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NUCLEAR
Another US war crime: the use of depleted uranium munitions in Iraq
Policy Group Calls for More Research on Health Effects of Depleted Uranium
India Test - Fires Medium - Range Missile
Russia Says Only UN Body Can Object to Iran Plant
Nuclear nightmare in Iraq
Leukaemia peril of the 'Iraqi Chernobyl'
IAEA Officials Prepare to Return to Iraq
Teaching Youth to Start Worrying About the Bomb
N. KOREA CONTINUES MISSILE EXPORTS TO MIDEAST
Canada to Join U.S. Missile Defense Talks
Canada, U.S. to Talk Missile Defense
Raytheon To Replace Russian Pu Reactors
Lawmakers Ratify Nuclear Treaty
Bush Administration Examines Steps to a Revamped Arsenal
Senators vow to pressure reluctant Yucca critics
Counties accused of misusing federal Yucca Mountain funds
The Devil's Dirt
Bid Denied for Smaller Waste Site in Utah
US dusts off nuclear card
What a Tangled Web We Weave . . .
Rockefeller Rips Lack of Iraqi WMD Finds
The Case for War is Blown Apart
Rumsfeld Denies 'False Pretext' for Iraq War
Chao trades barbs with organized labor
MILITARY
UK used cluster bombs in Iraq's urban areas
Rumsfeld's Remarks Spur U.K. War Critics
Blair's Office Defends Iraq Dossier
Boeing's pay dirt
Rep. Waxman Letter to Acting Secretary of the Army
Ravaged system frustrates doctors
Allies to Retain Larger Iraq Force as Strife Persists
Blair Visits Basra, With Praise for British Soldiers' Role
Top Palestinian Says He Hopes for Cease-Fire Pact With Hamas
Details Set for Meeting With Bush in Mideast
Classified: Censoring the Report About 9-11?
Relief for U.S. troops lacking
U.S. to Realign Troops in Asia
Despite Thin Intelligence Reports, US Plans To Overthrow Iranian Regime
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
California Official Asks Judge to Be Lenient With Pot Grower
Amnesty Calls World Less Safe
U.S. Agency to Be Cited in Suit About Trade and Child Labor
ENERGY AND OTHER
Pennsylvania Develops Wind Power Capability
Wind power sees 12 pct world market share in 2020
High Mercury Levels Found in Rain
Indian Waste Mercury Met by Activists in New York
Living near incinerator may up birth defect risk
Project Will Seek to Uncover Genetic Roots of Major Diseases
ACTIVISTS
Is there anything left that matters?
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Another US war crime: the use of depleted uranium munitions in Iraq
By Ben Nichols and Joe Lopez
29 May 2003
WSWS
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/may2003/depu-m29_prn.shtml
One of the war crimes for which the Bush administration should be prosecuted is the US military's extensive use of weapons tipped with depleted uranium (DU) during the war against Iraq.
The Pentagon has repeatedly dismissed warnings from a variety of scientific and other bodies about the potential dangers of such weaponry. In the aftermath of the war, Washington has refused to clean up the residue left behind or allow UN experts into the country to assess the potential long-term environmental and health hazards caused by depleted uranium.
In its use of DU weapons, the Bush administration has acted with complete indifference to international law and convention. In January 2001, the European Parliament voted in favor of a resolution that took the modest step of imposing a ban on the use of DU munitions while investigations were carried out into the links between DU and cancer.
In August 2002, the UN published a report which cited a series of international laws and conventions breached by the use of DU weapons, including: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the UN Charter; the UN Genocide Convention; the Convention Against Torture; the four Geneva Conventions of 1949; the Conventional Weapons Convention of 1980; and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 which all forbid the deployment of "poison or poisoned weapons" and "arms, projectiles or materials calculated to cause unnecessary suffering".
According to a recent CNN report, Pentagon and UN experts have estimated that US-led military forces used between 1,100 and 2,200 tonnes of depleted uranium during the invasion of Iraq. The amount far exceeds the 300 tonnes of depleted uranium used in the 1991 Gulf War and the 10 tonnes used by NATO forces during the bombing of Serbia in 1999.
Depleted uranium is a radioactive heavy metal, which is also chemically toxic. It is the waste product left over after the isotope uranium-235-used in nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons-has been extracted from naturally occurring uranium. What remains-depleted uranium-is composed almost entirely-99.7 percent-of the isotope uranium-238. While less radioactive than enriched or even naturally occurring uranium, DU is still toxic and its long-term affects on health are unknown.
The Pentagon has insisted on using DU munitions because they confer a significant military advantage. DU is 2.5 times denser than steel and 1.7 times the density of lead, enabling shells and bullets tipped with the substance to easily pierce most armour and concrete structures. It is also relatively cheap to manufacture-essentially being a waste product from the US nuclear industry and weapons program. DU bullets and shells emit almost no radiation prior to firing, but burn in mid air and vaporise after impact, spreading a layer of fine dust across a large area. Each DU tank shell is said to contain about five kilograms of depleted uranium.
Just days before the invasion of Iraq, Colonel James Naughton crudely summed up the reasons for using DU munitions and accused those warning of its dangers of falling for Iraqi propaganda. "The Iraqis tell us terrible things happened to our people because you used it last time. Why do they want it to go away? They want it to go away because we kicked the crap out of them-okay? I mean, there's no doubt that DU gave us a huge advantage over their tanks. They lost a lot of tanks."
Equally cynical was the response of Lieutenant Colonel Michael Sigmon, the deputy surgeon for the US Army's V Corps. Asked about the health risks of DU, he declared: "There is not really any danger, at least that we know about, for the people of Iraq." He claimed that children playing with expended DU tank shells would have to eat and practically suffocate on the depleted uranium residue before incurring any health problems.
These comments fly in the face of considerable anecdotal evidence from battlefields where DU munitions have been used-including in Iraq during the first Gulf War, in the Balkans and at the US bombing range on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques. In each case, significant increases in cancer rates, birth deformities and long-term health problems have been recorded.
A leading Iraqi specialist, Dr Salma Haddad, told reporters that several years after the 1991 Gulf War she began to encounter more and more children at Baghdad's Al Mansur Hospital with an aggressive form of cancer.
Haddad said she was particularly alarmed since the disease-acute myeloblastic leukemia-is closely associated with radiation exposure and her suspicions pointed to DU munitions. She went on to explain that the number of cancer cases admitted to her hospital was five times higher than in 1991.
Vested interests
But Pentagon officials continue to play down the dangers. Last month, spokesman Colonel David Lapan claimed that recent studies had demonstrated that DU was safe. Since 1990, he told the BBC "there've been a number of studies by the UK's Royal Society and the World Health Organisation, for example-into the health risks of DU, or lack of them. It's fair to say the 1990 study has been overtaken by them. One thing we have found in these various studies is that there are no long-term effects from DU."
In fact, the Royal Society report entitled "The health hazards of depleted uranium munitions" says nothing of the sort. The body has been one of the most vociferous in calling for a cleanup of depleted uranium and for more comprehensive tests into its health and environmental effects. It recently called on the British government to carry out health tests on troops returning from Iraq.
The study does state that the known risks of cancer are low and may only be twice as probable for people exposed to DU in the worst-case battlefield scenarios. But it also points to the need for further research. Far from being harmless, the Royal Society report explains: "DU is radioactive and poisonous. Exposure to sufficiently high levels might be expected to increase the incidence of some cancers, notably lung cancer, possibly leukemia and may damage the kidneys.
"The key question is whether exposures to DU on the battlefield are such that the increased incidence of cancer, or the likelihood of kidney damage, are insignificant or are high enough to cause concern. This is a very difficult question to answer given the lack of good quality data on some of the parameters that determine the extent of the exposure or the subsequent risk of disease."
Royal Society spokesperson Professor Brian Spratt commented last month: "The coalition needs to make clear where and how much depleted uranium was used in the recent conflict in Iraq. Although there are more pressing problems in Iraq ... the coalition needs to acknowledge that depleted uranium is a potential hazard and make inroads into tackling it by being open about where and how much depleted uranium has been deployed."
But neither Washington nor London has shown the slightest willingness to provide the necessary information, let alone acknowledge the dangers. When the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) asked to be allowed to send a team to Iraq to make an assessment of the environmental and health threats posed to the Iraqi population, the Bush administration refused.
Previous UNEP studies on depleted uranium have indicated that the substance can attack the kidneys if ingested most likely through contaminated water or cause lung cancer if the dust is inhaled.
Further evidence of the dangers of DU munitions has been provided by Major Doug Rokke, a Vietnam and Gulf War combat veteran. Rokke has specialised in hazardous materials and emergency medicine for over 20 years and has campaigned in recent years against the use of DU. He was assigned to clean up depleted uranium after the 1991 Gulf War in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
In a speech in January published by the magazine In These Times, Rokke denounced the use of DU munitions declaring: "We have willfully spread it all over the place. We've refused to clean up the mess; we've refused to provide medical care; not only to the American 'friendly fire' casualties who survived, but also to the DU cleanup teams; and we've refused to supply medical care to all the thousands and thousands of other people, including women and children-which makes it an indiscriminate weapon."
Rokke explained that indiscriminate weapons are banned by international law and that UN has issued several calls for a ban on the use of DU-which the US has rejected. Speaking from his experience in the first Gulf War, he warned: "When you leave all the contamination there, people are going to continue to get sick from just the uranium munitions alone... The army knows it's a problem, and they just don't care. They're going to use DU... When you go to war, you use the best weapon you have, and you will not ever give it up."
Washington also has other interests at stake. If DU is proven to have a long-term health impact, the US faces charges of criminal negligence and claims for compensation, not only from civilians in the Middle East and the Balkans, but from thousands of US veterans who have suffered debilitating illnesses.
Moreover, any cleanup of DU residue in Iraq and elsewhere would involve huge costs. According to an article in the US publication Newsday last month, the estimated cost of clearing a closed 500-acre military facility-the Jefferson Proving Ground in Indiana-was between $4 billion and $5 billion. The firing range was thought to contain about one fifth the amount of depleted uranium used during the 1991 Gulf War and many times less than the tonnage used this year on Iraq.
----
Policy Group Calls for More Research on Health Effects of Depleted Uranium
Steve Baragona
United Nations
29 May 2003
http://www.voanews.com/article.cfm?objectID=0E2E8F7A-44E7-45C5-8D6E6F9D0536EAE5#
A nuclear policy group is calling for more research on the health effects of special ammunition used by the U.S. military in the Iraq and other wars.
Tank-busting shells made of an extremely dense metal called depleted uranium are a Pentagon favorite. The super-hard shells penetrate heavy armor extremely well. They were used extensively in Iraq, as well as in the last Gulf war, and in the Balkans.
But depleted uranium is slightly radioactive, and can be toxic at high levels. Executive Director Charles Sheehan-Miles of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute says civilians may be at risk, even after combat is over.
"On impact the rounds burn into tiny particles. These blow into the air from the explosion," he said. "They settle around the impact site. They fill the damaged vehicle, and they can be inhaled or ingested by anyone who enters or climbs on the damaged vehicle."
Mr. Sheehan-Miles says children playing on damaged tanks may be especially at risk. Depleted uranium that finds its way into food crops and ground water may also pose a health risk.
Iraqi health officials have reported increases in birth defects and cancers since the 1991 Gulf War, especially in children. These figures have not been independently verified.
Mr. Sheehan-Miles says the health risks from depleted uranium, or DU, may be greater after the latest war in Iraq.
"DU munitions were fired over a longer period of time in sustained combat for several weeks. They were also used in highly populated urban areas," he said. "DU munitions were fired in Baghdad and in the other cities. So this dramatically increases the urgency of dealing with this issue."
The U.S. military disagrees. Pentagon officials say depleted uranium ammunition does not pose any health risk.
Studies on the issue have been mostly incomplete or inconclusive. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences says there is some evidence that depleted uranium exposure does not cause kidney damage, and at low doses does not cause lung cancer. But the study says there is not enough data to make a conclusion about higher-level exposure. And the Academy says it just can not say whether depleted uranium causes other kinds of cancer, or other diseases.
The Nuclear Policy Research Institute is calling for independent studies on the health effects of depleted uranium in Iraq. Mr. Sheehan-Miles says if the coalition forces do not trust Iraqi studies on depleted uranium, they need to allow outside doctors to evaluate the claims.
"The medical experts need to make that determination, not policy experts," he said.
The Institute is also calling on coalition forces to cordon off and clean up depleted uranium-contaminated sites.
-------- india / pakistan
India Test - Fires Medium - Range Missile
May 29, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-India-Missile-Test.html
NEW DELHI, India (AP) -- India test-fired a medium-range surface-to-air missile Thursday as part of an effort to develop weapons systems the government has said are necessary to improve the country's defenses against neighboring Pakistan and China.
The test of the Akash missile was successful, the Press Trust of India news agency said.
The Indian-made Akash has a range of 16 miles. It is one of the five missiles under various stages of development by the state-owned Defense Research and Development Organization, the news agency said.
The Akash missile has undergone several flight tests. The missile is capable of carrying a payload of 110 pounds.
India says it needs the missiles to defend itself against Pakistan to the west and China to the north.
India and China fought a brief mountain war in 1962. India and Pakistan have fought three wars since gaining independence from Britain in 1947 -- two of them over the disputed Himalayan territory of Kashmir.
India conducted its first nuclear test in 1974. Further tests in 1998 caused international outrage and provoked economic sanctions by the United States and other Western nations.
Pakistan followed suit with nuclear tests of its own.
Western nations gradually lifted sanctions against both countries as they joined the international campaign against the al-Qaida terror network and the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001.
-------- iran
Russia Says Only UN Body Can Object to Iran Plant
May 29, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-russia-iran.html
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia ignored U.S. objections on Thursday and vowed to keep building a nuclear power plant in Iran, saying only a special U.N. meeting could assess whether Tehran was violating promises not to use it to produce weapons.
Days before Russia hosts summit talks with U.S. President George Bush, the station at Bushehr remained a serious irritant as President Vladimir Putin tries to soothe differences over his refusal to back the war to topple Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Russia's Foreign Ministry said Moscow would defer to the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog in determining whether Iran was keeping promises to confine its nuclear program to peaceful purposes.
``We do note that unofficial information has recently appeared about military applications of Iran's nuclear program,'' spokesman Alexander Yakovenko said in a statement.
``Russia considers that only the International Atomic Energy Agency, as a competent international body, can evaluate Iran's non-proliferation commitments.''
The IAEA is due to discuss Iran next month and could rule it in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, signed by Tehran in 1970.
Yakovenko said the IAEA had so far found no violations by Iran of its non-proliferation obligations and Moscow expected the June meeting to lift all remaining concerns.
Atomic Energy Minister Alexander Rumyantsev, meanwhile, said U.S. nuclear experts had never suggested Moscow's cooperation with Tehran ran counter to existing international agreements.
``The U.S. side understands that our work is absolutely legal,'' Rumyantsev, whose ministry is building the Bushehr reactor, told Ekho Moskvy radio.
``But they say: You are boosting their scientific and technological potential and that could indirectly help them build nuclear weapons. My answer is: 'You must understand that this is not serious.'''
U.S. PRESSURE
In the runup to weekend summit talks in St Petersburg between Putin and Bush, U.S. officials have intensified pressure on Iran, saying it has failed to take action against extremists. Washington has long accused Iran of trying to acquire nuclear weapons and urged Moscow to halt nuclear cooperation with it.
Iran denies the project has military applications.
A Russian deputy foreign minister this week appeared to adopt a more conciliatory attitude toward U.S. appeals, telling Iran's ambassador of ``concern over serious, outstanding issues'' with its nuclear program.
But within 24 hours, Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov again threw Russia's weight behind the $800 million Bushehr plant. He said there could be no objections to the project, from the United States or any other country.
U.S. officials, asking why oil-rich Iran needs a nuclear power station, have said the issue will be on the agenda in St Petersburg, Putin's home town celebrating its 300th anniversary.
The daily Izvestia said the dispute had the potential to further upset the delicate alliance with the United States, formed after the September 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. targets.
``On the eve of the St Petersburg meeting between presidents Bush and Putin, Washington is defining its position,'' the daily said in a front-page article.
``Moscow's nuclear cooperation with Tehran is today, after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, the biggest thorn in the side of U.S.-Russian relations. The Bush administration is sending the Kremlin a clear signal.''
-------- iraq / inspections
Nuclear nightmare in Iraq
29 May 2003
Janes
http://www.janes.com/security/international_security/news/jid/jid030529_1_n.shtml
Throughout May, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has expressed mounting concern at the outbreak of looting that has been taking place at Iraq's abandoned nuclear sites - which number around 1,000 in total. JID has commissioned a leading British nuclear analyst to assess the security risk posed by the missing material and the golden opportunities the chaos in Iraq may have presented to international terrorists.
According to eyewitness reports as many as 400 looters a day have been ransacking the Al-Tuwaitha complex south of Baghdad, regarded as the main site for Iraq's former nuclear weapons programme and covering an area of 120 acres. The crowd got in by simply cutting the surrounding barbed-wire fence in the absence of security patrols.
Seals placed at Iraqi nuclear sites by the IAEA during past inspections have been tampered with and metal containers of 300-400kg of natural and low-enriched uranium and uranium oxide, either stolen or tipped out and the containers used for domestic purposes such as milking cows and storing drinking water, milk and tomatoes intended for human consumption. Documents and lab equipment have been stolen, while other materials have been dumped on the floors. The environmental consequences may prove disastrous.
Many drums of radioactive material, including plutonium, were found behind steel doors in Al-Tuwaitha's Building 39, a permanent storage site for low-level nuclear waste. The lock had been broken on Building 55 and readings consistent with thorium, cobalt and caesium were recorded. Some cylinders were emitting so much gamma and neutron radiation that the team could not interpret the results. Radioactive material may have been deliberately left there to expose the occupying forces to levels that would prove dangerous.
On 20 May, US authorities finally removed their objection to resumption of IAEA inspections in Iraq. The US has asked the inspectors to examine the plant along with its own experts, and will consider the return of UN weapons inspectors to Iraq to hunt for the elusive weapons of mass destruction.
The chaos in Iraq is creating the kind of environmental and security risks previously seen only in the territories of the former Soviet Union after 1991.
The Baghdad Nuclear Research Facility, another important nuclear site that has been looted, houses the remains of the Osirak reactor bombed by Israel in 1981 and the USA during the 1991 Gulf war. It contains spent reactor fuel, as well as radioactive isotopes including caesium and cobalt - materials that could be used by terrorists for making radiological dispersal devices (commonly known as 'dirty bombs'). Terrorists could obtain the material either directly or from looters selling material on the black market.
----
Leukaemia peril of the 'Iraqi Chernobyl'
By Anthony Browne
May 29, 2003
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,5944-695792,00.html
MORE than 1,000 villagers could die of leukaemia after the looting of tonnes of radioactive material from Iraq's atomic plant, the country's national nuclear inspector said.
The poverty-stricken locals have spent weeks drinking milk and water kept in hundreds of barrels that had previously been used to store a dangerous uranium compound.
Initial tests by Iraqi scientists suggest that entire villages are contaminated with radiation, including the buildings, water supply, lakes, crops and livestock.
The villagers of al-Wardia near the Tuwaitha nuclear facility, 30 miles south of Baghdad, have been told that they are all at risk of cancer and that the entire area may have to be evacuated and decontaminated.
Dr Hasham Abd al-Mlek, Iraq's national nuclear inspector, who has worked at Tuwaitha since 1988 and is now working with the American authorities, told The Times: "There are around 2,000 people in the villages, and most of them are affected. More than a thousand people will get cancer. They need medication and the area needs decontamination. Really, this is the Iraqi Chernobyl."
The coalition civilian administration of Iraq, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, is planning to give emergency health tests to thousands of people in the area to find out how contaminated they are with uranium.
The US military has set up a special "nuclear disablement team" to reclaim the radioactive material from the villagers and to make the area safe, although they are unable to give assurances that all the material has been accounted for and is not in the hands of terrorists.
The Tuwaitha nuclear plant was the centre of Saddam's nuclear bomb-making programme, which he abandoned in 1981 after Israeli jets bombed the first, large French-built nuclear reactor on the site. The French and Russians then built two smaller nuclear reactors for Saddam, which had insufficient capacity for a nuclear weapons programme.
The Americans bombed those reactors in the 1991 Gulf War and Tuwaitha has not been operational since. Originally, about 1,000 tonnes of a uranium oxide, called yellow cake, which Saddam needed to make a nuclear weapon, was stored there, but in recent months there were believed to be only 94 tonnes. Two tonnes of enriched uranium were left untouched by the looters.
The low-lying plant, which lies in a densely populated dusty plain, is set in the middle of a vast arid complex, surrounded by razor wire and was kept strictly off limits to locals by large security gates. During the war, however, the security gates were destroyed, the Iraqi guards fled and the entire compound was left unguarded for five days after the Americans arrived on April 5.
The villagers had lived in grinding poverty in wrecked houses just outside the compound boundaries when suddenly, for the first time, they could enter.
As he sat with other men in a local wicker-walled café, Wardia al-Jabouri, a village elder, said: "The Americans opened the doors and they knew what was inside, but they just left again, so all the people went inside."
The locals arrived in beaten-up cars and donkey carts, carrying lock-cutters to get through the internal fences, and looted most of the facility. They took not only computer equipment and furniture, but also about 200 large blue plastic barrels, each of which contained around 250kg of yellow cake.
They also took a whole range of other radioactive materials, including cobalt-60 and Americium-Beryllium, nylon bags containing a mysterious "white powder" and metal barrels painted with a skull and crossbones.
The villagers, none of whom has running water and only a few electricity, particularly treasured the blue plastic barrels for storing food and drink.
In oily, shredded clothes, Khudair Khalaf, a local welder, said: "We threw out the contents of the barrels, which was a yellow powder, on to the ground and washed them out in a ditch in the village.
"Some people used the barrels to store water, some to store cooking oil, others to sell milk from people as far away as Baghdad. The local school used two barrels. We sold barrels to people from other villages around the entire area."
Dr al-Mlek, who lives near the plant, watched the looting in horror, but was unable to stop it. "We told them they may get cancer, but they didn't listen," he said. "We spoke to the American soldiers, but they didn't listen, they just told us they were here to fight, not decontaminate. We spoke to the imam, who told people to put the barrels back, but only some did."
Eventually, the US soldiers, who now guard the centre of the site with Abrams tanks and Humvees, stopped the looting and Iraqi scientists started to test the area. Thair Ismael Jasim, an environmental scientist who was involved in the inspection, said: "These people washed the barrels, so this contamination is now everywhere in the village.
"The water is contaminated, and houses are contaminated, the animals and even vegetables are contaminated."
The inspection found that the milk from cows was contaminated, as were the ducks, and that some houses had six times the background level of radiation. One inspection team found a particularly dangerous neutron source that a man was keeping in his house, having no idea what it was.
"It was very high energy, very dangerous. The inspection team came to measure it, but ran away because the reading was so high", Dr al-Mlek said.
To the villagers, the inspection brought home to them what they had actually done. "We are very worried," Mr Khalaf said. "Our milk is polluted, our water is polluted. We know there will be cancer, that men will be infertile. It's very dangerous for our families."
The yellow cake is harmless outside the body, but, if ingested, leukaemia can start developing within about 120 days.
Only on May 18 did the US authorities finally get the barrels and the radioactive material back. They wanted troops to storm the village to seize the barrels, but the new US-appointed head of the nuclear operations, Dr Kadhar al-Abbas Hamza, persuaded them that it would be better to offer the villagers $3 (£1.80) for each barrel.
The US authorities collected about 150 barrels, but the villagers insist that there are still barrels "out there".
The US military's nuclear disablement team, formed just two months ago, has retrieved as much of the yellow cake as it can and insists that it is now stored securely.
"I do not believe there is a risk to the local population now," Colonel Mickey Freeland, head of the team, said as he stood in the sun outside the mud-brown "yellow cake factory", known as Location C.
There are fears that some of the material may have been siphoned off and could be used by terrorists to make a dirty bomb. Colonel Freeland could give little reassurance. "It is impossible to tell if any is missing," he said. But he did caution against causing a panic. "Let's not scare people. Let's determine the level of contamination, and the appropriate course of action. If there is contamination, we will clear it up. If people have ingested it, there is medication."
The Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance is now planning to screen thousands of people in the area. Officials from the United Nation's International Atomic Energy Agency will arrive on Saturday to start independent inspections.
But for the impoverished and contaminated villagers of al-Wardia, all they can do is wait, and pray.
"We can't do anything now, we are waiting for help. God help us!" Mr al-Jabouri said.
--------
IAEA Officials Prepare to Return to Iraq
May 29, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Nuclear.html
MANSIA, Iraq (AP) -- The word spread through town, trumpeted on loudspeakers attached to American vehicles: Return the containers taken from Iraq's largest nuclear facility, and we'll pay you $3 a barrel. Refuse, and you might be arrested.
Now 70 empty barrels -- purchased more than a decade ago by U.N. nuclear inspectors to store the Tuwaitha plant's 2 tons of uranium -- are in the hands of the U.S. military. The contents have vanished, however, and other stolen containers sit in a nearby schoolyard, a silent and unrecognized danger.
This is the jumbled scene that awaits the International Atomic Energy Agency, now headed back to Iraq under strictly set U.S. conditions, as it attempts to find out what happened on the Americans' watch. The team plans to arrive June 6.
The United States tried to keep the IAEA out of the country, but reluctantly agreed to its return under pressure from the arms control community, which was concerned about the plant's safety and American capability to secure the area and account for its contents.
According to U.S. and U.N. officials, the IAEA team will only be allowed to inspect Tuwaitha, 30 miles southeast of Baghdad, and not any of the other looted nuclear sites the agency had been safeguarding for more than a decade.
The United States told the IAEA that the team must be relatively small, with fewer than 10 members, and all must be safety experts rather than actual weapons inspectors. The group can remain in the country for up to two weeks but must stay on the grounds of Tuwaitha and not in Baghdad, where they had been based before the war.
``We're setting up some tents for them at Tuwaitha, and they'll stay out there,'' said Col. Tim Madere, an unconventional weapons expert with the Army's V Corps.
IAEA officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they were told the trip would be a one-time only visit. A U.S. official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said that was discussed but could change depending on how the trip goes.
IAEA officials were unhappy about the terms but said they would take what they could get.
``The mission will try to determine what nuclear material might have gone missing as a result of the looting and reports of destruction that we have seen over the last six weeks,'' said Mark Gwozdecky, IAEA spokesman.
He said the team would try to ``collect as much of the scattered material as possible, repackage it, reseal it and secure the facility.''
In addition, he said the IAEA was waiting for the U.N. Security Council -- not the United States -- to decide the inspectors' future in Iraq.
The comments on both sides and the atmosphere surrounding the trip illustrates the poisoned relations caused by the IAEA's prewar assessments that Iraq didn't recently have a nuclear weapons program. The Bush administration blames those assessments, in part, for its failure to win international support for the war.
Even now, the IAEA insists that it alone has the legal authority -- based on an international treaty signed by the United States -- to oversee Tuwaitha and other Iraqi nuclear facilities.
The United States maintains it has taken over those responsibilities as the occupying power. But senior U.S. military officers involved in the hunt have said privately that U.N. support and know-how would have aided their work significantly.
In the meantime, U.S. troops are trying to figure out what's missing from Tuwaitha. So far, military officials have said, at least 20 barrels of low-grade or natural uranium appeared to be gone.
Last week, American troops, accompanied by Iraqi health workers, entered Mansia, a village on the other side of a crumbling cement-and-brick wall that encloses much of Tuwaitha's 23,000 acres.
``The Americans came and announced they were buying the barrels for $3, so we all sold them,'' said Karam Yousef a 53-year-old unemployed father of eight whose crumbling mud hovel lacks running water and power.
The buyback program was conducted on the same day in four other villages.
But on a recent visit, Associated Press reporters saw eight containers of hazardous materials strewn in the yard of the Mother of the Prophet junior high school. Town clerics arranged a drop-off site in the yard after warning residents the materials could be unsafe.
Four containers had IAEA markings and warnings -- in English only -- that the contents contained dangerous chemicals. Four other metal suitcases with combination locks carried similar markings, though IAEA officials who saw photographs of the luggage couldn't account for their contents.
Town officials said no Americans visited the yard, although Iraqi nuclear experts knew the items were there.
``They've been sitting in the yard for more than one month,'' said Sabah Abed Al-Delphi. ``The Iraqi experts were here and said they would come back to take the materials away, but they haven't.''
-------- japan
HIROSHIMA JOURNAL
Teaching Youth to Start Worrying About the Bomb
May 29, 2003
The New York Times
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/29/international/asia/29JAPA.html
HIROSHIMA, Japan - After 18 years of almost daily lectures about surviving the atomic bomb dropped here on Aug. 6, 1945, Setsuko Iwamoto's stories to classrooms full of students have a finely limned quality about them, as smooth as pebbles in a creek.
There is no straining for melodrama as the 71-year-old woman recounts how her skin seemed to melt and pour off her arms after the flash, or how whatever scraps of cloth that could be found were used by people to protect themselves from the black rain that fell afterward.
Stories of survival do not get much more compelling. But Ms. Iwamoto worries now, with Japan inching toward rearmament, that the spirit of Hiroshima and the moral power of her story are fading.
Each year, she said, the stares of the students she faces from the podium grow blanker, just as their questions about the atomic bombing grow more stilted, appearing rehearsed rather than heartfelt.
"Just a few years ago, most schoolteachers had direct memories of the war," said Ms. Iwamoto, who said she was found to have cancer last year but appeared hale. "That's not the case at all anymore, though, and I wonder once this kind of lecture ends, how effectively the experience of war is taught.
"In my day we had trouble just surviving every day, whereas these days everyone in Japan is comfortable," Ms. Iwamoto added. "Children learn about war through manga [comic books] and think it is kind of cool. They have no particular sensation of Japan's defeat."
The profound shock of the Hiroshima bombing, and that of Nagasaki three days later, is widely credited not only with ending World War II, but with creating a strong emotional underpinning to Japan's official creed of nonviolence, consecrated in an American-drafted Constitution that faces increasingly strident calls for revision.
Fears about Japan becoming increasingly blasé about remembering the atomic bombings, though, are not limited to the survivors, or hibakusha, as they are known here.
Hiroshima's entire image and economy are linked to the horrendous final days of World War II, and city officials say visits by Japanese travelers are locked in a serious, long-term decline, broken only by a modest spike since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States.
Commissions have been formed to reverse the trend. A museum on the grounds of the Peace Park, near ground zero, has been expanded and modernized. In the hope of popularizing visits here, even a manga has been created - to celebrate the memory of Sadako Sasaki, a 12-year-old who died of blood cancer years after the bombing.
"We are faced with the challenge of conveying this experience to the next generations," said Noriyuki Masuda, associate director of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Association. "At some point we realized that what we had was a crisis involving young people's consciousness. We have been facing a change in attitudes and a decline of interest in Japan as a nation."
When Ms. Iwamoto completed her one-hour presentation to a lecture hall full of sixth graders who had come to Hiroshima on a field trip, five minutes were left for what was billed as a question and answer session.
In lieu of a question, a young girl who appeared to have been chosen for her excellence in study walked nervously to the microphone and read a brief speech in the name of her class. "Why must there be war?" she said flatly, ending her comments with a wish for the lecturer's good health.
Asked if visits at a slightly older age might favor deeper thought, not to mention real questions, the girl's teacher, Keiko Tokunaga, demurred. "This is the age when children are just beginning to think about the world," she said, "and I think that it is the best time to introduce ideas like this. But this is just a start."
Out on the grand plaza of the Peace Park, where the famous atomic bomb dome sits, just a stone's throw across the Motoyasu River, one has trouble imagining that visits to the Hiroshima memorial grounds are in decline.
Over the course of a fine spring day, one group after another of uniformed students troops from the museum to the dome, typically laying wreaths and garlands of origami cranes by a statue of Miss Sasaki, the renowned 12-year-old bomb victim. Foreign visitors, whose numbers have increased as those of Japanese have declined, are also constantly in evidence. This day, a group of volunteer greeters were excitedly awaiting the arrival of a group from Senegal, including the country's ambassador. At the approach of an American journalist, a group of ninth graders from Tokyo was unfailingly polite, and even excited to be answering questions about their trip here. None had discussed the bombing, or Japan's long-fixed identity as a nation of peace, with their parents before coming.
Nor did they have many ideas of how the war began or why it ended amid mushroom clouds and hundreds of thousands of instant casualties. "This was kind of an experiment, because it was the first atomic bombing," said Eiichiro Hiraka, a 14-year-old with a dream of becoming a professional baseball player. "Hiroshima was the perfect size for that."
A classmate, Kaoru Iwasaki, said she had studied World War II the year before but did not remember much. "I'm sorry, but I can't tell you why the war started," she said. Asked the same question, her friend Chisato Kajitani declared that she was not very interested in the subject. "I've never really thought about that question before," she said.
-------- korea
N. KOREA CONTINUES MISSILE EXPORTS TO MIDEAST
Middle East Newsline,
May 29, 2003
http://www.menewsline.com/stories/2003/may/05_29_4.html
WASHINGTON [MENL] -- The U.S. intelligence community has determined that North Korea has not been dissuaded from selling missiles and weapons of mass destruction components to Middle East clients.
The CIA said in its latest report that North Korea continues to be a major supplier of such countries as Iran, Libya and Syria. The report also cited exports of missile and WMD components to Iraq under the regime of President Saddam Hussein.
The unclassified report to Congress covers the foreign acquisition of technology relating to WMD and advanced conventional munitions for the first half of 2002. The report discusses both missile and WMD suppliers as well as importers.
"Throughout the first half of 2002, North Korea continued to export significant ballistic missile-related equipment, components, materials, and technical expertise to the Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa," the CIA report, released on Thursday, said. "Pyongyang attaches high priority to the development and sale of ballistic missiles, equipment, and related technology. Exports of ballistic missiles and related technology are one of the North's major sources of hard currency, which fuel continued missile development and production."
-------- missile defense
Canada to Join U.S. Missile Defense Talks
May 29, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-arms-canada-usa.html
OTTAWA (Reuters) - After months of wavering, the Canadian government decided Thursday to discuss with the United States the possibility of joining its missile defense shield.
The announcement was bound to help smooth over strained relations between Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien and President Bush. They are to sit down at a dinner in Russia Saturday night.
``I'm pleased to announce that the government has decided to enter into discussions with the United States on Canada's participation in ballistic missile defense,'' Defense Minister John McCallum told Parliament.
He said any agreement would seek to meet the government's ``goal of protecting Canadians and preserving the central role of NORAD in North American defense and security.''
NORAD is the joint U.S.-Canada aerospace defense command, based in Colorado.
The United States, long a critic of what it considers Canada's low level of defense spending, has urged it to join the missile defense system, designed to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles from what it says are ``rogue'' states such as North Korea.
Chretien had disappointed Bush by refusing to join in the war on Iraq, and in the last couple of days the Canadian prime minister has made pointed criticisms of the looming U.S. budget deficit.
The two leaders are to join in a dinner hosted by Russian President Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg Saturday, and will then fly on to Evian, France, for discussions of the Group of Eight leading industrialized nations.
The largest opposition party, the Canadian Alliance, has long demanded that the government join the missile defense plan, and an important contingent of Chretien's own Liberal Party has as well.
But other Liberals, as well as members of the leftist New Democratic and Bloc Quebecois parties, have characterized the shield as dangerously destabilizing.
``I feel truly shocked,'' New Democrat Libby Davies said of the surprise announcement, arguing that this could lead to the militarization of space, which Canada has long opposed.
McCallum said Canada would continue to combat the militarization of space, but this system would be defensive and based on the ground, not in space.
He said the federal government wanted to help design the system so that Canadians, most of whom live within 100 miles the U.S. border, would get protection equal to that of the Americans.
``The government of Canada will be better placed to protect the lives of Canadians if we are inside this tent rather than outside the tent,'' he said.
Seeking to answer those who worry about a possible loss of sovereignty by cooperating with the United States, McCallum said: ``A sovereign government would not wash its hands of the protection of the lives of its own citizens and leave it up to another government to do as it wishes.''
He also said Canadian companies were likely to benefit if Ottawa took part.
Ottawa had also worried that NORAD -- the North American Aerospace Defense Command -- would be sidelined if Washington set up its own missile defense command at another site in the absence of Canadian cooperation.
If Canada joins, it would likely be set up at NORAD headquarters, and McCallum said he would press for that to be the case.
--------
Canada, U.S. to Talk Missile Defense
May 29, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Canada-US-Missile-Defense.html
TORONTO (AP) -- Canada announced Thursday it will enter formal talks with the United States about joining a proposed missile defense system but only if the program meets the Canadian national interest.
Speaking in Parliament, Defense Minister John McCallum said Canada would benefit from being part of discussions on a system intended to secure North America.
``Let me be clear. While we believe missile defense has the potential to benefit Canada, our participation is not unconditional,'' he said, adding the government would not agree to any space-based defense system.
Nevertheless, McCallum said entering talks was in Canada's interest.
``A sovereign government has a duty and a responsibility to do its own due diligence to ensure maximum protection of the lives of its citizens,'' he said.
Prime Minister Jean Chretien and McCallum confirmed earlier this month that the government was considering joining the defense shield, signaling a change in its previous skepticism about what is known as the Star Wars issue due to concerns that ballistic missile defenses might spark an arms race.
U.S. officials have criticized Canada for cutting defense spending too much in budget-balancing during the 1990s and called for Chretien's government to play a larger role in North American defense.
In Washington, U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher called missile defense ``very important for us and for North America.''
The Canadian announcement shows the two countries ``still have many interests in common, including a defense of the people,'' Boucher said.
-------- russia
Raytheon To Replace Russian Pu Reactors With Coal Fired Plants
Russia is awash with the debris of the cold war
Reston
May 29, 2003
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/nuclear-blackmarket-03c.html
Under the terms of its Cooperative Threat Reduction Integrating Contract (CTRIC) Raytheon Company has been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to oversee the construction of a coal-fired power plant in Russia as part of a project to close down the last three operating plutonium production reactors in Russia. The contract will be a cost-plus award fee delivery order over the life of the project.
The power plant will provide electricity and heat to the surrounding communities of Zheleznogorsk, a city in Siberia, replacing an aging nuclear facility that produces weapons-grade plutonium.
Under the delivery order, Raytheon Technical Services Company LLC (RTSC) will partner with Fluor Corp., a world leader in the construction of coal- fired power plants. Fluor will lead the construction and technical management activities.
The team will work with DOE to plan and approve the project design in phase one. Construction will begin in phase two. The entire scope of the project is estimated to take eight years. Raytheon will share in a total of $466 million that the Department of Energy has designated for the shutdown of these reactors.
"We are excited about winning this contract which is an extension of our threat reduction activities in the former Soviet Union," said Bryan J. Even, a Raytheon vice president and president of Raytheon Technical Services Company LLC.
"Our success on this project is enhanced both by our understanding of the Russian business environment, and by our teaming with a renowned leader of power plant construction, Fluor Corp., to provide the technical and domain expertise this project requires."
RTSC has been doing business in Russia and the former Soviet Union (FSU) since 1988, and continues to perform on a broad range of contracts in the FSU, including the elimination of bombers and missiles, on-site inspection, logistics support of Cooperative Threat Reduction programs and construction- related services.
Raytheon: http://www.raytheon.com
-------- treaties
Lawmakers Ratify Nuclear Treaty
Thursday, May 29, 2003
Washington Post
Associated Press
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A51537-2003May28?language=printer
MOSCOW -- Russia's upper house of parliament ratified a landmark nuclear pact with the United States that slashes the nuclear arsenals of both nations by two-thirds, giving the measure a nod of approval.
Meeting behind closed doors, the Federation Council approved the measure by a 140-5 vote with two abstentions. The vote came days ahead of a summit between President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Putin, who negotiated the treaty during his last Russian summit with President Bush, lobbied hard for its ratification in both houses of parliament.
The U.S. Senate approved the accord, formally called the Moscow Treaty, in March. Russia's lower house of parliament, the State Duma, ratified the treaty earlier this month.
The Moscow Treaty calls on Russia and the United States to cut their strategic nuclear arsenals by about two-thirds by 2012.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Bush Administration Examines Steps to a Revamped Arsenal
May 29, 2003
The New York Times
By CARL HULSE and JAMES DAO
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/29/politics/29NUKE.html
WASHINGTON, May 28 - Backed by Congressional sentiment favoring a new approach to nuclear weapons, the Bush administration is taking steps that could lead to revamping the nation's cold-war-era atomic arsenal to meet what officials describe as more imminent modern threats.
The House and Senate last week approved a series of provisions sought by the White House and the Pentagon that could open the door to development of new nuclear weapons. Administration officials say the changes, which include relaxing a ban on research into smaller nuclear weapons, would not violate any existing arms treaties, though that is disputed by others.
These initiatives have alarmed arms control advocates and Democrats in Congress who say that the administration is determined to create a new generation of nuclear weapons, potentially touching off an arms race as other nations try to match American capability.
Critics of Bush administration nuclear policy were already deeply concerned about the administration's opposition to ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty as well as indications from officials that new testing might be needed to maintain the safety and reliability of the nuclear stockpile. A secret nuclear policy document issued last year also suggested that new weapons might be needed.
Taken together, these actions foreshadow potentially significant changes in the nation's nuclear weapons policy.
Administration officials say that they have made no decision to produce the first new nuclear weapons since the 1980's and that further Congressional debate and approval would be needed to do so. But they say an enormous nuclear capability to deter a rival superpower fortified with its own intercontinental missiles could be an outdated concept in the current world environment.
Instead, they say, a new generation of nuclear weapons may be needed to destroy facilities that could be constructed underground where biological and chemical weapons are being developed or stored.
"It is a return to looking at the defense of the nation in the face of a changing threat," Fred S. Celec, deputy assistant to the secretary of defense for nuclear matters, said of the push for authority to pursue a new nuclear program. "How do you deter and dissuade potential enemies of the United States from doing us harm? I don't know that we ought to eliminate any tools in our inventory."
Mr. Celec and other officials said that existing, congressionally imposed restrictions on research were chilling potential progress in the field of nuclear weapons science.
Linton Brooks, chief of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said: "We want to look at advanced concepts, not because we want to do anything in the near term, but so that we can look at future options. But now we can't do any sort of research without getting the lawyers involved."
Opponents are not reassured by promises by the administration that its sole aim is the study of nuclear potential. They point to position papers, testimony by officials and other declarations of the need for new nuclear thinking.
"It is unrealistic to think we are going to go ahead and even test but not use these nuclear weapons, particularly with the expressions and statements that have been made by the administration," Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said.
Mr. Kennedy and his allies, who in a series of votes last week were unable to block the provisions that opened the door to new nuclear research, say the push for new nuclear capacity is reckless and ill-conceived, given the White House demand that other nations disavow nuclear force. In a floor speech, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, called the juxtaposition diabolical.
As it adopted a larger defense measure last week, the House eased a 10-year-old ban on research into smaller nuclear weapons while the Senate lifted it entirely. Lawmakers also rejected proposals to block spending on turning existing nuclear warheads into weapons capable of piercing underground bunkers.
And they backed initiatives cutting the lead time for conducting nuclear tests to 18 months from 3 years. That could pave the way toward resumption of underground nuclear testing that was suspended more than a decade ago, the critics say. The administration says it has no plans for such tests.
The sums involved are tiny by the standards of the $400 billion Pentagon measure: $15 million for a feasibility study on weapons conversion already taking place at national nuclear laboratories and $6 million for research into "advanced concepts" like a weapon of five kilotons or less.
The legislation also includes $22.8 million to study the environmental impact of manufacturing plutonium pits, which are core elements of nuclear bombs. Though the final shape of the bills has yet to be worked out, it is clear that the administration will get much of what it wants.
There is also little doubt that senior officials in the Pentagon and the White House believe that the nation's nuclear arsenal is ill-equipped to deal with the post-Soviet world. Those officials have made it equally clear in a variety of writings, public statements and internal reports issued over recent years that the arsenal needs upgrading, perhaps with new kinds of weapons.
The existing stockpile mainly consists of immensely powerful weapons intended to deter a large power like the Soviet Union, but not small ones like North Korea or Iran. And it is not adequately outfitted to incinerate chemical or biological weapons facilities safely, or to destroy deeply buried targets, officials say.
Those concerns are clearly spelled out in a classified Pentagon document known as the Nuclear Posture Review, which was provided to Congress last year and has been obtained by The New York Times. While administration officials insist that not everything in the document has been made policy, it provides a comprehensive blueprint that reflects the thinking of many of the administration's national security policy makers.
"Today's nuclear arsenal continues to reflect its cold war origin," the report said, calling for a new approach known as "the new triad."
"New capabilities must be developed to defeat emerging threats such as hard and deeply buried targets, to find and attack mobile and relocatable targets, to defeat chemical or biological agents and to improve accuracy and limit collateral damage," it said.
Classified Pentagon studies have concluded that more than 70 countries now have underground facilities and that at least 1,100 of those sites are suspected of being strategic command centers or weapons bases.
Conventional weapons do not have the blast force and cannot burrow deeply enough into the ground to destroy such sites, Pentagon officials say. While large nuclear weapons might render such sites unusable, they would also cause immense damage to surrounding communities.
For that reason, the Pentagon has requested money to study sheathing nuclear weapons in harder cases so they can penetrate deeper into the earth before exploding. Many military planners also say they believe that nuclear weapons smaller than five kilotons would be good for hitting buried targets because they would cause less harm to nearby civilians.
Administration officials have also begun arguing that low-yield weapons might be more effective in deterring smaller countries from using or even developing unconventional weapons. Under this theory, those countries may now believe that the stigma of using a large nuclear weapon against them is so great that the United States would never do so.
But a less devastating weapon might seem more threatening to those countries precisely because the United States might appear more willing to use it, Pentagon officials say. The Nuclear Posture Review lists Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea and Syria as countries that pose new kinds of threats to the United States.
Democrats and arms control advocates say conventional weapons can be modified to destroy deeply buried targets as effectively as nuclear weapons. They say even low-yield nuclear weapons will release large amounts of radioactive debris.
And they argue that any moves by the United States to develop new nuclear weapons will encourage similar behavior in other countries.
"Arguments that low-yield weapons serve U.S. interests because they produce less collateral damage and are therefore more usable than high-yield weapons are shortsighted," a group of eight prominent nuclear scientists wrote in a letter sent to senators recently. Democrats said they would press their resistance when opportunities present themselves.
"I remember how people lived in this country in fear of the nuclear bomb," said Ms. Feinstein, who added that the nuclear questions before Congress merited close attention. "I think the American people have to weigh in on whether they want this nation to open that door and begin a new generation of nuclear weapons."
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- nevada
Senators vow to pressure reluctant Yucca critics
Las Vegas SUN
May 29, 2003
By Steve Kanigher http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2003/may/29/515145372.html
Nevada's senators and a "60 Minutes" film crew got an earful of complaints about research at the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear dump site Wednesday but they want to hear more, from two people who refused to show up at their hearing.
The witnesses who did appear at the Senate field hearing in Las Vegas complained that the Department of Energy, which has been studying the waste dump capabilities of the site, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, hasn't followed its own research game plans and has failed to correct chronic problems in a timely fashion.
But the absence of two other scheduled witnesses who pulled out earlier this week -- Robert Clark, who once ran DOE's quality assurance program and Donald Harris, an auditor with DOE contractor Navarro Research and Engineering -- drew the ire of Reid and Ensign.
They said they will use whatever means possible to compel the two experts to testify about alleged quality control problems with the nuclear waste project.
Democrat Reid, the Senate minority whip, and Republican Ensign, both opponents of plans to ship the nation's high-level nuclear waste to Nevada, blamed the DOE for applying pressure against potential whistle-blowers. They said they will even consider subpoenas if that's what it takes to get Clark and Harris to appear before the Senate Appropriation subcommittee on Energy and Water Development. The subcommittee conducted the field hearing even though only Reid and Ensign were present for it.
"We're doing whatever we can to see what we can do to compel them to testify," Ensign said. "We're looking at all legal and political means.
"Scientists are afraid to question the science because they're afraid of losing grants."
Reid said he and Ensign also plan to determine whether the DOE -- which was not invited to testify at the field hearing -- violated any federal whistle-blower laws.
"There will be other proceedings," Reid said. "That's for sure. We'll apply whatever political pressure we can."
The two senators said they hoped the sparsely attended field hearing in the Clark County Commission chambers would raise national as well as local awareness about problems with the proposed dump. The national attention may be provided in part by CBS' "60 Minutes" television news magazine, which had a film crew present as part of a plan to air a future segment on the controversies surrounding Yucca Mountain.
The witnesses who did appear were Robin Nazzaro, director of Natural Resources and Environment for the U.S. General Accounting Office, Allison Macfarlane, senior research associate with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Security Studies Program, and William Belke, a retired Nuclear Regulatory Commission official who served as its senior on-site licensing representative for the Yucca Mountain project.
Nazzaro said the GAO, the nonpartisan federal government watchdog, is still in its preliminary stages of an investigation into Yucca Mountain's quality assurance program, which is supposed to make sure the research is performed properly and adequately analyzed. But she said that the DOE's "track record of correcting problems with its quality assurance program is less than favorable."
She gave the example of a DOE computer software program whose problems have not been corrected since first discovered in 1998. Nazzaro said the failure of DOE to correct problems in a timely fashion cast doubts about whether the agency would be able to meet its goal of submitting an application to the NRC by 2004 to construct the repository.
"DOE's unsuccessful efforts to address recurring quality assurance problems, the identification of new problems since the issuance of its 2002 improvement plan, and NRC's recent comment that DOE's quality assurance program has yet to produce outcomes necessary to ensure that this program meets NRC requirements do not instill much confidence that the quality assurance problems will soon be resolved," Nazzaro said in a prepared statement.
Of 293 key technical issues that still needed to be resolved as of March, the DOE had developed strategies to tackle only 77 of those items, she said. Nazzaro also said the fact that $130 million was cut from DOE's Yucca Mountain budget this year raised doubts that the agency would be able to meet its deadline for submitting an application to the NRC.
"As we see these recurring problems DOE doesn't seem to be able to correct them," Nazzaro said. "The accountability issue has been a pervasive problem at DOE in terms of the accountability of contractors."
Macfarlane criticized DOE for failing to publish its Yucca Mountain studies in a way that would allow "peer review" by outside scientists. She said the proposed repository is the largest scientific project with which she is familiar that hasn't been properly reviewed by outsiders.
One area that she said hasn't been properly analyzed is the effect seeping water could have on the casks that are being designed to store the nuclear waste underground. Without naming names, she also told the senators that scientists have been pressured to not challenge DOE's Yucca Mountain work. They fear retaliation if they do challenge it, and there's good reason for that fear, she said.
Some of the scientists who have collected data on water-related issues that contradict DOE findings, have "taken a bashing" from the agency, Macfarlane said.
"DOE could improve the science by offering competitive research grants to research institutions," she said.
Belke likewise criticized DOE for failing to correct problems in a timely fashion and for retaliating against potential whistle-blowers.
"I don't think people should have fear of retaliation on their jobs," he said. "NRC management should also be more proactive and pay attention to deficiencies. The same deficiencies occur again and again and again.
"Right now the DOE has to prove they can do the little things. If they can't do the little things, they won't be able to do the big things in the future."
----
Counties accused of misusing federal Yucca Mountain funds
DOE auditors say money cannot be used on lobbying, lawsuits or to seek allies against site
By STEVE TETREAULT STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU
Thursday, May 29, 2003
Las Vegas Review-Journal
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2003/May-29-Thu-2003/news/21421379.html
WASHINGTON -- Three Nevada counties misspent $3.3 million in federal money as they monitored the government's bid to bury nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, inspectors said in a report released Wednesday.
Auditors for the Energy Department inspector general concluded money was improperly spent on lobbying, lawsuit research, and other activities not allowed for local governments given funds to oversee the Yucca Mountain Project.
The examiners challenged expenditures that included using Yucca oversight money to pay consultants on unrelated projects and to lobby for repository benefits.
A 14-page audit sent to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham challenged $2.08 million in Nye County spending for 2001 and 2002, and $1.13 million spent by Lincoln County. The audit also questioned $132,296 spent by Clark County.
Penalties could force rural Lincoln and Nye counties to shut down projects that measure the impact the proposed nuclear waste repository will have on residents, officials said.
"If they want their money back that they've given us, unless the county funds us out of general funds, we'd shut the doors," said Les Bradshaw, Nye County director of natural resources and federal facilities.
Officials from the counties defended their spending and said they plan to protest.
"We went through to link every expenditure over the two years to one of the allowable uses," said Caliente Mayor Kevin Phillips of Lincoln County.
Irene Navis, head of the Clark County nuclear waste planning division, said auditors disregarded explanations for charges they disallowed.
"There are some inaccuracies in this report," she said.
Energy Department managers will make final decisions on what expenses to disallow and whether the counties will be required to make reimbursements or have future payments reduced. DOE-county meetings are set for next month.
"The unauthorized expenditures will be recovered, or that amount will be withheld from future direct payments," Margaret Chu, director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, said in a memo attached to the audit.
Nine Nevada counties and Inyo County in California have received Yucca Mountain payments for 15 years, dividing $12 million in 2001 and 2002. Congress last year directed DOE to examine how they were spending the money.
Anticipating audit results, DOE already has withheld $1 million from Nye County and $400,000 from Lincoln County, about half of what each projected to receive this year for Yucca Mountain oversight.
Navis said $132,296 has been withheld from Clark County, a small part of its $1.8 million allocation this year.
Chu asked DOE lawyers for an opinion on proper use of county surpluses and accrued interest after auditors challenged the counties' practice of carrying over excess funding and keeping interest gained on that money.
Henry Neth, Nye County Commission chairman, said county spending corresponded to annual work plans approved by the Energy Department. But auditors criticized Yucca Mountain Project managers, saying they "had not sufficiently monitored" the counties.
Federal law allows the state and county governments to spend grant money to monitor DOE site work, to communicate with residents and the secretary of energy, to evaluate repository impact, and to form requests for impact aid. They cannot spend on lobbying, lawsuits or to seek allies against the project.
The inspectors challenged $865,000 Lincoln County spent on consultants who they said researched potential lawsuits and conducted other work beyond assessing the repository's impact.
The inspector general questioned Nye County's use of federal money to form a "community protection plan." Although the plan focuses on the repository's community impact, it also was used to lobby for a county research center and federal land transfers, auditors said.
Auditors challenged Clark County spending to meet with Yucca opponent groups in Washington and for the city of Las Vegas to research lawsuits and build relationships with other cities along potential nuclear waste routes to Nevada.
-------- utah
The Devil's Dirt
Southern Ute tribe fights for removal of toxic waste from ancient burial ground.
by John F. Harrington
Salt Lake City Weekly Feature -
May 29, 2003
http://www.slweekly.com/editorial/2003/feat_2003-05-29.cfm
It is said there is a common bond among aboriginal peoples the world over, a spiritual connection to the earth and natural forces shared across far-flung lands and millennia of time. The bond forms the basis for many similar religions practiced among different aboriginal groups.
The Newe Indians, known to non-Natives as the Western Shoshone of Nevada, have a word for it: shundahai, meaning, peace and harmony with all creation.
Principles like shundahai don't tend to get included in government policy. Yet, when it comes to aboriginal "religious" beliefs about land use, the concept of shundahai transcends things like Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) policies and guidelines. It is not written about in any Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) compendium of laws or regulations. The State of Utah Radiation Control Board does not make decisions based on those beliefs-but native groups believe they have legal rights that should force the government to protect their sacred beliefs.
Likewise, mining and waste disposal companies do not plan for the mitigation of spiritual disruption and desecration in their applications for permits and amendments to their licenses to operate or expand. They do not post bonds to mitigate spiritual damage brought about by their enterprises.
On broad White Mesa, three miles south of Blanding on U.S Highway 191 and some three miles north of the Southern Utes reservation in San Juan County, there are billions of pounds of dirt with a nasty history. What's being done with the dirt, where it's been and what it's been used to do, forms the conceptual basis of one of the more unconventional challenges to Utah's increasing stature as a radioactive waste dump.
Just outside the reservation, the International Uranium Corporation (IUC) wants to expand a site where it is currently holding uranium-laced mill tailings from other former processing sites around the United States. IUC is in business to ostensibly "recycle" the uranium from the "alternate feed" materials (the official regulatory name for toxic uranium mill tailings that are brought to another mill site) to produce new uranium fuel for the nuclear power industry. IUC's own records reveal that a tiny fraction of the material imported has been converted to recycled uranium and that the value of that material alone could not keep the company in business.
Thus, opponents claim, White Mesa is not a "recycling plant"-it's a toxic waste dump that uses recycling as an excuse for the government to clear the poisonous tailings out of other communities into the proximity of the politically powerless Southern Utes for storage, perhaps forever. The EPA has agreed. In some of its documents, the agency called IUC's White Mesa recycling operation "a sham (toxic waste and tailings) dump" because IUC was really just holding the billions of pounds of toxic dirt, while only processing a small portion to "recycle" uranium.
To add to the Utes' bitter feelings, the entire mill site and the area around it are part of the federally mapped White Mesa Archeological District that was inventoried by the Bureau of Land management in 1980. All of White Mesa is considered "sacred ground" by the Southern Utes and with good reason-the mesa is a gigantic cemetery filled with their dead ancestors and myriad cultural and Indian religious ceremonial sites, according to the BLM study.
Now IUC has applied to the federal government to bring in additional thousands of tons of radiation-laced mill tailings and unprocessed ore from Tennessee, New Jersey and California to add to its already massive stockpile of toxic material. This is just too much for the Southern Utes to bear.
Laced with varying degrees of radioactivity, the dirt also contains a witches' brew of heavy metal compounds like lead and other heavy trace metals that are known carcinogens high on the EPA list of human health threats. If IUC is successful in winning all of its current applications, the holding cells that contain the tailings that have already been hauled to White Mesa will be too small and the mill site will have to expand onto adjacent fallow "sacred ground."
IUC bought the uranium mill in 1997 from Energy Fuels Corporation, the company that built the site beginning in 1980. Energy Fuels was allowed by the BLM and the NRC to set up the facility, even though the BLM knew of the existence of the archeological resources and human graves. In fact, the study was conducted to find out what lay in the path of Energy Fuel's mill construction plans. Despite the result of the study, the mill was still permitted to be built on top of Indian graves.
When the bottom fell out of the uranium market, Energy Fuels closed White Mesa Mill and filed for bankruptcy. The bankruptcy staved off any reclamation of the mill site until IUC came along bought the facility and began a new kind of business-the extraction of uranium from the so-called "alternate feed materials."
There is a reason this happened. The federal BLM and EPA were pitted against NRC and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The latter two agencies were in a bind. They had to move the radioactive materials from other areas of the country the government itself had polluted as part of the nation's top secret atomic bomb development program. Despite the known hazardous content of the materials, they were moved to White Mesa without full-blown environmental impact studies being conducted.
Now, this summer, the State of Utah Radiation Control Board is supposed to assume authority over regulating IUC at White Mesa, and the Southern Utes see this as a chance to get out of the federal cross-agency problem and in front of a group that can help them.
To members of Utah aboriginal groups whose religions are directly connected to sacred ground like White Mesa, the operation of a mill tailings dump and uranium recycling plant directly on top of thousands of years of aboriginal graves and cultural sites is an abomination. To members of the LDS church-to choose a local analogy-it would be as if someone built a nuclear waste dump at the Bureau of Land Management's Martin's Cove in Wyoming, where Mormon pioneers froze to death-a place the church refers to as "sacred ground."
Now, a push to close the mill-based not on health and safety arguments, but on the basis of religious discrimination and laws pertaining to the desecration of graves and cemeteries-is emerging.
This unconventional and emotional approach surfaced at a Utah Radiation Control Board meeting in Salt Lake City May 2. Activists got on the agenda to protest not only the expansion of the site but also to start the ball rolling to try to get it shut down.
Environmental and cultural activists and two members of the Southern Ute tribe told the RCB that the accelerating dumping of toxic and radioactive uranium tailings from around the United States (material that originally comes from two different continents) at the IUC site was not only a potential health threat, but also a desecration of their huge cemetery.
Yolanda Whiskers Badback, packing an infant in a traditional carrier, kicked off the meeting with a pile of information. Bypassing the typical health and environmental issues, Badback got right to the spiritual point. "I don't like what they are doing to our sacred ground. This (the tailings) is not supposed to be mixed with our ancestors. They are ruining our sacred ground."
"Help us," pleaded Thelma Whiskers, Yolanda's sister. "Help my people to shut this place down," she asked members of the radiation board. "That's where my people, my ancestors, are buried," said Whiskers, a member of the Southern Ute tribe. "They are laying right there under that ground and they are dumping on them whatever they are hauling down there. My ancestors are buried right there and look what they are doing to them."
Bradley Angel, the executive director of Greenaction, a San Francisco-based health and environmental justice group, followed Whiskers to the microphone. Angel has a home in Grand County and spends most of his time there. He also has a lot of information about the White Mesa Archeological District.
"In the packets you were handed," he told board members, "there are pictures of a skeleton, of human remains, unearthed (during the original White Mesa Mill construction done before IUC owned the site). If I did the desecration that was done to the ceremonial kivas, to burial sites and the hundreds of other ancient, ancient, sites out there, I would be in jail, hopefully. But, I guess if your company's doing this with the blessing of various government agencies, it seems to be perfectly OK. We're here to tell you that it's not OK. It's not moral, it's not ethical and it's not legal."
Bradley's remarks were the first salvo in a promised legal battle, complete with a phalanx of eager volunteer lawyers, to clear IUC off White Mesa. The battle line will be drawn, says Bradley, beginning with the issue of First Amendment guarantee of freedom of religion. The approach is a new twist on arguments used for years by urban environmental activists, who claim that the location of hazardous sites in inner cities is a form of environmental racism.
"Of course it's racist, absolutely. There is no other way to look at it," says Ken Sleight, a long time environmental and human rights activist who lives up Pack Creek Canyon south of Moab, in San Juan County. Sleight attended the radiation board meeting and produced photos of blowing dust he said came right off tailings piles at IUC and headed out over populated areas. Sleight has been railing about the lack of knowledge surrounding the health issues related to the content of IUC's tailings mounds.
Sleight recently asked the San Juan County Commission to act as an advocate to request federal and/or state air monitoring and epidemiological studies for the areas of San Juan County where dust from White Mesa's tailings might blow. City Weekly obtained a copy of a tape recording of Sleight's exchanges with Commission Chairman Lynn Stevens, who frequently interrupted Sleight and asked questions laced with ridiculing overtones. When Sleight showed the commission pictures he took of dust blowing off the White Mesa area, Stevens asked, "If you think it's so dangerous, why did you go up there [to take the pictures]?"
At the May 2 hearing in Salt Lake City, Thelma Whiskers described similar treatment as she struggled to articulate her feelings of anger and the discrimination and ridicule she has suffered at the hands of certain San Juan County residents, including some employees of IUC. IUC President and CEO Ron Hochstein apologized to Whiskers at the conclusion of the meeting for the hazing she got at another public meeting.
In the end, Stevens said San Juan County would do "nothing" to seek health information about the tailings that would be beyond anything the federal government might release in connection with its hearings to determine if tailings from Moab's Atlas mill will be moved to White Mesa. As Sleight was leaving, one of the commissioners is heard on the tape saying: "Nice to see you again, Ken. Don't hurry back."
"That's their attitude," says Sleight. "They line up with the company, not behind the health of their own people."
The people of Utah have read and read about "radioactive waste" that's been, or will be, shipped into the state. But few, if any, know the hideous history of most of the material that, in this case, covers the ancestoral dead of the Southern Utes.
The hills around Shinkolobwe, Katanga Province, located in the Democratic Republic of Congo of Africa, don't look too different than the terrain in Cottonwood Wash outside of Blanding, Utah. Shinkolobwe's rocks are tan, cream, gray and the color of rust. Mineral-rich golden, black and bluish sands leak from seams between harder layers of differing compositions. It is a high spot overlooking the southern edge of one of the most vast and wild regions in the world, a place larger than all of Western Europe-the Congo River Basin. Only the Amazon collects and drains more water from the Earth's surface and eventually deposits it in an ocean. It is a primordial place, a breeding ground in the initial human inhabitation of the planet.
As is the case with the buttes bordering Cottonwood Wash, the dry ridges of Shinkolobwe appear nondescript to the uninitiated. Barren, withered and mercilessly burned by the heat of the day. On closer inspection, Shinkolobwe's hills begin to take on another meaning. Shinkolobwe's geology is a canvas. Nature has colored the flanks of these ridges in ways that are also a common sight in the American West and in rugged outcroppings that range up the Continental Divide to the Arctic Circle. These are rock and dirt pictures painted over millions of years--pictures that offer clues to the trained observer.
Aboriginal inhabitants lived for generations near the hills of Shinkolobwe, just as they have in the sprawling areas of the West sharing this geologic look.
Despite their separate beginnings, these peoples had something in common. While they undoubtedly knew the land, they knew nothing much about what was in the land. If the hunting was good, the reasons to remain nearby were more compelling.
In Adam Hochschild's book King Leopold's Ghost, one can read about the events that made it possible to find and mine the material that comprises much of the tailings on White Mesa. Those events began as a colonial, greed-driven rampage. It was a bizarre and successful land grab undertaken by a sexually dysfunctional Belgian potentate with too much time and not enough land on his hands. Natives who refused to work as slave labor had their arms, hands and penises hacked off. Severed heads were posted on sticks. The Congo River became a watery highway of carnage.
It was into this country the young Joseph Conrad shipped as a steamboat officer in search of adventure-only to find the source material for his classic, Heart Of Darkness. Hochschild writes that Conrad's Kurtz was a composite of at least two real men in the employ of King Leopold. One of them was a sadistic, venal trader and avid butterfly collector named Leon Rom, around whose garden the severed heads served as decoration.
Leopold used the wiles and deceit of the ersatz Welsh "journalist" and explorer John Morton Stanley and the complicity of U.S. President Chester Arthur to lay claim to the vast holdings he amazingly named the "Congo Free State." It was and remains the largest piece of real estate ever "owned" by one man.
It was a British shipping clerk, Edmund Dene Morel, who blew the whistle on Leopold's slaughter when he noticed the booty that was offloaded from the Congo was reciprocated with only more guns and troops being sent to the region-not finished goods and food.
When word of the deprivations-an estimated eight to 20 million inhabitants of the Congo Basin killed-began to leak and then cascade to the outside world through Morel's allies, like the Bishop of Canterbury and Mark Twain, the government of Belgium was forced to "annex" Leopold's "Free State" and make it a "traditional" colony-the Belgian Congo. The killing didn't stop-it simply became more diversified. The French got into the act on the north side of the Congo River and the Germans, under Kaiser Wilhelm, kept up the slaughter to the south and east of the Congo Basin.
After a time, the interlopers made it all the way to the end of the river where Katanga's mineral treasure was there for the taking. In 1915, an obscure prospector, Richard Rich Sharp, found himself at the end of the 3,000 miles of waterways that comprise the main Congo system. Where the water ended, Sharp found the Shinkolobwe Hills.
Sharp could read the geological paintings. Where the locals only saw the tans, grays, creams, blues and greens, Sharp saw copper, lead, zinc and another new substance that was just beginning to emerge as a precious metal. Sharp found uranium in the form of luminous pitchblende ore so radioactively potent, legend had it that one tribe's warriors would spread the dirt on their faces and they would glow in the dark, thereby scaring the hell out of potential enemies. These people were called the "Ghost Warriors."
Sharp reported his find to the keepers of the Belgian prefect and immediate steps were taken to hold the discovery a secret. Natives were impressed into digging out and accumulating the extremely "hot" ore-up to 65 percent pure uranium. Hapless workers strung from the mines to the transportation and refining of the pitchblende were clueless about the harmful effects of radiation.
The highly radioactive material was transported to the river and it began a tortured trip toward the Atlantic, and eventually to a plant at Olen, outside Antwerp. In 1922, the Belgians announced to an unsuspecting world that they had produced a gram of radium from the Katanga pitchblende at their new mill. By 1926, the Belgians had a monopoly on radium production and were charging $70,000 U.S. dollars a gram. The material was used in the first prototypes of X-ray machines. Fabulous profits were extracted from the Shinkolobwe ore.
The atom was on the loose. The Ghost Warriors' eerie paint would provide the basis for the launch of the modern Atomic Age as prospectors fanned out into remote places to look for the most expensive substance on the planet.
The United States, in a race to beat Nazi scientists to the destructive potential of the atom, spirited a 2,000 ton Shinkolobwe stockpile out of the Congo in 1940. The Nazis captured 1,200 tons of Shinkolobwe ore piled at Olen when they invaded Belgium in the same year. The Olen ore was not enough to produce the kind of atomic reaction that could have led the Nazis to fabricate a bomb. But the 2,000 tons of Shinkolobwe oar shipped to the United States would be commingled with material from Port Radium, Northwest Territories, Canada (another saga of aboriginal misery) in New York State and at the Mallinckrodt Chemical Company in St. Louis, where the ultra-hot ore was stored in what is now the downtown area for secret refinement as part of the Manhattan Project. The combined African and Canadian stockpiles then went on to be forged into the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombs. After the war, the United States got the rest of the Shinkolobwe stockpile, the other 1,200 tons, from the plant at Olen and added to its supply.
Eventually, a substantial amount of the radioactive leavings that launched the United States as the first nuclear world power would be brought to White Mesa, "bad spirits" and all. Every location the Shinkolobwe and Port Radium tailings have ever touched in Missouri and New York has been declared an environmental disaster area.
Superfund site? That'll be the case with White Mesa, too. Oh, yeah."
Steve Erickson is executive director of the non-profit watchdog group Citizens Education Project. Erickson conjures up a scenario where IUC eventually walks away from the White Mesa site when it's too full to take any more material for recycling. "They can't make anything near what they would need to make selling off the tiny amount of uranium they get from that material," says Erickson. According to IUC records, it's taken some 500 billion pounds of tailings so far to produce about 1.1 million pounds of recycled uranium. That's about 2,272 tons per pound.
"The rest of the material is overburden-waste that's being left right there," Erickson says. "Who knows what's in that stuff? The heavy metals and other junk? Nobody." No matter what happens when White Mesa eventually must close, as it must, Erickson says, "it will have to be bad. They can bury the stuff there, which has its own set of horrible consequences. Or they could look at moving it-but to where? And to think they are seriously thinking of moving the Moab tailings down there. It's insane, it really is insane."
Ron Hochstein, IUC's president and CEO, is an affable Canadian based out of Denver. He keeps the permit applications to bring more material to White Mesa on track. He has answers to every health question that's raised. Most of the dissent is based on ignorance, he says. "We just have to do a better job of educating the community about what we do," he says. He was hazy on the archeological issues sprung on him at the May 2 meeting, but he promises to catch up.
"We have people in place to deal with that," was the best he could do when interviewed after the meeting. Hochstein also insisted that IUC is not venturing outside its existing tailings cells onto new ground-but he also failed to volunteer the information that expansion must take place, according to their federal permit applications, if all the "alternate feed" materials IUC wants to import to Utah are allowed to come. He disputes the idea that dust blows off of IUC's tailings into adjacent San Juan County-even if witnesses say they have seen it (as this reporter did on Saturday, May 17). Hochstein also said that White Mesa tailings that have had uranium recycled from them could eventually be shipped away to places like Envirocare in Tooele County, but no such plan yet exists.
There is also a familiar colonial overtone surrounding IUC, the White Mesa operation and the Southern Utes. Hochstein's bosses operate in much the same way King Leopold ran his business dealings in the Congo in comfort from afar. The Congolese made him a billionaire, but Leopold never set foot in Africa his entire life.
Similarly, the founders and principals in IUC don't live anywhere near or hang out in Utah. They do make money off of the continued piling up of tailings over the heads of Yolanda Whisker's dead ancestors, however. IUC's chairman is Lukas Lundin, a 45-year-old graduate of New Mexico Tech and the son of Geneva, Switzerland resident and mineral and oil developer Adolph Lundin. The Lundins have holdings in at least 14 companies dealing in oil and mineral exploration and extraction all over the world-including in the U.S. State Department listed "terrorist" nation of Syria. When not working in the family concerns from his Vancouver, Canada offices, the younger Lundin rides off-road motorcycles across the world's deserts in races like the Las Vegas to Reno over-the-desert race and the Dakar motorcycle rally. He didn't return numerous phone calls City Weekly placed to his secretary at his Vancouver offices.
-------- us nuc waste
Bid Denied for Smaller Waste Site in Utah
May 29, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Utah-Nuclear-Waste.html
ROCKVILLE, Md. (AP) -- A bid to build a scaled-back nuclear waste dump in a Utah desert was rejected Thursday on a technicality, but the government left open a possibility it could be approved at a later date.
Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of eight electric utilities, has been seeking to store waste from nuclear reactors in casks on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian reservation, 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, until a permanent storage facility can be built at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
An initial proposal to store 4,000 casks containing 40,000 metric tons of radioactive waste was rejected by the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board in March out of concern that the risk of a military jet crash at the facility was too high. The site would be under the flight path for the nation's largest Air Force training range.
On Thursday, PFS attorneys asked the three-judge board to approve a smaller facility that would consist of just 336 casks. The companies said the scaled-down site would decrease the risk of a jet crash and fall within the risk factor the licensing board has said is acceptable.
But the panel said the PFS proposal would have to be filed as an amendment to the application rather than an appeal of the March ruling. If PFS decides to pursue the 336-cask storage, the application will be handled quickly, said Judge Michael Farrar.
Utah attorneys said PFS' downsized plan was a way for PFS to move ahead with its plans despite the licensing board's concerns and to build momentum for the 4,000-cask facility.
``This is outrageous; 336 casks is a ruse,'' said assistant Utah Attorney General Jim Soper.
Judge Jerry Kline asked PFS attorneys if they would be content with the smaller site.
``We see this as an interim step to achieving the full-sized facility,'' said PFS attorney Paul Gaukler. He said PFS is convinced it can ultimately prove to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the 4,000 casks can be stored safely.
On the Net:
Private Fuel Storage: http://www.privatefuelstorage.com/project/partners-svb.html
Nuclear Regulatory Commission: http://www.nrc.gov/
-------- us politics
US dusts off nuclear card
By Ehsan Ahrari,
May 29, 2003
Asia Times
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EE29Ak02.html
The United States' strategy of "Shock and Awe" in Iraq ran into a sobering phase of "Shock of Pause" when Iraqis started to show the power of a fledgling democracy by demanding the establishment of an Iran-style Islamic government, an option that was nightmarish for the administration of President George W Bush and his neo-conservatives inside and outside the government. But this period of pause - a duration when the US was attempting to reconstitute its policy regarding regime change - had to come to an end. The rationale of regime change has to be reformulated for the next targets, or a determination has to be made whether regime change should be shelved indefinitely as the US attempts to bring stability to two countries - Afghanistan and Iraq - where regime change has brought no high promises of stability or legitimacy for what replaced the previous governments.
In Afghanistan, al-Qaeda is gathering strength and the authority and legitimacy of President Hamid Karzai has remained under grave challenge. Iraq continues to pose an equally somber challenge in terms of establishing law and order. The US occupiers remain highly unpopular and demands for their ouster continue to echo in the streets of Baghdad, Faluja, Najaf and Karbala. The creation of an interim government appears to have been pushed back by a few more weeks or even months.
But the Bush administration remains neither fazed nor disheartened. Washington is a world unto itself. Discussions of strategic realities in this city, more often than not, do not reflect the realities on the ground in Afghanistan, Iraq or any other city that becomes the focal point of America's foreign policy at any given time.
Now there is widespread talk in Washington about putting pressure on the Iranian government, or even bringing about regime change in that country. The troubling part of this "talk" is that it is not just empty chatter. Palpable policy changes are in the air. The back-channel diplomatic dialogue between Tehran and Washington has been discontinued, a disconcerting development indeed. The strongest reason was the unsubstantiated accusation that Iran was involved in the al-Qaeda suicide attacks in Riyadh on May 12. The US has ratcheted up the anti-Iran rhetoric, suggesting that al-Qaeda terrorists are hiding in that country. Iran strongly denies both accusations. More to the point, the US has increased its pressure on the International Atomic Energy Agency to issue a critical report on Iran's nuclear programs. This measure was taken after Russian President Vladimir Putin rejected another attempt - this time by Secretary of State Colin Powell - to get Russia to stop assisting Iran in its nuclear program.
But simply lumping Iran in the so-called "axis of evil" category with Iraq and North Korea will not become a sound enough rationale for invading that country. After encountering the strongest opposition from its closest allies prior to the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration knows that it has to do a lot of groundwork before preparing for any semblance of regime change in Iran. Incidentally, regime change for Iran is not limited to a military campaign. Other options, such as an intense propaganda war, also are being considered, given the already noticeable degree of tensions inside Iran. The thinking in Washington is - wishful to be sure - that merely calling on Iranian youth to overthrow the existing government will result in another implosion in Iran a la the Islamic Revolution of 1978. Even if such a development were to materialize, no one is thinking about its implications for regional stability, especially with no governmental authority in neighboring Iraq.
The usual tensions between the Department of State (DOS) and the Department of Defense (DOD) already have resurfaced involving Iran. The DOS has listed the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) as a terrorist organization. Thus, it was scheduled to be targeted by the United States. However, the DOD started envisaging it as a military force to be used against Iran in a potential military campaign, much like the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. But the DOS was winning that argument and the White House ordered the Pentagon to disarm the MEK this month. Representatives of the Iranian government were also informed of that decision on May 3. However, the suicide attacks in Riyadh on May 12 seem to have strengthened the DOD's perspectives on the potential use of the MEK in the future.
As the Bush administration starts its focus on the roadmap for peace between the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Israel, Iran's support of Hezbollah and other violent groups in the occupied territories have also become another source of tension between Washington and Tehran.
Needless to say, Iran is in an entirely different category from Iraq. But that reality is not likely to constrain the Bush administration. The most contentious part of differences between Iran and the United States is the former's nuclear and missile development programs, about which Israel has consistently produced alarming analyses, and the neo-conservatives in the US have bought those analyses lock, stock and barrel. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the US has gradually established a muscular policy of denying all previous so-called "rogue" nations, and now nations of the "axis of evil", any weapons of mass destruction. So Iran's choices in this regard are rather stark. It should either abandon its nuclear program - regardless of its assurance that it has no plans of developing nuclear weapons - or face preemption and/or regime change. It is only a matter of time before such a clear-cut demand is made on the ayatollahs.
Ehsan Ahrari, PhD, is an Alexandria, Virginia, US-based independent strategic analyst.
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[Site includes links to original news stories where quotes are found.]
What a Tangled Web We Weave . . .
. . . when first we practice to deceive!
May 29, 2003
Billmon
http://billmon.org.v.sabren.com/archives/000172.html
"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."
Dick Cheney Speech to VFW National Convention August 26, 2002
"Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons."
George W. Bush Speech to UN General Assembly September 12, 2002
"If he declares he has none, then we will know that Saddam Hussein is once again misleading the world."
Ari Fleischer Press Briefing December 2, 2002
"We know for a fact that there are weapons there."
Ari Fleischer Press Briefing January 9, 2003
"Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent."
George W. Bush State of the Union Address January 28, 2003
"We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more."
Colin Powell Remarks to UN Security Council February 5, 2003
"We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have."
George W. Bush Radio Address February 8, 2003
"So has the strategic decision been made to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction by the leadership in Baghdad? . . . I think our judgment has to be clearly not."
Colin Powell Remarks to UN Security Council March 7, 2003
"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
George W. Bush Address to the Nation March 17, 2003
"Well, there is no question that we have evidence and information that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical particularly . . . all this will be made clear in the course of the operation, for whatever duration it takes."
Ari Fleisher Press Briefing March 21, 2003
"There is no doubt that the regime of Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction. And . . . as this operation continues, those weapons will be identified, found, along with the people who have produced them and who guard them."
Gen. Tommy Franks Press Conference March 22, 2003
"I have no doubt we're going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction."
Defense Policy Board member Kenneth Adelman Washington Post, p. A27 March 23, 2003
"One of our top objectives is to find and destroy the WMD. There are a number of sites."
Pentagon Spokeswoman Victoria Clark Press Briefing March 22, 2003
"We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."
Donald Rumsfeld ABC Interview March 30, 2003
"Obviously the administration intends to publicize all the weapons of mass destruction U.S. forces find -- and there will be plenty."
Neocon scholar Robert Kagan Washington Post op-ed April 9, 2003
"I think you have always heard, and you continue to hear from officials, a measure of high confidence that, indeed, the weapons of mass destruction will be found."
Ari Fleischer Press Briefing April 10, 2003
"We are learning more as we interrogate or have discussions with Iraqi scientists and people within the Iraqi structure, that perhaps he destroyed some, perhaps he dispersed some. And so we will find them."
George W. Bush NBC Interview April 24, 2003
"There are people who in large measure have information that we need . . . so that we can track down the weapons of mass destruction in that country."
Donald Rumsfeld Press Briefing April 25, 2003
"We'll find them. It'll be a matter of time to do so."
George W. Bush Remarks to Reporters May 3, 2003
"I'm absolutely sure that there are weapons of mass destruction there and the evidence will be forthcoming. We're just getting it just now."
Colin Powell Remarks to Reporters May 4, 2003
"We never believed that we'd just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country."
Donald Rumsfeld Fox News Interview May 4, 2003
"I'm not surprised if we begin to uncover the weapons program of Saddam Hussein -- because he had a weapons program."
George W. Bush Remarks to Reporters May 6, 2003
"U.S. officials never expected that "we were going to open garages and find" weapons of mass destruction."
Condoleeza Rice Reuters Interview May 12, 2003
"I just don't know whether it was all destroyed years ago -- I mean, there's no question that there were chemical weapons years ago -- whether they were destroyed right before the war, (or) whether they're still hidden."
Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, Commander 101st Airborne Press Briefing May 13, 2003
"Before the war, there's no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical. I expected them to be found. I still expect them to be found."
Gen. Michael Hagee, Commandant of the Marine Corps Interview with Reporters May 21, 2003
"Given time, given the number of prisoners now that we're interrogating, I'm confident that we're going to find weapons of mass destruction."
Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff NBC Today Show interview May 26, 2003
"They may have had time to destroy them, and I don't know the answer."
Donald Rumsfeld Remarks to Council on Foreign Relations May 27, 2003
"For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction (as justification for invading Iraq) because it was the one reason everyone could agree on."
Paul Wolfowitz Vanity Fair interview May 28, 2003
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Rockefeller Rips Lack of Iraqi WMD Finds
May 29, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Iraq-Congress.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- If Iraq's weapons of mass destruction posed enough of a threat to justify war, they should have been found by now, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee said Thursday.
Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia challenged comments by Bush administration officials that the weapons were well-hidden and may not be located soon.
``You can't quite say that it's going to take a lot more time if the intelligence community seemed to be in general agreement that WMD was out there,'' Rockefeller said in an interview.
Rockefeller said that if the weapons were so well concealed, the United States should have considered giving U.N. inspectors more time to find them.
The Bush administration's main argument for the war was that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons and was possibly developing nuclear weapons. Those weapons threatened the region and, if given to terrorists, could be used against the United States, it said.
In recent weeks the administration has tried to diminish expectations that weapons will be found soon. Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith told a House committee May 15 that it ``will take months, and perhaps years,'' for a complete account of Iraq's weapon programs to emerge.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday, as he has before, that U.S. teams are unlikely to find any weapons of mass destruction unless Iraqis involved in the programs tell the officials where to look.
``It's not because they're not there. We do believe they are there,'' Rumsfeld said in an interview on the Infinity Broadcasting radio network. ``We never believed that we or the inspectors would just trip over them.''
In a speech Tuesday, Rumsfeld joined others who have been saying for a month that Iraq may have destroyed chemical and biological weapons before the war. On Thursday, Rumsfeld said there was ``speculation and chatter'' among intelligence agencies that such weapons may have been moved to other countries or buried.
Iraq also may have developed the capability to quickly make biological or chemical weapons, eliminating the need for storing large amounts of dangerous material, Rumsfeld said. Proof of that, he said, includes the two trailers found in northern Iraq which American intelligence officials say were mobile biological weapons production facilities.
Rockefeller said that, based on the intelligence he saw before the war, he was persuaded that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons. He said it is still possible ``something may very well turn up.''
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer Thursday called the two trailers ``proof positive'' that Iraq lied about not having mobile labs.
But Rockefeller said it's not enough to prove the weapons existed.
``In the business of WMD, and proving to the American people your case, you've got to come up with WMD. It's not happened,'' he said.
In a related matter, Rockefeller criticized the FBI response to his request for an investigation into forged documents used by the Bush administration as evidence against Saddam before the war. The documents indicated that Iraq tried to buy uranium from the West African nation of Niger.
He said the FBI sent a ``bland'' letter saying the forgery was not an administration attempt to manipulate public opinion, but offered no specifics. He said an aide told the FBI this was unacceptable and asked for more details.
FBI spokesman Bill Carter said the bureau was continuing to look at issues raised by Rockefeller and his staff. ``We have not closed the book on this,'' he said.
Rockefeller and Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., this week also requested that the State Department and CIA inspectors general investigate the forgery.
Rockefeller said either intelligence agencies hadn't detected the forgery, or they suspected the documents were forged, but may have faced political pressures to rethink that view.
``In either case, it's not a very happy outcome,'' he said.
----
The Case for War is Blown Apart
by Ben Russell and Andy McSmith in Kuwait City
Thursday, May 29, 2003
by the lndependent/UK
http://commondreams.org/headlines03/0529-01.htm
Tony Blair stood accused last night of misleading Parliament and the British people over Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, and his claims that the threat posed by Iraq justified war.
I believe the Prime Minister lied to us and lied to us and lied to us. The whole war was built upon falsehood and I think the long-term damage will be to democracy in Britain
Tony Benn, the former Labour minister Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary, seized on a "breathtaking" statement by the US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, that Iraq's weapons may have been destroyed before the war, and anger boiled over among MPs who said the admission undermined the legal and political justification for war.
Mr Blair insisted yesterday he had "absolutely no doubt at all about the existence of weapons of mass destruction".
But Mr Cook said the Prime Minister's claims that Saddam could deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes were patently false. He added that Mr Rumsfeld's statement "blows an enormous gaping hole in the case for war made on both sides of the Atlantic" and called for MPs to hold an investigation.
Meanwhile, Labour rebels threatened to report Mr Blair to the Speaker of the Commons for the cardinal sin of misleading Parliament - and force him to answer emergency questions in the House.
Mr Rumsfeld ignited the row in a speech in New York, declaring: "It is ... possible that they [Iraq] decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict and I don't know the answer."
Speaking in the Commons before the crucial vote on war, Mr Blair told MPs that it was "palpably absurd" to claim that Saddam had destroyed weapons including 10,000 liters of anthrax, up to 6,500 chemical munitions; at least 80 tons of mustard gas, sarin, botulinum toxin and "a host of other biological poisons".
But Mr Cook said yesterday: "We were told Saddam had weapons ready for use within 45 minutes. It's now 45 days since the war has finished and we have still not found anything.
"It is plain he did not have that capacity to threaten us, possibly did not have the capacity to threaten even his neighbors, and that is profoundly important. We were, after all, told that those who opposed the resolution that would provide the basis for military action were in the wrong.
"Perhaps we should now admit they were in the right."
Speaking as he flew into Kuwait before a morale-boosting visit to British troops in Iraq today, Mr Blair said: "Rather than speculating, let's just wait until we get the full report back from our people who are interviewing the Iraqi scientists.
"We have already found two trailers that both our and the American security services believe were used for the manufacture of chemical and biological weapons."
He added: "Our priorities in Iraq are less to do with finding weapons of mass destruction, though that is obviously what a team is charged with doing, and they will do it, and more to do with humanitarian and political reconstruction."
Peter Kilfoyle, the anti-war rebel and former Labour Defense minister, said he was prepared to report Mr Blair to the Speaker of the Commons for misleading Parliament. Mr Kilfoyle, whose Commons motion calling on Mr Blair to publish the evidence backing up his claims about Saddam's arsenal has been signed by 72 MPs, warned: "This will not go away. The Government ought to publish whatever evidence they have for the claims they made."
Paul Keetch, the Liberal Democrat Defense spokesman, said: "No weapons means no threat. Without WMD, the case for war falls apart. It would seem either the intelligence was wrong and we should not rely on it, or, the politicians overplayed the threat. Even British troops who I met in Iraq recently were skeptical about the threat posed by WMD. Their lives were put at risk in order to eliminate this threat - we owe it to our troops to find out if that threat was real."
But Bernard Jenkin, the shadow Defense Secretary, said: "I think it is too early to rush to any conclusions at this stage; we must wait and see what the outcome actually is of these investigations."
Ministers have pointed to finds of chemical protection suits and suspected mobile biological weapons laboratories as evidence of Iraq's chemical and biological capability. But they have also played down the importance of finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Earlier this month, Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, provoked a storm of protest after claiming weapons finds were "not crucially important".
The Government has quietly watered down its claims, now arguing only that the Iraqi leader had weapons at some time before the war broke out.
Tony Benn, the former Labour minister, told LBC Radio: "I believe the Prime Minister lied to us and lied to us and lied to us. The whole war was built upon falsehood and I think the long-term damage will be to democracy in Britain. If you can't believe what you are told by ministers, the whole democratic process is put at risk. You can't be allowed to get away with telling lies for political purposes."
Alan Simpson, Labour MP for Nottingham South, said MPs "supported war based on a lie". He said: "If it's right Iraq destroyed the weapons prior to the war, then it means Iraq complied with the United Nations resolution 1441."
The former Labour minister Glenda Jackson added: "If the creators of this war are now saying weapons of mass destruction were destroyed before the war began, then all the government ministers who stood on the floor in the House of Commons adamantly speaking of the immediate threat are standing on shaky ground."
The build-up to war: What they said
Intelligence leaves no doubt that Iraq continues to possess and conceal lethal weapons
George Bush, Us President 18 March, 2003
We are asked to accept Saddam decided to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd
Tony Blair, Prime Minister 18 March, 2003
Saddam's removal is necessary to eradicate the threat from his weapons of mass destruction
Jack Straw, Foreign Secretary 2 April, 2003
Before people crow about the absence of weapons of mass destruction, I suggest they wait a bit
Tony Blair 28 April, 2003
It is possible Iraqi leaders decided they would destroy them prior to the conflict
Donald Rumsfeld, US Defense Secretary 28 May, 2003
----
Rumsfeld Denies 'False Pretext' for Iraq War
May 29, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-usa-rumsfeld.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld denied on Thursday that the Iraq war was waged under a false pretext even though U.S. search teams have failed to find the chemical and biological weapons cited as justification for the invasion.
During a radio interview, Rumsfeld expressed fresh confidence that such weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq, and offered several explanations for why they have not been located.
President Bush and other U.S. officials cited Iraq's allegedly large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and a program to develop nuclear weapons as justification for toppling President Saddam Hussein.
``Well I can assure you that this war was not waged under any false pretext,'' Rumsfeld said in comments on the Infinity Radio network.
Rumsfeld said the United States before the war had ``good intelligence'' about Iraqi weapons and said Iraq had a track record of using chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds and against Iran in the 1980s.
``We believed then and we believe now that the Iraqis have had chemical weapons (and) biological weapons and that they had a program to develop nuclear weapons but did not have nuclear weapons. That is what the United Kingdom's intelligence suggested as well. We still believe that,'' he said.
``Now, why haven't we been able to provide the kind of evidence that would have validated all of that in the last seven weeks?'' Rumsfeld asked.
``I think the answers are several reasons. And number one it's not because they're not there,'' saying Iraq is a large country, about the size of California, that there are hundreds of sites to search and that Saddam hid his weapons.
He also noted that U.S. forces have identified two trailers found in northern Iraq that American intelligence officials say are mobile biological weapons production facilities.
WEAPONS MAY HAVE BEEN DESTROYED
``My personal view is we're going to find them (actual weapons), just as we found these two mobile laboratories,'' he said. In a speech on Tuesday, Rumsfeld raised the possibility that Iraq had decided to destroy its chemical and biological arms before the war.
Asked whether he was happy with the quality of U.S. intelligence on Iraq, Rumsfeld did not give a direct answer. ``You always wish you had perfect visibility into what's going on in the world,'' he said, but added ``we don't live in a perfect world'' and it is difficult to know about ``repressive dictatorships and closed societies.''
Rumsfeld also renewed his criticism of Iran, saying Tehran was ``beaming in radio programs trying to stir up people in Iraq to oppose the (U.S.-led) coalition'' there.
He added that ``reasonable people assume'' Iran will have nuclear weapons ``sometime in this decade.'' And he renewed allegations that Iran was harboring senior members of the al Qaeda network.
Asked whether the United States was gearing up for war with Iran, Rumsfeld said, ``Not to my knowledge.'' But he said the United States hoped Iran would not support terrorism or the Hizbollah group.
Rumsfeld said the Bush administration's request to Congress to allow research into low-yield (five kiloton or less) nuclear weapons for use against deeply buried targets, and research into modifying existing higher-yield atomic weapons for similar purposes would not spur global nuclear proliferation.
He called such proliferation ``pervasive'' already, involving such countries as North Korea and Iran.
----
Chao trades barbs with organized labor
By Tom Ramstack
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/business/20030528-092331-9398r.htm
Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao yesterday accused organized labor of acting irrationally in its opposition to the Bush administration.
"I think the rhetoric is really overheated and exaggerated," Mrs. Chao said during a press reception downtown.
Leaders of the AFL-CIO labor federation have said they plan to emphasize rising unemployment during their effort to replace President Bush with a Democrat in the 2004 election.
Nationally, unemployment rose to 6 percent in April, up from 5.8 percent in March, according to the Labor Department.
About 124,000 jobs were cut from February to March. Another 48,000 were lost from March to April.
"Since President Bush came into office, workers have had to fend off attacks on the most basic rights while the economy has shed more than 2 million jobs," AFL-CIO spokeswoman Kathy Roeder said.
She mentioned health care benefits, overtime pay and workplace safety as worker rights in decline.
Mrs. Chao said any breakdown in relations with unions results from uncooperative labor leaders.
"It's got to be a two-way street," Mrs. Chao said. "I can't work with people who don't want to work with me."
The AFL-CIO has said the president's policies appeal primarily to the wealthy and largely ignore concerns of average Americans.
Mrs. Chao said increased job-safety inspections by the Labor Department and National Labor Relations Board decisions that favor workers show that the Bush administration protects the interests of workers.
Reported job accidents have dropped 8 percent in the last year, she said. Construction fatalities are down 10 percent.
She also said the $350 billion tax cut that the president signed yesterday would stimulate the economy and increase jobs.
"My greatest concern is job creation and enforcement of the law," Mrs. Chao said.
Union leaders said the tax breaks favor employers by allowing them to write off business expenses.
Mrs. Chao blamed part of the job declines on September 11 terror, which she said resulted in 1.5 million to 2 million layoffs. Most heavily damaged was the aviation industry.
Normal economic trends that the government cannot control are contributing to a weak economy, she said.
"Economics have their own cycles, and there are ups and downs," Mrs. Chao said.
Her conflicts with unions culminated during the winter meeting of the AFL-CIO's executive council in February in Hollywood, Fla.
"I have never seen a secretary of labor who is so anti-labor," AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said after a meeting between labor leaders and Mrs. Chao at that gathering.
Mrs. Chao blamed the breakdown in relations on proposed Labor Department rules that would hold labor leaders to a higher standard of ethics in their financial dealings.
"The issue was transparency and accountability," she said.
During the AFL-CIO meeting, she said she had a list of labor leaders convicted of financial crimes with union money, which showed the need for stricter disclosure requirements.
Only two weeks earlier, the Labor Department began an investigation of stock trades by a Washington insurance company called Ullico, which is owned by unions.
Top union leaders invested their own money in the company and reaped $6 million when Ullico repurchased their stock, prompting the investigation.
Ullico provides low-cost insurance for union members.
-------- MILITARY
-------- britain
UK used cluster bombs in Iraq's urban areas
Thu 29 May 2003
Scotsman
http://www.news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=601472003
BRITISH troops used cluster bombs in built-up areas during the war in Iraq, a defence minister confirmed today.
Adam Ingram insisted that the use of the controversial weapons in Basra was justified because they were targeted at Iraqi military units posing a threat to British troops' lives.
He said the UK was making huge efforts to remove the danger of unexploded bombs to Iraq's civilian population, with about 100,000 pieces of ordnance - possibly including cluster bombs - made safe since the war ended.
Cluster bombs pose a threat to civilians long after hostilities have ended, because some of the large numbers of bomblets they scatter over a wide area fail to explode on impact. Already there are reports of children being injured in Iraq after stumbling across unexploded ordnance.
Labour backbencher Austin Mitchell today described them as Britain's own "weapon of mass destruction".
In the early days of the conflict, Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon insisted that cluster bombs would not be used indiscriminately. But he was careful not to rule out their use.
The MoD says about 2000 of the bomblet shells were fired by artillery on the ground and about 60 cluster bombs were dropped during the war.
Mr Ingram said today: "Cluster bombs are not illegal. They are effective. They are used in specific circumstances where there is a threat to our troops."
----
Rumsfeld's Remarks Spur U.K. War Critics
By AUDREY WOODS
Associated Press Writer
May 28, 2003
LONDON (AP) -- Opponents of the U.S-British invasion of Iraq renewed their criticism of the war Wednesday after the American defense secretary said Iraq may have destroyed its weapons of mass destruction before the war.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, speaking in New York on Tuesday, said it was possible the reason Iraqi chemical or biological weapons had not yet been found was that Saddam Hussein's government "decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict."
Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was adamant that Saddam's possession of such weapons justified going to war, told reporters Wednesday that he still believed the weapons existed.
"I have said throughout and I just repeat to you, I have absolutely no doubt at all about the existence of weapons of mass destruction," Blair said on a flight to Kuwait before he visits British troops in Iraq on Thursday.
"And rather than speculating, let's just wait until we get the full report back from our people who are interviewing the Iraqi scientists," he said.
But Robin Cook, a former foreign secretary who quit as leader of the House of Commons in protest against the war, said Rumsfeld's comments vindicated his own stance.
"If Donald Rumsfeld is now admitting the weapons are not there, the truth is the weapons probably haven't been there for quite a long time," Cook told British Broadcasting Corp. Radio.
"It matters immensely," he said, "because the basis on which the war was sold to the British House of Commons, to the British people, was that Saddam represented a serious threat."
Former Cabinet minister Tony Benn, a left-wing member of Blair's Labor Party, told LBC radio, "I believe the prime minister lied to us and lied to us and lied to us. ... The whole war was built upon falsehood and I think the long-term damage will be to democracy in Britain."
Labor Party legislator Glenda Jackson said, "This war was fought on illegal and immoral grounds and there were no reasons for it."
Regarding Britain's role in Iraq, Blair said there were no plans at the present for British troops to assist U.S. forces in Baghdad. There are some 40,000 British troops still in Iraq, most in southern Iraq. The United States controls the northern zone, which includes Baghdad.
"We are giving the help they are requesting from us but I think the Americans themselves are very much seized of the fact that once you are through the immediate phase of the conflict, you have to peace-keep in a different way," Blair said.
"I do think the Americans have got a very clear view that they have got to grip the security situation in Baghdad."
--------
Blair's Office Defends Iraq Dossier
May 29, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Britain-Iraq-Intelligence.html
LONDON (AP) -- British intelligence agents were unhappy with the government's claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction ready to use within 45 minutes, the British Broadcasting Corp. reported Thursday.
Prime Minister Tony Blair's office responded that the claim, contained in an intelligence dossier released on Sept. 24, was entirely the work of British intelligence agencies.
``Not one word of the dossier was not entirely the work of the intelligence agencies,'' Blair's office said in a statement to the BBC.
The BBC, however, said its intelligence source didn't dispute the origin of the information, but said the agencies were skeptical of the claim that weapons of mass destruction could be ready for use within 45 minutes.
``The information which I'm told was dubious did come from the agencies, but they were unhappy about it because they didn't think it should have been in there,'' said BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan.
``They thought it was not corroborated sufficiently, and they actually thought it was wrong. They thought the informant concerned had got it wrong, they thought he had misunderstood what was happening.''
The BBC quoted an unidentified official as saying the claim was not in early drafts of the dossier, but was added in the week before publication at the behest of Blair's office.
``It was included in the dossier against our wishes because it wasn't reliable. Most things in the dossier were double-sourced but that was single-sourced, and we believe that the source was wrong,'' the BBC quoted its source as saying.
Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram confirmed in an interview that there was a single source for the 45-minute claim. He denied, however, that Blair's office had insisted on including the claim in the dossier.
``That is not the case. There was no pressure from No. 10 (Blair's office). That allegation is not true,'' Ingram told BBC radio.
Claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction were the heart of the British government's case for joining the United States in military action.
So far, U.S. and British forces in Iraq have produced no evidence of such chemical, biological or nuclear weapons programs.
Blair, who was visiting southern Iraq on Thursday, told reporters en route that he was convinced that Saddam did have such weapons.
``I have said throughout and I just repeat to you, I have absolutely no doubt at all about the existence of weapons of mass destruction,'' Blair said. ``And rather than speculating, let's just wait until we get the full report back from our people who are interviewing the Iraqi scientists,'' Blair said.
The question flared anew after U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld suggested Tuesday that Iraq might have destroyed its weapons of mass destruction before the war.
Robin Cook, a former foreign secretary who quit as leader of the House of Commons in protest against the war, said Rumsfeld's comments vindicated his own stance.
``If Donald Rumsfeld is now admitting the weapons are not there, the truth is the weapons probably haven't been there for quite a long time,'' Cook said Wednesday.
``It matters immensely,'' he said, ``because the basis on which the war was sold to the British House of Commons, to the British people, was that Saddam represented a serious threat.''
On the Net:
British dossier, http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/page271.asp
-------- business
Boeing's pay dirt
Robert Novak (archive)
May 29, 2003
Townhall.com
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/robertnovak/rn20030529.shtml
WASHINGTON -- No sooner did Congress adjourn last Friday for its Memorial Day recess than the Pentagon declared victory for the Boeing Company over U.S. taxpayers. Against advice from federal budget officials and its own outside advisers, the Defense Department boosted Boeing's ailing commercial aircraft business with a sweetheart Air Force leasing deal. That dramatically demonstrated political power in Washington.
Pressure from the speaker of the House, the president pro tem of the Senate and lawmakers from 17 states where the big defense contractor operates rolled over opposition from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). While the ultimate decision was made by President Bush, the political balance weighed heavily for Boeing.
"President Eisenhower must be speaking out in his grave about the military-industrial complex that he warned about," Sen. John McCain told me. McCain's was the only congressional voice to speak out when the deal was announced. Bailing out Boeing is a classic case of the public interest subordinated to protect a politically well-connected contractor.
The General Accounting Office (GAO) estimates $20 billion to $30 billion in government costs for leasing 100 Boeing 767 tankers for six years, costing $12.2 billion to $22.4 billion more than simply modernizing existing KC-135E tankers. Actually, the OMB reports the current fleet is in good shape, and the Air Force says there is no need to start replacing the KC-135Es before 2012. None of them, says the Air Force, will meet the time limit on use until 2040.
OMB Director Mitchell Daniels could see that this proposal was in Boeing's but not the nation's interest. Just before last Christmas, he thought the deal was sidetracked. When the Defense Department's leasing committee postponed further consideration, a Pentagon official told me: "It was decided that no deal was to be made." I concluded in a Dec. 19 column: "The deal is dead." Ominously, however, no announcement was made.
Democratic Rep. Norman Dicks of Washington state, who has carried Boeing's water in Congress for over 26 years, predicted after my column that the deal would be saved. Senate President Pro Tem Ted Stevens, Appropriations Committee chairman, hectored Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in an open hearing. House Speaker Dennis Hastert applied the heat behind the scenes. Daniels did reduce the cost to the taxpayers, but could not block the deal.
Concern for Boeing by Hastert, who represents a northern Illinois district, is a major benefit of the company's world headquarters moving from Seattle to Chicago. Boeing further strengthened itself by hiring Rudy F. deLeon, a senior Defense official in both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, as chief lobbyist. Boeing had a passionate advocate in Secretary of the Air Force James Roche, who has worked on both the military and industrial sides of the complex.
The drive toward a Boeing deal hit a bump two months ago when the Pentagon asked the opinion of the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA). Instead of the expected whitewash, the IDA appraisal (from a panel that included retired officers) was negative. McCain's efforts to obtain the report were rebuffed. This column also was unable to get it.
The Defense authorization act passed by the Senate last Thursday night ordered an analysis of alternatives to the Boeing lease. That senatorial intent was ignored by the Pentagon the next day when it announced the deal.
So delighted are Boeing's congressional cheerleaders that they admit the leasing deal was not driven by Air Force needs. Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington state exulted that it "will deliver a sustained boost for Boeing's production lines and its workers at a time when they need it most." When McCain asked Boeing whether it had offered a leasing deal to Continental Airlines and been turned down, he was told this was "proprietary" information. Boeing did not have a response to this column.
John McCain cannot reverse this deal, but he can make life miserable for James Roche. McCain said Friday that Secretary Roche contradicted Air Force studies and was "relentless in exaggerating aerial tanker shortfalls and problems in order to win approval of the lease." Roche, nominated to shift over as secretary of the Army to push Rumsfeld's modernization, must confront McCain in confirmation hearings that will explore what has been done for the Boeing Co.
--------
Rep. Waxman Letter to Acting Secretary of the Army
truthout
Thursday 29 May 2003
http://truthout.org/docs_03/060403A.shtml
Editor's Note | Rep. Waxman's letter to the office of the Army Secretary raises a number of disturbing issues. It appears that Halliburton subsidiary, Kellog Brown & Root, was given nearly $500 million in government contracts for the Iraq war without said contracts being proffered to other companies in a standard bidding process. Given Halliburton's close ties to Vice President Cheney, the potential impropriety of this action is manifest. As Rep. Waxman notes in his letter, Halliburton's contracts with the government allowed them "to profit from virtually every phase of the conflict with Iraq." Perhaps more disturbing is the timing of the issuance of said contracts. Waxman states that Brown & Root was contracted for Iraq war work in 2001. Was this contract offered before September 11? truthout is in the process of finding the answer to that question through Rep. Waxman's office. - wrp
Go to Rep. Waxman's Letter
http://www.truthout.org/mm_01/4.Wax.Brn.Root.Halli.pdf
-------- iraq
Ravaged system frustrates doctors
By Patrick Healy,
Boston Globe Staff,
5/29/2003
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/149/nation/Ravaged_system_frustrates_doctors+.shtml
BAGHDAD -- The near collapse of Iraq's strict disease-control measures, such as testing blood of foreigners at the border and prostitutes on the streets, has doctors here worried about a surge in hepatitis, HIV, and other viruses.
With an influx of Iraqi exiles and international aid workers to assist in rebuilding the country, the doctors say they believe the number of the communicable disease cases will rise sharply, although they report only anecdotal evidence of increases so far.
They say the country's 25 million people are exposed to viral outbreaks because of a lack of drugs, testing kits, medical supplies, and equipment, and because of the destruction of the central hospital where many of the ill were quarantined in repressive isolation under Saddam Hussein.
At Baghdad's central laboratory for viruses, doctors are also anxious about the possible fallout from looting at their facility and other hospitals. Iraqis stole hundreds of vials of HIV- and hepatitis-positive blood samples from laboratory freezers during the war, and medical officials say they have no idea what was done with the blood. Computers and blood-screening equipment were stolen and files were burned.
''We used to screen every risk group -- now we're screening no one except people coming to us,'' said Dr. Ramizia Al-Khayatt, who helps run Baghdad's Central Laboratory for Viruses. ''The health situation is miserable. Our controls are all gone.''
The capital's major blood-testing center is a dirty, poorly lit room with used cotton balls and syringe caps scattered among the broken floor tiles. In recent days, Iraqi men, women, and children have been lining up here to screen for illnesses stemming from contact with depleted uranium and other radioactive material from Hussein's regime.
Anxiety over the health of Iraqi children is especially high. More than 500,000 died from malnutrition, disease, and other maladies under 13 years of international sanctions that devastated Iraqi society, according to the United Nations. Now, families are worried about a new scourge of communicable diseases and war-related infections among the young.
''I've taken my daughter to three specialists since the war, and no one can diagnose her,'' said Ahmed Hussain, 35, standing with his 9-year-old daughter Hadeel, as she pressed cotton onto the spot where a nurse had just drawn blood. ''She's always sleepy and weak and doesn't eat or drink. . . . The doctor thinks maybe it's hepatitis or typhoid or something else, but they can't tell.''
The potential health crisis -- which UN doctors and international medical groups are closely monitoring -- is especially demoralizing to Iraqi disease-control experts, who prided themselves on a track record of low rates of viruses because of stringent screening protocols. These included testing the blood of people at border checkpoints, of prostitutes, of drug abusers who were arrested or hospitalized for other ailments, and of members of families with a history of communicable diseases.
Limiting the spread of HIV was a particular success story under Hussein's regime, doctors here say. According to Iraqi medical statistics, there have been only a few hundred confirmed cases of HIV since October 1985, when the first victim was treated, a foreigner who had been working in Florida and then came to Iraq. The first Iraqi to contract HIV was a hemophiliac believed to have received tainted blood in 1986.
Hepatitis has been a bigger problem. According to Iraqi health officials, millions of people have contracted hepatitis A during the past decade; about 500,000 have been diagnosed with hepatitis B (International health groups put the figure as high as 1.3 million.); and about 125,000 contracted hepatitis C.
Many of the sickest HIV-positive and hepatitis patients were quarantined at a sprawling hospital in southern Baghdad that has recently been ransacked from wing to wing. The hospital not only provided free drugs and living quarters, but also had a barber shop, a dentist, and a cafeteria for the sick. This week, young men were seen carrying tin and metal sheeting from the HIV ward that once housed a dozen patients; all that was left in the room was shattered glass on the floor.
Dr. Dali R. Omar, chief of the laboratory's AIDS and hepatitis unit, said he worries about stolen blood samples, which he says are not traceable. ''I'll be very happy if the specimens infect those thieves, because I hope they die,'' Omar said.
In an occupied, war-torn society held together mostly by religious and family ties, Omar says he worries about a rise in sexual promiscuity among young people who have little to do and feel increasingly hopeless. He also believes that Iraqi mores may crumble.
''All this talk of freedom and liberty is not good. I hear young people talking about sex more,'' he said.
Yonis Yousif, a nurse who usually staffs the blood-testing center, says that some days he cannot screen for hepatitis and HIV because he doesn't have the proper kits. People line up next to his metal desk where syringes and vials lie; there is no waiting room, no secretary, but also no lengthy health forms to fill out.
Yousif said he regularly turns away people who come for results of prewar tests that are now lost; they are told to check hospitals before undergoing another test.
Patrick Healy can be reached by e-mail at phealy@globe.com.
This story ran on page A16 of the Boston Globe on 5/29/2003.
--------
Allies to Retain Larger Iraq Force as Strife Persists
May 29, 2003
The New York Times
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/29/international/worldspecial/29IRAQ.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 28 - Faced with armed resistance that has killed four American soldiers this week, allied military commanders now plan to keep a larger force in Iraq than had been anticipated and to send war-hardened units to trouble spots outside Baghdad, senior American officials said today.
Instead of sending home the Third Infantry Division, which led the charge on Baghdad, American officials are developing plans that call for most of its troops to extend their stay and be used to quell unrest and extend American control.
Allied officials said that about 160,000 American and British troops were in Iraq and that most were likely to stay until security improves and other nations eased the burden by contributing troops.
Tens of thousands of logistics and transportation troops in Kuwait also support the Iraq deployment. As a result, the total number of allied forces involved directly and indirectly in securing Iraq is 200,000 or more, American military officials estimate.
Earlier this month, allied military officials said they were hoping to reduce American forces here at a faster rate, drawing the American presence in Iraq down to less than two divisions by the fall.
A new assessment of allied troop requirements is being prepared by the Army's V Corps, which assumes command next month of allied forces in Iraq. The review is not expected to be completed for several days but one American officer said, "The planning is looking at moving elements of the Third Division to hot spots outside of Baghdad."
The size of the American force used to enforce the peace in Iraq has important implications for the Pentagon debate over how to restructure the military and how many Army forces are needed in future. Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, predicted in February that hundreds of thousands of American troops would be needed to secure Iraq after a war.
That estimate was criticized by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz as a gross overestimate of what might be needed. "The idea that it would take several hundred thousand U.S. forces I think is far off the mark," said Mr. Rumsfeld, who has shown interest in cutting the size of the Army.
Defense Department civilians generally avoided providing their own estimate in public but some suggested that a force of about 100,000 American troops might be sufficient at the start and that the figure could quickly taper off. They asserted that the Iraqis would hail the Americans as liberators, that Iraq had little history of ethnic strife and that nations like France, which opposed the war, would assist in reconstruction.
With the new assessment, one possibility is that a substantial portion of the Third Infantry Division will be deployed to Falluja, 35 miles west of Baghdad, according to military officials. Fifteen Iraqis were killed and dozens were wounded in clashes with American soldiers last month, and two more Iraqis died after attacking American soldiers last week. On Tuesday, two American soldiers were killed and nine were wounded there after they came under fire at a checkpoint. Some of the fire directed at the Americans came from nearby buildings, including a mosque, American officials said.
Other units from the division - an infantry battalion or perhaps a cavalry squadron - may be sent north of Baghdad to reinforce the Fourth Infantry Division, which is charged with policing a huge swath of territory from Tikrit to Kirkuk to the Iranian border. A brigade is also likely to be kept in Baghdad to serve as a reserve force to back up the First Armored Division, officials said. The Third Infantry Division led the attack to Baghdad, and its M-1 tanks were the first to roll into the city. The division has been charged with providing security in Baghdad and many of its soldiers had expected to leave after the First Armored Division assumed responsibility for security in the Iraqi capital this week.
Some of the Third Infantry Division units have been in the Persian Gulf region for nine months. The idea of extending the deployment has come as a shock to many of the division's soldiers, who say they have done more than their share by leading the charge to Baghdad. But senior officials in the division hope that a new mission will raise morale, which has sagged as the division's deployment has been extended.
In addition to delaying the withdrawal of the Third Infantry Division some additional forces - engineers and intelligence units - may be sent from the United States.
The initial plan developed by American military commanders for reducing deployments in Iraq was consist with optimistic Defense Department assumptions. American military officials outlined a plan a month ago that would have reduced the American troop presence to less than two divisions by September, a force of 70,000 or substantially less, including logistical support.
That plan assumed that security would improve considerably and that troops from other nations would arrive to ease the burden on American and British forces. But continued attacks by remnants of Saddam Hussein's forces and paramilitary units, violence by criminal groups, slow progress toward rebuilding the Iraqi police and security forces and the vast amount of territory to be secured have led American commanders to rethink their plans about the pace of the reductions.
"You adapt to conditions," an American officer said.
One factor is geography. American commanders assert that security in Baghdad has been improving. The Army First Armored Division, which is fresh and has experience in peacekeeping operations in the Balkans, recently arrived in Iraq, as did the rest of the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment. In addition, some 4,000 military police officers have also been sent to the capital.
Even as American troops step up their efforts in Baghdad, however, they have become more concerned about areas outside the city. The Third Armored Cavalry Regiment is charged with securing a huge area that stretches from Baghdad to the Jordanian and Syrian borders. One soldier was killed in an ambush near the Syrian border this week.
The Fourth Infantry Division, which is deployed north of Baghdad, also has responsibility for the area from Tikrit to Kirkuk and toward the Iranian border. Its soldiers also monitor the Mujahedeen Khalq, the Iranian resistance movement that has turned over its heavy weapons and stays in designated areas northeast of Baghdad. There have been a series of attacks by rocket propelled grenades and a recent drive-by shooting directed against the Fourth Infantry Division. Citing the large area it has to cover, the division has asked the V Corps to send more forces up north, officials said.
Regarding the Third Infantry Division, the division's First and Second Brigades are the units expected to stay on. The division's Third Brigade is expected to be the first of the division's brigades to return home. That brigade went to Kuwait, returned to the United States and then was sent back to Kuwait for the war. As a result, it has been deployed abroad for 12 of the last 15 months.
Currently, there are 145,000 American Army and Marine forces in Iraq. With the inclusion of British forces, the number of allied troops is about 160,000. About 90,000 American troops are in Kuwait. Some are en route to the United States from Iraq, but many are supporting the American deployment in Iraq.
--------
Blair Visits Basra, With Praise for British Soldiers' Role
May 29, 2003
The New York Times
By MARC LACEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/29/international/worldspecial/29CND-BLAI.html
BASRA, Iraq, May 29 - Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain today became the first foreign leader to visit postwar Iraq after a quick stop in this strategic city in the south, which Mr. Blair said British soldiers had seized in war and were now rebuilding in relative peace.
"You fought the battle, you won the battle, and you fought it with great courage and valor," Mr. Blair told several hundred troops on the grounds of a grand palace that less than two months ago had been one of the many homes of Saddam Hussein.
"But it didn't stop there. You then went on to try to make something of the country you had liberated. And I think that's a lesson for armed forces everywhere, the world over."
The prime minister, who came under fierce political attack at home for joining the American-led war, portrayed his visit here not as a victory tour but as a tribute to British troops, especially those who died in the fight.
"This wasn't the pretend stuff that happens in films," Mr. Blair said.
"It was real war, with real bloodshed and real casualties. And there were people you will have known that aren't going back home. And we grieve for them, and we pay respect to them for everything they did and the sacrifice that they made."
Tight security surrounded the visit. Mr. Blair, dressed casually in blue chinos and a white shirt with his sleeves rolled up, arrived on a military transport plane at the Basra International Airport, which now serves as a British military base. His motorcade rushed through city streets under military escort to the palace, which is now also a British base.
Mr. Blair met with some carefully selected Iraqis but there were many others eager to talk with him who never got the chance.
"We were happy when his troops arrived but I'm not really happy to see him now," said Hashem al-Asarmy, an accountant at an oil company, standing near one of the many war-damaged buildings in Basra.
"Look at what this war has done to us."
Basra has improved markedly in the two months since British troops fought their way into the city and then struggled to contain Baath Party holdouts. Still, Iraq's second-largest city remains a troubled place, with trash piling up in the streets, diseases on the rise and the economy at a standstill. After dark, gunfire rings out across Basra and the looting of government buildings, businesses and homes that has been going on for weeks continues with a fury.
Mr. Blair saw some of the improvement today when he stopped at a primary school that had been thoroughly looted during the war but that was restored with the help of British soldiers. He popped his head in on an Arabic language class and heard the students sing welcome songs.
"I consider this school like my home and it was ruined," said Saad Kazem Allami, principal of Kadig al Kubra School for Girls. "Everything was gone."
When Mr. Blair arrived, he found the walls freshly repainted, the furniture restored and new blackboards hanging in every classroom.
"We from my country and the people here are delighted to have helped you in this regard," Mr. Blair told students and teachers in the school's courtyard.
Mr. Blair met with L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian leader of the American-led occupying authority, and received a briefing on the security situation in Iraq as well as on the challenge of forming a new government.
The creation of a new Iraqi leadership structure has proven as chaotic in Basra as in Baghdad. An interim council created by the British to help run Basra was disbanded recently after its leader was found to be tied to the Baathists. A new body will take its place, but officials with the American-led Organization for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance suggest it could take years before the country is truly running itself.
That does not sit well with many in Basra, which is home to Shiite dissidents who have struggled for more than a decade with Mr. Hussein's government.
"We want to run our own country," said Kaseem al-Jobory, spokesman for Al Dawah Party, one of the largest Islamic parties in Basra.
"We hope Mr. Blair knows that Iraqis love their country. This is not Britain and it never will be."
-------- israel / palestine
Top Palestinian Says He Hopes for Cease-Fire Pact With Hamas
May 29, 2003
The New York Times
By TERENCE NEILAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/29/international/middleeast/29CND-PALE.html
The Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, said in an interview published in Israel today that he expected to reach an agreement with the militant group Hamas next week to end its attacks on Israelis.
Considered a significant statement in the jockeying to reach a peace agreement in the region, it was issued only hours before a scheduled meeting between Mr. Abbas and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel. An accord with Hamas limited to a cease-fire, however, would fall far short of Israel's longstanding demands.
The Israeli government is insisting that Palestinian security forces begin arresting and disarming militants, and has always rejected a cease-fire alone as insufficient.
Mr. Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, stressed that no agreement with Hamas had been signed yet, but that in a meeting with the group's leaders in Gaza last Thursday "they showed willingness" to reach a cease-fire. He said he also hoped to reach similar agreements with other militant groups, including Islamic Jihad, and were engaged in talks with the groups' leaders abroad.
"My assessment is that by next week I will arrive at a cease-fire agreement with Hamas," Mr. Abbas said. "Hamas will commit to halting terrorism"' both within Israel and in the occupied territories, he said.
Hamas has been the main group behind a series of suicide bombings, and its leaders were reported to be studying the proposal.
"If the Israelis stop killing Palestinian civilians, free prisoners and end aggression, we avoid targeting Israeli civilians," a senior Hamas official, Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, was quoted by Reuters as saying.
The leader of Islamic Jihad said today that the organization had offered to stop attacks on Israeli civilians, but that it depended on a promise from Israel to halt military operations against Palestinians.
The prime minister's remarks, published in the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth, came before he was to meet at 9:30 p.m. Jerusalem time with Mr. Sharon to discuss an international peace plan backed by the United States.
Mr. Abbas and Mr. Sharon are also due to meet on the peace plan with President Bush next week in the Red Sea port city of Aqaba, Jordan, and any agreement before then with Hamas would lend an immediate positive note for the three-way talks, despite Israel's strong reservations.
The Palestinian leader said that a cease-fire would not be a respite in which Hamas would be able to re-equip itself and rebuild itself for the resumption of warfare. He said military activity by Hamas would stop completely.
"Israel needs to help by means of releasing prisoners and refraining from military operations," he added.
Asked whether the Palestinian Authority would resort to using force against Hamas, as it did in 1996, should the understandings be violated, Mr. Abbas, said: "We are not going backward. A civil war never."
-------- mideast
Details Set for Meeting With Bush in Mideast
May 29, 2003
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/29/international/middleeast/29PREX.html
WASHINGTON, May 28 - President Bush will hold a three-way meeting in Jordan next week with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel and Mahmoud Abbas, the new Palestinian prime minister, White House officials said today.
The announcement of the meeting in the Red Sea port city of Aqaba formalized Mr. Bush's deepening personal involvement in trying to resolve the Middle East conflict. It is part of an initiative that is full of potential chances for failure. But administration officials said they saw little choice but for Mr. Bush to lend his prestige and credibility to the effort after the Iraq war.
They also said they hoped that both the Israelis and Palestinians would take some concrete steps toward peace before the three leaders meet on Wednesday.
Mr. Bush is to go on Tuesday to the resort town of Sharm el Sheik in Egypt, where he will meet with a number of Arab leaders, including Mr. Abbas. Mr. Sharon will not be included in that meeting, an administration official said, because Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia objected.
Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said in a briefing to reporters today that Mr. Sharon would not be at the meeting of Arab leaders because "the format that we decided on was one that we thought worked best, and this format will work best."
Yasir Arafat, the longtime Palestinian leader, is to be excluded from the Sharm el Sheik gathering at the insistence of White House officials, who have been trying for months to marginalize him. Nonetheless, Arab diplomats said today that they believed that no agreement on the Middle East's future could be reached without the approval of Mr. Arafat.
White House officials said the meeting in Aqaba would take place with the caveat of "conditions permitting," apparently meaning that it could be called off if there was another round of violence or suicide bombings. But they also said that conditions now were better than they had been in many months for pushing both parties toward the idea of two nations, Israel and Palestine, existing side by side in the Middle East.
"The president just believes that this is a good time to sit down, face to face, eye to eye, with the leaders who have responsibility for trying to bring about that peace," Ms. Rice said.
The meeting in Aqaba became possible last weekend, when Mr. Sharon persuaded the Israeli government to endorse the American-backed peace plan, known as the road map, and to officially accept a Palestinian claim to statehood. But many details remain to be worked out. White House officials made it clear that the meeting in Aqaba would be a very early first step.
"This is going to be a long process, and it is going to have ups and downs, as it has always had," Ms. Rice said.
White House officials have been working on a meeting of the three leaders since Mr. Sharon canceled a May 20 visit to Washington because of a suicide bombing. With the White House visit off, administration officials began exploring the idea of a meeting of Mr. Bush, Mr. Sharon and Mr. Abbas in the Middle East at the end of a trip by Mr. Bush to an economic summit meeting in Evian, France.
Administration officials said the original location for a three-way meeting was Sharm el Sheik, the same spot President Bill Clinton visited on several occasions to try to bring the Israelis and Palestinians together. In October 2000, Mr. Clinton brokered a truce between Mr. Arafat and Ehud Barak, the Israeli prime minister at the time. But this time, administration officials said, Egypt was reluctant to be the host of a meeting that would include Mr. Sharon.
As a result, the administration officials came up with the solution of the two meetings, one with the Arab leaders in Sharm el Sheik - which is also to include President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and King Abdullah of Jordan - and the other the three-way meeting in Aqaba.
The meetings in Jordan and Egypt will come at the end of a six-day trip by Mr. Bush to Europe and the Middle East. The president is to leave this Friday for Poland, where he will tour the sites of the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau and deliver a speech about Europe and the trans-Atlantic alliance in Krakow.
On Saturday, Mr. Bush will meet with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in St. Petersburg for the city's 300th-anniversary celebration. He will then travel to a meeting of the leading industrialized democracies, known as the Group of 8, in Evian, France. There Mr. Bush will have his first face-to-face meeting since the war in Iraq with President Jacques Chirac of France. Mr. Bush will also meet with Hu Jintao, the new president of China.
From Evian, Mr. Bush will travel to the Middle East. After his meetings in Egypt and Jordan, he will make a final stop to see American troops at the United States Central Command forward headquarters in Doha, Qatar, where he will meet with the Bush administration's new civilian administrator for Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, and Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of allied forces in Iraq.
White House officials said there were no plans at this time for Mr. Bush to go to Iraq, where security and the delivery of basic services are unstable.
-------- spies
Classified: Censoring the Report About 9-11?
Bush officials are refusing to permit the release of matters already in the public domain-including the existence of intelligence documents referred to on the CIA Web site.
By Michael Isikoff,
5/29/03
NEWSWEEK June 2 issue
http://www.msnbc.com/news/917942.asp
Why is the Bush administration blocking the release of an 800-page congressional report about 9-11? The bipartisan report deals with law-enforcement and intelligence failures that preceded the attacks. For months, congressional leaders and administration officials have battled over declassifying the document, preventing a public release once slated for this week. NEWSWEEK has learned new details about the dispute.
AMONG THE PORTIONS of the report the administration refuses to declassify, sources say, are chapters dealing with two politically and diplomatically sensitive issues: the details of daily intelligence briefings given to Bush in the summer of 2001 and evidence pointing to Saudi government ties to Al Qaeda. Bush officials have taken such a hard line, sources say, that they're refusing to permit the release of matters already in the public domain-including the existence of intelligence documents referred to on the CIA Web site.
Terror Watch: Behind the Terror Alert
One document is called the PDB, the President's Daily Brief. The congressional report contains details of PDBs provided to Bush (and top national- security aides) prior to 9-11. The PDBs included warnings about possible attacks by Al Qaeda. (One PDB was given at the presidential ranch in Crawford, Texas, on Aug. 6, and dealt with the possibility that Al Qaeda might hijack airplanes.) But an administration review committee overseen by CIA Director George Tenet has refused to declassify anything that even refers to the existence of PDBs-though they are described on the CIA's own Web site (www.CIA.gov). A U.S. intelligence official said the review committee must consult with the White House before releasing anything. But the official denied charges by Florida Sen. Bob Graham, a Democratic presidential candidate, that Tenet's review committee was covering up White House embarrassments. "We're not playing politics," the official says. "Our concern is national security." Al Qaeda's Summer Plans
The other hot-button issue is the Saudis, sources say. The report discusses evidence that individuals with Saudi government connections may have provided the hijackers aid. One of them is Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi student who helped two hijackers get apartments in San Diego. The administration won't declassify references to al-Bayoumi even though, in response to a NEWSWEEK story, an FBI spokesman confirmed last November that he was being investigated. The report also includes interviews with U.S. officials about Saudi cooperation in the war on terror. Many were critical of the Saudis. The administration is declassifying only the response by former FBI director Louis Freeh praising Saudi assistance on the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing case. The U.S. intelligence official said that, in response to a letter cosigned by Graham and Rep. Porter Goss, House Intelligence Committee GOP chair, the review committee was considering allowing more portions of the report to become public.
-------- us
Relief for U.S. troops lacking
5/29/2003
By Tom Squitieri,
USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2003-05-29-peacekeepers-usat_x.htm
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon's search for troops from other nations to replace U.S. soldiers in the force that is stabilizing postwar Iraq has fallen short of expectations, and U.S. officials face the prospect of keeping more U.S. forces in Iraq than they had hoped, diplomats and military officials say.
Despite efforts to prod other nations to send troops - and a United Nations resolution on May 22 that cleared the way for countries to begin contributing soldiers to the postwar effort - the United States and Britain have gotten promises of just 13,000 troops from two dozen countries, according to diplomats for the affected countries. The first significant arrivals could come in July.
That's much fewer than the tens of thousands of troops U.S. planners want. There are about 150,000 U.S. troops and 15,000 British troops in Iraq, along with a smattering of soldiers from other nations. Pentagon officials had hoped to begin substituting troops from other countries for some U.S. troops as early as next month, when they had expected to send home most of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, which will now stay on.
Getting help from foreign troops is important for reasons beyond sending home battle-weary U.S. forces. The Bush administration would like to put a more multinational face on the occupation of Iraq by visibly involving a broader group of nations. Foreign help also could cut U.S. costs at a time when U.S. planners are facing an open-ended military mission in Afghanistan plus other operations in the war against terrorism.
In a speech Tuesday to the Council on Foreign Relations, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said 39 nations have contributed to the stabilization force or "provided other assistance." But the Pentagon will not specify which nations are contributing troops, or how many have been promised.
In his speech, Rumsfeld also said many U.S. troops will be required "for as long as it takes" to create a secure atmosphere in Iraq.
The United Sates is getting enthusiastic help from Poland. Polish officials said they are determined to take a lead role in the military security of Iraq as well as demonstrate to the United States and other NATO nations that it can be a good ally.
In Warsaw, 15 nations took part last week in talks on the force for Iraq. Polish officials said they received commitments from enough nations to fill out a 7,000-strong force for a sector of Iraq they will command.
Several countries the United States was hoping would send large numbers of troops now say they can contribute small groups for a short period of time. For example, Denmark says it was asked for 5,000 troops but will send 380.
Other nations that have participated in peacekeeping missions elsewhere have declined to send troops because public opinion in their countries heavily opposed the U.S. invasion and continues to oppose postwar U.S.-British control. There are other snags:
- NATO is preparing a force of 5,500 troops for peacekeeping duties in Afghanistan. That is drawing European troops who might have helped in Iraq.
- Worse-than-expected postwar lawlessness and violence in Iraq have forced U.S. planners to keep more troops there, and have increased the anxiety of some nations about committing their forces.
- Some nations have few soldiers to send or a lack of money to pay for any significant deployment.
Britain's 15,000 troops still in Iraq are down from 45,000 during the war, and Britain has said it will continue to reduce the size of its force.
British Defense Minister Geoffrey Hoon said in an interview that a long occupation would severely strain Britain's small military. "It is fair to say we are stretched," Hoon said.
----
U.S. to Realign Troops in Asia
The Pentagon is shifting to smaller, more mobile forces to confront new challenges. Among the changes, it may seek to base ships off Vietnam.
Esther Schrader
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
May 29, 2003
http://www.latimes.com/la-fg-asiamil29may29000425,0,38726.story
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon is planning a broad realignment of troops in Asia that may include moving Marines out of Japan and establishing a network of small bases in countries such as Australia, Singapore and Malaysia where the U.S. has never had a permanent military presence, senior administration officials say.
The moves in Asia, designed to include the transfer of troops away from the demilitarized zone in South Korea, represent the third phase of a sweeping plan by the Pentagon to reposition U.S. forces around the world to be closer to areas it considers unstable while cutting the U.S. presence in Cold War-era strongholds such as Germany.
The shift is also likely to lower the U.S. military's profile in areas where its presence has provoked resentment and become a troublesome political problem, such as Seoul and the Japanese island of Okinawa.
The change is already underway in the Middle East, where U.S. forces have largely pulled out of bases in Saudi Arabia and Turkey over the last month, and in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, where the Pentagon has moved rapidly to establish bases in territories formerly controlled by the Soviet Union.
"Everything is going to move everywhere," said Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy. "There is not going to be a place in the world where it's going to be the same as it used to be We're going to rationalize our posture everywhere - in Korea, in Japan, everywhere."
Feith declined to divulge details, but some of the moves being considered for Asia were described by other defense officials. The U.S. is considering moving most of the 20,000 Marines on Okinawa to new bases that would be established in Australia; increasing the presence of U.S. troops in Singapore and Malaysia; and seeking agreements to base Navy ships in Vietnamese waters and ground troops in the Philippines.
In South Korea, as previously reported, the Pentagon is hoping to begin moving Army troops away from the demilitarized zone and out of Seoul by October.
The Pentagon has not yet made plans to reduce the overall troop level of nearly 38,000 in South Korea, for fear of sending a signal of lack of resolve to North Korea. But eventually, one senior administration official said, such a reduction is probably in the cards.
"It's possible the numbers will be lower, but the capabilities will be greater," the official said.
Up to now, more than 75% of the 100,000 U.S. troops in East Asia have been concentrated in just two countries, South Korea and Japan. An additional 12,500 U.S. military personnel are on ships in the region, with just 1,270 more elsewhere, mostly logistics workers in Singapore.
The rationale for that deployment has been that U.S. forces needed to be prepared to defend Japan and South Korea, mainly against China. But in the post-Sept. 11 world, the threat from China is believed by Bush administration policymakers to pale beside that posed by unstable countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East that are viewed as breeding grounds for terrorists.
At the same time, countries such as Vietnam, Australia and several nations in Central Asia and Eastern Europe are openly seeking a U.S. military presence and the security and economic benefits that American bases could bring.
Such countries are, by virtue of their location, viewed as potential launching pads for moving U.S. forces quickly and clandestinely to future areas of conflict.
"During the Cold War, the general thought was the forces that we had in Europe were going to be used in Europe, the forces we had in Korea were going to be used in Korea, and so on," Feith said.
But, he said, what Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has been saying is that "our history demonstrates that we have no idea where our forces might be used next, and we should not be devising basing arrangements and we should not be creating a force structure premised on the notion that the forces are going to be used where they are based."
South Korea provides one example. Under the agreement that has kept U.S. troops there since the Korean War, those forces have maintained a focus on just one contingency - an attack on the South by North Korea.
The Army's 2nd Infantry Division is deployed along the DMZ. The remaining U.S. forces are headquartered at the Yongsan garrison in central Seoul and the Osan Air Base or are scattered around the country.
"That's a waste of manpower," said Derek Mitchell, a former Pentagon special assistant for Asian and Pacific affairs. "In an era where our forces are declining, we need to make those guys deployable. And in an era where [South] Koreans have developed a new [military] capability, they should be allowed to take greater control over their own defense."
Reducing the number of U.S. troops in South Korea, or at least their visibility, could also serve to remove a major irritant. The troops' presence has been controversial among South Koreans for years, and the deaths of two girls run over by a U.S. military vehicle last year inflamed anti-American sentiment.
A date for the withdrawal from Yongsan is still being worked out with South Korean authorities, but Bush administration officials say they would like to begin the move in October. The Pentagon plans to then consolidate its troops at several key hubs in South Korea.
"It's going to make them more capable and efficient. Both governments agree this makes sense," the senior administration official said.
For the Marines based on Okinawa, most for months without their families, the U.S. is also considering a major shift.
Under plans on the table, all but about 5,000 of the Marines would move, possibly to Australia. The 24,000 or so U.S. troops based with their families elsewhere in Japan would remain where they were.
But the Pentagon would increase the military equipment and weaponry stored and maintained at ports in Japan and elsewhere, allowing it to cut back the number of troops based in the region but leaving it able to deploy them rapidly to conflicts in the area.
Pentagon officials say such options are still being discussed and stress that no final decisions have been made.
Times staff writer Sonni Efron contributed to this report.
-------- propaganda wars
Despite Thin Intelligence Reports, US Plans To Overthrow Iranian Regime
by Jason Leopold
May 29, 2003
Antiwar.com
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/leopold3.html
Here we go again. While postwar Iraq continues to crumble, the Bush administration is now setting its sights on a new target - Iran - in its so-called effort to reshape most of the Middle East and bring democracy to countries ruled by vicious dictators. But the Bush administration is again relying on flimsy evidence and thin intelligence information in claiming that the Iran poses an immediate threat to the United States.
The U.S. still hasn't uncovered any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which was the prime reason for launching an attack against the country. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said in an interview reported by CNN Tuesday that it's possible the WMD in Iraq may have been destroyed prior to the war. So, right now, the Bush administration has a credibility problem similar to that of The New York Times, which is still reeling from a spectacular scandal that one of its reporters fabricated dozens of national stories.
In taking a hardline stance against Iran, the Bush administration is going to have to do better than "trust us" and this time offer some hard evidene that countries like Iran pose an immediate threat to U.S. interests.
Still, if the rhetoric coming out of the White House this week is any indicator, the U.S. is gearing up for war, again. The reasons, however, are based on accusations, not tangible evidence.
Ari Fleischer, Bush's press secretary, said during his daily press briefing Tuesday that Iran hasn't taken the appropriate steps to round up al Qaeda terrorists allegedly hiding out within its borders, a claim disputed by the CIA. Moreover, Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons puts the U.S. in grave danger. Therefore, regime change is in order.
"The future of Iran will be determined by the Iranian people, and I think the Iranian people have a great yearning for government that is representative of their concerns," Fleischer said.
Fleischer also said Iran's claim that its nuclear program is designed to produce fuel for civilian nuclear reactors is a "cover story."
"Our strong position is that Iran is preparing instead to produce fissile materials for nuclear weapons," Fleischer said. "That is what we see."
An Iranian opposition group says the Iranian government is building two secret nuclear sites that might already be partially operational, producing enriched uranium that could be used in nuclear weapons.
Alireza Jafarzadeh, a spokesman for the National Council of Resistance of Iran, claims the Iranian government has "planned it" so that it can "be able to get the bomb by 2005."
The NCRI provided detailed information about the previously undisclosed sites - Lashkar-Abad and Ramandeh, about 25 miles west of Tehran, but offered no direct evidence.
Iranian officials have denied harboring al-Qaeda operatives and said the country would vigorously defend itself against any U.S. threat, which in the eyes of the Bush administration, could set the stage for another war and further increase anti-American sentiment and put the U.S. in more danger of terrorist attacks, according to several Democratic lawmakers.
However, the real cover story is the one the Bush administration is spinning in order to win public support for what was already planned for Iran months ago, well before "Operation Iraqi Freedom."
Before the United States military decimated Iraq, the neocons at the highly influential think tanks the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century were already advising Bush administration officials, like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, on how to overthrow the ruling parties in Iran, Libya and Syria after the war in Iraq was over.
Many of AEI and PNAC's former members are now working in Bush's administration. PNAC's influence on Bush's foreign and defense policies are so powerful that many of its recommendations on how to transform the military have already been adopted by the Pentagon.
But unlike Iraq, using military force in these other countries to replace the rulers wasn't being considered as a way to oust the regimes, according to former Bush administration officials. Whether or not that becomes the course of action now is debatable, but even if military force isn't used for regime change in Iran or other Middle Eastern countries the reasons for engaging in political warfare in that region is just as troubling as the reasons the U.S. launched a military attack on Iraq: intelligence information that suggests these countries pose an immediate threat to the U.S. is thin and possibly non-existent.
Still, the Bush administration has its agenda and it seems that Iran is indeed its next target. Instead of military action, the Bush administration will encourage a "popular uprising" in its effort to overthrow Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and lend financial support to Iranians to get the job done.
To get Iranians to rise up against its government, U.S. Senator Sam Brownback, R-Kansas, has drafted an amendment to the Senate Foreign Authorization bill titled The Iran Democracy Act that calls for using the new Radio Farda to host programming from Iranian Americans who communicate with their families inside Iran about the desire for an internationally monitored referendum vote on what form of government Iran should have.
The amendment would also provide grants for private radio and TV stations in the U.S. that broadcast pro-democracy news and information into Iran. The amendment also provides funds to translate books, videos and other materials into Persian - specifically, information on building and organizing non-violent social movements.
Moreover, Brownback introduced legislation that would establish an Iran Democracy Foundation to provide grants to the Iranian-American community and for the radio and TV stations in the U.S. that broadcast directly into Iran.
This is the type of political warfare the Bush administration believes will force Iran's government from power. But the Bush administration will have a hard time convincing Iranians that it can follow through on its promise. For one, anarchy is running amok in postwar Iraq and many critics have accused the Bush administration of abandoning its goal of democratizing the country. Furthermore, Iranians remember how the first President Bush encouraged the Kurds to rise up against Saddam Hussein during the 1990s only to be abandoned by that administration and ultimately slaughtered by Hussein.
But that doesn't stop the think tanks from believing that it can't be done.
"For Iran, the approach might be compared to the approach the United States and other democratic states took to Poland in the 1980s," said David Frum, President Bush's former speechwriter, who is credited with coining the phrase "axis of evil," in an April 5 presentation at AEI. "In Poland, as in Iran, an economically incompetent authoritarian regime ruled over an increasingly angry population. In Poland, as in Iran, a mass opposition movement rose up against the regime: Solidarity in Poland, the student democratic movement in Iran. Back in the 1980s, the United States and its allies never confronted the Polish communists directly. Instead, they imposed stringent economic sanctions on the regime - and contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for its covert newspapers and radio stations and to support the families of jailed or exiled activists...as the regimes economy disintegrated, the Polish communists were compelled first to open negotiations with Solidarity, next to permit Solidarity to compete in semi-free elections, and finally to step aside for a Solidarity government. Fourteen years later, Poland is a democratic state and a staunch NATO ally."
Richard Perle, who sits on the Defense Policy Board, a group that advises Rumsfeld, is more blunt in the reasons for going after Iran and he is not shy about suggesting that military force be used if necessary.
"The idea that our victory over Saddam will drive other dictators to develop chemical and biological weapons misses the key point: They are already doing so. That's why we may someday need to preempt rather than wait until we are attacked," Perle said in a letter to AEI members earlier this month.
Michael Ledeen, another influential AEI scholar, claims that the U.S. ought to "bag" Iran's regime because of its anti-American views.
"The Iranian people have shown themselves to be the most pro-American population in the Muslim world, but the Iranian regime is arguably the most anti-American on Earth. Let's support the people, and help them bag the regime."
Jason Leopold is the former Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. He is currently finishing a book on the California energy crisis.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
-------- drug war
California Official Asks Judge to Be Lenient With Pot Grower
May 29, 2003
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/29/national/29POT.html
SAN FRANCISCO, May 28 - California's attorney general has urged a federal judge to be lenient when he sentences a man who was authorized by the City of Oakland to grow marijuana for medical use and was then convicted on marijuana cultivation charges.
The man, Ed Rosenthal, 58, says he legally grew marijuana for medical use under a 1996 law approved by California voters, but Judge Charles Breyer of Federal District Court here refused to allow a jury to hear that defense.
In a two-page letter submitted on Tuesday, the state's attorney general, Bill Lockyer, asked Judge Breyer to impose a sentence on June 4 that takes the marijuana law, the California Compassionate Use Act, into account.
The law, Mr. Lockyer wrote, "authorizes the possession or cultivation of marijuana for the personal medical purposes of the patient upon the written or oral recommendation or approval of a physician."
Mr. Rosenthal's prosecution underscored the federal government's position that medical marijuana is illegal and that the will of California voters had no effect on federal drug law.
The federal Probation Department recommended that Mr. Rosenthal receive a 21-month prison term. The maximum term is 60 years. Prosecutors have not made a recommendation. Mr. Lockyer asked Judge Breyer "to impose the minimum sentence allowed under the federal sentencing guidelines." Dennis Riordan, Mr. Rosenthal's lawyer, said the lowest allowable term would be no prison time at all.
At the same time, 9 of Mr. Rosenthal's 12 jurors asked the judge on Tuesday not to imprison Mr. Rosenthal. The jurors criticized their own verdict after learning that Mr. Rosenthal was acting under the auspices of Oakland's marijuana program.
"We feel strongly that Mr. Rosenthal deserves uninterrupted freedom because we convicted him without having all of the evidence," the nine jurors wrote Judge Breyer.
Mr. Rosenthal once wrote a column for High Times magazine and has written books including "The Big Book of Buds" and "Ask Ed: Marijuana Law. Don't Get Busted."
-------- human rights
HUMAN RIGHTS
Amnesty Calls World Less Safe
May 29, 2003
The New York Times
By SARAH LYALL
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/29/international/worldspecial2/29AMNE.html
LONDON, May 28 - The world has become more dangerous, and governments more repressive, since the effort to fight terrorism began after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, the human rights group Amnesty International said today.
Releasing its annual report, the group singled out the United States for particular opprobrium, condemning its detention of 600 foreign nationals at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as a "human rights scandal" and calling on the government to release or charge those held there.
"What would have been unacceptable on Sept. 10, 2001, is now becoming almost the norm," Irene Khan, Amnesty's secretary general, told reporters.
"The great supporters of human rights during the cold war now quite readily either roll them back in their own countries or encourage others to do so and turn a blind eye," she said.
In Washington, Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, denied that United States was violating the detainees' rights.
"I dismiss that as without merit," he said, according to The Associated Press. "The prisoners in Guantanámo are being treated humanely. They're receiving medical care. They're receiving food. They're receiving far better treatment than they received in the life that they were living previously."
But the report said that the problems were not confined to the United States, or to Britain, which it also criticized for post-Sept. 11 antiterrorism legislation that it said had allowed 11 foreign nationals to be interned without charge in high security prisons.
"The 'war on terror,' far from making the world a safer place, has made it more dangerous by curtailing human rights, undermining the rule of international law and shielding governments from scrutiny," Ms. Khan said.
--------
U.S. Agency to Be Cited in Suit About Trade and Child Labor
May 29, 2003
The New York Times
By ELIZABETH BECKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/29/international/africa/29TRAD.html
WASHINGTON, May 28 - An international labor rights group announced today that it planned to sue the United States Customs Service for breaking American trade law and allowing African cocoa picked by indentured child labor to be imported into this country.
Terry Collingsworth, director of the International Labor Rights Fund, said his group had grown impatient with the Customs Service for failing to investigate accusations that cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast used slave or indentured child labor.
He said those cocoa beans were purchased by large international food firms like Nestle, Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland Company.
"We are confident that if the Custom Service began an investigation the industry would take notice and find out whether indentured child labor was used to pick the cocoa beans," Mr. Collingsworth said.
Kevin Bell, spokesman for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Bureau, said, "We reject the charges against us and are in the process of writing a letter to the group explaining what we are doing."
The Ivory Coast is one of the major producers of cocoa in the world.
In a letter to the group, Richard Meade of Nestle U.S.A. said his company was working with members of Congress and organized labor. Together, he said, they had developed a plan "to better identify and address instances of abusive child labor in cocoa growing."
The labor group is only the latest organization to charge that plantation owners in the Ivory Coast buy children from neighboring countries like Mali to work in cocoa fields.
According to a 1998 report by Unicef's Ivory Coast office, children from Mali and Burkina Faso were brought by traffickers to work in the plantations. But the authors of the report wrote that it was impossible to estimate how many children were involved.
The State Department's 2002 report on human rights in the Ivory Coast stated that "some forced child labor and trafficking in children and women also persisted. "
Some of the children are said to be victims of smugglers' rings. Others are sent by their parents to the fields to earn money and learn a trade but end up forfeiting their earnings to middlemen. The plantation workers are paid 50 cents a day.
Marx-Vilaire Aristide, an investigator for the labor group, said that after visiting more than two dozen cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast he found some evidence of child labor but was chased off the premises once he was seen photographing the children.
Mr. Aristide, a Haitian who speaks French, said he interviewed several children from Mali who escaped from the plantations. He said they complained that they were badly treated, given little food and no money and in desperation fled the country to return to their homes.
As a result of the investigations, the labor rights group said today that it was the responsibility of customs officials to investigate which plantations continue the practice of indentured or slave child labor and then ban all products made from the cocoa beans.
"Once the agency has a reason to believe that a product is made by forced child labor," Mr. Collingsworth said, "the burden is on the importer to show that they are not."
But Mr. Bell of the Customs Service said the suit was unnecessary. "We already enforce the law," he said.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Pennsylvania Develops Wind Power Capability
HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania,
May 29, 2003
(ENS)
http://ens-news.com/ens/may2003/2003-05-29-09.asp#anchor6
Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) Acting Secretary Kathleen McGinty, who headed the White House Office of Environmental Quality in the Clinton administration, today offered the support of her office to a wind energy engineering facility that recently relocated from Delaware to Pennsylvania.
McGinty joined clean energy advocates, business leaders, federal and local elected officials to tour the office of AdvanTek International LLC in Boothwyn, Delaware County, where the firm designs and develops its wind turbine rotors. The company, which employs 13 engineers and technical staff, will play a critical role in doubling the land area for wind development in Pennsylvania and improving the efficiency of wind turbines.
"Fostering the development of companies like AdvanTek not only helps to cut pollution and improve environmental quality, but it also gives Pennsylvania a commanding edge in the renewable energy market, allowing for more opportunities in technology development and job growth," said McGinty.
In order for wind power to continue to grow, technologies must be developed to improve turbine power output in lower speed winds that are more common that high speed winds.
AdvanTek's Instantaneous Power ControlT (IPCT) technology is a new form of rotor blade and control system that reduces the cost of wind energy by capturing more power at lower wind speeds.
"IPCT is a game changing technology that will significantly decrease the cost of wind energy production, reduce the need for federal and state subsidies, shorten the distance between supply and demand, and strengthen our energy independence and security," said AdvanTek President Steven Kopf.
AdvanTek will employ an advanced wind turbine test center to demonstrate the IPCT rotor and control technology that can increase the annual output of utility scale turbines by as much as 25 percent.
The technology offers the potential to improve the net present value of a wind farm by more than 50 percent, and more than double the land area available for wind development in Pennsylvania.
"AdvanTek is another example of the public-private partnership represented here today that has made wind energy an economic force in Pennsylvania, providing emission free power to the region," said Thurman Brendlinger, director of the Clean Air Council's Pennsylvania Wind Campaign, which cosponsored AdvanTek's official opening ceremony.
Wind farms in Pennsylvania today produce 35 megawatts of electricity, enough to power about 10,000 homes. Another 110 megawatts of wind power is coming on line within the next year.
Demand for clean electricity continues to grow. Recently, the Pennsylvania Turnpike Authority, Swarthmore Borough, Swarthmore College and the University of Pennsylvania all increased their commitments to wind power by purchasing New Wind Energy from Community Energy, a Delaware County renewable energy marketing company.
--------
Wind power sees 12 pct world market share in 2020
REUTERS BELGIUM:
May 29, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/20964/story.htm
BRUSSELS - Europe's wind power industry said this week it could take a 12 percent share of the world's electricity market by 2020 if policies are put in place which recognise its benefits to the environment.
Wind energy, which produces neither the greenhouse gases of fossil fuels nor the radioactive waste of nuclear power, currently only provides 0.4 percent of the world's electricity and most of that is in Germany, Denmark and Spain.
But the European Wind Energy Association said the industry could grow that quickly if the right incentives were put in place, expanding the sector from a seven billion euros business to one worth 75 billion euros the year by 2020.
The EWEA wants governments to set themselves binding targets to increase the use of wind power, to remove subsidies to competing sectors like coal and nuclear and to ensure wind farms have fair access to energy grids.
The forecast, set out in a report by the EWEA and environmental group Greenpeace, is much more optimistic than one by the International Energy Agency (IEA), which sees a much smaller increase in the market share for "renewables" like wind.
In a report last year, the IEA, which monitors global energy trends for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, said all renewable electricity sources other than hydro would account for only three percent of world consumption by 2020, up from two percent in 2000.
Overall electricity generation would grow 2.6 percent per year, it said.
Wind power's advocates say the demand for power that does not produce carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas blamed for causing global warming, will increase as the Kyoto Protocol on climate change takes effect.
-------- environment
High Mercury Levels Found in Rain
WASHINGTON, DC,
May 29, 2003
(ENS)
http://ens-news.com/ens/may2003/2003-05-29-09.asp#anchor3
Rain falling over 12 eastern states has been found to contain high levels of mercury that exceed federal safe standards for people and wildlife, according to a new National Wildlife Federation report.
The paper, titled "Cycle of Harm: Mercury's Pathway from Rain to Fish in the Environment," found that mercury contamination levels in rain and snow falling over Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Texas consistently exceeded the Environmental Protection Agency's safe standards for mercury in surface water.
"We usually think of rain as pure and clean," said Mark Van Putten, president of the National Wildlife Federation. "But this report reveals that the rain falling over these states contains ominous levels of mercury and threatens the health of people and wildlife."
Mercury attacks the brain and nervous system and can be dangerous to sport fishermen, subsistence anglers, Native Americans and anyone who eats freshwater fish. Health officials in 44 states have issued advisories warning people to restrict or entirely avoid eating fish caught in thousands of inland lakes and streams.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in 12 women of childbearing age has blood mercury levels that exceed the federal safe level for protection of the fetus. This translates into approximately 320,000 babies born annually in the United States at risk for neuro developmental delays.
In wildlife, mercury inhibits reproduction among species such as rainbow trout, zebra fish, mallard and American black ducks, loons and terns, otters and mink.
Air pollution is considered the major cause of mercury in lakes and streams. Eighty five percent of all mercury pollution is created by coal fired power plants and municipal medical waste incinerators that send mercury into the air, where it falls back to Earth as rain or snow, according to the Mercury Policy Project, a nongovernmental organization formed in 1998 to raise awareness about the threat of mercury contamination.
In addition to calling for nationwide controls on mercury emissions from coal fired power plants and the elimination of mercury in products and manufacturing, the report recommends specific actions each state can take to safeguard the health of people and wildlife.
To read the full report, visit: http://www.nwf.org.
---
Indian Waste Mercury Met by Activists in New York
NEW YORK, New York,
May 29, 2003
(ENS)
http://ens-news.com/ens/may2003/2003-05-29-09.asp#anchor4
A ship carrying 290 metric tons of waste containing toxic mercury that contaminated a community in India was greeted upon its arrival today into New York harbor by demands that the mercury be permanently stored and not recycled into the global marketplace.
The waste is an assortment of glass contaminated with mercury, effluent sludge, broken thermometers and metallic mercury collected from a thermometer factory owned by the Unilever subsidiary, Hindustan Lever Limited located in the town of Kodaikanal in the state of Tamil Nadu, India.
The waste is headed for Hellertown, Pennsylvania where it is expected to be recycled by Bethlehem Apparatus Company, the world's largest mercury recycling facility. Unless other arrangements are made, environmentalists warn, the recycled mercury will be offered for sale on the open market.
An activist coalition composed of Greenpeace, Ban Mercury Working Group, and Clean Air Council, have asked Unilever for a meeting to negotiate a permanent retirement of the mercury.
"It will be a travesty of environmental justice if the same toxic mercury waste that damaged the people and the environment in India merely gets recycled and then sold back to India or other developing countries, where it will continue its cycle of poisoning developing countries again," said Ravi Agarwal, of Toxics Link India.
Exposure to mercury occurs from breathing contaminated air, ingesting contaminated water and food, and having dental and medical treatments. The U.S. federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry says, "Mercury, at high levels, may damage the brain, kidneys, and developing fetus."
"Unilever should purge its mercury double standard on developing countries like India, considering that mercury containing products have been banned for many years in the Netherlands, Unilever's home state," said Eco Matser, toxic campaigner at Greenpeace Netherlands.
There is mounting international concern over the sale of recycled mercury flooding the world market. Environmental groups contend that mercury should be made obsolete due to its severe toxicity. But the recycled mercury "will be dumped into the world market, ushering in cheaper mercury prices, which will increase further mercury use and subsequent harmful releases."
Of particular concern to environmentalists is the expected closing of 10 mercury cell chloralkali plants in the United States over the next decade, and the mandatory dismantling of 47 such plants in Europe by 2007. These plants use mercury in their production process. The dismantling will free up 15,000 metric tons of mercury for resale in Europe and from 1,500 to 2,500 metric tons in the United States.
Last February, the Governing Council of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) made a formal decision that there is sufficient evidence of significant global adverse impacts of mercury that warrant further international action to reduce the risks to human health and the environment from the release of mercury to the environment.
Among the impacts of concern is the widespread and increasing contamination of the world's fish stocks - a major global protein source for human populations.
----
Living near incinerator may up birth defect risk
29 May 2003
By Reuters
http://www.enn.com/news/2003-05-29/s_4641.asp
LONDON - Pregnant women living near incinerators or crematoriums may have a higher risk of having a child with birth defects, according to the findings of a British research team published Thursday.
Scientists at the University of Newcastle said they uncovered a 17 percent higher incidence of spina bifida and a 12 percent greater incidence of heart defects in an analysis of almost 245,000 births in northwest England between 1956 and 1993.
"We found an increased risk of spina bifida and heart defects in relation to proximity to incinerators and an increased risk of stillbirth, anencephalus (a brain abnormality), and other congenital anomalies in relation to proximity to crematoriums," Professor Louise Parker said in a report in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Both gave out harmful chemicals including dioxins. Parker and her colleagues called for further studies, including examining pollution levels emitted by the buildings, because they said they could not establish a cause for the defects from their results.
"Further investigations using actual pollution levels and high quality data ... are needed," Parker said.
-------- genetics
Project Will Seek to Uncover Genetic Roots of Major Diseases
May 29, 2003
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS WADE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/29/health/29DISE.html
A new approach to identifying the genes involved in complex illnesses like cancer and heart disease will be announced today by the Center for the Advancement of Genomics in Rockville, Md., and Duke University.
The goal is to jump-start the long-discussed idea of bringing genomic data to bear on people's health risks, based on the premise that all diseases have a genetic component.
Dr. J. Craig Venter, president of the Maryland center, is a leading expert in sequencing genomes, the operation of identifying the sequence of DNA units that encode the genetic information in a person's genome. He said he was opening a large center in June that could sequence 48 billion units of DNA a year.
This would enable the group to sequence many genes from a large number of patients, looking for mutations - changes in the DNA units - that might be associated with higher risk of disease.
Dr. Ralph Snyderman, chancellor for health affairs at Duke, said the collaboration grew out of a conversation he had several months ago with Dr. Venter in which he had become enamored of the idea of including genomic information in health care planning. "One of the powers of genomic information will be determining individualized risk for disease and response to therapy," Dr. Snyderman said.
Physicians at Duke's medical center plan to draw up lists of human genes considered likely to play a role in diseases of interest, like the 100 or so genes that may, when mutated, play a role in coronary artery disease. Dr. Venter's center would sequence the full DNA of these 100 genes from large numbers of patients, looking for the mutations that seemed to be linked to the disease. These mutations could then be used to assess the risk for coronary artery disease in the population at large.
The collaboration, to be called the Genomic-Based Prospective Medicine project, will focus first on heart disease, a form of cancer yet to be selected and aspects of infectious disease. Dr. Venter said that all findings would be published in the scientific literature, and that other universities were welcome to join.
At his new center, the cost of sequencing DNA will be as low as $1 for 800 DNA units, he said, a substantial saving on current costs.
The genes behind single-gene diseases are now easy to identify, but these diseases are relatively rare. Common diseases, like cancer and diabetes, are thought to be caused by many variant genes acting in concert. But because each variant gene makes only a small contribution, it has been hard to identify them.
The Venter-Duke project joins two other large-scale efforts to identify the genetic roots of common diseases. One is the study by Decode Genetics of virtually the entire Icelandic population, based on a comprehensive genealogy that allows patients to be put into pedigrees.
Dr. Kari Stefansson, president of the company, said on Tuesday that he had now mapped genes for 40 common diseases to their approximate location on the genome and had identified specific causative genes in 14 of them.
A second project is the HapMap approach developed at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., with the support of the National Institutes of Health.
The project's scientists have identified parts of the genome that have been inherited in large blocks from the ancestral human population, despite the shuffling of DNA that takes place between generations. They hope to use the blocks as shortcuts to finding disease genes.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Is there anything left that matters?
by Joan Chittister, OSB
Thursday, May 29, 2003
National Catholic Reporter
FWD by "carol wolman" cwolman@mcn.org
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0529-10.htm
This is what I don't understand: All of a sudden nothing seems to matter.
First, they said they wanted Bin Laden "dead or alive." But they didn't get him. So now they tell us that it doesn't matter. Our mission is greater than one man.
Then they said they wanted Saddam Hussein, "dead or alive." He's apparently alive but we haven't got him yet, either. However, President Bush told reporters recently, "It doesn't matter. Our mission is greater than one man."
Finally, they told us that we were invading Iraq to destroy their weapons of mass destruction. Now they say those weapons probably don't exist. Maybe never existed. Apparently that doesn't matter either.
Except that it does matter.
I know we're not supposed to say that. I know it's called "unpatriotic."
But it's also called honesty. And dishonesty matters.
It matters that the infrastructure of a foreign nation that couldn't defend itself against us has been destroyed on the grounds that it was a military threat to the world.
It matters that it was destroyed by us under a new doctrine of "pre-emptive war" when there was apparently nothing worth pre-empting.
It surely matters to the families here whose sons went to war to make the world safe from weapons of mass destruction and will never come home.
It matters to families in the United States whose life support programs were ended, whose medical insurance ran out, whose food stamps were cut off, whose day care programs were eliminated so we could spend the money on sending an army to do what did not need to be done.
It matters to the Iraqi girl whose face was burned by a lamp that toppled over as a result of a U.S. bombing run.
It matters to Ali, the Iraqi boy who lost his family - and both his arms - in a U.S. air attack.
It matters to the people in Baghdad whose water supply is now fetid, whose electricity is gone, whose streets are unsafe, whose 158 government ministries' buildings and all their records have been destroyed, whose cultural heritage and social system has been looted and whose cities teem with anti-American protests.
It matters that the people we say we "liberated" do not feel liberated in the midst of the lawlessness, destruction and wholesale social suffering that so-called liberation created.
It matters to the United Nations whose integrity was impugned, whose authority was denied, whose inspection teams are even now still being overlooked in the process of technical evaluation and disarmament.
It matters to the reputation of the United States in the eyes of the world, both now and for decades to come, perhaps.
And surely it matters to the integrity of this nation whether or not its intelligence gathering agencies have any real intelligence or not before we launch a military armada on its say-so.
And it should matter whether or not our government is either incompetent and didn't know what they were doing or were dishonest and refused to say. The unspoken truth is that either as a people we were misled, or we were lied to, about the real reason for this war. Either we made a huge - and unforgivable - mistake, an arrogant or ignorant mistake, or we are swaggering around the world like a blind giant, flailing in all directions while the rest of the world watches in horror or in ridicule. If Bill Clinton's definition of "is" matters, surely this matters. If a president's sex life matters, surely a president's use of global force against some of the weakest people in the world matters. If a president's word in a court of law about a private indiscretion matters, surely a president's word to the community of nations and the security of millions of people matters.
And if not, why not? If not, surely there is something as wrong with us as citizens, as thinkers, as Christians as there must be with some facet of the government. If wars that the public says are wrong yesterday - as over 70% of U.S. citizens did before the attack on Iraq - suddenly become "right" the minute the first bombs drop, what kind of national morality is that?
Of what are we really capable as a nation if the considered judgment of politicians and people around the world means nothing to us as a people?
What is the depth of the American soul if we can allow destruction to be done in our name and the name of "liberation" and never even demand an accounting of its costs, both personal and public, when it is over?
We like to take comfort in the notion that people make a distinction between our government and ourselves. We like to say that the people of the world love Americans, they simply mistrust our government. But excoriating a distant and anonymous "government" for wreaking rubble on a nation in pretense of good requires very little of either character or intelligence.
What may count most, however, is that we may well be the ones Proverbs warns when it reminds us: "Kings take pleasure in honest lips; they value the one who speaks the truth." The point is clear: If the people speak and the king doesn't listen, there is something wrong with the king. If the king acts precipitously and the people say nothing, something is wrong with the people.
It may be time for us to realize that in a country that prides itself on being democratic, we are our government. And the rest of the world is figuring that out very quickly.
>From where I stand, that matters.
A Benedictine Sister of Erie, Sister Joan is a best-selling author and well- known international lecturer. She is founder and executive director of Benetvision: A Resource and Research Center for Contemporary Spirituality, and past president of the Conference of American Benedictine Prioresses and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. Sister Joan has been recognized by universities and national organizations for her work for justice, peace and equality for women in the Church and society. She is an active member of the International Peace Council.
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