urge abstinence-only as a policy, whether it's effective or not, don't want to suggest that other programs work, too."
One Republican congressman, Representative James C. Greenwood of Pennsylvania, joined Mr. Waxman and 10 other Democrats, in writing Secretary Thompson on July 9 to complain about the deletion of the breast cancer report. Mr. Greenwood had no comment today.
Mr. Smith, who asked that the breast cancer report be expunged, could not be reached. In his letter, which was signed by 27 of his colleagues in the House, objections to the study were termed scientific, not political. Their letter contended that the large majority of studies showed a relationship between abortion and breast cancer, and argued that the study relied on by the National Cancer Institute "contains many significant flaws."
The deletions have caused anger among some health activists. Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, had a sharp criticism of H.H.S. She said: "They are gagging scientists and doctors. They are censoring medical and scientific facts. It's ideology and not medicine. The consequences to the health and well-being of American citizens are secondary to this administration."
James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth, a public health organization dealing with adolescent sexual health, objected to the removal of information on programs aimed at reducing sexual activity among teenagers, which was contained on the Web site of the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, saying that there "seems to be a concerted effort to censor science and research that supports contraception in favor of `abstinence-only until marriage' programs."
Terje Anderson of the National Association of People with AIDS, speaking of the deleted condom information, which was removed from the National Center for H.I.V., S.T.D. and TB Prevention Web site on July 23, 2001, said, "Something doesn't need to disappear for a year and a half to be updated."
The Web site said, in part: "Studies have shown that latex condoms are highly effective in preventing H.I.V. transmission."
Kitty Bina, a spokeswoman for the C.D.C. in Atlanta, said the revised version, which would explain that condoms did not always provide protection from other sexually transmitted diseases, had been sent to department headquarters for review.
The National Cancer Institute's removed document, "Abortion and Breast Cancer," said: "The current body of scientific evidence suggests that women who have had either induced or spontaneous abortion have the same risk as other women for developing breast cancer."
Dorie Hightower, a press officer at the National Cancer Institute, said: "We regularly review our fact sheets. We regularly update them for accuracy and scientific relevance. This was taken off the Web to review it for accuracy in July." She said that the review was to see if there had been other scientific studies. "There is supposed to be an interim statement that is going to be posted shortly," she said.
The C.D.C. Web site had also published information about intervention programs designed to discourage teenage sexual activity. Some mentioned abstinence, one mentioned condoms. Katharine Harvin, speaking for the C.D.C. in Atlanta, said the information was removed in June because some "communities and schools did not adopt packaged interventions, because some parts were disliked, or parts were liked and disliked."
--------
Iraq Inspectors Don't Want Journalists
November 26, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Journalists-Role.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The inspectors don't want journalists at their elbows. The Iraqis say they'll give them free rein. With their cameras and instant analysis, international journalists have become an early point of contention in the tense showdown over Iraq.
When the two leaders of the inspection program -- Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei -- met with Iraqi officials last week, they made clear that they did not want journalists tagging along with inspectors -- especially at suspected weapons sites.
``We don't want journalists to be with us in the facilities,'' said Melissa Fleming, spokeswoman of the International Atomic Energy Agency. ``We believe we can't carry out our professional job'' with journalists in tow.
But Iraq, which maintains one of the most restrictive press policies in the Mideast, is now championing free access for journalists -- at least as far as covering the inspections is concerned. Iraqi officials say they want maximum media coverage to prove to the world that they don't have weapons of mass destruction, despite Washington's claims to the contrary.
``We will allow everybody to follow in order that international public opinion be acquainted with what is going on in our country and from our point of view, the press will be granted full access to every single site,'' an Iraqi official said on condition of anonymity. ``Taking into consideration the transparency of our position, we are not hiding anything. Every journalist is allowed.''
U.N. officials appeared concerned that reporters, lacking the inspectors' technical and scientific expertise, might be too quick to report that no banned materials had been found before the experts had time to draw their own conclusions.
Apparently realizing the impossibility of excluding the media entirely, the U.N. team proposed that a limited number of journalists representing print, photos and television be allowed to go along on the first inspection Wednesday. The U.N. team proposed that it organize and manage the media pool.
The Iraqis, however, insisted it was their country and they would be responsible for media arrangements. On Tuesday, the Information Ministry told each news organization that it would be permitted to send at least two representatives along with the inspectors.
It was unclear, however, how the arrangement would work and whether journalists would be permitted to enter the sites. Senior inspector Dimitriou Perricos told reporters Tuesday that journalists could accompany the teams to the site but must stay outside.
``We have lots of work to do,'' Perricos said. ``We want to be friends.''
The U.N. team is clearly reluctant to have journalists reporting what the inspectors have or have not found, especially since those findings may not be clear to the professionals themselves without lengthy analysis of data.
Blix told the U.N. Security Council on Monday that he had advised the Iraqis that inspections were ``serious business'' and ``could not be allowed to turn into some circus.''
``We want to be the ones who draw the conclusions about what we see,'' Fleming said. ``We are the experts. Our nuclear inspectors know what given `dual use' items might mean, whereas a journalist doesn't. So we don't think it will be helpful at all to have the media with us during inspection. We hope to be as forthcoming as we can, after an inspection to provide a certain amount of information.''
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Embracing Big Brother
By William Raspberry,
Monday, November 25, 2002
Washington Post; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A34771-2002Nov24?language=printer
An article in last Tuesday's Wall Street Journal is the perfect point of departure for thinking about "homeland security'' -- both the vast new department and the legislative initiatives that are supposed to protect us from terrorism.
The story, in a nutshell, is that the FBI assembled a lookout list of hundreds of people the agency wanted to talk to. It then circulated the list to big banks, travel and car-rental agencies -- even to Las Vegas casino operators.
Two things happened, according to the FBI. First, the effort helped the agency locate some people with information of possible relevance to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Second, the FBI has "lost control of that list," which, however, is still circulating.
One version showed up on a South American security-related Web site under the heading "List of Suspected Terrorists Sent by the FBI to Financial Institutions." An unknown number of innocent people have found themselves labeled as terrorists and, if not kept off planes entirely, at least subjected to long delays and other inconveniences.
But we seem to be going along blithely with such efforts. I can't tell you how often I've heard some version of: If you don't have anything to hide, you shouldn't care that the government is watching your mail, monitoring your phone calls, clawing through your financial records or reading your e-mail. That nonchalance is especially commonplace as America continues to do battle against international terrorism. The response, in effect, is that terrorism is such a threat that it's worth giving up all we hold dear in order to oppose it.
Nor is privacy the only thing Americans seem prepared to sacrifice. There has been astonishingly little response to the government's continuing classification of people thought to have ties to al Qaeda so that they have neither recourse to the U.S. court system nor the protection of the Geneva Conventions for prisoners of war. We just hold them till we get tired of holding them, with no need for public justification.
There's been hardly a peep about the new rules that allow private elements of America's "critical infrastructure'' -- utilities, for instance -- an exemption from the normal workings of the Freedom of Information Act. The way the law is written seems to put someone who blows the whistle on illegal activity in the company in danger of criminal prosecution.
Closer to home, even the media haven't made much noise about elements of the new legislation that seem (to me, at least) to put journalists in the position of serving as government agents. It's one thing to believe, as I do, that most American journalists would (and should) volunteer information on activities that seemed to put their country in jeopardy. It's quite another to be told by the government: You must tell us whom you talked to and what you found out so we can decide the question of jeopardy.
There's not much question that the more the government can find out about what all of us are doing, the more likely it will be able to catch prospective and actual terrorists. In similar fashion, the more speed-recording cameras the police can install and the more private workers they are willing to cut in for a piece of the fines they collect, the more speeders and other miscreants they are likely to bring to heel. I still don't like it -- and not solely because of the almost limitless potential for abuse.
Too much of what the government is getting in this new dispensation is stuff that Attorney General John Ashcroft and others wanted long before Sept. 11, 2001 -- for instance the right of the FBI to get a warrant to search your home, even in your absence, go through your things and download the contents of your computer.
Congress twice denied the request for such authority. Now it has granted it. The war on terror, you know.
But as President Bush himself told us, the war on terror is a long-term affair, with no end in sight. What's to keep the same thing from being true of the recently granted "exceptions" to our personal liberties? And why do we seem not to care?
----
Homeland Security Moves to Begin March 1
By JENNIFER LOVEN
Associated Press Writer
Nov 26, 2002
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/B/BUSH_HOMELAND_SECURITY?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
Attacks-Glance: President Bush signs the homeland security bill. http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/files/photos/JSA105112515.html?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The long-sought Department of Homeland Security will begin taking shape March 1 when the Secret Service, Customs Service and several huge agencies will be folded into the massive new department.
It will be fully operational by Sept. 30, 2003 - more than two years after the attacks that prompted the overhaul. Critics warn there will be problems along the way.
"The threat of mass murder on our own soil will be met with a unified, effective response," President Bush said Monday as he signed a bill creating the new 170,000-person agency.
Bush chose longtime political ally Tom Ridge and two high-powered deputies to lead the new Department of Homeland Security and mount a "united, effective response" against terrorism on U.S. soil.
Within hours of signing the department into law Monday, Bush asked the Senate to approve his hand-picked leadership team and submitted his transition blueprint to Congress. That started a 90-day clock ticking after which agencies may begin moving to the new department.
The plan calls for a large portion of the department to take shape March 1, when the Secret Service, Coast Guard, Customs Service, Immigration and Naturalization Service and a few other agencies fold their employees and budgets into the new Cabinet entity.
Other changes will continue in phases even as the new agency searches for permanent housing, according to an outline of the shift distributed by the White House. According to the months-in-the-making plan, the final pieces will be in place by Sept. 30, 2003, more than two years after the attacks that prompted the overhaul and ahead of the year-plus transition process predicted earlier Monday by White House press secretary Ari Fleischer.
But even as Bush lauded the biggest government shake-up in more than a half-century as "historic action to defend the United States," he offered a sobering assessment of the terrorist threat.
"In a free and open society, no department of government can completely guarantee our safety against ruthless killers who move and plot in shadows," the president said at an overflow East Room ceremony.
For Ridge's deputy, Bush is nominating Navy Secretary Gordon England, a former General Dynamics Corp. vice president. Asa Hutchinson, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration and a former GOP congressman from Arkansas, is Bush's pick for undersecretary of border and transportation security.
Bush initially opposed creation of a Homeland Security Department. Facing criticism from Democrats, he embraced the concept in June and used it as a political issue in the midterm election campaign.
In the 57-year-old Ridge, Bush picked a Vietnam hero, 12-year congressional veteran and longtime political ally of the Bush family who was on the president's short list of potential running mates in 2000.
Raised in blue-collar Erie, Pa., Ridge worked summers as a union laborer and went to Harvard University.
Nearly 14 months ago, he left his position as Pennsylvania governor to serve in the White House and has won praise as the president's homeland security adviser for improving communication between Washington and local governments.
His most visible creation - the color-coded national warning system - became an instant butt of jokes but has helped Americans understand the ebbs and flows in terrorism threats, even if they're still unsure what, if anything, to do about the dangers.
No one else was seriously considered for the top job at the new department, Bush aides said.
The centrist views that made a vice presidential nomination untenable to conservatives in 2000 - Ridge supports abortion rights - could help him in his new post. His record of accommodating unions could help heal a rift between the White House and labor groups representing federal employees that oppose a provision allowing Bush to waive collective bargaining rules in the new department.
"He treated us with decency and dignity and respect, and was more than fair to state employees at the collective bargaining table," said Ed Keller of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 13, the largest public employees union in Pennsylvania.
Creating the department will involve merging $40 billion in budgets from a broad swath of well-protected bureaucratic turf. Critics warn that problems are sure to crop up.
Dwight Ink, a former Office of Management and Budget and General Services official, said: "I wouldn't expect all the warts to be worked out in the first year."
Ridge was more optimistic.
"Hopefully from day one we'll see tangible results," he said on CNN. "I understand that blending 22 departments and agencies and 170,000 people is going to be a very complicated, time-consuming task."
On the Net:
White House site: http://www.whitehouse.gov/
----
Cops Sued Over Homeless
Lawsuit alleges NYPD increased arrests instead of services
By Pete Bowles STAFF WRITER
November 26, 2002
Newsday
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/newyork/ny-nyhome263020163nov26,0,2516916.story?coll=ny-nynews-reddots-headlines
A police initiative that has resulted in the arrests of homeless people was described in a federal lawsuit yesterday as "a heartless attack" against those living on the street and a violation of their Constitutional rights.
Advocates for the homeless, in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, contend that a change in city policy resulted in the arrests of 272 homeless people from Oct. 26 to Nov. 21, a sharp increase over previous months.
The suit contends the mission of the Police Department's homeless outreach unit has been changed from offering services to the homeless and directing them to shelters, to arresting them.
"As a result, homeless people routinely are 'put through the system,' which often results in their being held in jail overnight," the suit contends. "Moreover, the arrest of homeless persons often results in their property being lost or destroyed."
But Gail Donoghue, a special assistant to the city's Corporation Counsel, denied any change in city policy.
"The mission of the Homeless Outreach Unit has not changed," she said. "The mission continues to be the offering of services to assist the homeless in finding shelter and safety while at the same time maintaining the quality of life in New York City."
The suit, filed by Picture the Homeless Inc., an organization comprised of homeless and formerly homeless people, also alleges that the 80 police officers in the Homeless Outreach Unit have been threatened with transfers to less desirable commands if they do not arrest the homeless.
The suit, prepared by the New York Civil Liberties Union, asks that the court direct the NYPD to stop singling out the homeless for arrest.
-------- drug war
[To reply - mailto:letters@washingtontimes.com]
Trading drugs
EDITORIAL •
November 26, 2002
WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20021126-604726.htm
"We're not making a lot of progress," a U.S. trade official told us yesterday regarding efforts in Geneva to launch a new round of world trade talks. "There seems to be a fair amount of give and take: People give something and then they take it back."
At issue are intellectual property rights - the laws that protect innovators and inventors from having their work pirated. Last November, trade negotiators agreed to provisions that grant the poorest countries the ability to purchase cheaper generic drugs to treat rampant diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. Now, there's a much-needed move to clarify some of these exemptions, but left-wing activists and the generic drug industry have combined to aggressively expand them. Thanks to some pliant trade ministers, draft language currently circulating contains legal holes that would allow virtually any country to declare any ailment a "public health problem." Indeed, in August, Egypt did just that with erectile dysfunction. Now, 12 companies produce knock-off Viagra at knock-off prices to combat this so-called crisis.
Not surprisingly, the pharmaceutical industry would like some strong language that limits the patent waivers to their original intention. But so far, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick has hit a dead end, and the fear is that he may cede ground.
The temptation to do so is strong. The World Trade Organization is a house of many mansions, and bad blood spills throughout. If a solution to the patent problem isn't reached, efforts to cement other trade deals could be at risk. In addition to a new round of world trade talks, Mr. Zoellick's hope to gain bilateral trade agreements with other partners could be dashed. Many of those partners, such as Singapore and the Americas, stand to benefit greatly from looser patent protections in the drug industry. Their willingness to cut deals later on hinges on how well they are humored, and Mr. Zoellick may feel that the only way to pave the way for future progress is by appeasement now.
Of course, opening markets is an important and worthy goal. Greater competition drives greater innovation, and that benefits everyone. However, free trade's success isn't measured by how many agreements are signed, but on how the world marketplace is best served.
That's where the unlikely alliance of anti-capitalist fringe groups and aggressively capitalist generics companies falls short. All the wonder drugs out there now are made possible because of intellectual property protections, not in spite of them. After all, it isn't governments (much less generics) that develop these treatments. Terry Barnett, president of pharmaceutical company Novartis' American operations, didn't mince words in his prediction. Soft patent protections "would threaten the innovative capacity of the industry," he told us.
The victims would not just be the pharmaceutical CEOs, but everyone everywhere. Profits are just the seed capital that goes into finding new cures. Only three of every 10 new medicines that go on the market break even - and only two of those actually make money. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. The pharmaceutical industry spends billions of dollars in research and development that lead to dead ends.
Indeed, pharmaceutical companies do more to help the world, rich and poor, than left-wing agitators and drug pirates. In standing firm for patent protections on drugs, Mr. Zoellick can protect not only an American industry's interests, but the world's interests, too.
-------- homeland security
Navy Secretary Is Nominated for No. 2 Post
November 26, 2002
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/26/politics/26ENGL.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 25 - In announcing his choice of Gordon R. England to be No. 2 at the new Department of Homeland Security, President Bush picked a man today with one leg in the corporate world and the other in national security affairs.
Mr. England, 65, has served since May 2001 as secretary of the Navy. From 1997 to 2001 he was executive vice president of General Dynamics.
A native of Baltimore, Mr. England earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland in 1961 and a master's degree in business administration from Texas Christian University in 1975.
Mr. England has also served as a member of the Defense Science Board, a panel that advises the secretary of defense on numerous issues, especially technology.
His civic and charitable work includes serving as vice chairman of the board of Goodwill Industries International and on the U.S.O. board of governors.
At General Dynamics, he was responsible for information systems and international business. His official Navy biography also lists corporate positions as executive vice president of the Combat Systems Group, president of General Dynamics Land Systems and president of General Dynamics Fort Worth aircraft company.
Pentagon officials who have watched Mr. England's tenure as Navy secretary said he impressed the service's sailors and flight crews with his knowledge of military affairs without ever posing as a warrior.
Working with Adm. Vern Clark, the chief of naval operations, and Gen. James L. Jones, commandant of the Marines, he was able to lobby for the programs of the Navy and Marines with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the rest of the executive branch and on Capitol Hill, officials said.
"It was a persuasive team in making the case for their programs, making their arguments fit the priorities that Rumsfeld had set, and also to meet the priorities of Congress," one senior military official said.
Mr. England's nomination now goes to the Senate for confirmation.
-------- terrorism
Analysis: Al Qaida chief in U.S. custody
By Richard Sale
UPI Terrorism Correspondent
November 26, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20021125-100548-6887r.htm
The recent arrest of a top Al Qaida field operations commander, Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, ends the career of a specialist in plotting attacks at sea and a 15-year associate of suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, according to administration officials. Top Stories
One U.S. government analyst said al Nashiri, in his 30s, a Yemeni born in Saudi Arabia, has been "the directing mind" for al Qaida operations in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea. He has also been active in operations against U.S. targets in Southeast and Southwest Asia, said this official, who asked not to be identified.
According to a former senior CIA official, al Nashiri was also the master plotter of the Oct. 6 bombing of the oil tanker Limburg and the October 2000 suicide attack on the USS Cole that killed 17 American sailors and injured 39 others.
Rohan Gunaratna, author of "Inside Al Qaida," said al Nashiri was involved in a plot two years ago to bomb U.S. embassies in Yemen, Bangladesh and India, foiled when two accomplices were arrested along with 100 pounds of high-explosive.
A longtime U.S. intelligence official, who asked not to be identified, said al Nashiri is believed to have been plotting additional strikes against U.S. warships and other craft transiting the Suez Canal or operating in the Red Sea.
Al Nashiri was "very intent on causing economic damage" not only to the United States but to "Western targets in general," focusing on oil tankers traveling the region, this official said.
Al Nashiri was also involved in plotting against targets in Malaysia, and may have been on a mission when arrested while at an airport en route to Malaysia about 10 days ago, he said.
Al Nashiri is in CIA custody and being interrogated by the CIA at a "secret site in a foreign country." The official refused to elaborate but confirmed that U.S. intelligence specialists are closely examining the hard drive of al Nashiri's computer. Former CIA counter-terrorism chief Vince Cannistraro told United Press International that the interrogation of al Nashiri has already produced a spate of terror alerts against U.S. targets such navy ports, facilities and warships in the region.
Former CIA counter-terrorism official Larry Johnson said Malaysia acted as an alternative planning base for last year's Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
On Wednesday, the State Department specifically mentioned Malaysia as a country where Americans and foreigners could face risk of attack by the Jemaat Islamiyah terror network, whose leaders were trained in Afghanistan by bin Laden.
But al Nashiri's main efforts appear to have been directed at naval targets. In addition to being the plotter and explosive specialist in the USS Cole attack, al Nashiri is alleged to have plotted to sink the USS Sullivans in Aden the same year, and this year was involved in a scheme to sink U.S. and British warships in the Straits of Gibraltar -- a plot broken up in Morocco, U.S. officials said.
He was also involved in an earlier plot to blow up U.S. navy warships in Bahrain, U.S. officials said.
Gunaratna told United Press International that al Nashiri had been trained by bin Laden's master bomber, Abu Khebab, in Afghanistan at the Derunta camp near Jalabad.
According to federal law-enforcement officials, al Nashiri is considered the most senior al Qaida operative to be captured since the arrest of Abu Zubayda, al Qaida's operations chief in Pakistan last March.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Alternative Energy Poll
ENN,
November 26, 2002 (and ongoing)
http://enn.com/indepth/energy/index.asp
Fossil fuels are depleted 100,000 times faster than they are formed. World energy consumption is expected to increase 40 to 50 percent by the year 2010, while the global mix of fuels - renewables (18 percent), nuclear (4 percent) and fossil (78 percent) - is projected to remain substantially the same as today. Where do we go from here?
ENN Poll
Which renewable energy source has the greatest potential? Hydro Wind Geothermal Other
-------- energy
California ethanol switch to boost gas prices, refiner profits
Story by Erwin Seba
REUTERS USA:
November 26, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/18769/story.htm
HOUSTON - California's switch to ethanol as a pollution-reducing gasoline additive will likely mean bad news at the pumps for motorists but better profits for the state's oil refiners, analysts say.
"It has the potential to be a mess," said Bryan Caviness, of Fitch Ratings.
"This is going to have the same effect on supply as removing an entire refinery from California," said one gasoline dealer. "That will have the effect of boosting prices and creating excellent refining profit margins."
California decided to switch to ethanol from another gasoline additive, MTBE, due to evidence MTBE is contaminating ground water, largely by leaking from underground fuel tanks.
Both MTBE and ethanol are oxygenates designed to reduce tailpipe emissions by