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NUCLEAR
Is Niger the smoking gun?
Beijing weighs up, then rejects, invasion of N Korea
NZ to send troops to Afghanistan
Protests as US Navy exercises start
Iran Sites Linked to Weapons
Iran shows missile muscle, despite nuclear furor
Iranian exiles describe newly found nuclear site
Nuclear Power in Japan
North Korea Reprocessed Nuclear Rods, Seoul Says
U.S. Says N. Korea Nuclear Activity Still Unclear
South Korea Issues Report on North Korean Explosions
Military Warheads as a Source of Nuclear Fuel
Nuclear waste facility gets boost
Nuclear Fuel Services Approved for Use of Uranium
Energy Dept. Halts Nuclear Shipments Plan
White House disowns British claim that Saddam tried to buy uranium
House Panel Cuts Bush Nuclear Weapons Requests
Bush Recantation Of Iraq Claim Stirs Calls for Probes
Bush Defends War, Sidestepping Issue of Faulty Intelligence
Bush and Rumsfeld Defend Use of Prewar Intelligence on Iraq
Where is Iraq War Instigator, Richard Perle?
MILITARY
West African oil attracts growing U.S. interest
How important is African oil?
EADS chief urges open transatlantic defence market
EGYPT TO GET U.S. AIR SUPPORT
Cold War Scientists Escape Chemical Charges - Lawyer
UK Quietly Presses U.S. Over Guantanamo Bay Trials
U.S. Firms Eager To Sell in Iraq
Progress Against Outlaws Is Cited as U.S. Releases Aid to Colombia
For a Town Council in Iraq, Many Queries, Few Answers
Iraq Insurgency Could Widen as U.S. Troops Flail
Shia u-turn boosts US Iraqi council plan
Citing national security, Bush sends $20M directly to PA
Guantanamo move puts US on trial
U.S. Gave Inaccurate Iraq Picture, Ex - Intel Official
Big Brother Gets a Brain
US withheld uranium intelligence from UN
U.S. to move 'striker' force to Hawaii for N Korea
House Approves $369 Billion for Defense Spending
Analysts fear mission in Liberia would stretch military
2 Spending Bills for the Military Advance in Congress
Tracing the pattern of WMD lies back to the source
Analysis: ACLU on DOJ 'deceit'
Is the Media Finally Turning on Bush?
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Man challenging 'enemy combatant' status
Secret aid poured into Colombian drug war
Man Challenging 'Enemy Combatant' Status
Man Held as 'Combatant' Petitions for Release
ENERGY AND OTHER
West Virginia Wind Farm to Power DC Area
Court Blocks Effort to Protect Secret Cheney Files
Cheney Loses Ruling on Energy Panel Records
UN Food Commission Lifts Irradiation Limits
Feds to sell pot seeds for medical use
Red clover fails to relieve hot flashes
ACTIVISTS
Emboldened Hong Kong Protesters Call For Free Elections
CIA whistleblower to talk about 9/11
Protesters demonstrate against Bush visit
INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL JUSTICE GROUP COLLECTS INFANT CARE KITS
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- britain
Is Niger the smoking gun?
Blair under fire as White House rejects British intelligence claiming Iraq tried to buy uranium
By Ben Russell and Andrew Buncombe in Washington
09 July 2003
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=422957
The White House has dealt a devastating blow to Tony Blair by rejecting as flawed British claims that Saddam Hussein attempted to buy uranium from Africa to restart his nuclear weapons programme.
The Bush administration was in full retreat yesterday with officials admitting that the allegation should not have been included in President George Bush's State of the Union address. The American admission represented the first serious split between London and Washington over the case against Saddam and exploded into a full-scale row in Westminster as Mr Blair told senior MPs that the Government was standing by its story.
Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Labour backbenchers demanded that Mr Blair release the intelligence behind the allegation to an independent inquiry.
In his address to Congress in January, Mr Bush said: "The British government has learnt that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
But a statement approved by the White House on Monday said: "Knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq's attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech. There is other reporting to suggest that Iraq tried to obtain uranium from Africa. However, the information is not detailed or specific enough for us to be certain that attempts were in fact made."
"In other words," a White House official told The New York Times, "we couldn't prove it and it might in fact be wrong."
The White House climbdown followed a sceptical report from the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee and claims from the retired US ambassador Joseph Wilson that the allegations of a link between Niger and Saddam were false. He had been sent to Niger by the CIA to investigate possible links nine months before Mr Bush's address.
Mr Wilson first made his claims anonymously in The Independent on Sunday 10 days ago. He repeated the claims in The New York Times at the weekend in a signed article. "I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons programme was twisted,"he said.
Monday was the first time the US had admitted publicly that key "evidence" backing the claim that Iraq was trying to "reconstitute its nuclear weapons programme" was false. The threat of Saddam acquiring nuclear weapons became central to the British and American governments' case for war. Tony Blair told MPs in September that Saddam was "actively trying to acquire nuclear weapons capability".
Mr Blair said yesterday the intelligence services were standing by their allegation that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium, despite a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in March dismissing the claims as based on crude forgeries. Questioned on the Niger affair by the Commons Liaison Committee, Mr Blair said the claims were based on multiple sources and did not rely on the forged documents obtained by the IAEA.
He said: "There was an historic link between Niger and Iraq. In the 1980s Iraq purchased somewhere in the region of 200 tons of uranium from Niger. The evidence that we had that the Iraqi government had gone back to try to purchase further amounts of uranium from Niger did not come from these so-called forged documents. They came from separate intelligence."
Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat leader, renewed his call for an independent inquiry. He said: "Once again, the Prime Minister is making assertions about contested intelligence assessments. The Niger documents are known to have been falsified, yet Tony Blair continues to insist the intelligence was accurate. The Bush administration now appears to be backing away from these claims. Once again it raises the question: did we go to war on a false premise?"
Michael Ancram, the shadow Foreign Secretary, added: "The only way that Tony Blair can establish the veracity of such intelligence information ... is to allow it to be examined in the context of an independent judicial inquiry. Given the total distrust of anything the Prime Minister says, it is vital for the re-establishment of the credibility of the intelligence services that this process is now undertaken."
Questioned in the Commons yesterday, Jack Straw said: "The information which was included in the dossier and assessed as reliable relating to the purchase of uranium - not that they had purchased it but Iraq had sought to purchase it - was based on sources quite separate than those based on the forged documents."
Mystery still surrounds the original source of the claim that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger. Foreign Office officials have admitted that it was passed on by a foreign intelligence service but insist that it fitted a pattern of evidence that Saddam was trying to revive his nuclear weapons programme.
Ministers have confirmed that they have not passed information on Niger to the IAEA, despite a commitment to co-operate with the nuclear weapons inspectorate.
The Government received a boost in its dispute with the BBC over a report claiming Downing Street "sexed up" its dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction with a claim that they could be deployed within 45 minutes. An official at the Ministry of Defence admitted meeting the BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan a week before the claim was broadcast but denied making any comment on No 10's involvement.
-------- china
Beijing weighs up, then rejects, invasion of N Korea
By Hamish McDonald,
Sydney Morning Herald Correspondent in Beijing and Tom Allard
July 9 2003
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/07/08/1057430211332.html
China asked its military to study a quick intervention in North Korea but decided that its relationship with the United States was more important than propping up the Stalinist state, with which it shares a border.
A source in Beijing said the study for a pre-emptive Chinese invasion was ordered by a Chinese Communist Party working group formed in late February under the country's senior leader, Hu Jintao.
The result of the study was negative. The People's Liberation Army concluded that although the Chinese-North Korean border was only lightly defended, the Chinese lacked the logistical capability of racing to the demilitarised zone facing South Korea.
"That this kind of thing is being considered in China tells us about the gravity with which this is being regarded in Beijing," said a senior Western diplomat closely following the crisis.
The source said the Chinese working group took the view that China's economic interests in keeping regional stability and co-operative relations with the US far outweighed its strategic stake in North Korea.
Moreover, it is now confident that Korean nationalism would see the Americans off, should the peninsula be reunified under the Seoul Government.
China's role in bringing about a resolution to the nuclear brinkmanship in the Korean peninsula is vital, and its preparedness to accept a democratic, capitalist and unified Korea on its border is a substantial development that will please the West.
But China is yet to be persuaded about other initiatives from the West to curb North Korea's nuclear threat.
Most notably, it has yet to back a co-ordinated multinational effort to intercept North Korean vessels and aircraft transporting nuclear material, weapons of mass destruction, missiles and related technologies.
The so-called Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) holds its second meeting in Brisbane today, with senior defence and foreign affairs officials from 11 countries taking part.
An Australian foreign affairs official said yesterday that military capability and intelligence sharing would be the main topics for discussion.
"We need to be able to make sure that our military are capable of doing the things that will be needed . . . if the Government decided it wanted such interdiction to take place," the official said.
The Minister for Defence, Senator Robert Hill, had been closely involved in developing the policy, and senior uniformed and civilian defence officials from Australia would be attending the meeting, the official said.
The PSI favours participating countries intercepting North Korean and other suspect vessels in their own waters as a first step. But a multinational force roaming international waters could evolve over time, perhaps with United Nations approval.
Denying overflight rights for suspicious North Korean aircraft is also a main item on the agenda, with "robust" action to force them down among the options outlined last week by John Bolton, US undersecretary of state for arms control.
The PSI is anxious for China to come on board, and Mr Bolton has had discussions with Chinese officials about the "selective interdiction" plan.
But North Korea experts in China warn that a proposed naval blockade to prevent North Korean exports of missiles and other weapons of mass destruction will face kamikaze-type attacks from a desperate regime.
The annual $A900 million earned from missile sales is the main source of hard currency for Pyongyang, far exceeding other sources such as remittances from ethnic Koreans in Japan.
Analysts in Beijing are taking seriously Pyongyang's warnings that it would consider interceptions of its ships and aircraft an act of war and strike back.
But Mr Bolton dismissed this threat. "The North Koreans are filled with bluster," he said before leaving Washington for Brisbane.
-------- depleted uranium
NZ to send troops to Afghanistan
Wednesday July 09, 2003
Pakistan Tribune
http://paktribune.com/news/index.php?id=31421
WELLINGTON, July 09 (Online): New Zealand will send 100 military personnel to Afghanistan to form a so-called Provincial Reconstruction Team in Bamian - site of the giant Buddha statues destroyed by the Taleban in 2001.
In a year-long deployment, they may also use borrowed United States military equipment, including four-wheel-drive Humvee vehicles.
There would be a small number of infantry soldiers "for protection", said Mr Burton and all military personnel would carry weapons.
Mr Burton said the contingent would be drawn from all three services and comprise a mix of skills: infantry, communications, intelligence, liaison, linguistics, medics, engineering, transport and supply.
Most would be rotated at between four and six months.
The New Zealanders will leave next month to take over a PRT base established in Bamian by the United States in January this year.
Supply and logistics support will be provided by US-led Coalition forces in Afghanistan.
The cost of a 12-month deployment is estimated to be $26 million.
The Bamian PRT is 200km west of Bagram Air Force Base, where the New Zealanders will train when they first arrive.
The handover would be completed by the last week in September, Mr Burton said.
The New Zealanders would be under New Zealand command.
"Provincial Reconstruction Team" is a term given to military units engaging in post-conflict social and political reconstruction.
Mr Burton said the job of the PRT would not be to rebuild but to provide an environment in which others, such as non-government organisations, could do so.
"A PRT is not a combat unit. Rather, its task is to assist the transitional government under President Karzai to expand its influence outside Kabul."
The PRT would provide strengthened military observer capacity, monitoring and assessing civil, political and military reform efforts through community engagement.
They would also act as liaisons for non-government agencies and other civilian organisations.
"In a way you could regard this almost as an enhanced military support but not an active military deployment," he said.
"Our people have already proved themselves adept at working in such diverse situations as the former Republic of Yugoslavia, Bougainville, and [East Timor]."
Question-and-answer material provided by Mr Burton's office hints that the New Zealand personnel may be at risk from depleted uranium (DU) munitions.
The answer: "All personnel being deployed into areas where DU may have been used are briefed on any potential risks that my be posed by DU. The New Zealand Defence Force will continue to provide medical checks and support to any personnel who think they may have been exposed."
The material says the United States has established three PRT, in Bamian, Gardez and Konduz, and that the British are in the process of establishing a fourth in Mazar-e-Sharif.
Bamian is 200km northwest of the capital, Kabul.
----
Protests as US Navy exercises start
09jul03
Australia Herald Sun
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,6725231%255E421,00.html
US Navy training exercises off the West Australian coast sparked protests from environmental campaigners today.
Bombing and air-to-ground support practice missions will be held today and tomorrow within the Lancelin defence training area (DTA), using non-explosive target marking munitions and inert practice bombs.
The exercises are being flown from the 96,000 tonne, nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, which has been accompanied by three other ships on its journey into Fremantle.
Despite assurances that no depleted uranium munitions are being used during the exercises, about 30 anti-nuclear campaigners gathered in Fremantle to protest against the exercises.
WA Greens MP Dee Margetts, who has protested against the use of Lancelin by the US military, said no assurances had been given that depleted uranium would not be used in the future.
"Although the navy have assured locals that no depleted uranium munitions will be used during the training, it cannot give them a guarantee that depleted uranium will not be used in future," she said.
"John Howard should show his commitment to the people and sovereign state of Australia and stop co-operating as a client state of the United States of America."
Nicola Paris of the Fremantle anti-nuclear group (FANG) said the protest was against the US navy, not the sailors themselves.
"Most people would agree what the US military says cannot be trusted, so when they say no uranium is being used, should we believe them?"
The guided-missile cruiser USS Antietam and the frigate USS Ingraham were due to dock in Fremantle this morning, while the USS Carl Vinson and support ship USS Sacramento were expected on Sunday, after the exercises are completed. More than 7000 sailors will disembark in Fremantle during the week.
-------- iran
Iran Sites Linked to Weapons
Associated Press,
July 9, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30041-2003Jul8?language=printer
Members of the main Iranian resistance group said they had identified two new sites they alleged were affiliated with Iran's clandestine nuclear weapons program.
They are an experimental uranium centrifuge site at the Kolahdouz industrial complex outside Tehran and a nuclear-fuel preparation center at Ardekan in central Iran, said Alireza Jafarzadeh, a U.S. representative of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, at a news conference in Washington.
There was no way to immediately verify their claims, which Jafarzadeh said would be reported to both U.S. authorities and the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog organization.
Iran insists that its nuclear facilities are for a civilian power program, not weapons. Centrifuges are used to make a richer form of uranium that can be used in weapons.
----
Iran shows missile muscle, despite nuclear furor
09 July 2003
By Alistair Lyon,
Reuters
http://www.enn.com/news/2003-07-09/s_6357.asp
LONDON - If you want respect, show muscle - or so Iranian leaders may have reasoned when they confirmed their completion of tests of a medium-range ballistic missile capable of hitting Israel and other countries in the region.
Already accused by the United States of seeking nuclear arms and delivery systems, Iran announced on Monday that the "final test" of the Shahab-3 missile had taken place a few weeks ago.
The timing was doubly sensitive in view of this week's visit to Tehran by Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, who will press Iran to open its nuclear power program and prove it is not secretly developing atomic bombs.
"It's slightly surprising because they have been trying to calm fears they are going down the nuclear route," Tim Garden, a defense expert at London's Royal Institute of International Affairs, said of Iran's disclosure of progress on the Shahab-3.
Israel, which falls within the missile's 1,300-km (810-mile) range, points to Iran's nuclear and missile ambitions as a deadly threat and wants the world to thwart them.
Indeed, some Iranians believe that last week's Israeli media reports about the Shahab-3 test were deliberately designed to force an Iranian response and keep the heat on Tehran.
Iran denies seeking nuclear arms or harboring aggressive intentions but sees the Shahab-3 as a vital deterrent against the Jewish state, the Middle East's only nuclear power. It also perceives a threat from the United States, which has forces in Iraq, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other countries within reach of the Shahab-3.
"It's more of a deterrent than anything else," said Ali Ansari, an Iranian academic at Britain's Durham University. He said the missile program had sprung from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, when Iraqi Scud missiles were crashing into Tehran and Iran lacked the means to retaliate.
"It's also to do with having strategic reach, not just to deter Israelis, but other potential enemies. There is a prestige factor. They feel it's what a regional power should have."
U.S. Hostility
The United States, which has called Iran part of an "axis of evil," gives short shrift to Iranian security logic.
"We've seen Iran's efforts to develop its missile capabilities, including flight testing, as a threat to the region and a threat to U.S. interests in the region," said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher.
But Iranian political analyst Amir Ali Nourbakhsh said Iran must be given security assurances if it was to bow to pressure to sign the additional protocol to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that would permit more intrusive inspections.
"Maybe the Shahab-3 could deter Israel even if it does not have a nuclear warhead, but the United States and the European Union should assure Iran that its security won't be undermined if it signs the additional protocol," Nourbakhsh said.
The Shahab-3, first tested in 1998, is based on the North Korean Nodong-1 missile but has been improved with Russian technology. Questions remain about its effectiveness.
"They have had real problems with the testing of this," said Robin Hughes, deputy news editor of Jane's Defence Weekly, adding that the latest launch followed several failed ones. He said it was not clear if the missile was already in operational service with the armed forces and or how accurate it was. "It would be a disaster if they got it wrong," he said.
Uzi Rubin, co-founder of Israel's Arrow antimissile system, said word on the Shahab-3's readiness was no surprise.
"The Iranians have long made clear their intention to develop the missile, with Israel as its intended target. One of the threats we had in mind in developing the Arrow was a long-range Iranian missile," he said. "The Shahab-3 can deliver whatever warhead the Iranians come up with. If they have nuclear capability, then they can have a long-range nuclear missile. The Shahab would be less successful with biological or chemical agents, however," Rubin added.
While Iran denies trying to make atomic bombs, stretched Scuds like the Shahab-3 could be used to deliver them.
"There is an unspoken affinity between a nuclear program and missiles of this sort," said Ian Bellany, professor of politics at Britain's Lancaster University.
ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, will renew his call for Iran to sign the additional protocol to the NPT when he meets President Mohammad Khatami and atomic energy chief Gholamreza Aghazadeh on Wednesday.
(Additional reporting by Dan Williams in Jerusalem)
-------- iraq / inspections
Iranian exiles describe newly found nuclear site
Brian Knowlton IHT
Wednesday, July 9, 2003
International Herald Tribune
http://www.iht.com/articles/102194.html
WASHINGTON A new Iranian nuclear complex, apparently with close links to the military, has been found northwest of Tehran, according to an Iranian opposition group that has provided reliable information in the past on such facilities.
The information, if confirmed, would further bolster the Bush administration's contention that Iran is violating its commitment under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty not to produce nuclear weapons. The site, known as the Kohladouz complex, apparently is under much more clear-cut military control than sites revealed earlier by the opposition group and confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations monitoring organization. Those sites were under the control of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. If the military link is confirmed, it would strengthen the suggestion that the work done at the complex is linked to a weapons program.
The information was presented at a news conference by Alireza Jafarzadeh, a spokesman for the National Council of Resistance of Iran. The council includes several Iranian organizations that seek the ouster of the government in Tehran.
"Iran, more vigorously than ever, is continuing its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," Jafarzadeh asserted.
The presentation came a day before Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the IAEA, was to arrive in Tehran - with the backing of the United States, Britain and several other countries - in an attempt to secure an agreement to give his inspectors greater access to Iranian nuclear facilities.
It also came a day after the Iranian Foreign Ministry confirmed a successful final test of a missile, the Shahab-3, with a range sufficient to reach Israel, as well as parts of Saudi Arabia and Iraq where U.S. troops are stationed.
As with the earlier revelations, Jafarzadeh said that the latest information had come from the Mujahedeen Khalq, a rebel group also known as the People's Mujahedeen that is a member of his council. The United States classifies that group as a terrorist organization, although Jafarzadeh's organization maintains that the designation was a politically motivated U.S. gesture aimed at building ties to what had been seen as an emerging moderate wing of the Iranian leadership.
Iran has insisted that its nuclear programs are designed to produce energy for civilian use.
Jafarzadeh would provide no further details on the source of his report, but he offered a detailed picture of what his group says the Kolahdouz complex represents. He said it was hidden among warehouses and workshops for building tanks and armored personnel carriers, in part of a broader complex overseen by the Defense Industry Organization.
Attempts to contact IAEA spokesmen for comment on Jafarzadeh's report were not immediately successful.
WASHINGTON A new Iranian nuclear complex, apparently with close links to the military, has been found northwest of Tehran, according to an Iranian opposition group that has provided reliable information in the past on such facilities.
The information, if confirmed, would further bolster the Bush administration's contention that Iran is violating its commitment under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty not to produce nuclear weapons. The site, known as the Kohladouz complex, apparently is under much more clear-cut military control than sites revealed earlier by the opposition group and confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations monitoring organization. Those sites were under the control of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. If the military link is confirmed, it would strengthen the suggestion that the work done at the complex is linked to a weapons program.
The information was presented at a news conference by Alireza Jafarzadeh, a spokesman for the National Council of Resistance of Iran. The council includes several Iranian organizations that seek the ouster of the government in Tehran.
"Iran, more vigorously than ever, is continuing its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," Jafarzadeh asserted.
The presentation came a day before Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the IAEA, was to arrive in Tehran - with the backing of the United States, Britain and several other countries - in an attempt to secure an agreement to give his inspectors greater access to Iranian nuclear facilities.
It also came a day after the Iranian Foreign Ministry confirmed a successful final test of a missile, the Shahab-3, with a range sufficient to reach Israel, as well as parts of Saudi Arabia and Iraq where U.S. troops are stationed.
As with the earlier revelations, Jafarzadeh said that the latest information had come from the Mujahedeen Khalq, a rebel group also known as the People's Mujahedeen that is a member of his council. The United States classifies that group as a terrorist organization, although Jafarzadeh's organization maintains that the designation was a politically motivated U.S. gesture aimed at building ties to what had been seen as an emerging moderate wing of the Iranian leadership.
Iran has insisted that its nuclear programs are designed to produce energy for civilian use.
Jafarzadeh would provide no further details on the source of his report, but he offered a detailed picture of what his group says the Kolahdouz complex represents. He said it was hidden among warehouses and workshops for building tanks and armored personnel carriers, in part of a broader complex overseen by the Defense Industry Organization.
Attempts to contact IAEA spokesmen for comment on Jafarzadeh's report were not immediately successful.
-------- japan
Nuclear Power in Japan
July 2003
World Nuclear Association
http://www.world-nuclear.org/
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/printable_information_papers/inf79print.htm
- Japan needs to import some 80% of its energy requirements.
- Its first commercial nuclear power reactor began operating in mid 1966.
- Nuclear energy has been a national strategic priority since 1973.
- Today 53 reactors provide some 34% of the country's electricity.
Despite being the only country to have suffered the devastating effects of nuclear weapons in wartime, Japan has embraced the peaceful use of nuclear technology to provide a substantial portion of its electricity. Today, nuclear energy accounts for some 34% of the country's total electricity production.
As Japan has few natural resources of its own, it depends on imports for some 80% of its primary energy needs. Initially it was dependent on fossil fuel imports, particularly oil from the Middle East. This geographical and commodity vulnerability became critical due to the oil shock in 1973. At this time, Japan already had a growing nuclear industry, with five operating reactors. Re-evaluation of domestic energy policy resulted in diversification and in particular, a major nuclear construction program. A high priority was given to reducing the country's dependence on oil imports.
Development of nuclear program & policy
Japan started its nuclear research program in 1954, with Y230 million being budgeted for nuclear energy. The Atomic Energy Basic Law, which strictly limits the use of nuclear technology to peaceful purposes, was introduced in 1955. The law aims to ensure that three principles - democratic methods, independent management, and transparency - are the basis of nuclear research activities, as well as promoting international co-operation. Inauguration of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1956 promoted nuclear power development and utilisation. Several other nuclear energy-related organisations were also established in 1956 under this law: the Science & Technology Agency; Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI) and the Atomic Fuel Corporation (renamed PNC in 1967 - see below).
Japan imported its first commercial nuclear power reactor from the UK. Tokai-1 - a 160 MWe gas-cooled (Magnox) reactor built by GEC. It began operating in July 1966 and continued until March 1998.
After this unit was completed, only light water reactors (LWRs) utilising enriched uranium - either boiling water reactors (BWRs) or pressurised water reactors (PWRs) have been constructed. In 1970, the first three such reactors were completed and began commercial operation. There followed a period in which Japanese utilities purchased designs from US vendors and built them with the co-operation of Japanese companies, who would then receive a licence to build similar plants in Japan. Companies such as Hitachi Co Ltd, Toshiba Co Ltd and Mitsubishi Heavy Industry Co Ltd developed the capacity to design and construct LWRs by themselves. By the end of the 1970s the Japanese industry had largely established its own domestic nuclear power production capacity and today it exports to other east Asian countries and is involved in the development of new reactor designs likely to be used in Europe.
Due to reliability problems with the earliest reactors they required long maintenance outages, with the average capacity factor averaging 46% over 1975-77 (by 2001, the average capacity factor had reached 79%). In 1975, the LWR Improvement & Standardisation Program was launched by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) and the nuclear power industry. This aimed, by 1985, to standardise LWR designs in three phases. In phases 1 and 2, the existing BWR and PWR designs were to be modified to improve their operation and maintenance. The third phase of the program involved increasing the reactor size to 1300-1400 MWe and making fundamental changes to the designs. These were to be the Advanced BWR (ABWR)and the Advanced PWR (APWR).
A major research and fuel cycle establishment through to the late 1990s was the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation, better known as PNC. Its activities ranged very widely, from uranium exploration in Australia to disposal of high-level wastes. After two accidents and PNC's unsatisfactory response to them the government in 1998 reconstituted PNC as the leaner Japan Nuclear Cycle Development Institute (JNC), whose brief is to focus on fast breeder reactor development, reprocessing high-burnup fuel, MOX fabrication and high-level waste disposal. A merger of JNC and JAERI is proposed for 2005, both are under the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science & Technology (MEXT).
Japanese energy policy has been driven by considerations of energy security and the need to minimise dependence on current imports. The main elements regarding nuclear power are:
- continue to have nuclear power as a major element of electricity production.
- recycle uranium and plutonium from spent fuel, initially in LWRs, and have reprocessing domestically from 2005.
- steadily develop fast breeder reactors in order to improve uranium utilisation dramatically.
- promote nuclear energy to the public, emphasising safety and non-proliferation.
In March 2002 the Japanese government announced that it would rely heavily on nuclear energy to achieve greenhouse gas emission reduction goals set by the Kyoto Protocol. A 10-year energy plan, submitted in July 2001 to the Minister of Economy Trade & Industry (METI), was endorsed by cabinet. It calls for an increase in nuclear power generation by about 30 percent (13,000 MWe), with the expectation that utilities will have 9 to 12 new nuclear plants operating by 2010. At present Japan has 54 reactors totalling 44,300 MWe on line, with 3 (3700 MWe) under construction and 12 (15,858 MWe) planned.
In June 2002, Japan's upper house approved a new Energy Policy Law by 206 to 27. The law sets out the basic principles of energy security and stable supply, and the responsibilities of the national government and local public corporations, apparently giving greater authority to the government in establishing the energy infrastructure for economic growth. The law also seeks greater efficiency in consumption, a further move away from dependence on fossil fuels, and market liberalisation. It requires the government to report annually to the Diet on energy policy and its implementation.
In November 2002, the Japanese government announced that it would introduce a tax on coal for the first time, alongside those on oil, gas and LPG in METI's special energy account, to give a total net tax increase of some JPY 10 billion from October 2003. At the same time METI will reduce its power-source development tax, including that applying to nuclear generation, by 15.7% - amounting to JPY 50 billion per year. While the taxes in the special energy account were originally designed to improve Japan's energy supply mix, the change is part of the first phase of addressing Kyoto goals by reducing carbon emissions. The second phase, planned for 2005-07, will involve a more comprehensive environmental tax system, including a carbon tax.
These developments, despite some scandal in 2002 connected with records of equipment inspections at nuclear power plants, are expected to pave the way for an increased role for nuclear energy.
Reactor development
In the 1970s a prototype Advanced Thermal Reactor (ATR) was built at Fugen. This had heavy water moderator and light water cooling in pressure tubes and was designed for both uranium and plutonium fuel. It was the first thermal reactor in the world to use a full mixed-oxide (MOX) core. The 148 MWe unit was operated by JNC until finally shut down in March 2003. Construction of a 600 MWe demonstration ATR was planned at Ohma, but in 1995 it was decided not to proceed.
Since 1970, 28 BWRs (including two ABWRs) and 23 PWRs have been brought into operation.
The first ABWRs (of 1315 MWe) were Tokyo Electric Power Co's (Tepco's) Kashiwazaki-Kariwa units 6 and 7 which started up in 1996-97 and are now in commercial operation. These were built by a consortium of General Electric (USA), Toshiba and Hitachi. Two further ABWRs - Higashidori-1 and Shika-2 - are currently under construction. The 1500 MWe APWR design has also been developed by four utilities with Mitsubishi and Westinghouse, but partly due to siting problems, construction of the first plants at Tsuruga (units 3 & 4) has yet to start. It is simpler than present PWRs, combines active and passive cooling systems to greater effect, and has over 55 gigawatt days per tonne (GWd/t) burn-up. Design work continues and will be the basis for the next generation of Japanese PWRs. In addition, Mitsubishi is participating in development of Westinghouse's AP-1000 reactor.
In relation to fast breeder reactors (FBRs), the Joyo experimental FBR has been operatingsuccessfully since it reached first criticality in 1977, and has accumulated a lot of technical data. The Monju prototype FBR reactor started up in April 1994, but a sodium leakage in its secondary heat transfer system during performance tests in December 1995 meant that it has not operated since. Its oversight has passed to JNC, and the Minister for Science & Technology has said that its early restart is a key aim. JNC also undertakes FBR and related R&D at O-arai in Ibaraki prefecture, near Tokai-mura.
At the end of 1998 a small prototype gas cooled reactor, the 30 MWt High Temperature Engineering Test Reactor (HTTR) started up. This was Japan's first graphite-moderated and helium-cooled reactor. It runs at 850°C and eventually up to 950°C, which will allow its application to chemical processes such as thermochemical production of hydrogen. Its fuel is ceramic-coated particles incorporated into hexagonal graphite prisms, giving it a high level of inherent safety. It is designed to establish a basis for the commercialisation of second-generation helium-cooled plants running at high temperatures for either industrial applications or to drive direct cycle gas turbines.
Power reactors operating in Japan
Reactor Type Net capacity Utility Operational
Fukushima I-1 BWR 439 MWe TEPCO March 1971
Fukushima I-2 BWR 760 MWe TEPCO July 1974
Fukushima I-3 BWR 760 MWe TEPCO March 1976
Fukushima I-4 BWR 760 MWe TEPCO October 1978
Fukushima I-5 BWR 760 MWe TEPCO April 1978
Fukushima I-6 BWR 1067 MWe TEPCO October 1979
Fukushima II-1 BWR 1067 MWe TEPCO April 1982
Fukushima II-2 BWR 1067 MWe TEPCO February 1984
Fukushima II-3 BWR 1067 MWe TEPCO June 1985
Fukushima II-4 BWR 1067 MWe TEPCO August 1987
Genkai-1 PWR 529 MWe Kyushu October 1975
Genkai-2 PWR 529 MWe Kyushu March 1981
Genkai-3 PWR 1127 MWe Kyushu March 1994
Genkai-4 PWR 1127 MWe Kyushu July 1997
Hamaoka-1 BWR 515 MWe Chubu March 1976
Hamaoka-2 BWR 806 MWe Chubu November 1978
Hamaoka-3 BWR 1056 MWe Chubu August 1987
Hamaoka-4 BWR 1092 MWe Chubu September 1993
Ikata-1 PWR 538 MWe Shikoku September 1977
Ikata-2 PWR 538 MWe Shikoku March 1982
Ikata-3 PWR 846 MWe Shikoku December 1994
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa-1 BWR 1067 MWe TEPCO September 1985
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa-2 BWR 1067 MWe TEPCO September 1990
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa-3 BWR 1067 MWe TEPCO August 1993
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa-4 BWR 1067 MWe TEPCO August 1994
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa-5 BWR 1067 MWe TEPCO April 1990
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa-6 ABWR 1315 MWe TEPCO November 1996
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa-7 ABWR 1315 MWe TEPCO July 1997
Mihama-1 PWR 320 MWe Kansai November 1970
Mihama-2 PWR 470 MWe Kansai July 1972
Mihama-3 PWR 780 MWe Kansai December 1976
Ohi-1 PWR 1120 MWe Kansai March 1979
Ohi-2 PWR 1120 MWe Kansai December 1979
Ohi-3 PWR 1127 MWe Kansai December 1991
Ohi-4 PWR 1127 MWe Kansai February 1993
Onagawa-1 BWR 498 MWe Tohoku June 1984
Onagawa-2 BWR 796 MWe Tohoku July 1995
Onagawa-3 BWR 798 MWe Tohoku January 2002
Sendai-1 PWR 846 MWe Kyushu July 1984
Sendai-2 PWR 846 MWe Kyushu November 1985
Shika-1 BWR 505 MWe Hokuriku July 1993
Shimane-1 BWR 439 MWe Chugoku March 1974
Shimane-2 BWR 789 MWe Chugoku February 1989
Takahama-1 PWR 780 MWe Kansai November 1974
Takahama-2 PWR 780 MWe Kansai November 1975
Takahama-3 PWR 830 MWe Kansai January 1985
Takahama-4 PWR 830 MWe Kansai June 1985
Tokai-2 BWR 1056 MWe JAPC November 1978
Tomari-1 PWR 550 MWe Hokkaido June 1989
Tomari-2 PWR 550 MWe Hokkaido April 1991
Tsuruga-1 BWR 341 MWe JAPC March 1970
Tsuruga-2 PWR 1115 MWe JAPC February 1987
Monju prototype FBR 246 MWe JNC August 1995
Total: 53 reactors 44,141 MWe
Japanese reactors under construction
Reactor Type Net capacity Utility Construction start Start-up&
Hamaoka -5 BWR 1325 MWe Chubu Electric July 2000 2005
Higashidori-1 ABWR 1067 MWe Tohoku November 2000 2005
Shika-2 ABWR 1315 MWe Hokuriku August 2001 2006
total 3707 MWe
& Latest announced commercial operation
Japanese Reactors planned or on order
REACTOR TYPE MWe Utility start & construction start & operation
Fukushima 7 & 8 ABWR 1325 Tepco 2002 2009-10
Ohma ABWR 1350 EPDC 2003 2008
Tomari 3 PWR 912 Hokkaido 2003 2008
Tsuruga 3 & 4 APWR 1500 JAPC 2004 2011-12
Shimane 3 ABWR 1375 Chugoku 2004 2010
Higashidori 1-2 ABWR 1320 Tepco 2004-5 2011-12
Higashidori 2 ABWR 1385 Tohoku 2007 2012+
Maki 1 BWR 825 Tohoku 2006 2012
Namieodaka BWR 825 Tohoku 2009 2014
Kaminoseki 1-2 ABWR 1320 JAPC 2007-10 2012-15
& according to latest announcements
Fuel cycle facilities
Japan has been progressively developing a complete domestic nuclear fuel cycle industry, based on imported uranium.
Japan Nuclear Cycle Development Institute (JNC) operates a small uranium refining and conversion plant, as well as a small centrifuge enrichment demonstration plant, at Ningyo Toge, Okayama prefecture.
While most enrichment services are still imported, Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd (JNFL) operates a commercial enrichment plant at Rokkasho. Its eventual capacity is planned to be 1.5 million SWU/yr. JNFL's shareholders are the power utilities.
At Tokai-mura, in Ibaraki prefecture north of Tokyo, Mitsubishi Nuclear Fuel Co Ltd operates a major fuel fabrication facility, which started up in 1972. Further fuel fabrication plants are operated by Nuclear Fuel Industries (NFI) in Tokai and Kumatori, and JNC has some experimental mixed oxide (MOX) fuel facilities at Tokai for both the Fugen ATR and the FBR program, with capacity about 10 t/yr for each.
Also at Tokai, JNC has operated a 90 t/yr pilot reprocessing plant which has treated over a thousand tonnes of spent fuel since 1977. JNC operates spent fuel storage facilities there and is proposing a further one. It has also operated a pilot high-level waste (HLW) vitrification plant at Tokai since 1995. Tokai is the main site of JNC's R&D on HLW treatment and disposal.
In 1984, the Federation of Electric Power Companies (FEPC) applied to the Rokkasho-mura village and Aomori prefecture for permission to construct a major complex including uranium enrichment plant, low-level waste (LLW) storage centre, HLW storage centre, and a reprocessing plant. Currently JNFL operates both LLW and HLW storage facilities there, while its 800 t/yr reprocessingplant is under construction and is expected to be commissioned in 2005.
Reprocessing and MOX fuel
For energy security reasons, and notwithstanding the low price of uranium for many years, Japanese policy since 1956 has been to maximise the utilisation of imported uranium. Until now, the reprocessing of spent fuel has been largely undertaken in Europe by BNFL and Cogema, with vitrified high-level wastes being returned to Japan for disposal. This reprocessing will finish in 2005, when full-scale operation of JNFL's reprocessing plant at Rokkasho-mura is scheduled to start. Spent fuel has been accumulating there since 1999 in anticipation of its operation (shipments to Europe finished in 1998).
Plutonium recovered by reprocessing in the UK and France will be used mainly in LWRs as mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel - the "pluthermal" program initiated in 1994. Japanese utilities have announced plans to use MOX fuel in 16-18 reactors by the year 2010. However, recent local concerns about MOX fuel use have stalled implementation of that program. The controversy surrounding MOX relates to its plutonium content.
So far, Japan has received three shipments containing over 2 tonnes of its (reactor-grade) plutonium from Europe. The first shipment, in 1992, was simply plutonium oxide and earmarked for use in the Monju prototype FBR. However, Monju has yet to be loaded with this as it remains shut down due to the sodium leak in 1996. The second shipment, in the form of MOX fuel for light water reactors, was in 1999. Part of this shipment from BNFL and intended for use in Kansai Electric Power Co's Takahama plant was found to contain falsified quality control data. The shipment was subsequently returned to the UK in 2002. The third shipment consisted of MOX fuel from BNFL for use in TEPCO's Kashiwazaki-Kariwa-3 reactor.
Two prefectural governments - Fukushima and Niigata - have moved to defer the use of MOX fuel at reactors within those prefectures, forcing TEPCO and Kansai to suspend or reschedule their planned use within those prefectures.
Meanwhile, Japan's Pu stocks increase - at the end of 2001 there was 38 tonnes of separated reactor-grade plutonium stored and awaiting use in MOX fuel. Some 5.7 tonnes was in Japan and the rest in Europe, mostly France.
Fast Breeder Reactors
Originally the concept was to use MOX fuel in FBRs, making Japan virtually independent regarding nuclear fuel. But FBRs proved uneconomic in an era of abundant low-cost uranium, so development slowed and the MOX program shifted to thermal LWR reactors.
From 1961 to 1994 there was a strong commitment to FBRs, with PNC as the main agency. In 1967 FBR development was put forward as the main goal of the Japanese nuclear program, along with the ATR. In 1994 the FBR commercial timeline was pushed out to 2030. In 1999 JNC initiated a program to review promising concepts, define a development plan by 2005 and establish a system of FBR technology by 2015. The parameters are: passive safety, economic competitiveness with LWR, efficient utilisation of resources (burning transuranics and depleted U), reduced wastes, proliferation resistance and versatility (include hydrogen production). Utilities are also involved, with CREIPI and JAERI.
Phase 2 of the study is now focusing on four basic reactor designs: sodium-cooled with MOX and metal fuels, helium-cooled with nitride and MOX fuels, lead-bismuth eutectic-cooled with nitride and metal fuels, and supercritical water-cooled with MOX fuel. All involve closed fuel cycle, and three reprocessing routes are considered: advanced aqueous, oxide electrowinning and metal pyroprocessing (electrorefining). Both sets of options, and those for advanced fuel fabrication, will be narrowed down further in 2003. This work is linked with the Generation IV initiative, where Japan is playing a leading role with sodium-cooled FBRs.
High-level wastes
In 1995, Japan's first high-level waste (HLW) interim storage facility opened in Rokkasho-mura. The first shipment of vitrified HLW from Europe (from the reprocessing of Japanese fuel) also arrived in 1995.
In May 2000, the Japanese parliament (the Diet) passed the Law on Final Disposal of Specified Radioactive Waste (the "Final Disposal Law") which mandates deep geological disposal of high-level wastes. In line with this, the Nuclear Waste Management Organisation (NUMO) was set up in October 2000 by the private sector to progress plans for disposal, including site selection, demonstration of technology there, licensing, construction, operation and closure of the repository. Some 40,000 canisters of vitrified HLW are envisaged by 2020, needing disposal. Repository operation is expected from the 2030s.
JNC runs the Tona Geoscience Centre at Toki, in Gifu prefecture, which is focused on deep geological disposal.
Decommissioning
The original Tokai-1 power station, a British Magnox reactor which closed down in 1998, will be decommissioned over 17 years, the first ten as "safe storage" to allow radioactivity to decay. In Phase 1 (to 2006), preliminary work will occur, in Phase 2 (to 2011) the steam generators and turbines will be removed, and in Phase 3 (to 2018) the reactor will be dismantled, the buildings demolished and the site left ready for re-use. All radioactive wastes will be classified as low-level (LLW), albeit in three categories, and will be buried - the 1% of level I wastes 50-100 metres deep. The total cost will be 93 billion yen - 35 billion for dismantling and 58 billion for waste treatment.
After it closes in 2003, JNC plans to decommission the Fugen ATR over 25 years, at a total cost of about 70 billion yen, including waste treatment and disposal. JAERI is responsible for research on reactor decommissioning.
Regulation and safety
The Nuclear & Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) within the Ministry of Economy Trade & Industry (METI, the successor of MITI) is responsible for nuclear power regulation, licensing and safety. It conducts regular inspections of safety-related aspects of all power plants.
The Nuclear Safety Commission is a more senior government body set up in 1978 under the Atomic Energy Basic Law and is responsible for formulating policy, alongside the Atomic Energy Commission. Both are part of the Cabinet Office.
The Science & Technology Agency was responsible for safety of test and research reactors, nuclear fuel facilities and radioactive waste management, as well as R&D, but its functions were taken over by NISA in 2001.
Public support for nuclear power in Japan has been eroded in the last few years due to a series of accidents and scandals. The accidents were the sodium leak at the Monju FBR, a fire at the JNC waste bituminisation facility connected with its reprocessing plant at Tokai, and the 1999 criticality accident at a small fuel fabrication plant at Tokai. The criticality accident, which claimed two lives, happened as a result of workers following an unauthorised procedures manual. None of these accidents were in mainstream civil nuclear fuel cycle facilities.
Following the 1999 Tokai criticality accident, electric power companies, along with enterprises involved with the nuclear industry established the Nuclear Safety Network (NSnet). The network's main activities are to enhance the safety culture of the nuclear industry, conduct peer reviews, and disseminate information about nuclear safety.
Japan's Nuclear Safety Commission confirmed in April 2002 that using mixed oxide (MOX) fuel is safe, and that its use at up to 18 reactors by 2010 was supported. Senior members of the government have reaffirmed that the country's use of MOX "must happen", and that the government will initiate educational and information programs to win wider acceptance for it. A local referendum last year has delayed plans for its introduction.
In 2002 a scandal erupted over the documentation of equipment inspections at Tepco's reactors, and extended to other plants. While the issues were not safety-related, the industry's reputation was sullied. Inspection of the shrouds and pumps around the core is the responsibility of the company, which in this case had contracted it out. In May 2002 questions emerged about data falsification and the significance of cracks in reactor shrouds (used to direct water flow in BWRs) and whether faults were reported to senior management.
Non-proliferation
The Atomic Energy Basic law prohibits the military use of nuclear energy and successive governments have articulated principles reinforcing this. In 1976 Japan became a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty with its safeguards arrangements administered by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, and in 1999 it was one of the first countries to ratify the Additional Protocol with IAEA, accepting intrusive inspections.
Japan also has bilateral safeguards arrangements with its major nuclear supplier states and has long been a member of the Nuclear Suppliers Group which restricts export of nuclear equipment.
References:
Nuclear Engineer, vol.40, no.5, September/October 1999, p.186-191.
Country Nuclear Power Profiles, IAEA, 1998, p.285-313.
OECD/NEA 1995, Japan
Nuclear Review, no.394, June 2001, p.14-19.
Nuclear Fuel Cycle, TEPCO, March 2002.
Nuclear Power Stations in Japan, CRIEPI, January 2000.
Paper by H Kurihara, WNA Symposium, 2002.
Pickett S.E. 2002, Japan's nuclear energy policy, Energy Policy 30, 1337-55, Dec 2002.
NucNet news # 424/98, 112 & 149/02, 133/03.
Nuclear Engineering International, Oct 1998.
JAIF Atoms in Japan, various.
JNC brochure, 1998
Masuda, S. 2003, HLW Disposal Program in Japan, KAIF/KNS Conference, Seoul. Ichimiya, M. 2003, Design Study on Advanced Fast Reactor Cycle System in Japan, KAIF/KNS conference.
-------- korea
North Korea Reprocessed Nuclear Rods, Seoul Says
July 9, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north-nuclear.html
SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea recently reprocessed a small number of its estimated 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods and has also tested devices used to trigger atomic explosions, South Korea's intelligence agency said on Wednesday.
The National Intelligence Service (NIS) statement to parliament on recent North Korean nuclear activity follows similar reports in U.S. newspapers and comes as Seoul and its allies are trying to draw Pyongyang into talks. Advertisement
The NIS reported to the National Assembly Intelligence Committee that Seoul ``estimates North Korea has recently reprocessed a small number of the 8,000 fuel rods it was keeping at Yongbyon,'' a spokesman for the agency told Reuters.
Yongbyon, the base of North Korea's nuclear program, is a city 75 km (47 miles) north of the capital, Pyongyang.
The 8,000 spent fuel rods were part of a plutonium-based nuclear weapons program that was frozen under a 1994 nuclear agreement between North Korea and the United States. The pact unraveled earlier this year after U.S. revelations of a covert North Korean scheme to enrich uranium for bombmaking.
The NIS told parliament that Seoul had also confirmed North Korea had at least 70 times tested devices that could be used to trigger nuclear explosions at Yongduk-dong, some 40 km (25 miles) northwest of Yongbyon.
BLACK WAR CLOUDS
China, an old ally of North Korea which is hosting South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun this week, said the intelligence report had yet to be confirmed, but that Beijing was against any testing of nuclear weapons in the region.
``China is opposed to the testing of nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula. This stance has not changed,'' a Foreign Ministry official, who asked not to be identified, told Reuters.
Earlier, a North Korean cabinet-level delegation which flew into Seoul on Wednesday for economic talks issued a dire warning.
``It is a grim reality that the black clouds of nuclear war are gathering on the Korean Peninsula minute by minute,'' said the arrival statement released by the North Koreans.
On July 1, the New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence officials believed North Korea was developing technology that could make nuclear warheads small enough to be carried by its missiles.
Officials who had seen the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency reports told the newspaper that American satellites had identified an advanced nuclear testing site. The New York Times identified the site as Youngdoktong, but Seoul officials said the location was Yongduk-dong.
Equipment at the site has been set up to test explosives that could set off compact nuclear explosions when detonated, the New York Times said.
The information had been shared with Japan, South Korea and other allies in recent weeks, the newspaper said. NIS chief Ko Young-koo visited Washington last month.
Intelligence officials cited by the newspaper believed the testing facility suggests that North Korea wants to make sophisticated weapons that would be light enough to attach to its growing arsenal of medium- and long-range missiles.
Before Wednesday's NIS hearing, top South Korean officials including Foreign Minister Yoon Young-kwan had said the explosives tests reported by the New York Times were not news and were widely known among Seoul and its allies.
--------
U.S. Says N. Korea Nuclear Activity Still Unclear
July 9, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north-usa.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States still has questions about North Korea's nuclear fuel reprocessing activities despite a South Korean intelligence report saying Pyongyang has begun reprocessing spent fuel rods, a U.S. official said on Wednesday.
``Our assessment of where they are on reprocessing is not 100 percent clear. There's enough question to want to leave ourselves some wiggle room on that,'' he told Reuters.
South Korea's National Intelligence Service said on Wednesday that North Korea recently reprocessed a small number of its estimated 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods and has also tested devices used to trigger atomic explosions.
The 8,000 spent fuel rods were part of a plutonium-based nuclear weapons program at the Yongbyon nuclear site that was frozen under a 1994 nuclear deal between North Korea and the United States.
The pact unravelled this year after U.S. revelations of a covert North Korean scheme to enrich uranium for bombmaking.
In recent months, U.S. officials have said they detected activities at the Yongbyon site, including near the holding pond where the spent fuel rods were stored. Some reprocessing may have taken place but it was unclear how much, they said.
On Wednesday, the U.S. official said there was still doubt about ``where they (North Koreans) are in theprocess.''
The South Korean National Intelligence Service report seemed firmer.
Many experts consider reprocessing, which produces fuel for nuclear weapons, a threatening activity that the United States and its allies cannot permit the North to engage in.
U.S. officials have long said they believe Pyongyang has produced one or two nuclear weapons but reprocessing could provide fuel to rapidly expand that arsenal.
The South Korean intelligence agency also said North Korea had at least 70 times tested devices that could be used to trigger nuclear explosions at Yongduk-dong, some 25 miles northwest of Yongbyon. The U.S. official did not speak to this point.
--------
South Korea Issues Report on North Korean Explosions
July 9, 2003
The New York Times
By DON KIRK
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/09/international/asia/09CND-KORE.html
SEOUL, July 9 - North Korea has conducted at least 70 "high-explosive tests" of devices used in nuclear warheads at a site about 25 miles northwest of its main nuclear complex in Yongbyon, South Korea said in an intelligence report released today.
The report also said that North Korean scientists had reprocessed some of the 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods at the Yongbyon complex, 50 miles north of Pyongyang.
The report, released while South Korea's president, Roh Moo Hyun, was in China attempting to resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis, was the first time that South Korea had reported in any detail on North Korea's attempt to develop nuclear weapons.
The report was also the first time that South Korea had quantified the number of tests that North Korea had conducted in its attempt to develop nuclear warheads.
The document did not reveal when the tests were conducted.
In testimony presented to South Korea's National Assembly, Ko Young Koo, director of South Korea's National Intelligence Service, did not cite the source of the estimates but said his agency had been "keeping track of the movement."
For months, Washington has been trying to convince Asian nations, especially South Korea and China, to join with the United States and present a unified diplomatic front to force North Korea the country to give up its weapons. American intelligence officials recently shared with South Korea and Japan intelligence reports that North Korea is developing technology to make nuclear warheads small enough to fit inside the medium-range missiles that North Korea has been producing for the past few years. The high-energy explosions described today by the South Korean intelligence officials appear to be part of the evidence of that program, which has apparently not yet gone as far as an actual nuclear test.
The fact that South Korean intelligence officials presented information on North Korean nuclear capabilities to the assembly today is an indication that some in the new South Korean government are becoming increasingly worried about the imminence of the North Korean nuclear threat.
Mr. Ko's report also raised the question of how close North Korea had come to actually setting off a nuclear explosion. The use of the term "high-explosive" indicated that North Korean scientists had been experimenting with the non-nuclear explosives essential to detonating a nuclear warhead but still had not crossed the line to nuclear testing.
Mr. Ko's remarks, reported by South Korea's semi-official Yonhap news agency, came eight days after an article in The New York Times cited C.I.A. reports of spy satellites that had pinpointed the test site in a sub-district of Gusong City named Youngdoktong. Soeul officials said today that the site was named Yongduk-dong.
The Times article said that North Korea had been working on the technology needed to design nuclear warheads small enough to fit inside the medium-range missiles that North Korea has been producing for the past few years.
For months North Korea has said it had begun to reprocess the rods, but until today South Korea had discounted those claims as part of North Korea's strategy to force bilateral talks.
The South Korean National Intelligence Service chose a singularly controversial moment at which to release a report that went considerably beyond any other descriptions released here of North Korean nuclear activities.
Several hours before the report was released to Yonhap, a North Korean delegation arrived here for talks on economic and commercial issues. The delegation, upon its arrival, warned that "the dark cloud of a nuclear war" hangs over the Korean peninsula. "A very tense situation, war or peace, is being created," the delegation said the statement.
In China today, South Korea President Roh Moo Hyun said, "North Korea must dismantle its nuclear project."
Mr. Roh, speaking at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said that no country "has a right to threaten the security of neighboring states and the stability of the region."
Although South Korea and China agreed during Mr. Roh's visit that the nuclear issue in North Korea "could be settled through talks," the South Korean president's remarks appeared surprisingly tough for a leader who has stressed the need for cooperation rather than confrontation in dealing with North Korea.
It was not immediately clear whether the National Intelligence Service report was deliberately timed to coincide with Mr. Roh's China visit, which ends on Thursday, and with the arrival of the North Korean delegation in Seoul.
Regardless, the report was expected to have widespread diplomatic and political repercussions.
Although North Korea has said it had a nuclear program, American and South Korean officials have been uncertain how much credence to give such claims.
North Korean rhetoric in recent weeks has escalated while the United States has refused to negotiate the nuclear issue on a bilateral basis. The Americans insist that South Korea, China, Japan and possibly Russia should all have seats at the table.
The South Korean report today is certain to intensify debate here over the extent to which South Korea should pursue reconciliation with the North.
North Korea has engaged in commerical and cultural projects that link the two Koreas while, at the same time, it has claimed to pursue its nuclear ambitions.
North Korea's nuclear activities resumed early this year after North Korea broke off the 1994 Geneva framework agreement and expelled International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors who had been monitoring the Yongbyon facility. The 8,000 spent fuel rods, which are designed for nuclear warheads that use plutonium as their core explosive material, were stored under the terms of the agreement.
The Geneva agreement began to unravel last October when North Korean officials admitted to an American delegation that it was conducting a a separate program for developing warheads from uranium. Washington subsequently suspended monthly shipments of 500,000 tons of heavy fuel, which the United States had agreed to send pending the completion of twin nuclear power plants. The power plant project is now in limbo.
Although the North is assumed to have made one or two nuclear warheads, there is no sign that North Korean scientists have made a warhead using uranium as its core material.
-------- russia
Military Warheads as a Source of Nuclear Fuel
July 2003
World Nuclear Association
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf13.htm
- Weapons-grade uranium and plutonium surplus to military requirements in the USA and Russia is being made available for use as civil fuel.
- Weapons-grade uranium is highly enriched, to over 90% U-235 (the fissile isotope). Weapons-grade plutonium has over 93% Pu-239 and can be used, like reactor-grade plutonium, in fuel for electricity production.
- Highly-enriched uranium from weapons stockpiles is displacing some 10,000 tonnes of U3O8 production from mines each year, and meets about 15% of world reactor requirements.
For more than three decades concern has centred on the possibility that uranium intended for commercial nuclear power might be diverted for use in weapons. Today, however, attention is focused on the role of military uranium as a major source of fuel for commercial nuclear power.
Since 1987 the United States and countries of the former USSR have signed a series of disarmament treaties to reduce the nuclear arsenals by about 80% by 2003.
Nuclear materials declared surplus to military requirements by the USA and Russia are now being converted into fuel for commercial nuclear reactors. The main material is highly enriched uranium (HEU), containing at least 20% uranium-235 (U-235) and usually about 90% U-235. HEU can be blended down with uranium containing low levels of U-235 to produce low enriched uranium (LEU), typically less than 5% U-235, fuel for power reactors. It is blended with depleted uranium (mostly U-238), natural uranium (0.7% U-235), or partially-enriched uranium.
Highly-enriched uranium in US and Russian weapons and other military stockpiles amounts to about 2000 tonnes, equivalent to twelve times annual world mine production.
World stockpiles of weapons-grade plutonium are reported to be some 260 tonnes, which if used in mixed oxide fuel in conventional reactors would be equivalent to a little over one year's world uranium production. Military plutonium can blended with uranium oxide to form mixed oxide (MOX) fuel.
After LEU or MOX is burned in power reactors, the spent fuel is not suitable for weapons manufacture.
MEGATONS TO MEGAWATTS
Commitments by the US and Russia to convert nuclear weapons into fuel for electricity production is known as the Megatons to Megawatts program.
Surplus weapons-grade HEU resulting from the various disarmament agreements led in 1993 to an agreement between the US and Russian governments. Under this Russia is to convert 500 tonnes of HEU from warheads and military stockpiles (equivalent to around 20,000 bombs) to LEU to be bought by the USA for use in civil nuclear reactors.
In 1994, a US$12 billion implementing contract was signed between the US Enrichment Corporation (now USEC Inc) and Russia's Techsnabexport (Tenex) as executive agents for the US and Russian governments. USEC is purchasing a minimum of 500 tonnes of weapons-grade HEU over 20 years, at a rate of up to 30 tonnes/year from 1999. The HEU is blended down to 4.4% U-235 in Russia, using 1.5% U-235 (enriched tails), to restrict levels of U-234 in the final product. USEC can then sell the LEU to its utility customers as fuel. By mid-November 2001, Russia had dispatched 137 tonnes of HEU to USEC, (4,031 tonnes of LEU) arising from 5481 nuclear warheads.
For its part, the US Government has declared just over 174 tonnes of HEU (of various enrichments) to be surplus from military stockpiles. Of this, USEC has taken delivery of 14.2 tonnes in the form of uranium hexafluoride (UF6) containing around 75% U-235, and 50 tonnes as uranium oxide or metal containing around 40% U-235. Downblending of the UF6 was completed in 1998, to produce 387 tonnes of LEU. Some 13.5 tonnes of the HEU oxide or metal had been processed by September 2001 to produce 140.3 tonnes of LEU. The rest should be processed by 2005.
In the short term most US military HEU is likely to be blended down to 20% U-235, then stored. In this form it is not useable for weapons.
A more detailed paper on the US-Russia HEU Agreement is on the WNA web site.
MARKET IMPACT
Overall, the blending down of 500 tonnes of Russian weapons HEU will result in about 15,000 tonnes of LEU over 20 years. This is equivalent to about 153,000 tonnes of natural U, or just over twice annual world demand.
The dilution of 18 tonnes of military HEU in 1997 displaced some 6400 tonnes of uranium oxide production, equivalent to output from a large uranium mine.
From 1999 the dilution of 30 tonnes of military HEU is displacing about 10,600 tonnes of uranium oxide mine production per year which represents some 15% of world reactor requirements.
Under the 1994 Agreement, USEC recognised the need to release the diluted military uranium to nuclear utilities in such a way as not to impact negatively on the US uranium market.
HOW THE MARKET WORKS
Normally, a utility buys natural uranium from a mining company as "yellowcake" (U3O8) and has it converted to UF6. It then supplies this feed to USEC, paying them for the enrichment component. USEC runs its energy-intensive enrichment plant to separate an appropriate amount of enriched uranium (eg at 3.5 - 5.0% U-235, leaving a lot of depleted uranium). USEC then returns the enriched uranium to the utility for its reactor.
A different, and somewhat complicated, system is used for the Russian material. The utility supplies the feed component of natural uranium as before and pays USEC for the enrichment component. But instead of running their plant, USEC pays the Russians for some blended-down weapons uranium and passes this on to the customer utility as "enriched" uranium fuel. The customers receive the blended-down Russian material, paid for as if it were their own uranium which had been enriched.
USEC pays Russia for the enrichment services component (basically energy) of the low-enriched product it receives. Russia takes ownership of the corresponding amount of natural uranium "feed" provided to USEC by its utility customers for toll enrichment services. The material remains in the US, and Russia receives the proceeds of its sale. The customers receive the Russian material, and pay as though it were their own uranium which had been enriched.
Problems arose because the natural uranium feed, now owned by Russia, could not be sold at a price satisfactory to its new owner, so some 11,000 tonnes has accumulated at USEC since January 1997.
1999 MARKET AGREEMENT
After years of stalled negotiations on this matter, a US$ 2.8 billion deal was approved early in 1999 by the US and Russian governments. It involves 163,000 tonnes of U3O8 feed to be supplied over the remaining 15 years of the US-Russian HEU agreement.
Cameco, Cogema, and Nukem have signed the commercial agreement with Tenex of Russia, giving them "exclusive options to purchase" 118,000 tonnes of this, leaving the remainder "available to Tenex". One important stipulation is that stockpiles, each of some 26 000 tonnes U3O8, will be held by both Russian and US governments for ten years, to 2009. The US stockpile already exists, Russia's will be built up over the next few years from all HEU feed not purchased by Tenex or an associate, and Russia is free to sell only what exceeds this.
The new agreement does not change the overall supply and demand situation, but it removes some major uncertainties over how the material is released to the market. This should help stabilise the nuclear fuel market, albeit at a level which favours low-cost producers.
PLUTONIUM
Disarmament will also give rise to some 150-200 tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium (Pu). Weapons-grade plutonium has over 93% of the fissile isotope, Pu-239, and can be used, like reactor-grade Pu, in fuel for electricity production. Discussions are under way on the options for its disposal. These include:
- Immobilisation with high-level waste - treating plutonium as waste,
- Fabrication with uranium oxide as a MOXfuel for burning in existing reactors,
- Fuelling fast-neutron reactors.
In June 2000, the USA and Russia agreed to dispose of 34 tonnes each of weapons-grade plutonium by 2014. The US undertook to pursue a dual track program, self-funded, while the G-7 nations are providing some US$ 1 billion to set up Russia's program, which is wholly MOX-oriented.
In the USA there is wide support for burning plutonium as a MOX fuel in conventional reactors. A consortium has been retained and funded to implement the program to convert 25.5 tonnes of plutonium to MOX, and it has applied for a construction permit to build a MOX fabrication plant. The federal budget for 2002 has set aside $115 million for the MOX program. However, the Department of Energy has deferred the US$ 1.2 billion funding for construction of the facilities needed for the plutonium immobilisation program (for 8.5 tPu).
Meanwhile the US has developed a "spent fuel standard". This specifies that plutonium should never be more accessible than if it were incorporated in spent fuel and thus protected from interference by strong gamma radiation. The plutonium immobilisation plant, when it is eventually built, will thus incorporate the Pu in a version of Synroc (artificial rock), and encase small discs of this in canisters of vitrified high-level radioactive waste.
Europe's well-developed MOX capacity suggests that weapons plutonium could be disposed of relatively quickly. Input weapons-grade plutonium might need to be mixed with reactor grade material, but using such MOX as 30% of the fuel in one third of the world's reactor capacity would remove about 15 tonnes of warhead plutonium per year. This would amount to burning 3000 warheads per year to produce 110 billion kWh of electricity.
Over 35 reactors in Europe are licensed to use MOX fuel, and 20 French reactors are licensed to use it as 30% of their fuel.
Russia intends to use its plutonium in MOX fuel, burning it in both late-model conventional reactors and particularly fast neutron reactors. However, some may be sold to Western Europe to cover costs, with the spent fuel (which cannot be reprocessed) being returned to Russia. The 34 tonnes of plutonium initially available for MOX is enough for 1350 fuel assemblies for light-water reactors.
Since the early 1990s Russia has had a program to develop a thorium-uranium fuel, which more recently has moved to have a particular emphasis on utilisation of weapons-grade plutonium in a thorium-plutonium fuel. The program is based at Moscow's Kurchatov Institute and involves the US company Thorium Power and US government funding to design fuel for Russian VVER-1000 reactors. Whereas normal fuel uses enriched uranium oxide, the new design has a demountable centre portion and blanket arrangement, with the plutonium in the centre and the thorium (with uranium) around it
Nuclear waste facility gets boost
YUCCA MOUNTAIN: Panel adds millions for project
By STEVE TETREAULT STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU
Wednesday, July 09, 2003
Las Vegas Review-Journal
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2003/Jul-09-Wed-2003/news/21693036.html
WASHINGTON -- The Energy Department's financially struggling effort to bury nuclear waste in Nevada got a boost Tuesday when a congressional panel outlined a 2004 spending plan that adds millions to the project's coffers.
The $765 million being set aside for the Yucca Mountain Project in the U.S. House is 29 percent more than President Bush requested. It restores $134 million cut last year and adds even more to begin work on segments that have been shelved for lack of funding.
"My top DOE priority is Yucca Mountain," said Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio, who wrote the legislation as chairman of the energy and water appropriations subcommittee. "The money is here to make the program work."
The repository budget must be passed by the House and then by the Senate before becoming final. Tuesday's action sets in motion a new confrontation with Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the program's leading critic in Congress who has engineered budget cuts in past years.
"Yucca Mountain may be a priority for House Republicans, but Senator Reid will use his leadership to significantly cut back that number just as he has done in the past," spokeswoman Tessa Hafen said.
Energy Department officials have found an enthusiastic ally in Hobson, 66, a seven-term Republican from Springfield, Ohio, who this year became chairman of the House energy and water subcommittee.
Hobson convened his 13-member panel Tuesday to review and approve a 2004 spending bill totalling $21.7 billion for programs operated by the Energy Department, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and smaller agencies.
Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, the senior Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said Democrats probably will support the bill.
Hobson said the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks "changed everything." Until a Yucca repository opens, nuclear waste will remain scattered and vulnerable at reactor sites around the country, he said.
"This is not just an energy issue. This is a homeland security issue," he said.
To illustrate his commitment, Hobson said he planned to enlarge and frame a photo of Yucca Mountain and hang it on the wall alongside pictures of dams and other projects his panel supports.
Hobson said the $765 million set aside would enable the Energy Department to meet a December 2004 goal to complete a repository license application and remain on a path to open a repository 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas by 2010.
Further, he said, it will allow the department next year to begin developing a Nevada railroad corridor to the repository, a waste transfer station within the state and other features for waste acceptance at Yucca Mountain.
DOE officials had postponed all those segments in the face of steep budget reductions in recent years, and in fact has been planning layoffs and other cost reductions in trying to stay on schedule.
Noting that the spending bill won't be finalized until later this year, Allen Benson, an Energy Department spokesman in Las Vegas, issued a cautious reaction.
"We'll wait to see what the final numbers are," Benson said.
Nevadans in Congress said they were astounded at the committee's generosity. They said the project's flaws make it unworthy of any support.
"Until the licensing process is complete, whistle-blower allegations are settled and the lawsuits are finalized, there is no Yucca Mountain," said Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev. "Why they would want to spend taxpayer money and put it in that hole in the ground is beyond me."
Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., "will certainly join with Senator Reid in reducing that as much as humanly possible when it comes over to the Senate side," Ensign spokesman Jack Finn said.
Hobson said he intends to be an aggressive champion of the nuclear waste project and plans to weigh in from his leadership position on how the program should proceed.
For instance, the new spending bill directs DOE officials to abandon two proposed railroad corridors that would carry nuclear waste through parts of Southern Nevada en route to the repository, according to Hobson.
One of them would originate at a Union Pacific siding near Apex and pass north of Las Vegas and Indian Springs before entering the southwest corner of the Nevada Test Site. The second route would ship waste north from Jean.
A Hobson aide said DOE instead would be given 60 days to choose among one of three remaining routes that originate at Carlin and Caliente.
Hobson said the bill contains other instructions for the Energy Department, but he would not release a full copy until it could be reviewed by members of the House Appropriations Committee. The committee is scheduled to take up the measure next week.
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Nuclear Fuel Services Approved for Use of Uranium
July 9, 2003
(ENS)
http://ens-news.com/ens/jul2003/2003-07-09-09.asp#anchor6
WASHINGTON, DC, The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved a license amendment to allow Nuclear Fuel Services, Inc. (NFS) to possess and use special nuclear material at its newly constructed uranyl nitrate building in Erwin, Tennessee. Special nuclear material refers to plutonium, uranium-233, or uranium enriched in the isotopes uranium-233 or uranium-235.
The amendment, issued Monday, is the first of three NFS has proposed as part of its Blended Low-Enriched Uranium (BLEU) project. The project is part of a U.S. Department of Energy program to reduce stockpiles of surplus high-enriched uranium through reuse or disposal as radioactive waste.
NFS currently manufactures high-enriched nuclear reactor fuel and is constructing a new complex at the Erwin site to manufacture low-enriched nuclear reactor fuel.
The license amendment approval allows NFS to begin receiving down-blended, low-enriched uranium from the Savannah River Site complex in South Carolina for eventual use in the BLEU project. The amendment also increases the amount of uranium-235 NFS is allowed to possess.
On Tuesday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued a confirmatory order noting that NFS has agreed to implement security enhancements required by the commission earlier this year for similar fuel cycle facilities. Implementation of the security measures was verified by an NRC inspection team in June.
A second amendment application, for the blended, low-enriched uranium preparation facility, was submitted in October 2002 and is currently under NRC review. The company has not yet formally applied for the third license amendment, which will be for the oxide conversion facility. Together, the three amendments make up the BLEU project.
The NRC issued the approval over the objections of Friends of the Nolichucky River Valley, the State of Franklin Group of the Sierra Club, the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, and the Tennessee Environmental Council.
On April 29, the NRC turned down an emergency request to halt NFS' construction of any buildings intended for use as part the BLEU project.
The environmental groups argued that NFS's construction is proceeding before the NRC staff has complied with the National Environmental Policy Act by completing its environmental review and determining whether an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) is required for the proposed BLEU project."
To allow construction to go forward, the groups claimed, "will influence the NRC's decisionmaking process regarding the proposed BLEU Project, by committing resouces to a pre-ordained course of action before the agency has decided whether to prepare an EIS that evaluates the impacts of that course of action or reasonable alternatives."
They said the NRC should prepare an EIS for the entire BLEU project because it will have "significant adverse impacts on the environment."
In response, NFS claims that the staff's Environmental Assessment (EA) already examined the impacts of the "entire BLEU project."
But the NRC said the company "apparently continues to take issue with the staff's characterization of the scope and completeness of the issued EA, and likewise of the extent of the environmental reviews which will be conducted for the second and third [license] amendments. This is a matter we do not resolve today."
While the company will require license amendments before it can begin the process operations associated with the BLEU Project and before it can exceed its current U-235 possession limit, it does not appear to require any NRC permit to begin construction activities, thus "rendering uncertain our current authority to halt those actions," the commission ruled.
The construction activities do not pre-ordain or restrict the NRC's decisionmaking, the commission ruled, saying that the staff retains "full discretion" to deny any or all of the three license amendments, or to impose licensing conditions, as needed.
Even if the commission's power to halt NFS's construction activities were clearer, petitioners have given no reason to take emergency action, the NRC ruled, because they did not indicate how they might suffer immediate environmental harm as a result of new building construction within the boundaries of the company's existing site.
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Energy Dept. Halts Nuclear Shipments Plan
July 9, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nuclear-Shipments.html
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A plan to ship nuclear waste from Nevada to New Mexico through Southern California was canceled Wednesday because of opposition from state officials, the Department of Energy said.
It marked the first time shipment plans have been halted because of a state's resistance, DOE spokesman Joe Davis said. There were no immediate plans to reschedule the truck shipments of medium-level waste on the circuitous 300-mile route through California. They were to have started as early as Thursday.
``The waste that we ship to New Mexico for storage, we have never had a state that I'm aware of not agree to let us use a route,'' Davis said. ``This sets a very dangerous precedent for the future of radioactive waste shipments.''
He noted that much of the waste that would have been shipped originated in California before it was moved to Nevada.
DOE had not indicated how much waste would have been trucked.
The DOE decision came after the Western Governors' Association notified the agency that California did not concur on the route. The agency's protocol is to get a state's agreement before shipping, Davis said.
``This is not a delay,'' he said. ``We're canceling the shipments until the Western Governors' Association and the state of California and state of Nevada can engage together and propose a meaningful compromise.''
The primary objection was the roundabout route, from Nevada through California and Arizona to a disposal facility in New Mexico. Part of the trip was along state Highway 127, a former wagon road that authorities said was not designed for heavy trucks, is poorly maintained in places and is popular with tourists heading to Death Valley.
The dispute over the low-level waste could point to a larger fight over highly radioactive material that is supposed to be transported from nuclear power plants to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump that could open as early as 2010.
California Highway Patrol spokesman Tom Marshall said the agency didn't necessarily object to moving low-grade material through the state, but didn't want the state to become the primary route for shipping higher-grade material.
``We didn't feel the road was adequate to handle the bulkier, the heavier, the more dangerous stuff,'' Marshall said.
-------- us politics
White House disowns British claim that Saddam tried to buy uranium
By David Rennie in Washington and George Jones
09/07/2003
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$VGWS0S4C5Z1VZQFIQMGSFFOAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2003/07/09/wdoss09.xml/
The White House has delivered a fresh blow to Tony Blair's justification for war against Iraq by disowning Britain's claim that Saddam Hussein sought to buy uranium from Africa to produce nuclear weapons.
Dick Cheney said Saddam was trying to reconstitute his nuclear weapons
The trans-Atlantic rift centres on one of the most dramatic claims made by President George W Bush in his State of the Union Address in January.
In that speech - the most important of the presidential year - Mr Bush declared: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Late on Monday night, the White House acknowledged for the first time that the British claim might be wrong, saying: "Knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq's attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech."
The split with Washington over one of the key arguments for military action was a further setback for Mr Blair after a Commons committee said the "jury is still out" on the Government's claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
The Prime Minister yesterday insisted he had been right to go to war and denied misleading the public or parliament. But he appeared to be preparing the ground for the possibility that only "evidence of weapons of mass destruction programmes" might be found, rather than stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.
The Anglo-American claims that Saddam Hussein was actively seeking a nuclear weapons programme were at the heart of the case for war.
Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, said there was evidence that Saddam was trying to reconstitute his nuclear weapons. The Africa connection was a vital part of that case.
Mr Blair yesterday defended the uranium claim, telling a committee of senior MPs it was not a "fantasy" and that the British intelligence services stood by it.
The allegation that Iraq was trying to acquire nuclear technology and materials was made in the dossier published by the British government last September.
However, in a report published on Monday, the Commons Foreign Affairs committee said serious doubt has since been cast on the claim.
It reported that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in March that some of the documents it had acquired - though not through the UK - were forgeries.
Mr Blair and No 10 have always claimed they had separate sources for the alleged resumption of uranium trade between Iraq and Niger.
Giving evidence to the Commons Liaison Committee yesterday, Mr Blair said the British evidence that Iraq sought to purchase further uranium from Niger did not come from the forged documents.
He said Britain's intelligence service was standing by its evidence, but he did not elaborate on what it was.
When Downing Street was asked directly about the White House retraction, a spokesman said: "We stand by the intelligence that was in that dossier."
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House Panel Cuts Bush Nuclear Weapons Requests
REUTERS USA:
July 9, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/21439/story.htm
WASHINGTON - A House of Representatives panel yesterday passed a bill that would curb spending on U.S. nuclear weapons programs, in what lawmakers termed "a shot across the bow" of the Bush administration.
Showing rare bipartisan unity, the House Appropriations subcommittee unanimously approved the $27.1 billion measure to fund energy and water programs in 2004, including a boost in funding for the controversial Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump.
Overall the bill would be an increase of around $942 million over the current fiscal year but would slash more than $326 million from President Bush's budget request for the federal agency which oversees nuclear weapons programs.
Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers expressed skepticism about whether the current U.S. nuclear stockpile was appropriate in a world without a superpower foe.
"We have a Cold War footprint," said Ohio Republican Rep. David Hobson, the subcommittee's chairman. "We need to look better at what the future is."
The bill would also cut most of the $15.5 million Bush had requested to study new, smaller nuclear weapons that could be used to destroy deeply buried bunkers, aides said. Critics say they fear the move could spark a new nuclear arms race.
The National Nuclear Security Administration -- which is part of the U.S. Department of Energy -- would still receive $8.5 billion next year, an increase of $330 million over 2003.
But the bill would cut a largely-symbolic $60 million from an effort to help Russia dispose of its Cold War nuclear arsenal, to show Congress' displeasure with slowdowns that have seen the program accumulate some $1 billion in unspent funds.
Texas Democratic Rep. Chet Edwards said the move was "a shot across the bow" of the Department of Energy.
The bill would also substantially boost funding for the Yucca Mountain project providing $174 million more than Bush had requested and $308 million more than Congress approved this fiscal year. The plan aims to site the first permanent U.S. nuclear waste repository in the desert northwest of Las Vegas.
Much of the extra money would go toward developing a rail line to transport nuclear waste around Las Vegas, in an effort to damp down fierce political opposition inside Nevada. The bill, one of 13 Congress must pass each year to fund the federal government, now goes to the full Appropriations Committee. The Senate has yet to act on its companion measure.
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Bush Recantation Of Iraq Claim Stirs Calls for Probes
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 9, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29766-2003Jul8?language=printer
Democrats called for investigations yesterday after the White House acknowledged Monday that President Bush should not have said in his State of the Union address last January that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa.
The White House acknowledgment followed a British parliamentary report casting doubt on intelligence about the alleged uranium sale, which Bush had attributed to the British.
"Knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq's attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech," the White House statement said. In the speech, Bush was trying to make the case that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.
Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) called it a "very important admission," adding, "This ought to be reviewed very carefully. It ought to be the subject of careful scrutiny as well as some hearings."
The senior Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.), said the administration's admission was not a revelation. "The whole world knew it was a fraud," Rockefeller said, adding that the current intelligence committee inquiry should determine how it got into the Bush speech. "Who decided this was something they could work with?" Rockefeller asked.
Sen. Carl M. Levin (Mich.), ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, yesterday questioned why, as late as the president's Jan. 28 speech, "policymakers were still using information which the intelligence community knew was almost certainly false."
Levin said he hoped the intelligence committee inquiry and one he is conducting with the Democratic staff of the armed services panel will explore why the CIA had kept what it knew buried "in the bowels of the agency," repeating a phrase used recently by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to explain why she did not know the information was incorrect.
Republicans saw things differently.
Sen. Rick Santorum (Pa.), chairman of the Republican Conference, praised the administration for being forthright. "I think they had the best information that they thought, and it was reliable at the time that the president said it," Santorum told reporters. "It has since turned out to be, at least according to the reports that have been just released, not true," he said. "The president stepped forward and said so," he continued. "I think that's all you can expect."
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) also defended Bush's approach, telling reporters that it is "very easy to pick one little flaw here and one little flaw there." He defended the U.S.-led war against Iraq as "morally sound, and it is not just because somebody forged or made a mistake. . . . The Democrats can try all they want to undermine that, but the American people understand it and they support it."
At the White House yesterday, officials stressed that Bush's assertions in the State of the Union address did not depend entirely on discredited documents about Niger but also referred to intelligence contained in a still-classified September 2002 national intelligence estimate that listed two other countries, identified yesterday by a senior intelligence official as Congo and Somalia, where Iraq allegedly had sought uranium. That information, however, has been described as "sketchy" by intelligence officials, and the British parliamentary commission said it had not been proved.
Several candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination spoke out yesterday. Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) said Bush's "factual lapse" cannot be easily dismissed "as an intelligence failure." He said the president "has a pattern of using excessive language in his speeches and off-the-cuff remarks" which "represents a failure of presidential leadership."
Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) said the administration "doesn't get honesty points for belatedly admitting what has been apparent to the world for some time -- that emphatic statements made on Iraq were inaccurate."
Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), former chairman of the intelligence panel, said, "George Bush's credibility is increasingly in doubt."
Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) expanded the credibility problem to the administration: "The White House's admission that it cited false information to set this country on the path toward war erodes the credibility of the administration."
Former Vermont governor Howard Dean said, "The credibility of the U.S. is a precious commodity. We should all be deeply dismayed that our nation was taken to war and our reputation in the world forever tainted by what appears to be the deliberate effort of this administration to mislead the American people, Congress and the United Nations."
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Bush Defends War, Sidestepping Issue of Faulty Intelligence
July 9, 2003
New York Times
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/09/international/worldspecial/19CND-INTE.html?hp
PRETORIA, South Africa, July 9 - President Bush brushed aside questions today about the accuracy of a piece of evidence he used to justify war with Iraq, saying he was "absolutely confident" he made the right decision to use military force to remove Saddam Hussein from power.
Speaking at a news conference here with President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Mr. Bush did not directly answer a question about whether he regretted including in his State of the Union address this year a statement that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium in Africa for use in a nuclear weapons program. The White House acknowledged on Monday that the intelligence behind the statement was incomplete and perhaps inaccurate, drawing criticism from Democrats on Capitol Hill who said it raised doubts about the administration's case for the war.
But Mr. Bush, in his first comments on the matter, made clear that the specific piece of evidence in question did not make any difference to his basic position that Mr. Hussein's government posed a threat to the United States and the stability of the Middle East.
"There is no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a threat to world peace," Mr. Bush said. "And there's no doubt in my mind that the United States, along with allies and friends, did the right thing in removing him from power. And there's no doubt in my mind, when it's all said and done, the facts will show the world the truth."
The administration's failure so far to find any substantial caches of chemical or biological weapons and the weakening of its case that Mr. Hussein was trying to rebuild his nuclear program have fed the longstanding and deep skepticism among many opponents of the war that Iraq was as much of a threat as Mr. Bush made it out to be.
Some Democrats have seized on the doubts about the accuracy of the intelligence on the uranium as new justification for a full-scale investigation, seeking to put Mr. Bush on the defensive over his handling of the war at a time when his reelection campaign is stressing his role as commander in chief of a continuing war against terrorism.
Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, said the Bush administration was being "forthright" in acknowledging that information that it received after the State of the Union address led it to pull back the assertion that Iraq had been trying to purchase uranium in Niger, in West Africa.
"This information should not have risen to the level of a presidential speech," Mr. Fleischer said. "There was reporting, although it wasn't very specific, about Iraq's seeking to obtain uranium from Africa."
But he also suggested that the White House continued to put some store in the intelligence that was the basis of Mr. Bush's statement.
"Just because something didn't make it to the level where it should have been included in a presidential speech, in hindsight, doesn't mean the information was necessarily inaccurate," Mr. Fleischer said.
The White House has faced questions about Mr. Bush's assertion about the uranium purchase for months, and they intensified this week after an article was published on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times on Sunday by Joseph C. Wilson 4th, a former ambassador who was sent last year to Niger to investigate reports of the attempted purchase. Mr. Wilson, who said he was dispatched after Vice President Dick Cheney's office took an interest in the matter, reported back that the intelligence was likely fraudulent.
But Mr. Fleischer said Mr. Wilson's report was vague and did not specifically address the main problem with the intelligence, that documents purporting to document Iraq's efforts were almost certainly forged.
"He spent eight days in Niger and concluded that Niger denied the allegation," Mr. Fleischer said. "Well, typically nations don't admit to going around nuclear nonproliferation."
He said there had been "other reporting" beyond the apparently forged documents about Mr. Hussein's efforts to acquire a lightly processed form of uranium known as yellow cake, but did not specify what it was.
"I think the American people continue to express their support for ridding the world of Saddam Hussein based on just cause, knowing that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons that were unaccounted for that we're still confident we'll find," Mr. Fleischer said. "I think the burden is on those people who think he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are."
Mr. Bush said that the United States had underestimated how close Mr. Hussein was to building a nuclear weapon in 1991, before the first Persian Gulf war, and that there had long been evidence that Iraq was trying again. He dismissed the criticism of his justification for war as "attempts to try to rewrite history."
"Imagine a world in which this tyrant had a nuclear weapon," Mr. Bush said.
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Bush and Rumsfeld Defend Use of Prewar Intelligence on Iraq
Despite Use of False Information, Bush Says He Has 'No Doubt' in His Decision
By Dana Milbank and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, July 9, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31709-2003Jul9?language=printer
PRETORIA, South Africa, July 9 -- President Bush today brushed aside questions about the accuracy of his claim in his State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear materials in Africa, declaring there was "no doubt" that his decision to go to war to remove Saddam Hussein from power was correct.
The president avoided directly answering questions about whether he regretted the inclusion of the claim and whether he still believed the charge -- that Iraq had sought a form of uranium from Niger -- to be true despite the acknowledgement from White House aides this week that the allegation was wrong and should not have been in the speech.
Bush dismissed the matter as "attempts to rewrite history."
"There is no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the world peace," Bush said at a news conference with South African President Thabo Mbeki on the second day of his five-day African tour. "And there's no doubt in my mind that the United States, along with allies and friends, did the right thing in removing him from power. And there's no doubt in my mind, when it's all said and done, the facts will show the world the truth."
The White House acknowledged Monday that the intelligence underlying the president's uranium-purchase assertion was incorrect and should not have been in his State of the Union speech. Leading Democrats have seized on the admission as justification for a congressional inquiry into the administration's handling of pre-war intelligence on Iraq.
Talking about Iraq's broader pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, Bush told those gathered in the lush gardens outside the government's Union Building here that President Bill Clinton in 1998 "raided Iraq based upon the very same intelligence." Bush was referring to four days of bombing by the United States and Britain in December 1998 of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons facilities as well as its missile-production plants.
Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer, told reporters that the White House only learned after the president's speech that documents that were the basis for his uranium-purchase claim had been forged. "After the speech, information was learned about the forged documents," he said. "With the advantage of hindsight, it's known now what was not known by the White House prior to the speech. This information should not have risen to the level of a presidential speech."
It has emerged in recent weeks, however, that the CIA dispatched a respected former senior diplomat, Joseph C. Wilson, to Niger the year before the president's speech to investigate the uranium claims and that Wilson concluded the allegations were false. Administration officials have said the information had not been conveyed to the White House at the time of the speech.
The CIA and State Department, a month before the president's speech, had stopped referring to the Niger issue in public statements and documents because they were questioning the reliability of the intelligence, senior officials said.
On Capitol Hill today, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld sought to diminish the importance of the debate over the intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs. "The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit" of weapons of mass destruction, he told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "We acted because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light -- through the prism of our experience on 9-11."
Rumsfeld was repeatedly questioned about the administration's handling of the uranium-purchase claim, saying at one point that "I can't give you a good answer" as to why he was not told about intelligence analysts' doubts about the report.
"This is a significant piece of intelligence; it was relied on at the highest level, very publicly, very visibly, by the president and by you within two days of each other, right before the war; a very significant statement about seeking uranium in Africa," Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said. "At the same time, the intelligence community knew . . . in the depths of their agency that this was not true, it seems to me is absolutely startling."
But Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) vigorously denounced re-visiting the question of whether U.S. intelligence was wrong, calling the issue "nothing but an absurd media-driven diversionary tactic."
Bush's aides said today that the president was not angry to learn that the allegation about Iraq's efforts to buy uranium in Niger turned out to be false. They said he has accepted their account of how the line had come to be included in his State of the Union speech, and plans no recriminations.
"He understands intelligence and that as new information becomes available, we're going to continually update," Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said. "He wanted an explanation and we told him how the process works and he accepted it. He just asked, 'Why?' "
White House officials said the uranium claim was included in the president's address last Jan. 28 only after the wording had been approved by the CIA, Pentagon and State Department. In his remarks, Bush declared, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Bartlett said the passage was included in drafts of the speech for at least 10 days before Bush delivered it. Bartlett said he knew of no objections to including the charge, or debate over the wording.
"We wouldn't lead with something that we thought could be refuted," Bartlett said. "There was no debate or questions with regard to that line when it was signed off on. This was not a last-minute addition."
Bartlett said the sentence was included as part of a desire to build a five-point case against Hussein -- that he possessed or was seeking biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, had a history of human rights violations and had links to terrorism.
"This was not the centerpiece of our case," Bartlett said. "It fit in the overall context of the model that we had been following in outlining the case -- what he did, what he has, what he's trying to do, and the fact that he was not complying with the demands of the world."
Bartlett said he did not know which White House official wrote that section of the speech, which eventually went through more than 25 drafts. Rough drafts of Bush's State of the Union addresses start with an outline produced by White House speechwriters after conversations with Bush and his closest advisers. The speechwriters solicit input from department and agencies responsible for particular topics, and then officials from those parts of the administration are asked to vet the resulting language.
A senior administration official said that numerous officials at the CIA had the chance to object to the line about Hussein's quest for uranium. "If [CIA Director George J.] Tenet had called up and said, 'Take it out,' we would have taken it out," the official said. "When it was signed off on at highest level, it was not brought into question by those who would know or those who were tasked to know at the agency."
The official said the claim was tied to British officials because they had included it in a government intelligence dossier last September. "When given a choice, why not cite a public document?" the official said.
A British parliamentary commission, which investigated the British government's handling of Iraq intelligence, on Monday cast serious doubt about the uranium claim in the British intelligence dossier that was the basis for Bush's remarks. Publication of the British report prompted the White House to formally acknowledge that the assertion was wrong and end months of uncertainty over the matter during which senior officials had defended the president's remarks.
Allen reported from Washington. Staff writers Walter Pincus and Thomas E. Ricks contributed to this report.
----
Where is Iraq War Instigator, Richard Perle?
Wednesday, July 09 2003
By William Hughes,
For Palestine Chronicle
http://palestinechronicle.com/article.php?story=20030709193632884
"The shifty Perle, the Mother of all Neocons, also predicted, like former Defense Department official, Ken Adelman, that a U.S. invasion of Iraq would be a 'cakewalk!' .."
http://palestinechronicle.com/images/articles/4_images/perle_709.JPG
Perhaps we should take a break on looking for Saddam Hussein, Usama bin Laden, William "Slots" Bennett, or, even James J. "Whitey" Bulger. For me, the key question today is: Where is Richard Perle?
Before the launching of Iraq War No. 2, in March 20, 2003, Perle, America's Iago, regularly appeared on TV and cable TV programs, on radio, and in the print media, too. He repeated, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, why it was so absolutely critical for the U.S. to immediately invade Iraq.
America was "at risk," he said, with that ubiquitous smirk on his mug. There wasn't a moment to lose. "Saddam has WMD," he told us, and he also "hates America" and poses a dire "threat to our security?"
The shifty Perle, the Mother of all Neocons, also predicted, like former Defense Department official, Ken Adelman, that a U.S. invasion of Iraq would be a "cakewalk!" It will be "easy," he boasted. We would also be "exporting democracy" to the Iraqi people, who will "welcome us" with open arms "as liberators," he claimed over and over again in similar words. Cakewalk! Easy! Exporting Democracy! Liberators! Sure!
Now, Perle is among the missing! The man with the sinister-looking scowl hasn't showed up on the Talking Head circuits since about the time the U.S. occupation of Iraq began going sour. Could he be hiding out in his beloved Israel, in a safe house provided by Benjamin Netanyahu, a/k/a "Bend-the-Truth Yahoo"? Or, are the War Hawks, Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA) and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), telling him to keep a low profile by working temporarily as an extra on a Hollywood movie? Who knows?
It's a certainty that the idea of "regime change" for Baghdad was first hustled in Zionist Israel. A 1996 paper concocted by Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, entitled, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Security the Realm," called for, inter alia, "the removal of Saddam Hussain and the installation of a Hashemite monarchy in Baghdad."
The "realm" Perle, Feith and Wurmser were seeking to secure, however, wasn't America's, but Israel's! The study was intended as a blueprint for the then-upcoming Likud-dominated government of Netanyahu. Feith now works for "our" Defense Department, in a high policy post, while Wurmser is planted in the State Department as a "special assistant." ("Examining the Role of Israel-and its American Friends-in Promoting War on Iraq," Allan C. Brownfeld, WRMEA, May, 2003).
For a while, Perle was a chief honcho of the Defense Policy Board, which advised Donald Rumsfeld and reported directly to another shadowy figure, Deputy Defense Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz. Perle was recently forced to resign from the top post, but still remains on the Board.
Perle is a notorious Israeli Firster. He is a member of the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs (JINSA). He is also a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a hard line, right wing "think tank," that has slated Iran as Amerca's next war target. Perle advocates a so-called "Pax Americana," a new American Empire, which promotes America's world domination. Gee, I wonder if Israel will benefit from that scheme, too?
Perle serves, also, on the Board of Advisors of the Foundation for Defense of Democracy (FDD)-another right wing group, which is, of course, fanatically pro-Israel. He hangs out with Super-Hawks, such as: Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol and Gary Bauer.
In fact, Perle is a master deceiver! American soldiers are now dying in Iraq, 30 since President George W. Bush declared "mission accomplished" on board the USS Lincoln, on May 1, 2003. As the body bags of our fallen heroes return to Dover, Delaware's Air Force base, loved ones have every right to blame Perle, and his ilk, for their losses.
The Iraq invasion was not a "cakewalk." Iraq doesn't have WMD, nor did it have any ties to terrorists, as Perle tooted. And, the Iraqi people bitterly resent the U.S./British invasion and occupation of their country.
The unnecessary and immoral destruction by Coalition Forces of Iraq's gas, water and electrical works, the bombing of their cities, pollution of their lands and rivers by toxic chemicals, leaking raw sewage and tons of depleted uranium, the death and injuries to countless thousands of innocent civilians,and the mostly total collapse of its social, health, cultural and monetary systems, too, has been a human catastrophe of the first magnitude. A country of 25.5 million souls has become a living hell for no darn good reason. Opponents of the war have nothing to regret.
Democracy, Perle's rotten lies to the contrary, is not, like Coke Cola, an exportable product. Americans troops now face death around every corner in Iraq, as the situation on the ground begins to resemble the guerrilla warfare conditions of the British-occupied north of Ireland during the late 70s. The Iraqi war will only be over when the Iraqi people say so. The cost to U.S. taxpayers could hit $1.6 trillion. And, this totally uncalled for conflict has created even more enemies for America around the globe.
A final question: Will the slippery Perle, America's Iago, ever be forced to answer to the people for his incalculable wrongdoing?
(c) William Hughes 2003. William Hughes is the author of "Andrew Jackson vs. New World Order" (Authors Choice Press) and "Baltimore Iconoclast" (Writer's Showcase). He can be reached at liamhughes@mindspring.com.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
West African oil attracts growing U.S. interest
09 July 2003
By James Jukwey,
Reuters
http://www.enn.com/news/2003-07-09/s_6355.asp
LONDON - U.S. companies are pouring billions of dollars into West Africa as prolific oil finds draw investment to a continent usually of little economic significance for Washington.
President Bush, a former oilman, concludes his week-long African tour Saturday in Nigeria, Africa's biggest oil producer, which delivers premium crude oil.
The Middle East has long been a major source of oil for the United States, but some in the U.S. administration believe Washington could lessen its dependence on the Arab world by harnessing West African oil reserves.
"We are looking at a 2005 estimate that 20 percent of our oil imports will be coming from Africa, and that's also going to grow rapidly and markedly in the years after 2005," said Walter Kansteiner, the top State Department official on Africa.
Other estimates suggest African oil supply to the United States could rise by 2015 to as much as 25 percent, from about 15 percent now.
Africa's oil belt stretches from Angola in the southwest to the island state of Sao Tome and Principe on the equator. Chad, one of Africa's most impoverished nations, is set to join too later this year when an Exxon Mobil-led consortium begins to pump crude there in a multibillion dollar project.
Apart from landlocked Chad, much of the investment by U.S. companies in African oil is in offshore areas. New reserves have been found in deep waters far from violent zones like Nigeria's Delta region, which recently has been plagued by banditry by groups demanding a share of the oil windfall.
Corruption
Industry analysts say a factor in favor of West Africa is its relative proximity to U.S. markets. West African oil shipments take less than half the time to reach U.S. shores than shipments from the Middle East.
But human rights groups criticize the lack of democracy and accountability in the region, which they say means the money will not benefit the people.
New entrants into the oil sector, such as Angola and Chad, have recently pledged to be more open and accountable with their oil bonanza. If that happens, it will be a far cry from Nigeria's experience. The oil boom is regarded in some quarters as a curse because of the corruption and ethnic rivalries it has bred.
While U.S. oil companies are raising their production in Nigeria, analysts believe the country's membership in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) will constrain its output capacity.
"The OPEC quota is a factor that could slow the rate of oil production capacity growth in Nigeria," said James Burkhard, an analyst in African energy at the Cambridge Energy Research Associates in Boston, Mass. That constraint does not exist for Angola or other producers in the region, Burkhard said.
Within Nigeria, there is strong suspicion that the United States plans to lever it out of OPEC, and Bush could put pressure on Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo when they meet.
U.S. analysts disagree. "I don't think Nigeria would ever leave OPEC. They have too much to gain, because it is one of the few places that they sit at the table," said Sarah Emerson, an analyst with Energy Security Analysis Inc in Boston.
--------
How important is African oil?
Wednesday, 9 July, 2003
BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3054948.stm
President George W Bush is in Africa to launch HIV/Aids, development and anti-terrorism initiatives.
But his visit has also highlighted the growing importance of oil imports for the United States.
The US imports two thirds of its oil needs.
About 15% of that amount comes from West Africa and that figure is projected to rise to 25% in the next 10 years.
The oil sector in Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the fastest growing in the world.
Production has taken off in the Gulf of Guinea which includes Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Gabon, Angola and Congo.
By the end of 2003, hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude will be flowing from oil fields in Chad, through rain forests in Cameroon to tankers docked off the Atlantic coast.
Political problems are much more localised in Africa Douglas Mason, EIU
An American company has secured a concession in the neighbouring Central African Republic.
In the aftermath of 11 September 2001, America is seen as looking to reduce its dependence on the Middle East by looking elsewhere for energy supplies.
Despite a reputation for political and economic stability, oil flows from Africa can be reliable, especially as production often takes place off-shore.
"Usually oil production takes place in enclaves, so continues regardless of what goes on around," said Douglas Mason, Africa specialist at the Economist Intelligence Unit.
"Political problems are much more localised in Africa."
US military involvement
America may even eventually increase its military presence in the region to secure its oil supplies.
Sao Tome - which has big oil reserves - has invited the US Navy to build a port from which to patrol the Gulf of Guinea.
But some analysts say investing in African oil reserves will not solve all America's energy problems.
"It is as well to diversify as much as possible. But no one oil source is more reliable than the other," says Robert Mabro, President of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.
Africa and Russia are not going to replace Saudi Arabia which has excess capacity which can stabilise the market Professor Paul Stevens, Dundee University
"There is a move to reduce reliance on the Middle East but Africa also has its problems. Look at the recent strikes in Nigeria."
Professor of Petroleum and Economics at Dundee University, Paul Stevens describes as "mis-informed" officials in Washington who see African oil as crucially important to the US.
They want to reduce America's reliance on Saudi Arabia's goodwill, he says.
"It doesn't matter where you get it from, it's how much you pay. If oil cost $60 a barrel in the Middle East, it's still going to cost $60 in Africa.
"Africa and Russia are not going to replace Saudi Arabia which has excess capacity which can stabilise the market."
-------- arms sales
EADS chief urges open transatlantic defence market
NEW YORK (AFP)
Jul 09, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/030709174449.fvcvtz1o.html
EADS, the world's second-largest aerospace and defence company, wants an open transatlantic defence market that would benefit US and European manufacturers, co-chief executive Philippe Camus said Wednesday.
"It's a win-win situation for the taxpayer on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean because more competition means more value for the same price," Camus told reporters in New York.
"And it's a win-win situation for the industry because competition will give us a better efficiency -- a better overall capcity to address the overall market," he said.
In recent months, there have been rumblings in the United States about closing certain markets to companies based in countries that opposed the US-led invasion of Iraq.
The European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co. (EADS) has long sought a foothold in the lucrative US defence market.
"We are ready to be a provider to the US Department of Defence and to follow the same rules" as British or US firms, Camus said.
Rather than buying up US defence firms, Camus said EADS would seek to extend its our capacity through direct investment and building or buying factories.
"Our priority is developing our products, our technologies and enlarging our US or European or Asian industrial footprint in order to address the specific market," he said.
"I do prefer that to acquiring company."
--------
EGYPT TO GET U.S. AIR SUPPORT
Wed, 09 Jul 2003
Middle East Newsline
http://www.menewsline.com/stories/2003/july/07_10_4.html
WASHINGTON [MENL] -- The United States will help Egypt in support of its air force weaponry.
The Bush administration has approved a project to help several of its allies in the Middle East and other areas of the world with support for U.S. air weaponry and equipment. The allies include Egypt, Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The Defense Department has awarded a $13.8 million contract to Madison Research Corp. to head a support program for Egypt and other U.S. allies. The program is meant to provide a wide range of diverse non-engineering, technical and acquisition management support required in the acquisition, development, production and support of various equipment and weapon systems.
Madison Research provides support for the the acquisition of products for U.S. fighter jets. The technical support includes system analysis, system engineering and integration and Madison has provided expertise in the areas of sensors, and rocket and missile propulsion, including the guided multiple launch rocket system.
-------- britain
Cold War Scientists Escape Chemical Charges - Lawyer
Story by Jeremy Lovell
REUTERS UK:
July 9, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/21451/story.htm
LONDON - Scientists who tested chemical weapons including nerve gas on British servicemen during the Cold War will not face prosecution, a lawyer for the veterans said.
The servicemen claim that between the 1950s and mid 1980s they were duped into taking part in tests at the top secret chemical warfare facility of Porton Down near the Wiltshire town of Salisbury, about 100 miles southwest of London.
"Letters went out last night to 700 people telling them that there would be no criminal prosecutions," lawyer Alan Care, who represents more than 500 veterans of tests at Porton Down, told Reuters.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), responsible for deciding whether there was enough evidence to prosecute scientists at Porton Down, declined immediate comment.
The servicemen claim they volunteered to take part in experiments to find the cure for the common cold, but that when they arrived at Porton Down they were coerced into taking part in the chemical warfare trials instead.
At least one -- Aircraftsman Ronald Maddison -- died after being exposed to Sarin nerve agent in May 1953.
"It was not just Sarin, it was mustard gas, LSD, London Smog and many other nerve agents," Care said.
An inquest into Maddison's death was held in secret in 1953 for reasons of "national security."
But following a 1999 investigation codenamed Operation Antler, Wiltshire police decided there were grounds for criminal prosecutions for "administering unlawful substances and assault" and sent the names of eight people to the CPS.
Care admitted the CPS decision not prosecute despite the Wiltshire police findings was a blow, but would not deter the veterans from pursuing damage claims.
"It is one government department deciding not to prosecute another. As far as we are concerned, it makes no difference to our case. We will still be pursuing our civil case for damages," he said.
"I have always thought that going after individual scientists was too much like looking for scapegoats. They were working for the government, and it is the government that must answer," he added.
--------
UK Quietly Presses U.S. Over Guantanamo Bay Trials
Wed July 9, 2003
By Andrew Cawthorne
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=ZJZHL42GUVDYOCRBAEOCFFA?type=politicsNews&storyID=3061044
LONDON - Britain's Tony Blair said on Wednesday his government was pressing Washington behind the scenes to ensure the planned trials of terrorism suspects jailed at Guantanamo Bay do not violate international law.
Challenged by UK legislators to "put your foot down" against President Bush's administration over the controversial trial proposals, the prime minister told parliament that "representations" were being made.
Under repeated questioning, Blair declined to condemn the trials or call for the extradition of Britons there, leaving their relatives and lawyers frustrated.
"Purely private representations have not worked. The British government has to review its strategy and make formal diplomatic protests like Pakistan did," Louise Christian, a lawyer for UK Guantanamo Bay suspect Feroz Abbasi's family, told Reuters.
"If we were the closest ally to the U.S. in the war on terrorism and we are not able to do anything for our own citizens held by them, then it's a disgrace," Christian added.
The U.S. plans for military trials of a first batch of six foreigners -- including two Britons, Abbasi, 23, and Moazzam Begg, 35 -- at the naval base in Cuba, have provoked worldwide criticism and strained the close U.S.-UK political alliance.
"We will make active representations, indeed are making active representations to them, to make absolutely sure that any such trial that takes place will take place in accordance with proper international law," Blair told parliament.
"The precise nature of this trial has not yet been formulated and therefore it's important that we wait and see whether indeed our representations have been heeded."
DEATH PENALTY
Washington says the six Guantanamo Bay prisoners it intends to try first attended terrorist training camps and may have been involved in financing Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, which it blames for the September 11 attacks.
The trials could bring the death penalty.
Blair reiterated Britain's opposition to the death penalty, and called for an open legal process.
"Any commission or tribunal that tries these men must be one conducted in accordance with proper canons of law so that a fair trial is both taking place and seen to take place," he said.
The Pentagon's preliminary information on the trials has sparked outrage among rights groups, politicians and lawyers.
"The detainees are not set to receive a fair trial in the eyes of British domestic law, U.S. law or international law," British Law Society President Carolyn Kirby said on Wednesday.
"We have many serious concerns, not least that the civilian defense counsel and the accused will be asked to leave the trial while so-called secret evidence is being presented."
Criticism has also focused on the level of control the U.S. "appointing authority" would potentially have over all aspects of the trial -- appointing both leading prosecution and defense lawyers -- and the constant surveillance of the suspects.
U.S. military officials have had preliminary discussions about building an execution chamber at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. navy base, where about 600 prisoners are being held, but say talk of executions is premature.
-------- business
U.S. Firms Eager To Sell in Iraq
Laws, Security Fears Still Major Obstacles
By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 9, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29517-2003Jul8?language=printer
At his truck wash off Interstate 90 in Billings, Mont., Don Haugan runs a little side business making a special industrial cleaner for removing road oil and grime from trucks and their equipment.
Truckers give testimonials for the stuff, and Haugan does, too. His Hoogie's Pro-CAD "is good, flat good," he said, adding that "it's ready for the world."
In fact, Haugan's marketing partner was in Washington last week looking for tips at a private conference on rebuilding Iraq. The two men, who met over cold beers at a Montana gin mill in 1956, see huge potential for their degreaser in the oil-rich country. A little more than a month after the United Nations ended economic sanctions, many U.S. firms are jostling to take part in Iraq's emerging new economy -- even before that economy has taken shape.
The companies range in size and clout from a firm owned by the Chickasaw Indian tribe of Oklahoma to Mack Trucks Inc. and American Express Co. Shut out by the limited competition for government rebuilding contracts, the companies are striking out on their own. They are packing private conferences, hiring lawyers and consultants, and paying big bucks for guides -- one costs $1,495 a year for 22 issues -- to doing business in postwar Iraq.
But firms pursuing commercial ventures in Iraq are confronting a daunting list of obstacles, including serious security issues, the lack of infrastructure to support business and an existing commercial code unfavorable to foreign investment.
"The idea of simply going to Iraq to do business is a dream whose reality is off in the distant future," said William A. Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council.
Two months after the official end of major military operations, Iraq's security problems are well documented. Ports and airports are still closed to civilian traffic, and passport restrictions on U.S. citizens remain in place.
Although U.S. officials are working to come up with a new commercial framework, no one knows for certain what it will look like or how much influence the United States will ultimately have over it. In an Iraq business guide published on its Web site, the Commerce Department noted that long-term commercial environment and business opportunities in Iraq "will ultimately be the responsibility of competent Iraqi authorities."
In the meantime, Iraqi laws prohibit foreign ownership of real estate, foreigners acting as commercial agents, and capital-sharing arrangements between foreign and Iraqi companies.
"There's a great deal that needs to change," said David L. Khairallah, former deputy general counsel of the World Bank and now a lawyer at White & Case LLP in Washington. "All of these issues would have to be settled in a way to give assurance to foreign investors."
The security issue is, by far, the biggest obstacle. "There's trade, but it's frontier trade," said Toby T. Gati, senior international adviser at Washington's Akin, Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP. "It's not real business. It's an Arab bazaar. What, are our Marines going to send in a Humvee to protect the first Wal-Mart? It's a very low priority for the military."
Thomas Ernsing, a New York consultant, said he's fielded a steady stream of inquiries from businesses interested in Iraq. He would ultimately like to open an office in Baghdad for his 3C New York Inc. But Ernsing said that for now, he is waiting for the situation to stabilize and advising his clients to do the same.
"Basically everything is on hold," he said. "We are not doing anything. It's chaos there."
Some companies have already thrown in the towel.
John Diehl, vice president of industrial sales for Diehl Inc., a family-owned maker of evaporated milk in Defiance, Ohio, worked the phones for more than a month trying to drum up interest in his product. Through his Washington trade group, he eventually hooked up with someone at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was responsible for awarding the main Iraqi reconstruction contracts.
But Diehl said he was told the U.S. government had a surplus of powdered milk. He could ship directly to Iraq and compete in the retail market, but the Europeans would beat him on cost. "We saw a real opportunity for the reconstruction effort," he said. "But I've given up."
Others are forging ahead in spite of the challenges.
Tecore Wireless Systems of Columbia is preparing to build a telecommunications distribution center in Baghdad, according to chief executive Jay Salkini. He said he is not worried about security or the lack of regulation because he has contractors, insiders in Iraq, who have secured the appropriate licenses.
"The operators have their own arrangements with the authorities," he said, declining further comment.
General Electric Co. is taking a more conservative route. Spokesman Gary Sheffer said the company is exploring opportunities to sell medical diagnostic and power-generation equipment through the U.S. government contract process. As for whether GE would go in privately, "it's too early to make that kind of conclusion," Sheffer said.
Mack Trucks also is looking to build up its brand in Iraq. Frank Meehan, senior vice president of international operations for the Pennsylvania truck-maker, said the company has been in the Middle East for years and used to distribute in Iraq. "As the environment in Iraq stabilizes, we feel there is an opportunity to grow our business there," he said.
And Hoogie's Inc. is getting ready as well for what Haugan, a former Marine who learned his business cleaning beer taps and coils at Anheuser-Busch Co., described as an opportunity he always dreamed would come along someday.
Tarakegne Tesfaye, Hoogie's marketing director and an Ethiopian businessman who has worked in the Middle East for more than 20 years, said he has scouted potential plants in Kuwait where the cleanser could be mixed and then brought into Iraq.
Tesfaye said companies have to be patient. "You can't rush into this kind of venture," he said. "People, they were a little bit optimistic that things would be more shiny immediately after the war stopped."
Global insurance giant American International Group Inc. is also standing by.
"In the long run, financial services institutions like AIG are very interested in the Iraq market, but we recognize there has to be a political authority, a regulatory environment," said Frank G. Wisner, vice chairman of external affairs for AIG and a former U.S. ambassador. "These rules do not today exist. When they do, we will come in."
-------- colombia
Progress Against Outlaws Is Cited as U.S. Releases Aid to Colombia
July 9, 2003
The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/09/international/americas/09COLO.html
WASHINGTON, July 8 - The Bush administration certified today that Colombia was making progress in reining in paramilitary forces that terrorize the civilian population and often work in conjunction with the country's armed forces.
The decision, which releases about $27 million in military aid, was criticized by human rights groups. They accused the administration of whitewashing Colombia's record - in areas like prosecuting the paramilitaries for human rights abuses, severing their ties with the nation's military and bringing corrupt military leaders to trial - in order to protect its counternarcotics cooperation with the Colombian government.
"It is unacceptable for our country to turn a blind eye while U.S. tax dollars benefit forces that abuse their power, commit shocking acts of violence and fuel the Colombian conflict," said William F. Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA.
Colombia contends it is making progress and has captured more than 2,000 outlaw fighters in the past year. The military killed 16 of the right-wing gunmen in Meta Province today, Reuters reported.
The Bush administration continued to withhold about $5 million in additional military aid, angered by Colombia's refusal to sign an agreement that would exempt all Americans in that country from being turned over for prosecution by the International Criminal Court.
The amount is largely symbolic, since Colombia receives about $800 million in United States aid. But the issue has created a political headache for President Álvaro Uribe, one of Washington's closest allies in the region, who faces criticism for giving in to American demands.
Colombian officials say a special exemption is unnecessary because an agreement signed in 1962 excludes Americans from Colombian jurisdiction if they are working on behalf of the United States.
Washington wants an exemption for all Americans, not merely those working for the government.
-------- iraq
LEADERSHIP
For a Town Council in Iraq, Many Queries, Few Answers
July 9, 2003
The New York Times
By AMY WALDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/09/international/worldspecial/09COUN.html
ABU GHRAIB, Iraq, July 5 - On a recent morning, the Abu Ghraib town council was hearing the usual litany of complaints, offering its usual mix of help and, mostly, impotence in return. Overhead, a fan turned, but the air did not.
The constituents' woes came down to the essentials. They had no power, and thus no clean water - could they get generators? They had no security - could they get weapons permits?
If anyone could help them, it should have been the man at the center of the scene, Dari Hamis al-Dari. In April, he was selected by the local tribes to lead Iraq's first freely formed town council after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Since then, he has sat at a desk in a white robe and headdress, in a room lined with men in tribal robes and Western dress all looking to him for answers. He has not had many.
Mr. Dari could do nothing for the man who, lacking electricity, stayed up all night fanning a sick child, nothing for the 5-year-old child who was left legless by unexploded ordnance that detonated, a sight that caused him to weep. He could do nothing for the multitudes complaining of cars, weapons or relatives taken by American forces, other than give their names to the Americans. He could do nothing for those lacking drinking water or waiting for food rations.
"What do you tell the people - have more patience?" he asked rhetorically. "Till when?"
If America has natural allies in Iraq, they are men like Mr. Dari. He attended the American Jesuit school in Baghdad, then university in Frankfurt. He has lived in Europe and speaks excellent English. He maintained his independence throughout Mr. Hussein's rule, shunning the material blandishments with which Mr. Hussein bought the loyalty of many tribal sheiks.
A part-time farmer and businessman, he is a member of the sizable Zobaa tribe, which his brother leads. He welcomed the Americans and has worked closely with their military commanders in his area.
So the impatience creeping into his voice and the frustration lining his handsome face bode poorly for the fate of the American-led occupation here - even if American officials succeed in drawing Iraqis into a new national leadership. There is no indication that Mr. Dari, who is 64, would turn on the Americans. He is simply losing faith in them.
"Conditions have never been worse," he said bluntly. "We've never been through such a long bad period."
Abu Ghraib - a largely agricultural area just west of Baghdad that is also home to Iraq's most notorious prison - has had only one to three hours of power a day in recent weeks. Drinking water cannot be pumped without electricity, so people take water from dirty canals.
The food ration system that functioned smoothly under Saddam Hussein is breaking down, out here at least. Trucks leave Baghdad laden with food, but it mysteriously gets offloaded at markets along the way.
Crime, rare under the old government, is rampant. Mr. Dari's car was taken from him at gunpoint in Baghdad recently. Four of his council members have been the victims of carjacking attempts. And while the criminals are well-armed, the Americans are disarming the victims, taking weapons while the weapons licenses they insist on are in short supply.
"People here feel naked without their pistols," Mr. Dari said, putting his own in a holster.
In a time of rising discontent, Mr. Dari is the buffer between occupier and occupied. It is a role that, historically, has earned little appreciation. Recent attacks on Iraqis cooperating with the Americans suggest that this chapter will be no different.
"We are stuck between the Americans and our people," Mr. Dari said of the council, which sits, for no salary, from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. daily. "And there were so many promises from one side."
Some people are calling the council members "America lovers" and traitors, he said, because they are working with the Americans.
"He's caught in the middle," one of his American partners, Lt. Col. Jeff Ingram of the First Armored Division, acknowledged. "He defends us a lot."
These days, Mr. Dari is warning the Americans more than he is defending them. When he first met with them, he said, he told them that they did not have much time to meet people's expectations. That time is almost up, he believes.
"I'm not threatening you with another Vietnam - God forbid," he said. "I'm just trying to get help for the people before something happens."
Something is already happening, of course. Out here, as across much of Iraq, the attacks on Americans are stepping up. Colonel Ingram said his company is being attacked at least once a day, fortunately by men who are not very good shots.
Colonel Ingram blames the Iraqis for most of the area's problems, saying it is they who have torn down the power lines he fixed, they who are robbing one another. "The U.S. is not the problem, it's the solution," he said.
But he too wonders about the slow pace of rebuilding. "I would have expected the U.S., the biggest country in the world, to say here's the water purification system, here's the big generator," he said.
As of the other day, neither Mr. Dari nor Colonel Ingram had ever had any contact with the American-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Mr. Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
So they soldier on alone, often seeking progress in vain. The council tried to distribute generators found at a Republican Guard camp to villages, but found that many of the village "representatives" were driving out of the camp and selling the generators. Others were being set upon by angry mobs wanting the generators for themselves.
American soldiers were deployed to keep order, but in the heat and chaos their tempers frayed. They broke windshields and cursed at Iraqis, further shrinking the reservoir of good will.
Mr. Dari said he received 10 to 12 complaints a day about weapons, cars or relatives taken by the Americans. One man came to report that American soldiers had taken away his deaf relative a month ago for having a picture of Saddam Hussein in his house, and that he had not been seen since. Officials from an Islamic charity said the Americans had confiscated their car and raided their office - then left both unsecured, giving looters free rein.
Then there are the small problems. The woman who is illegally squatting in a government building (American soldiers told Mr. Dari they could not evict her unless she threatened someone; property rights were not in their "purview.") The two council members whom the council dismissed for corruption. The effort to find the American commander with the authority to sign a contract for garbage collection.
Mr. Dari is just old enough to remember when the British had an air base just west of here. They told Iraqis they had come to liberate them from the Ottomans, he recalled, and they stayed 40 years.
"I hope history isn't repeating itself," he said, and pressed his temples as if hoping to make the impatient men at both elbows disappear.
--------
Iraq Insurgency Could Widen as U.S. Troops Flail
Wed July 9, 2003
By Alistair Lyon,
Middle East Diplomatic Correspondent
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=ZJZHL42GUVDYOCRBAEOCFFA?type=reutersEdge&storyID=3060843
LONDON (Reuters) - Deadly attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq have so far been the work of disparate insurgents, but anger at the U.S.-led occupation could spark broader resistance.
"It's not yet a guerrilla war," said Mustafa Alani, an Iraqi analyst at London's Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).
"There is no central control, it's not a unified movement and the attacks are concentrated in the western part of Iraq."
This partly chimes with the views of General Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said at the weekend that resistance was fragmented and restricted to a Sunni Muslim triangle from Baghdad to the north and west.
He identified five groups behind assaults that have killed 29 U.S. soldiers since President Bush declared major combat over on May 1, three weeks after Saddam Hussein's fall.
RELATED ARTICLES FACTBOX-U.S. Most Wanted List of Iraqis These were Saddam loyalists, foreign fighters from Syria and Iran, the Ansar al-Islam group said to be linked to al Qaeda, criminals freed by Saddam before the war, and Sunni extremists.
Analysts agreed the resistance was fractured, but said U.S. officials, at least in public, were understating the growing resentment of many Iraqis at the unsubtle tactics of American troops grappling to impose control in a postwar power vacuum.
"I see this as Somalia writ large," said Jonathan Stevenson, an American counter-terrorism expert at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies. "So far atomized groups are becoming increasingly hostile to the American occupation."
Much more is at stake for the United States in Iraq than in Somalia, where a U.S. relief mission ended in disaster in 1993 after 18 U.S. troops were killed in a firefight with militiamen.
Stevenson said the Americans were meeting a "creeping but rather strong nationalism" in Iraq, where they were failing to deliver on perceived promises to improve living conditions and hand the country back to Iraqis after 35 years of Baathist rule.
MUSCLEBOUND OCCUPATION
U.S. firepower could suppress any direct military challenge from what he described as a nascent insurgency, but this would not produce the stability the Americans sought.
"They need a political solution that vindicates the war and wins the peace. They're still groping for how to do that."
Stevenson said there was no solid indication yet that al Qaeda or other "transnational terrorists" were meddling in Iraq, but argued that the U.S. presence there was a tempting target.
"Even if they haven't yet penetrated Iraq, they would like to do so and hook up with indigenous Islamists there," he said.
U.S. administrator Paul Bremer has said patience is needed to rebuild a shattered country, but time is not on his side.
"If the political failure continues, along with the difficulty in providing services, the economic crisis, the problem of the Iraqi army, some sort of organized resistance movement could develop into guerrilla warfare," Alani said.
He said U.S. troops had made serious blunders, notably in the town of Falluja, west of Baghdad, where he said anti-U.S. attacks had begun as revenge for the killings of 15 youthful demonstrators by American forces in late April.
Alani said the Americans should have made amends in line with the Sunni town's tribal, conservative traditions by sending mediators to apologize, pay blood money and perhaps promise to build a new school in memory of the dead youngsters.
"They did nothing and they have paid a high price," he said, referring to attacks in the Falluja-Ramadi area, where he said Islamist radicals had later joined forces with vengeful townsfolk. "You can't kill people and just walk away."
Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at Britain's Warwick University, said events in Falluja and elsewhere proved that the U.S. military had no understanding of Iraqi society. "I can't see how they can impose stability without it," he said.
BAATH REVIVALISTS
He said that while remnants of Saddam's security services, drawn mainly from his home area of Tikrit, were behind much of the anti-U.S. violence, non-Tikriti Baathists might also be orchestrating attacks in line with the party's ideology.
"These people believe in the Baath party's worship of a strong state, its chauvinistic nationalism directed against outsiders, and its paranoia of imperialism," Dodge said.
He said intrusive searches by British paratroopers of homes in a southern Shi'ite town had led to the killings of six British military police there, but there were few signs that majority Shi'ites were actively combating the occupation yet.
"The Shi'ites are playing a waiting game," he said. "But they are also arming and organizing."
The Shi'ites, long oppressed by Saddam's Sunni-dominated Baathists, want their share of power in the new Iraq, but for now are waiting to see what political structure emerges.
"If they don't get what they believe they deserve, we will get an intifada (uprising)," Alani predicted.
Classic counter-insurgency tactics require much more than the overwhelming force that U.S. troops have largely relied on in efforts to crack down on Iraqi gunmen, bombers and saboteurs.
Ellie Goldsworthy, head of the UK Armed Forces program at RUSI, said it was vital to stop the one percent of Saddam loyalists from gaining recruits among the 99 percent of Iraqis who might be disgruntled, but not sworn foes of the Americans.
"I'm aghast at how ineptly the Americans have handled this," she said. "Some things are difficult to handle, others are cheap and easy, like smiling and talking to people with respect -- you don't wear sunglasses when you are trying to build rapport."
Goldsworthy said the U.S. military was focused on protecting its own forces and loathe to take risks to create a more benign environment, as British forces have tried to do in the south.
"The American approach to dealing with Iraqis is very similar to the way Israelis deal with Palestinians," she said.
----
Shia u-turn boosts US Iraqi council plan
Jonathan Steele in Baghdad and Brian Whitaker
Wednesday July 9, 2003
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,994526,00.html
US plans to appoint a "governing council" of Iraqis have taken a significant step forward with the decision by one of the leading Shia political groups to drop its opposition and come on board.
Paul Bremer, Iraq's US administrator, described the move yesterday as "important progress in establishing the basis for democratic government in Iraq".
The council will be given the task of writing a constitution and organising elections for a fully-fledged government.
With no let-up in the attacks on US forces and the emergence of yet another apparent message from Iraq's former leader, Saddam Hussein, yesterday, Mr Bremer needed a breakthrough.
It came with a u-turn by the powerful Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri). The council was exiled in Tehran for 20 years but regularly mounted cross-border attacks through its armed wing. It had repeatedly insisted that Mr Bremer's proposed council be elected by Iraqis.
"Any government chosen by Bremer cannot be defended before the Iraqi people," its spokesman, Ammar al Hakim, told the Guardian last Saturday at the party's national headquarters in Najaf.
But at a meeting with six other representatives of the so-called Group of Seven main parties in Salaheddin in Iraqi Kurdistan on Monday, Sciri decided to join the others in "welcoming" the proposed council.
They were apparently persuaded that holding elections would take too long. They also accepted assurances from Mr Bremer that the council will appoint interim ministers, approve the budget, and be able to represent Iraq internationally and at meetings with the Arab League.
The other six groups, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the Kurdish Democratic party, the Iraqi National Congress, the Iraqi National Accord, the Islamic Dawa party, and the Association of Independent Democrats, led by Adnan Pachachi, were also in exile or opposition during the Saddam Hussein regime. They appeared to have fewer doubts about the council.
According to Mr Pachachi, the only leader with ministerial experience (he was foreign minister before Saddam took power) the new body will have both legislative and executive functions, and will even act as a kind of collective head of state.
"Beside appointing ministers, the council will have to pass an electoral law and laws on political parties and the media, and make recommendations for overhauling the educational and judicial system. Its chairman will receive ambassadors' credentials and foreign dignitaries. The Swiss have a rotating head of state. This will be similar", he told the Guardian yesterday.
The council will have a majority from the Shias, who form 60% of Iraq's population, the first time a governing body in Iraq has not been dominated by the Sunni minority.
No party will have more than one representative. In addition to the Group of Seven, there will be around 20 other members, either from smaller parties or independents. Three or four will be women, coalition officials say. Choosing the other members is expected to take another week.
The only major party still opposed to the council is the Communist party. Its leaders told Mr Bremer they believed there should be a national conference of some 200 Iraqis from a wide range of secular and religious groups which should pick the council rather than have Mr Bremer appoint it. Mr Bremer's predecessor, General Jay Garner, favoured a similar idea, though without consulting the Communists. Mr Bremer rejected it.
He acknowledged yesterday that he retains the "ultimate authority" in case of disputes between him and the council, though he avoided using the word "veto" at a press conference last night.
In a tape, apparently from Saddam, which two Arab TV stations aired yesterday, the deposed Iraqi leader called for covert guerrilla attacks to end US occupation. "I appeal to you, O Iraqis, Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen, Shiites or Sunni, Christians or Muslims, it is your duty to expel the aggressor invaders from our country," the voice on the tape said.
The Lebanese LBC-al-Hayat satellite channel transmitted the 15-minute audio tape in full, while the Qatar-based al-Jazeera provided extracts.
Although both channels said the tape was new, its content appeared very similar and possibly identical to that of a tape received by the Sydney Morning Herald in May.
-------- israel / palestine
Citing national security, Bush sends $20M directly to PA
09/07/2003
By Nathan Guttman,
Haaretz Correspondent, and Agencies
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/316358.html
The U.S. administration, citing "national security needs and special circumstances" to bypass Congressional prohibitions, is sending $20 million in special aid to the Palestinian Authority to help strengthen the government of Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas.
Israel was notified of the aid and did not express any objections.
Congressional legislation prohibits direct aid to the PA, requiring aid to go through international agencies or non-governmental organizations. Therefore, President George W.
Bush needed a special article in the legislation that allows the president to bypass the prohibition for reasons of national security and unexpected circumstances.
After consultation with Congress, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage signed a waiver from the congressional restrictions.
The money, said the administration in a letter to Congress, would be used to buttress PA control in areas where it assumes security responsibility from Israel.
This year, the Palestinians are due to receive $124.5 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development, while the State Department's refugees bureau provides Palestinians with $89 million through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
Annual U.S. aid to the Palestinians is usually about $200 million, with about $75 million going through UNRWA.
Washington has indicated that if it sees the Abbas government making progress, it is ready to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into PA coffers for rehabilitating the infrastructure demolished by the Israel Defense Forces during the intifada.
If the administration decides to substantially increase aid to the PA, it will have to persuade Congress that the PA government is taking active steps to dismantle the terror organizations.
The European Union and the Arab League have given more than $1 billion directly to Arafat and the Authority this year.
Except for the increasingly right-wing Zionist Organization of America under Morton Klein, major Jewish organizations have not tried to prevent aid to the Palestinians.
The ZOA is against any aid to the Palestinians and campaigns to that end in Congress.
-------- prisoners of war
Guantanamo move puts US on trial
Jul 9, 2003
Inter Press Service
By Jim Lobe
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/EG09Ag01.html
WASHINGTON - The United States' announcement on Friday that six of its foreign captives in its "war on terrorism" are eligible to be tried before military tribunals - where they could potentially be given the death penalty - appears likely to annoy some of its strongest allies, especially the United Kingdom.
The announcement came just as the administration of President George W Bush has begun mending fences damaged by the US war in Iraq in hopes that other countries will contribute peacekeepers to Washington's troubled occupation.
Reports that two of the six to be tried are British citizens captured in Afghanistan prompted expressions of concern over the weekend from London, where Prime Minister Tony Blair has been battered by weeks of controversy over whether he misled the British public about the imminence of any threat posed by Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
The London Observer reported on Sunday that Britain's foreign secretary, Jack Straw, will ask his US counterpart, Secretary of State Colin Powell, to repatriate the two men, rather than to permit them to be tried by a US military court whose procedures, according to US and international human-rights groups, do not meet minimum due-process standards and which is empowered to impose the death penalty.
The newspaper also reported that the two Britons, Moazzam Begg and Ferz Abassi, will be given a choice to plead guilty and accept a 20-year prison sentence or to undergo trial on charges that will, if sustained by the court, result in a death sentence. It said the acting British ambassador in Washington, Tony Brenton, will raise London's "official concern" about the cases directly with the White House this week.
A third defendant, David Hicks from Australia, has also been identified as one of the six, according to reports from Australia. The identity and nationalities of the other three have not been disclosed, although presumably their home governments have been informed.
The three known defendants are being held with as many as 680 other foreign captives at Camp X-Ray at Washington's Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba where, according to a series of court decisions, none of them enjoys the basic due-process rights required by the US constitution.
Most of the captives there were seized in Afghanistan during and after the US-led military campaign that ousted the Taliban government in late 2001. Some, however, were seized as part of the US "war on terrorism" well after the anti-Taliban campaign and in countries other than Afghanistan.
Of the hundreds who have been held at Guantanamo, only about 40 have been released and repatriated. Camp officials admit that many of those who continue in captivity held low-ranking positions in the Taliban and whose intelligence value, if any, ran out long ago. In April, the administration acknowledged that three of the prisoners were between the ages of 13 and 15.
Human-rights and civil-liberties groups, such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch (HRW), and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), have strongly protested against the conditions under which the detainees are being held, and particularly the failure to accord any of the prisoners a hearing to determine whether they qualify as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions. Washington has instead insisted that all of the detainees are "illegal combatants" and thus not entitled to all the protections accorded to POWs.
They also have objected to the military commissions that are supposed to try at least some of the detainees, insisting that they fall far short of minimum due-process standards. "Any trial before these military commissions would be a travesty of justice," Amnesty International said on Friday after the announcement regarding the six who may now be tried. "We urge the US administration to rethink its strategy before it causes any further affront to international fair-trial norms and any more damage to its own reputation."
While the rules for the commissions incorporate some due-process safeguards, such as public trials, requiring proof beyond a reasonable doubt for conviction, and the cross-examination of witnesses, these provisions are not nearly enough to overcome other serious flaws in the rules, the most important of which, perhaps, is the denial of a right to appeal to an independent and impartial court that is not part of the executive branch of the US government.
In addition, the right to counsel is far too limited under the rules, according to rights advocates and military-justice lawyers in the United States. Under the rules, all defendants will be represented by military defense counsel, even if they or their families prefer to hire a civilian lawyer to defend them. That provision violates the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the US is a party, and which guarantees the right of criminal defendants to be represented by a lawyer "of their choosing".
In addition, limitations on defense counsel's ability to represent clients are particularly severe, according to HRW and the Lawyers' Committee for Human Rights. They permit the government, for example, to monitor attorney-client communications, deny access to certain documents, and require counsel to do all their research related to the defense at the site of the commissions, presumably at Guantanamo. That means that, even if evidence or testimony were available in Afghanistan, defense lawyers would be barred from using it in the commission proceedings.
"These are fundamentally contrary to the American tradition of a fair trial," said Michael Noone, a retired US Air Force colonel who teaches military law at Catholic University of America here.
The British government clearly shares the views of the critics regarding the commissions. "It isn't something that we would be able to do in this country," said Baroness Symons, a senior Foreign Office official, in an interview last weekend with the British Broadcasting Corp, "because, of course, we would want to ensure that there is a separation between government on one hand and the judiciary on the other".
That sentiment was echoed by the Begg's father, Azmat Begg, who lives in Birmingham, England. On being told by the British government that his son had been designated for possible trial, he told the BBC, "I was very depressed, very unhappy, and very much worried because the judge is from the military, the prosecution is from the military, the jury is from the military and even his solicitor is from the military. Everything is being done by the military, so it is not going to be a fair trial."
The European Commission (EC) in Brussels also publicly urged the United States on Friday to forgo any application of the death penalty in these cases. "The death sentence cannot be applied by military courts," said EC spokesman Diego de Ojeda, "as this would make the international coalition lose the integrity and credibility it has so far enjoyed.
"Our position clearly remains that the fight against terrorism should not give rise to a violation of human rights," he added.
Pentagon officials have indicated that they plan to prosecute only a few dozen of their captives, although they have remained mum about what they intend to do with the rest of the prisoners.
-------- spies / intelligence
U.S. Gave Inaccurate Iraq Picture, Ex - Intel Official
July 9, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-usa-weapons.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration gave an inaccurate picture of Iraq's military threat before the war, a recently retired State Department intelligence official said on Wednesday, saying intelligence reports showed that Baghdad posed no imminent threat.
``I believe the Bush administration did not provide an accurate picture to the American people of the military threat posed by Iraq,'' said Greg Thielmann, who retired in September from his post of director of the strategic, proliferation and military affairs office in the State Department's bureau of intelligence and research.
``Some of the fault lies with the performance of the intelligence community, but most of it lies with the way senior officials misused the information they were provided,'' he said at a press conference held by the Arms Control Association.
President Bush justified going to war based on the threat from Iraq's alleged biological and chemical weapons and nuclear weapons program.
``As of March 2003, when we began military operations, Iraq posed no imminent threat to either its neighbors or to the United States,'' Thielmann said.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Wednesday said the United States did not go to war with Iraq because of dramatic new evidence of banned weapons but because it saw existing information in a new light after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Administration officials trying to make the case for war said that aluminum tubes that Iraq was trying to procure were definitely for a uranium enrichment centrifuge.
But the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate report on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction said that ``most'' intelligence analysts believed the tubes were for Iraq's nuclear weapons program, while ``some'' believed they could be used for other purposes, Thielmann said.
CIA Director George Tenet also made ``some inaccurate formulations'' when he told Congress that Iraq ``retains'' a small number of SCUD missiles, Thielmann said.
``This was not what the intelligence community said,'' Thielmann said. The intelligence community said Iraq ``probably'' had SCUDS because some could not be accounted for, he said.
Critics have accused the Bush administration of publicly hyping the threat from Iraq by leaving out caveats and qualifiers that were included in intelligence reports.
--------
Big Brother Gets a Brain
The Pentagon's Plan for Tracking Everything That Moves
by Noah Shachtman
July 9 - 15, 2003
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0328/shachtman.php
The cameras are already in place. The computer code is being developed at a dozen or more major companies and universities. And the trial runs have already been planned.
Everything is set for a new Pentagon program to become perhaps the federal government's widest reaching, most invasive mechanism yet for keeping us all under watch. Not in the far-off, dystopian future. But here, and soon.
The military is scheduled to issue contracts for Combat Zones That See, or CTS, as early as September. The first demonstration should take place before next summer, according to a spokesperson. Approach a checkpoint at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, during the test and CTS will spot you. Turn the wheel on this sprawling, 8,656-acre army encampment, and CTS will record your action. Your face and license plate will likely be matched to those on terrorist watch lists. Make a move considered suspicious, and CTS will instantly report you to the authorities.
Fort Belvoir is only the beginning for CTS. Its architects at the Pentagon say it will help protect our troops in cities like Baghdad, where for the past few weeks fleeting attackers have been picking off American fighters in ones and twos. But defense experts believe the surveillance effort has a second, more sinister, purpose: to keep entire cities under an omnipresent, unblinking eye.
This isn't some science fiction nightmare. Far from it. CTS depends on parts you could get, in a pinch, at Kmart.
"There's almost a 100 percent chance that it will work," said Jim Lewis, who heads the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, "because it's just connecting things that already exist."
As currently configured, the old-line cameras speckled throughout every major city aren't that much of a privacy concern. Yes, there are lenses everywhere-several thousand just in Manhattan. But they see so much, it's almost impossible for snoops to sift through all the footage and find what's important.
CTS would coordinate the cameras, gathering their views in a single information storehouse. The goal, according to a recent Pentagon presentation to defense contractors, is to "track everything that moves."
"This gives the U.S. government capabilities Big Brother only pretended to have," said John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, a defense think tank. "Before, we said Big Brother's watching. But he really wasn't, because there was too much to watch."
CTS could help soldiers spot dangers as they navigate perilous urban areas, Pentagon researchers insist. That's not how defense analysts like Pike see it. The program "seems to have more to do with domestic surveillance than a foreign battlefield," he said, "and more to do with the Department of Homeland Security than the Department of Defense."
"Right now, this may be a military program," added Lewis. "But when it gets up and running, there's going to be a huge temptation to apply it to policing at home"-to keep tabs on ordinary citizens, whether or not they've done something wrong.
Traditionally, the authorities have collected information only on people who might be connected to a crime. If there was a murder in the East Village, the cops didn't bring in all of St. Mark's Place; they interrogated only the people who might have information about the killer. Even the most extreme abuses of law enforcement power-like J. Edgar Hoover's domestic spying on political activists-homed in on very specific individuals, or groups, that he imagined as threats to the state. He didn't put the whole state under watch.
September 11 changed that. Now, the idea is to find out as much as possible about as many people as possible. After all, the logic goes, the country can't afford to sit back and wait to be attacked. Almost anyone could play a part in a terrorist plot. So the government has to keep tabs on almost everyone.
CTS, a $12 million, three-year program, is emerging as a potential centerpiece of that initiative.
"Before, it was 'let's catch the bad guys and bring them to trial after stuff happens,' " Lewis said. "Now it's 'let's look for patterns and stop [an attack] before it happens.' "
That's why Attorney General John Ashcroft pushed for a program to turn a million civilians into citizen-spies, snooping on their neighbors. That's why the USA Patriot Act now allows for wiretaps without warrants. And it's why the Pentagon has begun researching an array of high-tech tools to pry into average people's lives.
CTS is the brainchild of DARPA, the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. That's the group of minds behind the notoriously invasive Total (sorry, "Terrorism") Information Awareness über-database. TIA's backers say the project will be carefully targeted, but privacy advocates say it could compile in a single place an unprecedented amount of information about you-your school transcripts, medical records, credit card bills, e-mail, and so much more.
"LifeLog," currently in the early planning stage at DARPA, would twist all these bits into narrative "threads," giving officials a chance to watch events develop. Along the way, LifeLog's developers would like to capture the name of every TV show you watch, every magazine you read.
Still, watching your data trail just isn't the same as actually watching your physical tail. You can change your e-mail address, and start paying cash. But you can't run away from yourself. And that's the missing piece CTS could provide-an almost instant ability to track, moment by moment, where you are and what you're doing.
"Before, there was a reasonable expectation of privacy when you were walking down the street," Lewis said. "Now that's something that will have to be adjusted."
That's not all that will change. As everybody who's ever mugged for the camera knows, people act differently when they're being watched.
Sometimes, that's not such a bad thing. Web-surfing habits are monitored on the job, so you wait until you're home to download porn. On the street, you can be a little less skittish, knowing your neighbors, your beat cops, your corner store owners are keeping an eye on you.
But being watched by a faceless, inaccessible government minder, that's something altogether different.
In 1791, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed a jail, circular in shape. The warden would sit in a dark observation booth in the middle; the prisoners would sit in well-lit, inward-facing cells along the circumference. Under the constant threat of being watched, the jailed would change their behavior, Bentham theorized, bending their activities to the warden's rules.
Two centuries later, England has 2.5 million security cameras spread throughout the country, by some estimates. Several cities, like the port town of King's Lynn, are covered by the lenses.
"It's exactly what Bentham predicted," said Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, a British civil liberties group. "The kids there are giving up going onto the street. They say it's almost like being in a glass-paneled room, with their parents on the other side. They're forced into smaller and smaller areas so they can be kids in private."
Putting people under electronic watch induces a kind of split personality, said Bill Brown, who leads tours of Manhattan's spy cams as part of his duties with the Surveillance Camera Players. The authorities want people to obey the law, to behave rationally. But video surveillance does the exact opposite. It makes people feel-correctly-like they're constantly being watched, like they're paranoid.
"And that's not a rational state at all," Brown said. "It's a mental condition."
Stalin and Saddam did their best. They tried hard to keep under surveillance as many of their citizens as they could. But these efforts could never succeed completely. There was always a "fundamental barrier-the ratio of watchers to the watched," said John Pike of Globalsecurity.org.
"You couldn't have everybody working for the secret police," he continued. "The thing that's so singularly seductive about automatic video surveillance is that it breaks that fundamental barrier down."
CTS will keep watch by equipping each camera with a processor, like the one in your computer. The chips will have programmed into them "video understanding algorithms" that can distinguish one car from another. At each checkpoint, the car's speed, time of arrival, color, size, license plate, and shape are all instantly passed on to a central server. If the early tests identifying cars go well, software that recognizes a person's face and style of walk could also be added.
By sharing only this refined data-instead of the raw video itself-CTS should keep fragile computer networks from becoming overloaded with hours and hours of meaningless footage. Everybody knows how much of a pain it can be to get a video clip in your e-mail inbox, instead of a simple text message. Now imagine how much worse the problem would get if thousands and thousands of such clips were being sent back and forth, all day, every day. CTS would help government networks avoid that burden, with each camera transmitting a mere 8 kilobits per second, instead of the 200 or so kilobits needed for high-resolution video.
CTS would also keep the snoops who stare at the monitors from being overwhelmed. "We have enough cameras, but not enough people to watch the video feeds," said Tom Strat, who's heading up CTS for DARPA's Information Exploitation Office.
If all's well, CTS cameras might send back to headquarters only basic data or the occasional low-resolution image. But when there's something fishy going down-like a car speeding away unexpectedly, or a briefcase left in a train station-the images could come sharper, and more quickly. Proto-CTS programs from contractors Northrop Grumman and the Sarnoff Corporation would interrupt the gray monotony of surveillance footage, setting red boxes aflash around the suspect person or object.
"It focuses your attention right there," said Bruce De Witte of Northrop.
But CTS would do more than change what investigators see. It would also give them a record of everything that happens in a city's public places, potential evidence for prosecutors and terrorist hunters.
In its presentation to industry, DARPA said it wanted CTS to be able to find the common threads between a shooting at a bus stop one month and a bombing at a disco the next.
In theory, CTS could take an inventory of all of the cars around the bus stop and near the disco immediately before and after the incidents. Then it could examine where those cars went, to see if there were any vehicles in common-or if a car acted as a sort of messenger between two others.
The forensic process could be further enhanced by one of DARPA's analysis programs, like LifeLog or Total Information Awareness. After mining license plate numbers from the footage, investigators could identify the car owners. And then dig into the owners' Web-surfing trails, to see if there were any visits to explosive-making sites. And scan e-mail accounts for virulent language. And plumb credit card receipts for big fertilizer purchases.
To the uninitiated, storing and sharing all this information might seem like insurmountably complex tasks. And according to Strat, the CTS manager, the ability to network surveillance cameras over a wide area is "not right around the corner."
Defense and technology analysts have a different view.
"(CTS) is pretty creepy. And the creepiest part about it is that it's not all that sophisticated," said Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the privacy-rights proponent Electronic Frontier Foundation.
DARPA has mandated that the CTS demonstrations be done only with readily available, "off the shelf" equipment-the kind of stuff you could get at Spyville.com. You could find slightly less diesel versions of the gear at Amazon.com.
So getting the cameras will be easy. What may be harder is handing off information-a description of a suspicious vehicle, say-from one camera to the next. These lenses will be separated by hundreds, even thousands, of meters. And "appearances can change dramatically" in those distances, Johns Hopkins University senior research scientist Chris Diehl said. Slight variations in light or in the camera's angle can make a car look very different to a mechanical eye. "If you read the literature, there really isn't a proven method" for solving this problem, he said.
Yet this obstacle seems surmountable. In a CTS simulation conducted by software developer Alphatech, a car could be tracked over 10 kilometers with accuracy of 90 percent or better with cameras placed 400 meters apart. The percentage went up, of course, as the cameras moved closer together.
CTS is but one of an array of private and public sector programs to sort through the ever expanding amount of surveillance imagery. University of California at San Diego's Computer Vision and Robotics Research lab just received a $600,000 grant from a Defense Department counterterror group for a CTS-like project. At Los Alamos National Laboratory, Stephen Brumby is using genetic algorithms-programs that are bred from smaller components of code-to automatically analyze satellite pictures.
At the Sarnoff Corporation, a project dubbed Video Flashlight would morph cameras' views into a single three-dimensional model. Using a joystick, a security officer could maneuver through this simulated world as though playing a game of Half Life or Grand Theft Auto.
In order for Video Flashlight to work, however, it would have to use stationary cameras. CTS doesn't have that limitation; it's supposed to function with drones and other battlefield sensors. That's one of the reasons Globalsecurity.org's John Pike thinks the program could have a legitimate military function-"to the extent that it is relevant to urban operations, as opposed to the running of a well-oiled police state."
Combat in cities "tends to quickly degenerate into small firefights," Pike explained. It's a lot harder to know what's happening in a crowded city than it is in an open desert. Radios cut out quicker; drones and satellites have a harder time peering through the concrete canyons and narrow passageways of urban life. CTS could restore some of that sight, giving U.S. generals a "broader situational awareness."
This assumes, of course, that CTS has anything to do with urban combat. If it does, it'd be a surprise to some of the businesses bidding for the CTS contract.
"The primary application is for homeland security," said Tom Lento, a spokesman for the Sarnoff Corporation.
"The whole theme here is homeland security," added Northrop Grumman's De Witte.
Strat disagreed. "DARPA's mission is not to do homeland security," he said.
In a presentation to industry, DARPA noted, "CTS technology will be demonstrated only within the observable boundaries of government installations where video surveillance is expressly permitted, and operational deployment areas outside the United States where it is consistent with all local laws."
But in an interview, Strat did admit that "there's a chance that some of this technology might work its way" into domestic surveillance programs.
In the test at Fort Belvoir this year the aim is to track 90 percent of all of cars within the target area for any given 30-minute period. The paths of 1 million vehicles should be stored and retrievable within three seconds. A year after that, CTS is supposed to move on to testing in an urban combat setting, where it will gather information from 100 mobile sensors, like drone spy planes and "video ropes" containing dozens of tiny cameras.
Shortly thereafter, CTS could be keeping tabs on a city near you.
"This is coming whether we like it or not," said Jim Lewis, with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "It's not how do we stop the tidal wave. It's how do we manage it."
Noah Shachtman edits the blog www.defensetech.org.
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US withheld uranium intelligence from UN
By Edward Alden, Guy Dinmore and James Harding in Washington
July 9 2003
Financial Times
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1057562236568&p=1012571727092
The US government withheld from United Nations weapons inspectors evidence to back its claim that the Iraqi government had attempted to obtain uranium from Africa, despite repeated pledges to co-operate fully with the inspectors. Advertisement
In a letter released on Tuesday, the International Atomic Energy Agency said it was forced to wait six weeks for the evidence - from December 2002 to early February 2003 - at a critical time, when it was investigating US charges that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear programme.
During that period, the US several times repeated the allegations, most notably in President George W. Bush's January State of the Union address.
The letter, which was released by Democratic congressman Henry Waxman, came as political pressure grew on the administration over charges that it distorted intelligence to build its case for war on Iraq.
The Democratic National Committee called for a full investigation of Mr Bush's statements.
Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the DNC, said: "Either President Bush knowingly used false information in his State of the Union address or senior administration officials allowed the use of that information. This was not a mistake. It was no oversight and it was no error."
The administration admitted on Monday that the president's assertion that Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger was based on "bogus" information.
Further questions are also being asked about repeated claims by the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency that Iraq was importing aluminium tubes for use in a nuclear weapons programme.
The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research was not convinced that the tubes' specifications made them fit for use in the uranium enrichment process, according to a US administration official privy to their findings. The Department of Energy backed up the State Department in its effort to counter the conclusions, the official said, but they were overriden by the CIA.
The White House on Tuesday sought to explain how a statement based on false information could have been included in the most important speech of the presidential calendar.
The documents alleging a transaction between Niger and Iraq had been forged, a White House official confirmed, and said that further intelligence reports suggesting other Iraqi attempts to source uranium in Africa were "not detailed or specific enough to be certain that such attempts were in fact made".
Officials also tried to explain how a special envoy's investigation showing that there was no truth in the Iraq-Niger reports was overlooked by the Bush administration.
Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador, went last year to Niger at the request of the CIA to assess the reports of an attempt made by Iraq to buy uranium .
He reported back to the CIA that the reports appeared to be false.
His findings, US officials say, were fed into the "intel stream" - the flow of classified information that goes to all parts of the intelligence community in the US government.
But, they say, Mr Wilson's visit was not flagged up and his findings were not drawn to the attention of senior officials.
People in the Bush administration say that George Tenet, CIA director, had been unaware that Mr Wilson was sent to Niger and senior figures at the National Security Council, such as Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, did not see the reports containing his conclusions.
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U.S. to move 'striker' force to Hawaii for N Korea
Wednesday, July 9, 2003
Japan Today Discussion
http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&cat=8&id=265734
TOKYO - The United States is set to relocate to Pearl Harbor a "striker brigade" consisting of an aircraft carrier, advanced transport aircraft and other strategic resources for rapid forward deployment to deal with North Korean threats and terrorist moves in East Asia, visiting Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle said Tuesday.
In an interview with Kyodo News, Lingle also said a U.S. general has told her Japan has promised to send 1,000 Self-Defense Forces (SDF) troops to Iraq after the Diet enacts a bill to deploy SDF personnel to the war-torn country to help its reconstruction. (Kyodo News)
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House Approves $369 Billion for Defense Spending
Funds Lay Groundwork for Shift That Rumsfeld Is Seeking to Lighter, More Mobile Military Force
By Dan Morgan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 9, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29483-2003Jul8?language=printer
By 399 to 19, the House yesterday approved a $369.1 billion Pentagon spending bill for 2004 that begins a shift toward the lighter, more mobile combat systems favored by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Republican leaders had allotted an hour for debate on the huge measure, but used 48 minutes when Democrats made no attempt to challenge its priorities.
The bill includes $1.7 billion for the Army's Future Combat System, a network of ground- and air-based robots, sensors, light armored vehicles and guns; $35 million for the Stryker Brigade Combat Teams, which will operate a mobile gun system; $4.2 billion for the Joint Strike Fighter, a next-generation plane that could be launched from carriers or land; $158 million for the Navy's Littoral Combat Ship, a small vessel that would be able to perform a variety of missions along enemy coastlines; and $100 million to "accelerate the development and procurement of the [Air Force's] next generation bomber." It also includes $4.6 billion for the Special Operations Command, $160 million more than the Pentagon requested, signifying increased reliance on clandestine forces to fight terrorism and new threats.
All members of the Maryland and Virginia delegations supported the bill.
In the Senate, an Appropriations subcommittee approved a 2004 defense spending bill that closely follows the administration's recommendations, but differs in several respects from the House measure. The House rejected the Navy's request for a multiyear purchasing program for Virginia-class nuclear attack submarines, citing the need to monitor the vessels' rising cost, now at $2.6 billion per boat. The Senate subcommittee approved the multiyear plan.
However, the Senate panel also indicated concerns about the program's cost, and reduced from seven to five the number of boats to be purchased over the next five years.
"There's been a 34 percent increase in cost," said Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), chairman of the Appropriations Committee. "We just won't have the money to keep up that pace of development."
Congress is funding the war in Iraq with separate legislation.
Yesterday, the administration asked Congress for an additional $1.9 billion to help fight forest fires, provide emergency relief to areas hit by tropical storms, and investigate the space shuttle Columbia's disintegration.
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Analysts fear mission in Liberia would stretch military
July 09, 2003
By Guy Taylor
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030708-110214-1507r.htm
Anticipation over whether President Bush will send thousands of American peacekeeping troops into Liberia has stirred debate among military analysts over what such a mission would mean.
With some 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and at least another 10,000 engaged in Afghanistan, some former military personnel have begun to wave the flag of caution.
Missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, coupled with smaller troop deployments to Colombia, Kosovo, the Philippines and Uzbekistan, have the military spread too thin to be intervening in a civil war in Africa, one analyst says.
"The needle is starting to point on empty in the military gas tank," said retired Special Forces Maj. F. Andy Messing. "We're running out of spare parts [and] we're running out of air capability."
"At some point," Maj. Messing said, "somebody has to tell the president: Look, we just can't do this anymore without doing it badly or without endangering our soldiers or without risking a major political military failure.
"Iraq is leading us in that direction. Right now, we don't have enough soldiers in Iraq."
Retired Army Gen. William C. Moore said more troops may be needed in Iraq to relieve those already there. Some, including elements of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, have been deployed for nearly eight months.
But Gen. Moore said the United States is capable of dealing with such demands, and he would support the idea of sending troops to Liberia as part of an effort orchestrated by the United Nations.
With U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan urging Mr. Bush to deploy an American force in Liberia, Gen. Moore suggested the United States may earn significant geopolitical capital by going along with the plan, particularly as a way to mend the internal U.N. rift over the Iraq war.
"I think you can rationalize the mission from a geopolitical perspective and possibly a national security perspective," he said, adding that "before the president commits, there has to be some strong United Nations Security Council action."
West African leaders have called for a 2,000-strong American force to lead a largely African force in intervening in Liberia. The Pentagon has been training African troops for peacekeeping, and forces from Ghana and Senegal are expected to play a major role.
Arriving yesterday in Senegal at the start of a weeklong tour of five African nations, Mr. Bush said little to suggest he was any closer to making a decision about Liberia. During a brief speech delivered at Goree Island, a historical slave port on the western tip of Africa, Mr. Bush said: "Against the waste and violence of civil war, we will stand together for peace."
About 500 miles to the south of where the president spoke, a 32-member team of U.S. military specialists was arriving in the Liberian capital of Monrovia to begin a humanitarian assessment in preparation for any troop deployment.
Mr. Bush demanded last week that Liberian President Charles Taylor step down before the United States sent any more troops. Mr. Taylor, who was indicted June 4 for backing rebels in a 10-year terror campaign for Sierra Leone's diamond fields, also had been accused of participating in several other West African conflicts.
On Sunday, Mr. Taylor said he would step down and accept an offer of asylum in Nigeria, but did not say when. Yesterday, as members of the small U.S. military team traversed Monrovia en route to a refugee camp on the capital city's outskirts, they were turned back by a blockade set up by Liberian government troops loyal to Mr. Taylor.
The civil war in Liberia, a nation founded in 1847 by former American slaves, involves multiple factions and has displaced more than 1 million people. Fighting killed hundreds of trapped civilians in Monrovia last month.
"There has to be a good assessment made of the situation the troops will be entering," Gen. Moore said. "Is this going to be an intervention, a stabilization or a peacekeeping mission? In my mind, I see it as an intervention."
Former Army Capt. John Hillen, author of "Blue Helmets," a book on international peacekeeping, said it is too early to judge whether Mr. Bush should send more troops.
"We need to answer the question," he said, "[of] what do we as a government or as an international community wish to accomplish here."
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2 Spending Bills for the Military Advance in Congress
July 9, 2003
The New York Times
By CARL HULSE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/09/politics/09CONG.html
WASHINGTON, July 8 - The House approved another increase in military spending tonight while the Senate advanced a measure that provides the Pentagon with a nearly identical $369 billion next year for an array of new hardware, personnel needs and continued research into a missile defense system. Advertisement
House members easily approved their version of the military spending bill, which is $4.3 billion more than was allocated last year excluding the $62 billion in emergency spending on the war in Iraq. It is about $3 billion below the president's request. The vote was 399 to 19.
In addition to substantial increases for new ships, tanks and aircraft, the House measure reflects a heightened emphasis on special-operations forces by providing a 35 percent budget increase for the units playing a central role in modern combat.
In the Senate, the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee cleared a bill that Senator Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican who is chairman of the committee, said would allow the military to conduct current combat operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere while maintaining readiness and modernizing the armed forces.
"This is a balanced bill that supports the priorities of the military services," Mr. Stevens said. "It fully funds key readiness programs critical to the global war on terrorism."
The House measure provides $1.3 billion for the type of unmanned aerial drones that have been employed in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan; $11.5 billion for shipbuilding; $74 billion for new aircraft; and $65 billion for research and development into weapons and radar systems.
It also allocates almost $9 billion for missile defense, $193 million less than the White House sought for one of its top defense priorities. Mr. Stevens said his measure granted the full administration request.
-------- propaganda wars
MOSAIC OF LIES
Tracing the pattern of WMD lies back to the source
July 9, 2003
Antiwar.com
by Justin Raimondo
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j070903.html
Who lied us into war?
The easy answer: George W. Bush. But that's too easy. It's highly unlikely the President of the United States got up there and knowingly fibbed about the existence of weapons that would surely not be found. No doubt he fully expected the evidence to turn up, verifying what he and other members of his administration had been saying all along: that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction capable of posing a regional threat. When no such evidence was forthcoming, however, the President's partisan critics in Congress - most of whom supported the war, and voted for the authorization to use force - were quick to jump on this administration's growing credibility gap.
The case for war was made on many grounds, but WMD was surely the most convincing, at least to the general public. Tony Blair regaled the Brits with tales of how Saddam could order the deployment of terror weapons "within 45 minutes," and Bush, not to be outdone, declared that the contiental U.S. was in danger from unmanned Iraqi drones capable of wreaking destruction on American cities. Clouds of deadly anthrax, chemical weapons, and other bioengineered horrors were conjured by the War Party as imminent threats, but the argument that Saddam was on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons was the trump card in the President's deck, and he played it in his 2003 state of the union address
"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."
This assertion that the U.S. had to act to avert a nuclear catastrophe was echoed by Vice President Dick Cheney, who said of Saddam on the eve of war
"We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."
Three months later, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was backpedaling as fast as he could:
"I don't know anybody that I can think of who has contended that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons."
Yet Cheney's definitive assertion was the culmination of a long string of public statements by the President and his top officials that Saddam could acquire and deploy nukes in the near future. In a Cincinnati speech last year, Bush averred that Saddam "is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon," a line of argument prefigured by Condoleeza Rice's pronouncement on CNN the day after the first anniversary of 9/11:
"We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
It turns out that the only smoking gun is the one left in the hands of the President after he shot off his mouth and propounded what the White House now acknowledges was inaccurate information. But who supplied the ammunition? What was the source of the intelligence that convinced White House speechwriters to include the reference to uranium?
The aluminum tubes were soon shown to be unsuited to producing nuclear materials. But this uranium business is particularly embarrassing for the President, who faces a rising chorus of questions about the course and conduct of the continuing war in Iraq, since the whole thing turns out to have been a crude hoax.
The submission of outright forgeries to the United Nations inspection team, purporting to show that the Iraqis had tried to buy uranium in the African country of Niger, was the last straw as far as the Europeans were concerned. It was the crudeness of the forgeries that seemed to underscore Washington's contempt for its former allies. The documents referenced individuals who hadn't work for Niger's government for years, the letterheads were odd, and there were any number of other errors that marked them as pretty obviously phony.
Anyone with elementary computer skills and a few minutes to spare could have debunked the Niger uranium story: yet the White House was bamboozled. Bush-haters of a partisan hue are inclined to believe the forgery was concocted by the President's men, but the Washington Post report on the official investigation took a different and far more interesting tack:
"The FBI is looking into the forgery of a key piece of evidence linking Iraq to a nuclear weapons program, including the possibility that a foreign government is using a deception campaign to foster support for military action against Iraq."
The author of the Post piece was silent on the question of which foreign government. However, CNN was quick to cite government officials who said:
"They got the documents from the intelligence service of another country, which was not Britain and was not Israel, which they will not name."
That was another lie.
The source of much disinformation seems to have been a unit of the Defense Department set up by Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and lorded over by his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, the "Office of Special Plans." But Robert Dreyfuss, writing in The Nation, cites a former U.S. ambassador with strong ties to the CIA who says there is another layer to the onion
"According to the former official, also feeding information to the Office of Special Plans was a secret, rump unit established last year in the office of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel. This unit, which paralleled Shulsky's - and which has not previously been reported - prepared intelligence reports on Iraq in English (not Hebrew) and forwarded them to the Office of Special Plans. It was created in Sharon's office, not inside Israel's Mossad intelligence service, because the Mossad - which prides itself on extreme professionalism - had views closer to the CIA's, not the Pentagon's, on Iraq. This secretive unit, and not the Mossad, may well have been the source of the forged documents purporting to show that Iraq tried to purchase yellowcake uranium for weapons from Niger in West Africa, according to the former official."
What could be plainer?
This war has, from the beginning, been a war for Israel's sake. In spite of the President's rather comic bookish scenario of unmanned drones catching NORAD unawares, Saddam's WMD, if they ever existed, never represented a credible threat to the U.S. Our massive and ongoing projection of military power in the region is clearly meant to secure some breathing space for our beleaguered ally.
Yet the idea of a war launched in order to divert the Intifada away from Israel and toward ourselves would have been a hard sell, except to Jerry Falwell and his dispensationalist flock. What amounted to a covert operation had to be undertaken by the Israelis, in cooperation with the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Perle faction in the U.S. government, in order to deceive the American people - and, apparently, even the White House - into believing war was necessary and inevitable.
Without ignoring the other factors that went into the making of this fateful war, it seems clear that Israel and its American amen corner were chiefly responsible for taking active measures that led to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The Niger uranium story is but a single thread in the mosaic of lies. If we go down the trail of deception, however, from the White House to the Defense Department to the Office of Special Plans - we'll find the same liars at the end of the road.
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Analysis: ACLU on DOJ 'deceit'
By Michael Kirkland
UPI Legal Affairs Correspondent
7/9/2003
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030709-115637-5145r
WASHINGTON, July 9 (UPI) -- The Justice Department and the American Civil Liberties Union are at war over what the ACLU says are deliberate misrepresentations of the USA Patriot Act.
The department strongly denies ACLU allegations that it is misleading the public about the sweeping surveillance provisions of the massive anti-terrorism law.
The battle between the civil liberties group and the department is fully joined as Congress considers the proposed USA Patriot II Act, which would extend some of the domestic spying provisions of its predecessor.
At stake is public opinion and the opinion of members of Congress who are being asked to enact or block the proposed law.
The ACLU released a report Wednesday, "Seeking Truth from Justice," that concludes the Justice Department participated in a "pattern of deceit" about the effects of the first USA Patriot Act on average Americans.
"It is time for the Justice Department to stop misleading the American people," the report says. The USA Patriot Act was enacted by Congress in 2001 "with minimal discussion and debate in the panicked weeks after 9-11."
Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo had just barely glanced at the report Wednesday morning, but his name is all over it. The report repeatedly cites quotes from Corallo and from Attorney General John Ashcroft as examples of misrepresentation.
The quotes were taken out of context, Corallo said, and are missing the qualifiers he made in the second part of his answers to questions.
A frustrated Corallo also urged the public to read the actual language of the act to see if it is being misrepresented.
"The Patriot Act was passed by an overwhelming bipartisan majority of the United States Congress," Corallo said in a phone interview. "It is the single most important tool the Congress has given federal law enforcement to prevent terrorist attacks."
He pointed out that "the federal appeals courts have consistently upheld our authority under the USA Patriot Act."
Nor, he said, does the act give the department sweeping new powers.
"The USA Patriot Act simply allows us to apply tools that we already had to fight organized crime and drug trafficking to terrorism," he said. "The Patriot Act goes an extra step in prohibiting investigations of United States citizens and green card holders solely on the basis of their First Amendment activities" -- political expression. "That's something that our critics never mention."
Corallo repeatedly urged members of the public to read the act and decide for themselves about its effects.
"When the average American reads the act and sees that language, they understand that what we are doing is protecting them from terrorism and protecting their civil liberties," he said.
In a statement announcing the release of Wednesday's report, the ACLU said that it has "found a consistent pattern of factually inaccurate assertions by the Department of Justice in statements to the media and Congress, statements that mischaracterize the scope, potential impact and likely harm of the now-notorious ... act."
The report contrasts Justice Department statements about the act with the language of the act itself, the ACLU statement said.
"If the Justice Department wishes to convince the American people and their elected representatives that it carries the Constitution with it at all times during its prosecution of the war on terror, it must be conscientious with the truth," Laura W. Murphy, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, said in the statement.
"That the department and its allies would repeatedly misrepresent the scope and nature of new surveillance powers is troubling, to say the least," said Ann Beeson, ACLU associate legal director.
The statement particularly targeted what it called the department's "repeated assertion that the USA Patriot Act's surveillance provisions cannot be used against U.S. citizens. In fact, the surveillance provisions are applicable to citizens and non-citizens alike. Some of the surveillance provisions can be used even against citizens who are not suspected of espionage, terrorism or crime of any kind."
The statement also cited what it said was the department's "repeated assertion that section 215 of the Patriot Act, which permits the government to demand that any organization -- including a library, bookstore, or hospital -- turn its records over to the FBI, cannot be invoked unless the government can show 'probable cause.' In fact," the statement said, "the law contains no such restriction. Section 215 requires only that the government declare that the records are 'sought for' an ongoing investigation. The 'sought for' standard is an extremely lenient one, and it bears no resemblance to 'probable cause.'"
The statement added that "the standard is so low is especially troubling in light of the attorney general's recent acknowledgement (at a June 2003 congressional hearing) that the FBI could use section 215 to obtain not only library and bookstore records but also computer files, educational records, and even genetic information."
The full report is accessible from aclu.org.
It quotes Justice Department officials in newspaper stories across the country.
Among the "half-truths" cited by the report is the Justice Department assertion that investigators must "convince a judge" to obtain records under section 215.
The language of the act, the report says, only requires certification that the records are needed, not proof of any kind.
Among the outright "falsehoods" cited by the report is a Justice Department's assertion that investigators have no interest "in looking at the book preferences of Americans."
"Democratic societies are based on checks and balances," the report says, "not on blind faith in the good intentions of government officials."
The report points to a Justice Department inspector general's investigation that found abuses of illegal immigrants detained in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
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Is the Media Finally Turning on Bush?
The Importance of Tipping
By DAVID LINDORFF
July 9, 2003
Counterpunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff07092003.html
Tipping.
That's the new watchword.
When does the situation facing American troops in Iraq deteriorate to the point that public sentiment "tips" against further U.S. involvement and against the Bush administration's policy of occupation and "nation building"?
The signs, for American GI's and for George Bush's reelection hopes, are getting grimmer.
Already 70 American soldiers have died in Iraq since virtual fly-boy Bush prematurely declared the war to be "over" in a staged victory rally aboard an aircraft carrier off San Diego harbor.
A search for the terms "guerrilla war" and "Iraq" turns up hundreds of citations, most dating from about the middle of June onward. Some, like an article on June 18 in the Detroit Free Press, simply use the term "guerrilla war" in news reports as an unremarkable and most apt characterization of the current military situation in Iraq. Others, like an article on June 23 in the Christian Science Monitor, use the term in editorials warning that the situation threatens to become a "quagmire," (another Vietnam-era term that's returning to currency). Still others use the term in articles warning that the current crisis is heading towards a Vietnam-like situation.
Any way you look at it, there is a growing acceptance in the media that the U.S. is not in control of events in Iraq, is not being viewed as a liberator by Iraqi people, and is facing mounting military threats.
The mounting alarm at this shift in coverage seems to be greater at the Pentagon and the White House than concerns about the actual attacks on American troops themselves, though if those attacks continue to increase in frequency and severity, that could change. For now, though, the Bush administration's panic at the spreading popularity of the term "guerrilla war" in the formerly worshipful national media is understandable.
If the American media continue to increasingly portray Iraq as a dangerous hell hole for American soldiers, and continue to play up the American body count each day, the American public will quickly start to view this Bush military adventure they way they came to view President Johnson's military adventure in Indochina--as a disaster.
This shift in public attitude in Johnson's case took several years to develop. But Johnson had several advantages not available to Bush. First of all, he began as a hugely popular president, having won election in a landslide. Second, most Americans believed that America had been attacked in Vietnam. Few knew or believed until years later that the alleged attack on an American destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin was a sham). Johnson also had the advantage that he was sending American soldiers into a war that he hadn't started (the Indochina conflict dated back to the 1950s, when the Eisenhower administration took over the battle against Ho Chi Minh's anti-colonial revolutionaries from France). In Bush's case, on the other hand, the blame for any military disaster in Iraq belongs unambiguously with him and his advisers. This was a war quite publicly started by Bush, and it is widely understood already that he started it based upon lies made to the American public. It is his war to lose.
Why the sudden shift in the U.S. media, from unabashed war boosterism to increasing skepticism?
The answer is simple: the continued killing of American troops.
For the first time since at least 9/11, the dynamic of the corporate media business is working against Bush's interests. Top management at the media conglomerates may still have a strong political affinity for the Bush administration, with its anti-regulation ideology and its general pro-business, pro-rich policies, but dead soldiers make great news, and the news business lives and dies on ratings and circulation.
Viewers and readers eat up stories about innocent, dedicated young soldiers getting killed in the line of duty, particularly by nefarious guerrillas who shoot and run instead of standing and fighting so they can be wasted for their crimes. We are hooked on these stories because they get us angry--first of course at those who are doing the killing, but before too long, also at those in power who are putting our "boys" in harm's way.
Add to that the growing awareness that the reasons for sending American troops into Iraq were bogus in the first place, and you quickly shift to a broad opposition to administration policy.
All this could happen--indeed is happening--very rapidly. First the media has to tip from support for the war to opposition. That appears to be happening already. Then the public will begin to tip, from support for the war and for the Bush administration, to public sentiment in favor of bringing the troops home and for punishing Bush for sending them there in the first place.
Already, Iraq is at a point like Vietnam in the late 1960s, where the government realizes that it can't just declare victory and leave, because it's clear that when U.S. troops leave, a new regime will take power that will be strongly anti-American. The more American troops get slain in Iraq, the less forgiving Americans would be if the U.S. pulled out only to see those lives wasted.
That's where the term "quagmire" comes in. Clearly the U.S. could have quit Vietnam any time, but to do so the administration in power, whether Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson or Nixon, would have had to admit to defeat--as Nixon ultimately had to do when Vietnamese troops stormed Saigon and the U.S. Embassy. The same is now increasingly true with Iraq. The longer U.S. forces remain in Iraq, the more American soldiers die at the hands of Iraqi fighters, the harder it will be for Bush and his advisers to call it quits.
Hence the talk of sending more troops to Iraq, in hopes of quelling the insurrection.
A president running for election during a popular war, or a war for the nation's survival, can be hard to beat.
A president running for election during an unpopular war, and a war that the American public doesn't even see as having anything to do with the nation's security, is another thing entirely.
This could turn out to be a very interesting presidential election campaign.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
-------- courts
Man challenging 'enemy combatant' status
7/9/2003
(AP)
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-07-09-man-challenge-ecstatus_x.htm
PEORIA, Ill. - Attorneys for a Qatari man accused of aiding al-Qaeda are challenging his designation as an enemy combatant.
Bradley University graduate Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri, in federal custody since January 2002, was placed under military control June 23 after President Bush said he was an al-Qaeda sleeper agent.
The designation strips him of the right to counsel and allows the government to detain him indefinitely.
Attorney Lee Smith filed a 22-page petition Tuesday for a writ of habeas corpus, asking the government to justify its reasons for holding Al-Marri. He also is asking U.S. District Judge Michael Mihm to allow Al-Marri to meet with attorneys and Qatar officials.
"We think it's an important part of our constitution to be presented with the evidence against you and then to have an attorney as an advocate," Smith said.
A spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Jan Paul Miller declined to comment. A call to a Department of Defense spokesman was not returned Tuesday.
Miller has said that information surfaced proving Al-Marri was helping al-Qaeda plan terrorist attacks in the U.S. Prosecutors have said Al-Marri was linked to Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, an unindicted co-conspirator in a case stemming from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Only two other people have been designated enemy combatants since the Sept. 11 attacks: Yaser Esam Hamdi, who was captured in Afghanistan but born in Louisiana; and Jose Padilla, a former Chicago street gang member who was allegedly plotting to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb."
Al-Marri was awaiting trial on charges of credit card fraud and lying to the FBI when he was designated an enemy combatant.
He graduated from Bradley University in 1991 with a computer science degree and was living in West Peoria when he was taken into custody. His wife and five children have since left the country. Copyright 2003 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
-------- drug war
Secret aid poured into Colombian drug war
Continuing human rights abuses have not hindered flow of equipment and advice to Bogota
David Pallister, Sibylla Brodzinksy in Bogota and Owen Bowcott
Wednesday July 9, 2003
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,994219,00.html
Britain is secretly stepping up military assistance to Colombia as the war on drug trafficking becomes increasingly entangled in the effort to defeat leftwing guerrillas and drive them back to the negotiating table.
Despite continuing reports of serious abuses by the security forces and the concerns of human rights groups about President Alvaro Uribe's tactics, Tony Blair has encouraged the Foreign Office to hold an international conference on support for Colombia, beginning today.
Whitehall refuses to disclose the extent of British military involvement on the grounds of national security. "We provide some military aid but we don't talk about the details," a Foreign Office spokeswoman said.
But a Guardian investigation can identify a number of key areas of UK support. · SAS training of the narcotics police, the Fuerza Jungla.
· Military advice to the army's new counter-guerrilla mountain units.
· A surge in the supply of military hardware and intelligence equipment.
· Assistance in setting up an intelligence centre and a joint intelligence committee.
The UK is now the second biggest donor of military aid to Colombia, a security analyst with close ties to the Colombian defence ministry has suggested. "The British like to keep a low profile here," he said.
The US defence department website openly gives details of the $2bn aid given under Plan Colombia to fight what the administration calls "narco-terrorists".
It includes training and equipping three military brigades and providing 60 Black Hawk helicopters and Huey-2 gunships to eradicate coca crops.
Unusually, the Foreign Office confirmed four years ago that Britain had given training and advice on urban warfare techniques, counter-guerrilla strategy and "psychiatry".
Since then ministers have admitted training the Colombian narcotics police but declined to elaborate on grounds of "national security". One of the reasons for their reticence is the role of the SAS, whose activities are never formally acknowledged. Sent by Mrs Thatcher in 1989 to fight the drug cartels, they are believed to have extended their role to counter-insurgency training.
The new intelligence assistance builds on work begun in the early 1990s when an M16 station head was sent to Bogota to start an anti-narcotic operation. After Labour came to power it was considerably expanded and coordinated in London by an M16 officer whose name is known to the Guardian.
British customs officers working with SAS and SBS soldiers have arranged the interception of the fast boats the cocaine barons use to send the drug for shipment through the Caribbean.
The additional military equipment has been substantial, particularly for the navy and the army helicopter fleet. Foreign Office licences for exporting military items rose by 50% between 2001 and 2002. Last year's items included cryptography material, missile technology, components for combat helicopters, explosives, airborne refuelling equipment and technology for submarines.
Before this week's conference Amnesty International called on western governments to stop giving military aid, because of the increasing human rights abuses by the security forces. It said: "The Colombian government has not implemented the UN human rights recommendations and military assistance only gives a green light to the army to carry on as before."
But Mr Blair has made the country, blighted by 40 years of civil war, a significant foreign priority, sending minis ters, retired generals and security advisers to Bogota. When Mo Mowlam was in the Cabinet Office in charge of drugs policy she went three times.
Advisers
Sir John Steele, head of security at the Northern Ireland Office, General Sir Michael Rose, a former SAS commander, and General Sir Roger Wheeler, former chief of the army general staff, were all sent to Bogota to give advice during failed peace negotiations with the main rebel group, Farc.
At least one Colombian general has been received in Belfast. The intention of the exchanges was partially to improve the Colombian security forces' respect for democratic government and human rights.
This week's conference, involving the EU, the US, several Latin American countries and the IMF, is the second Britain has held in two years. Asked why, the Foreign Office said the country had been "identified by the PM as a priority".
The scale of human distress in Colombia is described by aid agencies as the worst in the western hemisphere: 2.5 million people displaced and political murders at the rate of 20 a day.
Human rights organisations have long accused the Colombian security forces of backing the rightwing militias respon sible for murders, massacres and drug smuggling. Many military intelligence files are said to wrongly describe civil activists as subversives or terrorist sympathisers. The police are routinely accused by rights organisations, and the US state department, of taking part in or colluding in massacres.
Critics say the war on drugs - involving aerial spraying with defoliants to kill the coca bushes from which cocaine is made - is merely displacing the trade and the accompanying corruption and political destabilisation to neighbouring countries and remoter parts of the Colombian jungle.
Peace talks with Farc collapsed last year and President Uribe took office last August with a mandate for a strong military offensive. Most Colombians believe the Marxist rebels exploited the talks for drug trafficking and hiding hostages.
President Uribe's latest policy document promises to defeat the rebels and bring them to the negotiating table within two years. He is creating peasant militias to support the army in the hope of returning civil government to areas from which it has long been absent.
Although Britain has environmental reservations about aerial spraying it allows the American technicians and pilots involved to be employed through a British-registered company, DynCorp Aerospace Operations (UK) Ltd, a subsidiary of DynCorp International, one of the US government's biggest military contractors. It has a two-storey office block in Aldershot, the home of the British army.
Mr Uribe's election seems to have strengthened relations with Britain. The son of a wealthy Colombian landowner who was killed by Farc in the early 1980s, he recently spent a year lecturing in Latin American studies at St Antony's College, Oxford. Concerns have been voiced about his political past and the company he keeps. He dismisses them as smears. "I have been honourable and accountable," he told Newsweek last year.
As head of the civil aviation authority in the early 1980s he was accused of offences in connection with granting air strip and pilots' licences. He was cleared but later his deputy was jailed for five years for accepting campaign money from the Cali cocaine cartel. Then, as mayor of Medellin, the drug barons' "sanctuary", he allegedly accepted funds from the notorious trafficker Pablo Escobar for two urban regeneration schemes.
In the late 1990s Mr Uribe became governor of Antioquia province and was instrumental in raising militias to help the counter-insurgency drive. The plan badly backfired. Some of the groups committed serious human rights violations and, when banned in 1997, many joined the death-squad paramilitaries.
His security advisers General Rito Alejo De Rio, dismissed from the army in 1999, and Pedro Juan Moreno, his former chief of staff in Antioquia, have been accused of connections with the paramilitaries.
In 1997 and 1998 the US customs seized three shipments of potassium permanganate, essential in the manufacture of cocaine, bought by Mr Moreno's company GMP Productos Quimicos. The Colombian police and the US drug enforcement administration believed that many of GMP's sales invoices were fraudulent.
In 2000 the DEA confirmed the seizures and concluded that there was "ample evidence" that the chemical might be diverted for illicit use. Mr Moreno insisted that it was for innocent purposes.
Despite these difficulties Mr Uribe won the election with a 53% landslide. He won the confidence of Mr Blair when he visited London as president-elect last July.
The Foreign Office minister Bill Rammell, who visited Colombia in May, said yesterday: "There's terrorism and political insurgency, and the drugs: they have both become inextricably linked. The drugs - not ideology - are driving the conflict now and we take a strong view that we all have a shared responsibility to tackle the problem.
"We are supporting what the Uribe government is doing in terms of trying to professionalise its security forces and to reform institutions, but that has to go hand in hand with respect for human rights and the role of NGOs. We will will be advising the Colombian government to move forward to a negotiated settlement. We don't believe there can be a fundamental military solution."
-------- prisons / prisoners
Man Challenging 'Enemy Combatant' Status
July 9, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Student.html
PEORIA, Ill. (AP) -- Attorneys for a Qatari man accused of aiding al-Qaida are challenging his designation as an enemy combatant.
Bradley University graduate Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri, in federal custody since January 2002, was placed under military control June 23 after President Bush said he was an al-Qaida sleeper agent.
The designation strips him of the right to counsel and allows the government to detain him indefinitely.
Attorney Lee Smith filed a 22-page petition Tuesday for a writ of habeas corpus, asking the government to justify its reasons for holding Al-Marri. He also is asking U.S. District Judge Michael Mihm to allow Al-Marri to meet with attorneys and Qatar officials.
``We think it's an important part of our constitution to be presented with the evidence against you and then to have an attorney as an advocate,'' Smith said.
A spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Jan Paul Miller declined to comment. A call to a Department of Defense spokesman was not returned Tuesday.
Miller has said that information surfaced proving Al-Marri was helping al-Qaida plan terrorist attacks in the U.S. Prosecutors have said Al-Marri was linked to Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, an unindicted co-conspirator in a case stemming from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Only two other people have been designated enemy combatants since the Sept. 11 attacks: Yaser Esam Hamdi, who was captured in Afghanistan but born in Louisiana; and Jose Padilla, a former Chicago street gang member who was allegedly plotting to detonate a radioactive ``dirty bomb.''
Al-Marri was awaiting trial on charges of credit card fraud and lying to the FBI when he was designated an enemy combatant.
He graduated from Bradley University in 1991 with a computer science degree and was living in West Peoria when he was taken into custody. His wife and five children have since left the country.
--------
Man Held as 'Combatant' Petitions for Release
July 9, 2003
The New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/09/politics/09COMB.html
WASHINGTON, July 8 - Lawyers for a Qatari student who was jailed by the military last month asked a federal court today to free him and challenged President Bush's authority to treat terrorism suspects as "enemy combatants."
Lawyers for the student, Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri, argued in an appeal filed in federal court in Illinois that Mr. Bush's June 23 order declaring Mr. Marri to be an operative for Al Qaeda and an enemy combatant represented an act of "unbridled authority" that was illegal and unconstitutional. Advertisement
Specialists in military law said that the legal challenge, coming just days after the Bush administration announced it was considering the use of military tribunals against six terrorism suspects, could present an important test of the executive branch's power to imprison suspects outside the reach of the civilian court system.
Mr. Marri, 37, had been scheduled to go on trial this month in Illinois on charges that he lied to the F.B.I. soon after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, about his travels and engaged in credit card fraud. But in a surprise decision last month, the Bush administration instead had him removed from the court system and jailed in a Navy brig in South Carolina as an enemy combatant. Officials said recent intelligence indicated that he had visited a Qaeda terrorist training camp in Afghanistan and that he was prepared to help "settle" operatives in the United States for further attacks after Sept. 11.
Bush administration officials declined to comment on the legal challenge today. "If we have any response, we'll respond in court," said Bryan Sierra, a Justice Department spokesman.
The petition filed today by Mr. Marri's lawyers, seeking a writ of habeas corpus to have him freed, will draw attention because his case represents the first time the Bush administration has used the enemy combatant designation to remove someone from the protections of the criminal courts. As an enemy combatant, Mr. Marri can be held indefinitely by the military and has no legal right to a lawyer unless the military decides to bring formal charges against him, officials said.
Lawrence S. Lustberg, a New Jersey lawyer who represents Mr. Marri, said in an interview that the administration had denied him any contact with his client since Mr. Marri was declared an enemy combatant.
Mr. Lustberg also said he believed that Mr. Bush declared Mr. Marri an enemy combatant in part because his client refused to cooperate with prosecutors in the criminal case against him and had been challenging the special custody restrictions that the Justice Department sought to impose on him.
The administration has also publicly labeled as enemy combatants two other terrorism suspects, Jose Padilla, suspected in a scheme to set off a radioactive device known as a dirty bomb, and Yaser Esam Hamdi, captured in fighting in Afghanistan. Both men are American citizens. An appellate court ruled earlier this year in Mr. Hamdi's case that a citizen captured on the battlefield could be held indefinitely as an enemy combatant.
Mr. Marri, a citizen of Qatar, came to the United States the day before the Sept. 11 attacks on a student visa, saying he planned to get a master's degree at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill. He received a bachelor's degree there in 1991.
Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice and an authority on military law, said Mr. Marri's petition could hinge on how the courts interpreted the power granted to Mr. Bush, as commander in chief, to handle suspected enemies captured off the battlefield.
"The courts are never anxious to intervene in a case like this," and to second-guess the executive branch's authority over national security, Mr. Fidell said.
"But on the other hand, I think district judges do recognize that they are a bulwark and that the courthouse door is not lightly to be closed," he said. "The withdrawal of a pending prosecution from a district court is the kind of thing that rubs judges the wrong way."
Mr. Marri's petition argues that the authority to imprison people like him as enemy combatants goes beyond the military power granted to the president by Congress after the Sept. 11 attacks and represents an unprecedented "usurpation of power" by Mr. Bush.
"The president lacks constitutional or other legal authority to unilaterally designate an individual captured on American soil as an enemy combatant, to detain such person without charge or judicial review, to deny such person his due process and other constitutional rights," or to circumvent the courts, the filing said.
Deadline on Qaeda Deposition
ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 8 (AP) - A federal judge has given prosecutors until Monday to decide if they will comply with her ruling granting Zacarias Moussaoui, charged in the Sept. 11 attacks, access to a Qaeda prisoner.
The judge, Leonie M. Brinkema of Federal District Court, issued the order on Monday.
Mr. Moussaoui has claimed that Ramzi bin al-Shibh, an acknowledged member of Al Qaeda, would corroborate his assertion that he was not part of the plot behind the attacks.
In January, Judge Brinkema ruled that Mr. Moussaoui had a constitutional right to interview a witness potentially favorable to his defense.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
West Virginia Wind Farm to Power DC Area
July 9, 2003
(ENS)
http://ens-news.com/ens/jul2003/2003-07-09-09.asp#anchor8
WASHINGTON, DC, The largest wind farm east of the Mississippi River was dedicated today at the Mountaineer Wind Energy Center on Backbone Mountain in the Thomas/Parsons area of Tucker County, West Virginia.
The 66 megawatt Mountaineer Wind Energy Center features 44 NEG Micon wind turbines that stand about 228 feet tall with 100 foot blades. The facility produces enough electricity to power 22,000 average homes.
FPL Energy owns the facility and operates it under a 20 year wholesale power agreement with Exelon Corporation. Washington Gas Energy Services, under a marketing agreement with Community Energy, Inc., makes wind power from the new wind facility available to its customers.
About 10,000 residential and commercial customers in the Washington, DC region are purchasing some or all of their electricity from the new wind facility. Customers include the U.S. Army, American University, Catholic University, the National Geographic Society, the Fairmont Hotel, the Bullis School and Ecoprint.
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is purchasing wind energy for part of the power needed for its Washington, DC headquarters. "Wind power is an important part of the solution to global warming," said Katherine Silverthorne, director of World Wildlife Fund's Climate Change Program. "Wind power from West Virginia can help WWF and others in our nation's capital take part in the transition to a clean energy future."
Austin Grill has signed up to purchase 100 percent wind energy at all of its restaurants in the Washington, DC metropolitan region. Austin Grill Chief Operating Officer Chris Patterson said, "Austin Grill's decision to support and promote wind energy is a serious step for cleaner air in and around the nation's capital. It is an important and necessary investment. We hope our 100 percent commitment to clean energy will inspire residents and local businesses to follow our lead."
Compared to the average electric generation in the mid-Atlantic region, the wind project will offset approximately 200 million pounds of air pollution annually. This is the carbon dioxide equivalent of planting over 14 million trees or taking 14,000 cars off the road.
-------- energy
Court Blocks Effort to Protect Secret Cheney Files
July 9, 2003
New York Times
By NEIL A. LEWIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/09/politics/09CHEN.html
WASHINGTON, July 8 - A divided federal appeals court today dealt a blow to the Bush administration's efforts to keep information secret about Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force.
In a case that has become a major legal test of how accountable the administration should be, a two-judge majority said the government had no basis to ask the appeals court to block a lower court's ruling that required disclosure of information.
Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group based in Washington, and the Sierra Club have sued the government to find out if the task force was influenced by participants from the energy industry who were also political allies of the administration.
In the ruling, the majority suggested that the issue was similar to a 1993 case in which the same appeals court ruled it could not intervene to stop an inquiry into a health task force headed by Hillary Rodham Clinton, then the first lady.
But the judges in the majority, Judges David S. Tatel and Harry T. Edwards of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, provided some potential satisfaction for the administration when they said that the request for information about the energy task force might be too broad. They said that question could be decided by the trial judge, Emmet G. Sullivan.
Judge Sullivan had ruled earlier that the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch might be entitled to a limited amount of information about the meetings Mr. Cheney and his aides had with the energy industry while formulating the White House's energy plan. The White House had asserted that Judge Sullivan's request would be an improper intrusion into the executive branch.
The task force plan, adopted four months after President Bush took office, backed several steps supported by industry.
Dissenting today, Judge A. Raymond Randolph said that the case involving Mrs. Clinton's health care task force left open too much leeway for discovery, and he suggested it should not be binding in this case.
----
Cheney Loses Ruling on Energy Panel Records
By Henri E. Cauvin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 9, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29486-2003Jul8?language=printer
A federal appeals court yesterday rejected Vice President Cheney's bid to keep secret all the workings of his energy task force, saying sufficient safeguards were already in place to prevent the disclosure of genuinely privileged information.
The 2 to 1 ruling, by a panel of judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, does not in itself order the release of specific information, but it affirms a lower court judge's order seeking documents that would shed light on the membership of the group Cheney assembled more than two years ago to help develop U.S. energy policy.
Drawing on two rulings issued by the court against President Bill Clinton, Judge David S. Tatel said the Cheney group had not shown that irreparable harm would be done if the lower court were allowed to proceed.
Tatel, a Clinton appointee, was joined in the ruling by Judge Harry T. Edwards, a Carter appointee, who filed a concurring opinion. Judge A. Raymond Randolph, who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush, dissented.
Judicial Watch, the conservative watchdog group that brought the case in 2001, can now continue its legal effort to force the White House to disclose the names of nongovernmental officials who were consulted by Cheney's task force. Larry Klayman, chairman of Judicial Watch, said the group may seek to obtain a deposition from Cheney, and eventually hopes to force the release of the task force's minutes, working papers and computer records -- some of which, the court said, the group may remain out of reach.
"This ruling means that the government is not above the law," Klayman said.
The administration has acknowledged that the task force consulted private figures, including Kenneth L. Lay, former chairman of Enron Corp., the energy trading firm that collapsed in an accounting scandal. Critics say these industry representatives were essentially members of the advisory group, and that its workings were therefore subject to public scrutiny.
In its suit, Judicial Watch accused the task force of breaking federal law and demanded the release of its records. A similar suit filed subsequently in California by the Sierra Club was joined with Judicial Watch's suit, and the consolidated action came before U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan in Washington.
After Sullivan denied Cheney's motion to dismiss the case and ordered the task force to turn over documents for the preliminary review process known as discovery, Justice Department lawyers acted to halt the effort.
Cheney sought to have the D.C. Court of Appeals halt discovery and dismiss him as a party, even as the suit remained before the lower court. But Tatel and Edwards decided that the "petitioners have not satisfied the heavy burden necessary" for that to occur, Tatel wrote in his opinion.
Cheney, he said, is free to invoke executive privilege if he believes information is protected, but to simply grant him blanket protection would undermine the process.
In this case, Sullivan would judge the merits of Cheney's claim of privilege, and if he disagreed and denied the privilege, the vice president would be able to appeal. But Cheney, Tatel pointed out, had not invoked the privilege as yet, and his lawyers had not sought to narrow the scope of discovery.
"Were we to hold . . . that the Constitution protects the President and Vice President from ever having to invoke executive privilege, we would have transformed executive privilege from a doctrine designed to protect presidential communications into virtual immunity from suit," Tatel wrote.
In his dissent, Randolph said the discovery envisioned by the majority was troubling. "For the judiciary to permit this sort of discovery strikes me as a violation of the separation of powers," he wrote.
With little guidance in the law for what qualifies someone as a member of a presidential committee, the court will have to go to great lengths to even try to make such determinations, Randolph said.
"What if the private individual attended all meetings but did not speak, or was present for only for a short period each time?" Randolph wondered in his opinion. "Would it matter whether the private individual had a place at the table or sat on the side with Group's staff?"
What will happen next is unclear. The Justice Department, which is representing Cheney and the task force, could request the case be heard by the full panel of the appeals court, or it could try to bring the case before the Supreme Court.
In a statement released late yesterday, Assistant Attorney General Peter D. Keisler said the government is reviewing the opinions to "decide how best to proceed in the courts to protect the effective functioning of the executive branch."
David Bookbinder, a senior lawyer for the Sierra Club, said he expects the government will do whatever it can to drag out the case.
"That's what this whole appeal was about -- a way to delay," he said.
The Bush administration's close ties to the energy industry, starting with the president, have made the task force the subject of considerable scrutiny, particularly by environmental activists who fear that their interests have been overtaken by those of deep-pocketed energy officials.
More broadly, the controversy over the energy task force has, for many critics, become emblematic of the administration's secretive ways.
Staff writer Mike Allen contributed to this report.
-------- health
UN Food Commission Lifts Irradiation Limits
July 9, 2003
(ENS)
http://ens-news.com/ens/jul2003/2003-07-09-02.asp
ROME, Italy, A United Nations commission that is the highest international body on food standards has adopted an agreement covering the assessment of risks to consumers from foods derived from biotechnology, including genetically modified foods, and irradiated products.
The Codex Alimentarius Commission, a subsidiary of both the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization on Monday adopted more than 50 new safety and quality standards, some new guidelines, and others that are revisions of old standards.
The guidelines cover food safety, not environmental risks. They establish broad general principles to make analysis and management of risks related to biotech foods uniform across Codex's 169 member countries.
The guidelines include pre-market safety evaluations, product tracing for recall purposes, and post-market monitoring.
They cover the scientific assessment of genetically modified plants, such as corn, soybeans or potatoes, and foods and beverages derived from genetically modified micro-organisms, including cheese, yogurt and beer.
The guidelines include provisions for determining if the product may provoke unexpected allergies in consumers.
Secretary of the Codex Commission Alan Randell called the new guidelines an important step towards understanding the risks associated with foods derived from biotechnology. "Now, any country, regulatory body or other organization or individual will be able to compare the risk assessments of a given food derived from biotechnology with the assessments done by other countries," he said.
Randell
Secretary of the Codex Commission Alan Randell (Photo courtesy FAO) The commission adopted a controversial new standard for irradiated foods that allows the foods to be subjected to higher levels of gamma rays to kill bacteria and increase shelf life.
Codex removed the maximum radiation dose of 10 kiloGray to which foods can be treated, which had been in place since 1979. Countries wishing to use a higher dose will have to demonstrate that irradiating foods above 10 kiloGray meets a "legitimate technological purpose," a standard that was not further defined.
The commission determined that such levels would eliminate bacterial spores and the radiation resistant pathogenic bacteria Clostridium botulinum, and also reduce the need to use more toxic chemical methods of combating bacteria, some of which can be harmful to the environment.
Today 37 countries irradiate food using 170 irradiators. In the United States 500,000,000 tons of food are irradiated each year, including spices, flour, fresh fruits and vegetables, pork, poultry and beef.
But consumer groups in the United States, Canada and Italy today condemned the "weakening" of international food irradiation rules, which they say will allow any food to be irradiated at any dose, regardless of how high.
"This is the final straw in the reckless pursuit of using irradiation, which is still an experimental technology, to solve complicated food safety problems," said Andrea Peart of the Sierra Club of Canada. "This decision is a severe blow against the rights of nations to establish their own food safety laws. It is undemocratic on its face."
The groups say Codex has ignored documented evidence that irradiated foods may not be safe for human consumption. They say irradiation may destroy vitamins and promote the formation of chemicals linked to cancer and birth defects.
Among the toxic chemicals formed in irradiated foods are 2-alkylcyclobutanones (2-ACBs), which have been found to promote cancer development and cause genetic damage in rats, and cause genetic damage to human cells, the consumer groups point out.
Other toxic chemicals that have been detected in irradiated foods include compounds that are known or suspected to cause cancer or birth defects, including benzene, ethanol, toluene and methyl ethyl ketone.
Giulio Labbro Francia of the Italian consumer's group Movimento Dei Consumatori said, "We are at a loss to explain Codex's contention that irradiated foods are safe to eat in the face of so much evidence to the contrary. Now consumers throughout the world are in danger of the unknown health impacts."
The irradiation decision was made over the objections of 10 countries, including Austria, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Mexico, and Spain.
"The UN and WHO have abandoned their mission to protect the health and welfare of the world's population," said Andrianna Natsoulas of the U.S. organization Public Citizen. "People who eat irradiated foods will become guinea pigs in what will amount to one of the largest feeding experiments in history."
Randell defended the lifting of radiation limits for foods. "This is a really important breakthrough," he said. "For the consumer it means a potential for higher levels of food safety because of the protection offered by food irradiation. For example, it can be applied to spices which can carry bacteria resistant to other treatments. Irradiated foods are proven safe and do not contain any radioactive traces."
Codex standards are enforceable through the World Trade Organization, so member nations with food irradiation laws stricter than the new Codex standard could have their laws challenged and overruled. Currently, only Brazil has a food irradiation law in keeping with the new Codex standard, meaning that laws in every other nation may have to be revised.
"The commission made some very important decisions for food safety. The most important of these was to extend food safety systems to small and medium sized enterprises, especially in developing countries. This will help these small businesses produce safe food for consumers and improve their prospects for trade," Randell said.
Responding to consumer concerns about meat, the Codex commission adopted standards that will improve the safety of meat by establishing principles of meat hygiene. A Code of Practice on good animal feeding calls for stricter and more systematic controls over sources of contamination.
Codex adopted new quality standards for chocolate based on the amount of cocoa in chocolate and chocolate products. The new standard sets a minimum 35 percent of cocoa solids in products marketed as chocolate and a minimum 20 percent in chocolate type products, such as chocolate flakes. The new standard requires the minimum cocoa content to be clearly marked on the packaging of all chocolate flavored products.
The Codex Alimentarius Commission elected Stuart Slorach of Sweden as its new chairperson, replacing Thomas Billy of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Slorach is deputy director-general of the Swedish National Food Administration and a former vice chair of the commission.
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Feds to sell pot seeds for medical use
canada.com (CP)
Wednesday, July 09, 2003
http://www.canada.com/health/story.html?id=C4836D7B-01BF-40D2-B988-A9C7EC2A264B
OTTAWA _ The federal government will sell marijuana to those authorized to use it for medicinal purposes.
Seeds will be sold to authorized people who want to grow their own marijuana, Health Canada spokeswoman Cindy Cripps-Prawak said Wednesday. Dried marijuana will be available for those too ill to grow their own.
Cripps-Prawak stressed the policy is an interim measure, and the government is not approving pot as a legal drug.
The announcement came on the day an Ontario court judge set as a deadline for the federal government to come up with regulations for distributing medical marijuana. The judge set the July 9 deadline, saying it's unfair that medicinal users must turn to illegal means to obtain their marijuana even though they are authorized to use it for their health.
Ottawa will appeal the judge's ruling, and Cripps-Prawak said it's expected to be heard at the end of the month.
Meanwhile, a packet of 30 seeds from the federal government will cost $20 and dried pot will cost $5 a gram.
According to the RCMP, the street price of the drug varies from $10 to $25 a gram, Cripps-Prawak said.
"We did not try to be competitive with the black market,'' she said. "What we did try to do is establish a price which is reasonable, based on costs associated with the production and implementation of the program.''
The marijuana will come from an underground lab in Flin Flon, Man., where the government is growing the plant for research into its medicinal use.
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Red clover fails to relieve hot flashes
July 09, 2003
Washington Times
Around the Nation
http://www.washtimes.com/national/aroundnation.htm
CHICAGO - Red-clover supplements marketed as a way to relieve menopausal symptoms work no better than dummy pills at easing hot flashes, a study found - disappointing news for women seeking alternatives to hormone treatment.
In the past year, studies have linked prescription hormone pills, the longtime mainstay treatment for hot flashes and other symptoms of menopause, to breast cancer, heart problems and even senility.
In the red-clover study, 252 women ages 45 to 60 took either dummy pills, Promensil pills or Rimostil pills for 12 weeks. Promensil, marketed for hot flashes, and Rimostil, marketed for postmenopausal heart and bone health, are dietary supplements made from red clover, which contains estrogenlike compounds called isoflavones.
Women in all three groups reported a modest reduction in hot flashes, from about eight a day to five. There were no significant side effects from the red-clover pills.
The study appears in today's Journal of the American Medical Association.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Emboldened Hong Kong Protesters Call For Free Elections
July 9, 2003
New York Times
By KEITH BRADSHER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/09/international/asia/09CND-HONG.html?hp
HONG KONG, July 9 - Tens of thousands of demonstrators gathered this evening under a waxing moon to stand before this city's legislature building and call for free elections and the resignation of Hong Kong's leader.
Tonight's crowd was sizable, filling a downtown avenue and two urban parks. But it did not come anywhere close to matching the estimated 500,000 people who marched here on July 1, mainly to protest a stringent internal security bill that the government was trying to push through the Legislative Council.
The government toned down that bill on Saturday and then postponed a vote on it early Monday, and has not set a new schedule for its consideration.
Richard Tsoi, a spokesman for the Human Civil Rights Front, which organized both rallies, said that tonight's peaceful gathering drew the 50,000 people that the group had expected even before the government withdrew the bill on Monday.
The police estimated that at least 30,000 people were present halfway through the two-hour rally and that more may have left earlier or arrived later.
In tonight's rally, speakers called not only for the security legislation to be redone entirely but for Hong Kong's chief executive and all lawmakers to be elected by universal suffrage, making the territory a democratic model for the rest of China.
Demonstrators also chanted many times for the resignation of Hong Kong's chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa, although Mr. Tsoi said that this was not the purpose of the rally. Record unemployment of 8.3 percent, falling home prices and Hong Kong's slow initial response to SARS have sapped Mr. Tung's popularity.
Compared to those in the July 1 rally, tonight's demonstrators seemed to include a higher proportion of students and other young people. But there were also signs that last week's demonstration may have broadened the range of people willing to attend rallies here. Ho Chin, a 69-year-old retired electrician, said that he had never attended a political demonstration until last week, but came again tonight because, he said, "I want to have a vote."
Beijing has shown no interest in letting people here play a greater role in choosing their leaders, and top Hong Kong officials have been openly hostile at times. The political leader of this city's powerful business community declared today that he thought the political system should continue to reserve a large role for business people because democratically elected candidates too often lacked technical expertise in legislative issues affecting companies.
As demonstrators wearing white shirts and waving green light wands converged in Hong Kong's central business district in the fading light just after sunset, it also seemed as though Tung Chee-hwa, Hong Kong's chief executive, might retain his job despite the calls in the streets for his resignation.
Ma Lik, the secretary general of the pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong, said that Mr. Tung should reassign some ministers but should not resign.
Sir Gordon Wu, an influential construction tycoon here, agreed with Mr. Ma. Mr. Tung should stay but his cabinet should change, he said in a telephone interview, explaining that, "in every football team, there always are changes in the lineup."
At a brief news conference less than two hours before this evening's demonstration, Mr. Tung said that the government would "take actions to allay public dissatisfaction and improve the effectiveness of the government." But he provided no details and took no questions.
Academic experts said that the final decision about Mr. Tung's future rested with Beijing, six years after Britain handed over Hong Kong to China.
James Tien, the chairman of the pro-business and pro-government Liberal Party and the man who compelled the government to postpone the security legislation by resigning from the cabinet on Sunday evening, said today that Hong Kong was not ready for more democracy.
The minority of lawmakers who are already elected by the general public here are not friendly enough to the business community and lack expertise in business issues, Mr. Tien said at a news conference for foreign correspondents. He also complained that democratically elected politicians here are too reluctant to accept financial contributions and other help from business leaders that might produce closer ties to the corporate sector.
Voicing a common view among this city's entrepreneurs, Mr. Tien suggested that the Legislative Council here needed members like Eric Li, a political independent who is elected by the territory's 22,000 accountants. "He doesn't have time to meet the public all the time and get himself elected," said Mr. Tien, a wealthy property developer who collects expensive sports cars.
Mr. Li said in a subsequent telephone interview that he viewed himself as a full-time politician now, and believed that all Legislative Council seats should be filled through universal suffrage someday. But he said that business people should continue to be allocated special seats in the 2004 and 2008 elections for the Legislative Council, contending that the political parties were not well enough developed yet to attract technically qualified people as candidates.
An 800-member Election Committee, chosen by 3 percent of Hong Kong's population, mainly pro-Beijing business people and professionals, selects the chief executive here, under a system devised before Britain handed over Hong Kong to China in 1997.
Hong Kong's Basic Law, the closest thing it has to a constitution, calls vaguely for the government to seek more democratic means of choosing the chief executive in 2007 and Legislative Council members in 2008.
But Sing Ming, a political scientist at the City University, said that unless political reformers unexpectedly gain a lot of power in Beijing and decide to turn Hong Kong into a democratic experiment, officials here "will try to procrastinate as much as they can."
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CIA whistleblower to talk about 9/11
BY Heath Druzin
July 9, 2003
The Nevada County, California, Union Newspaper
http://www.theunion.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20030709/NEWS/107090067
Crusading, courageous, paranoid.
Depending on who you talk to, Michael Ruppert is any and all of the above.
The controversial former police officer and CIA whistleblower will speak at 7 tonight at the Grass Valley Veterans Memorial Hall.
In his talk, Ruppert said he will address the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and his claims that the government had foreknowledge of the events, which they then tried to cover up. Environmental issues, including the consequences of depleted oil reserves, will also be discussed.
Ruppert, 52, served as a Los Angeles Police Department narcotics officer until 1978, when he said he was forced out for discovering a link between the Central Intelligence Agency's connection to the LAPD's Organized Crime Intelligence unit.
Since then, he has taken on several government agencies, starting with the CIA, which he says sold drugs in the 1970s to fund covert operations. More recently, he has leveled heavy criticism against the Bush administration.
"I think Bush will be impeached before or after the next election," he said in a phone interview with The Union. "A similar model (to Richard Nixon's impeachment) is shaping up over forged documents citing Iraq receiving uranium from Niger."
If Ruppert's claims seem fantastic, they have not gone unnoticed by prominent critics, such as David Corn, Washington editor for The Nation, who in a May 2002 column blasted Ruppert for being short on facts and long on accusations. Corn also alluded to Ruppert being mentally unstable.
Ruppert shrugs off such criticisms, saying "facts are facts."
"By similar standards to what David Corn is using, if an American parent of a serviceman in Iraq is worried about them getting shot, they are paranoid," he said. "Calling me paranoid is a way to deflect attention from what is really going on."
Ruppert also addressed state issues, connecting a natural gas shortage of "apocalyptic proportions" to the California energy crisis.
"A great deal has to do with government corruption," he said. "But to think we can solve these problems by swapping Gray Davis for Arnold Schwarzenegger - it's not going to happen."
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Protesters demonstrate against Bush visit
July 9 2003
By Dakar
Reuters
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/07/08/1057430201632.html
Protesters shouting "George Bush, assassin, George Bush, criminal" marched slowly through rush-hour traffic in Senegal's capital, Dakar, yesterday, protesting against the US President's visit to West Africa.
Their grievances ranged from the war in Iraq and Afghanistan to US involvement in the Middle East to frustration at security measures taken in the mainly Muslim country before Mr Bush's arrival last night.
The protesters numbered only about 50, but they voiced some of the concerns in the poverty-stricken continent, where Mr Bush will spend five days.
"Bush is a man of war," said Seydina Sarr, who held a white sheet with "Bush butcher. Make tea not war" scribbled on it. He said: "We don't want to be Bush's trampoline even if he does give us millions of dollars."
Mr Bush will not even venture into Dakar. Senegal President Abdoulaye Wade and several other African heads of state will visit him near the airport.
The US President will go to Goree Island where 400 residents have been told to close their homes until Mr Bush has left.
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INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL JUSTICE GROUP COLLECTS INFANT CARE KITS FOR IRAQI FAMILIES
AFSC Continues 85 Year Tradition Working in Troubled Regions of the World
American Friends Service Committee - Middle Atlantic Region
4806 York Road, Baltimore, MD 21212
Ph: 410-323-7200
Fax: 410-323-7292
E.Mail: mobuszewski@afsc.org
PRESS RELEASE-FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 9, 2003
Philadelphia, PA - Parents around the world hope the best for their children: enough food to eat, clean water, education, the possibilities for a good and useful life. Mothers and fathers in Iraq are no different.
In the aftermath of war, much remains unsettled and uncertain for families in Iraq. The international social justice group, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) is continuing to provide material assistance to Iraqis with INFANT CARE KITS. These kits will be distributed to clinics, maternal wards and other places so that new mothers have a few basics to begin life with their new children.
Since the first Gulf war, more than twelve years of economic sanctions have adversely affected medical services for most Iraqis. Studies by U.N. agencies have shown a steady increase in the infant mortality rate. At the Al-Batool Maternity Hospital in Mosul, 1,200 babies are born each month.
To assure high quality and consistency for all recipients, each INFANT CARE KIT must include the following NEW items:
· 2 receiving blankets
· 1 pack baby washcloths
· 1 bar baby soap (such as Johnson & Johnson)
· 1 baby hair brush
Place the items in a gallon size zip-lock bag. To defray shipping costs and to purchase additional useful items such as vitamins, we request a contribution of $10.00 per kit. Please do not send cash! Write a check for the total amount - payable to: AFSC/EMAP, 1501 Cherry Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102-1479.
For those in the Baltimore area, the kits can be brought to 4806 York Road, just south of the Govans Post Office. The deadline for this kit campaign is October 31, 2003. For more information please contact Mark Lancaster at 410-323-7200.
Now in its 86th year of operation, AFSCs Emergency and Material Assistance Program (EMAP), has provided crucial and, at times, life-saving assistance to people struggling for survival in the wake of natural or human-made disasters. The program has helped people caught in the crossfire of civil war or the horrors of famine, serving those who are suffering without regard to their religious, ethnic, or political affiliation. Its relief efforts throughout World Wars I and II were among the reasons why the American Friends Service Committee and its British counterpart received the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the Religious Society of Friends.
Today, EMAP continues to respond to crises in its time-honored way. It also is adapting to keep pace with a changing world. The program is offering new opportunities for caring people to volunteer their time and donate materials. Just as importantly, EMAP ensures that the assistance it gives does not inadvertently harm, but rather strengthens people's resilience, economic independence, and sense of personal dignity.
In addition to the national center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, EMAP has regional centers in Baltimore, Maryland, Cambridge, Massachusetts; High Point, North Carolina; Richmond, Indiana; and San Francisco, California.
#
The American Friends Service Committee is a Quaker organization that includes people of various faiths who are committed to social justice, peace and humanitarian service. Its work is based on the belief in the worth of every person and faith in the power of love to overcome violence and injustice.
Ideas for Fundraising and Making Kits
· Hold a bake sale of favorite goodies in your school or community.
· Turn a large carton into a baby crib by decorating the sides and place a slot in the top to receive donated items for the kits, such as infant washcloths.
· Organize an educational event in your school. Ask classes to bring materials for the kits and hold a party to put them together.
· Solicit local stores for donations of the kit ingredients.
· Hold a simple meal and ask those attending to donate the price of a dinner to the Infant Care Kits Project.
· Organize a reading contest. Obtain pledges for the number of books participants read and donate the money.
· Get a group of friends to hold a car wash to raise money for the Kit project.
· Hold a sports (volleyball, basketball, etc.) marathon. Ask participants to get pledges for the number of minutes/hours played.
· Put a "Kids Care" container in your house of worship to collect coins for the kits. Make an announcement and put a sign on the container about Iraq and the kits.
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