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NUCLEAR
NASA grant gives researchers look at radiation impact
Lake City landfill leaking
Italy miffed over Iran nuclear initiative by Europe's "big three"
Iran to curb nuclear program
Iran Claims Victory in EU Nuke Deal
Iran halts uranium enrichment, gives access to nuke sites
Iran Will Allow U.N. Inspections of Nuclear Sites
Iran Vows To Curb Nuclear Activities
North Korea Rebuffs U.S. Security Offer
Bush Says U.S. Willing to Give N.Korea Guarantees
'N.K. reprocessed 2,500 fuel rods'
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia in secret nuke pact
Russia to Build New Ballistic Missile
Russia hopes nuclear deal will ease pressure over Iran power plant
A question of fact and fission
Duke power tests controversial fuel
Tenn. Nuclear Reactor Now Makes Bomb Fuel
Senate panel examines Patriot Act
A Double-Barreled Attack on American War Policy
White House Threatens a Veto of Its Own Spending Bill for Iraq
MILITARY
Karzai: Terror lingers in Afghanistan
U.S. and Singapore in defense talks
IRA Disarms Further After Britain Schedules N. Ireland Election
Stealthy, All-Weather Cruise Missile Deployed To B-52 Squadrons
General Dynamics halts BAE merger talks
Democrats show Iraq gas price list in contract probe
New Information May Bolster Questions on Halliburton
U.S. Reports Increase in Daily Attacks in Iraq
In Shiite Slum, Army's New Caution
Israel to Keep Building Barrier Despite U.N. Censure
Israelis, Palestinians Differ on Strike
Sudan peace deal near
China Launches Satellite Developed with Brazil
CIA declined intelligence, former official says
Players: William J. Luti
U.N. Resolution Condemns Israeli Barrier
U.N. Assembly Calls for Halt Of Israel Wall
Pentagon Says It Will Call Up Added Reserves
Army Reports Some Absences From a Trial Leave Program
U.S. Soldiers Bringing Media to Tikrit
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Electrical Towers May Be Targets
TSA to Check Plane Inspections
Ashcroft Briefed Regularly on Inquiry Into C.I.A. Leak
Anger after police racism film
Study Finds Hundreds of Thousands of Inmates Mentally Ill
Report on State Prisons Cites Inmates' Mental Illness
U.S. Erecting a Solid Prison at Guantánamo for Long Term
Rumsfeld Questions U.S. in Terror Fight
France Trains for Subway Gas Attack
ACTIVISTS
Protest targets Bush Iraq policy
Ex-US Navy "floating time bombs" of pollution head for Britain
Dissatisfied with air security, activists test it
DU protesters found NOT GUILTY
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
NASA grant gives researchers look at radiation impact
10/22/2003
(AP)
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnovations/2003-10-22-space-radition-mice_x.htm
FORT COLLINS, Colo. - A $9.7 million NASA grant will give Colorado State University cancer researchers the opportunity to zap mice with radiation to learn what protection astronauts beyond Earth's protective atmosphere might need.
The five-year project will also use the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York to expose cells and mice to high-energy particle radiation, officials announced Tuesday.
The human body can repair cell damage from a range of radiation, including X-rays. But cells don't fully recover from damage by the radiation found more commonly in space.
Potential radiation exposure for astronauts can be 25 times higher if they're on a spacewalk fixing the Hubble Space Telescope and 700 times higher on a round-trip Mars journey, experts said.
"The biggest concern is for things like trips to Mars where astronauts will be completely outside the atmosphere for relatively long periods of time," said Robert Ullrich, director of the CSU cancer biology group.
"The uncertainty between (radiation) dose and risk is felt to be too large at this time to actually plan missions to Mars or beyond," said Francis Cucinotta of NASA's Johnson Space Center.
-------- depleted uranium
Lake City landfill leaking
By James Dornbrook
The Independence, Missouri, Examiner
Wednesday, October 22, 2003
http://www.examiner.net/stories/102203/new_102203010.shtml
An old abandoned landfill at Lake City Army Ammunition Plant has become the center of attention as the U.S. Army attempts to clean up contamination seeping from land under its control.
The old landfill was used between the 1940s and 1980s. The landfill and other sites around the grounds are contaminated with toxic chemicals used to make rocket fuel and explosives, metals used to make ammunition and other material waste from weapons manufacturing. Depleted uranium rounds for anti-tank weapons had been manufactured at the plant in the past, but the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission removed the base from its list of managed sites in October 2001.
Hundreds of monitoring wells have been placed around the grounds in an attempt to locate areas of concern. Two of the wells recently picked up high concentrations of perchlorate, a toxin used in the manufacture of rocket fuel. Perchlorate can cause thyroid and brain growth problems if consumed in drinking water.
The U.S. Army hired several companies to tackle the contamination problems and make sure nothing is spreading outside of the fence around Lake City.
One company, T&N Associates, has been repairing and resealing the old 8.28 acre landfill.
Gary Vogelsong, project manager, said the landfill has been cracking on the surface due to settling and past construction errors. He said many of the cracks are five to six feet deep and anywhere from one to two feet wide. The depth of the safety cap on the landfill is anywhere from one to six feet under the surface, so it is likely the cap has been compromised by the cracking. Rain water gushes into the cracks and washes contaminants into a nearby creek, which can then carry them outside the fence.
Vogelsong said his company has located all the cracks, and is busy digging them up and filling them with compacted material. The company has also been taking measures to slow rainwater runoff from the hill.
A document is being put together outlining a plan to create a new wetland at the base of the landfill, to capture runoff and allow it to settle among aquatic plants that can absorb toxins. The document will be released for a 30-day public review on Nov. 17. The Missouri Department of Natural Resources must then approve the document. The Army Corps of Engineers would like to have the wetland constructed by spring or summer of 2004.
The U.S. Army also hired a company called Arcadis, which was awarded a guaranteed fixed price contract to clean up the grounds. Details of the contract were not released to the public, because the negotiations were declared confidential.
Lee Ann Smith, project manager for Arcadis, said the intent of her company is to restore the land to a safe and useful level. Her company will work closely with regulatory agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency.
Arcadis will begin collecting groundwater data immediately and then develop a model that will contain contaminants on site. The goal is to have remedies in place by 2007.
"We believe we are going to be able to take care of the majority of these issues with several basic remedies," Smith said. "If we just took the money and walked away without solving the problems we wouldn't be in business very long."
Smith said some of the strategies her company may use include building retaining berms, removing contaminated soils, and attracting contaminant cleaning insects by injecting cheese whey or molasses into the soil near boundaries.
Neighbors who are members of the Lake City Restoration Advisory Board were skeptical about the whole plan.
"For years we've heard that this wasn't going to be cleaned up in several lifetimes. Now, in several board meetings, we hear it's going to be cleaned up within the next few years," said Greg Perry, neighbor and board member. "I guess I'll stay cautiously optimistic, but I have fuzzy feelings about this."
Perry was concerned about the contract with Arcadis being a fixed- price contract. He said this encouraged the cheapest, quickest remedies to be put in place.
"Contamination has been a major problem around here for years and now Arcadis is going to come in, dig a couple holes, squirt in some Cheez Whiz and this is all going to be fixed? I still have serious concerns about this," Perry said.
Perry said Lake City was built on one of the largest aquifers in the area and over the years, waste has just been dumped wherever it was most convenient. His biggest concern is that contaminants are seeping into a groundwater plume and being carried all over the county from there.
"I didn't become a member of the advisory board to just nod my head and go along with whatever they decide. I want these problems fixed correctly," Perry said.
Other members of the board pleaded with Army officials to get them information before the decisions are made, instead of afterward when it doesn't matter any more.
The next meeting of the Restoration Advisory Board is on January 20, 2004.
To reach James Dornbrook e-mail james.dornbrook@examiner.net or call (816) 350-6322.
-------- europe
Italy miffed over Iran nuclear initiative by Europe's "big three"
ROME (AFP)
Oct 22, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031022115517.tcssrrku.html
An embarrassed Italy sought to explain Wednesday why it was not involved in the British-Franco-German initiative that scored a diplomatic coup by securing Iran's cooperation over its nuclear activities.
Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said Italy was prevented from joining its partners in the Iran mission because of its role as the current president of the European Union.
"Their initiative was followed and supported by the presidency," Frattini told La Repubblica newspaper. "But it is true that we were penalised somewhat as the European presidency."
Iran bowed to international pressure on Tuesday and agreed to tougher inspections of nuclear sites and to suspend uranium enrichment programmes after talks in Tehran with the foreign ministers of Europe's "big three" -- Britain, France and Germany.
"If Italy claimed its ranking as a big nation during its EU presidency it would lose its credibility among the 'smalls' and that would be a serious mistake," Frattini added.
He also denied there was an elite club of the most powerful nations within the European Union, which is set to expand in May next year from 15 to 25 member states.
"Such a club should not exist and will not," Frattini said.
However, differences between the more powerful EU nations and the smaller states and incoming members have been highlighted as the Union tries to hammer out a new constitution.
-------- iran
Iran to curb nuclear program
As Europe plays good cop to Washington's bad cop, Iran agreed Tuesday to a closer monitoring of its nuclear effort.
By Peter Ford
The Christian Science Monitor
October 22, 2003
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1022/p01s04-wome.html
PARIS - Iran pledged Tuesday to suspend uranium enrichment and allow tough international checks of its nuclear program, defusing a looming crisis and crowning European diplomatic efforts to avert a conflict between Washington and Tehran.
Iran's moves to assuage Western fears that it is building a nuclear bomb came after senior officials met with three European foreign ministers who pressed the authorities to comply with demands by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). In return, the ministers promised technical help with Iran's civilian nuclear power project.
The agreement signaled a striking success for the European Union's persistent efforts in recent months to engage Iran in talks over its nuclear ambitions. That policy contrasted with Washington's more threatening approach.
"The deal shows that it is good to combine carrots and sticks," says François Heisbourg, head of the Strategic Research Foundation in Paris. "The US was talking all sticks, without using them, while the Europeans put the sticks in the balance but made clear there would be carrots," such as trade deals and technical assistance.
The IAEA had set an Oct. 31 deadline for Iran to prove it does not have a nuclear weapons program, as Washington alleges.
Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi promised, "We are ready for total transparency because we are not pursuing an illegal program." The secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council left a meeting with the European ministers saying Iran would sign a protocol to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, allowing spot checks anywhere by IAEA inspectors, and would also suspend uranium enrichment for as long as it saw fit.
"Once international concerns ... are fully resolved, Iran could expect easier access to modern technology and supplies in a range of areas," the three foreign ministers - Jack Straw of Britain, Joschka Fischer of Germany, and Dominique de Villepin of France - said in a joint statement.
It was unclear at press time how the United States, which has cold-shouldered Iran as a member of President Bush's "axis of evil," would react to this proposal. Asked whether the EU was defying Washington, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana told France Inter radio Tuesday, "We simply want to solve a very difficult issue for the region via dialogue and political means."
The agreement does not entirely resolve the crisis between Iran and the international community over its nuclear policy, but is "a promising start in which everyone has to play their part," Mr. de Villepin said.
Tehran's case may still go to the UN Security Council - which could impose sanctions - if IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei cannot verify in a Nov. 20 report that Iran has no intentions of building nuclear weapons. Mr. ElBaradei said that he hopes and expects that "in the next few days Iran will deliver to the IAEA a complete declaration of all its past nuclear activities." He called Tuesday's deal "an encouraging sign toward clarifying all aspects of Iran's past nuclear program and regulating its future activities through verification."
IAEA inspectors have found traces of enriched uranium at Iranian nuclear sites that have not been explained. Enriched uranium is used to fuel reactors, but if enriched further can be used in warheads.
This new agreement, however, suggests that Tehran is not interested in dragging out the crisis, analysts say. All its major trading partners - the EU, Japan, Canada, and Australia - have demanded that it meet the IAEA demands. "Iran especially cannot afford to alienate Europe after spending so long building ties that would take another 10 years to rebuild," says Hossein Alikhani, director of the Center for World Dialogue, a think tank in Cyprus.
The visit of three European ministers offered a face saving way out for Tehran, adds Mr. Heisbourg. "It is one thing to conclude an agreement with three Europeans, and another to be seen caving in to the Americans," he points out.
At the same time, suggests Ali Ansari, an expert on Iran at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, "the Europeans are acutely aware that at a time when [operations in] Afghanistan and Iraq have not been completed, this is not the time for a conflict with Iran.
"They were anxious to keep Iran onside, to bring it into the fold, because they know that confrontation will not bring results," and might even spur Tehran to renounce the nonproliferation treaty altogether, he adds.
ElBaradei, the IAEA chief, meanwhile, is reluctant to declare Iran noncompliant with his agency's requirements unless such a finding has consequences, according to sources familiar with his thinking. UN sanctions could be one such consequence, but Iran is well practiced in smuggling nuclear parts, experts say, while a bombing raid on its nuclear facilities would set back its program, but then drive it further underground.
Much will now depend on what Iran actually does in the coming weeks - how fully it answers the IAEA's questions about the past, how quickly it signs the additional protocol, and how long it suspends uranium enrichment.
"The key test comes now," says Dr. Ansari. "The Iranians have shown willing, but saying it is one thing, and doing it is another. In the coming weeks, they have to show that they are not pussyfooting around."
• Michael Theodoulou in Cyprus and Faye Bowers in Washington contributed to this report.
----
Iran Claims Victory in EU Nuke Deal
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
Associated Press Writer
Oct 22, 2003
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAN_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran's pledge to three European states to open its nuclear program to unfettered inspections and to suspend uranium enrichment is a "victory" that isolates the United States, Iran's representative to the U.N. nuclear agency said Wednesday.
"A big conspiracy has been foiled ... (and) the United States has been isolated," Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran's envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency, told state-run television.
He said the United States, which accuses Iran of seeking nuclear weapons, had sought to bring Iran's nuclear program before the U.N. Security Council, which could have imposed sanctions.
The United States said it would wait to see whether Iran would act on its words.
The European Union "showed the U.S. that global issues can't be resolved by war and destruction, but by dialogue. It's a victory for us, the EU and the international community," Salehi said.
Iran contends its nuclear program is only for peaceful energy purposes, but it had for weeks resisted IAEA demands to prove it by submitting to unfettered inspections and insisted it would continue enriching uranium - enriched uranium can be used in bombs.
Iran's reversal on Tuesday was linked to a European offer of greater cooperation on nuclear energy, which Iran has sought. Iran also was seen as keen to keep the dispute from reaching the Security Council.
President Mohammad Khatami told reporters Wednesday the agreement didn't mean Iran has given up obtaining nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.
"We haven't lost anything," Khatami said.
The foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany visited Tuesday and secured Iran's commitment to suspend uranium enrichment and to sign an additional protocol to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that gives IAEA inspectors the right of unfettered access. The three European ministers promised that if Iran does meet its commitments, their countries would help it acquire peaceful nuclear technology. Iran faces an Oct. 31 deadline to prove to the IAEA that its nuclear program is entirely peaceful. If Iran fails to satisfy the IAEA, the U.N. agency is expected to refer the matter to the Security Council.
Iran, though, has said it does not recognize the deadline and it remained unclear when it would sign the protocol or stop enriching uranium. It also was unclear how long the uranium enrichment suspension would last once it does begin.
Late Tuesday, the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, Hasan Rowhani, said Iran would sign the protocol before the next IAEA board meeting on Nov. 20.
Khatami said Wednesday that the additional protocol must first be approved by parliament, indicating Iran would not move quickly.
"It has to go through its legal course," Khatami told reporters.
Government spokesman Abdollah Ramezanzadeh told The Associated Press the process would begin next week with Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi formally asking permission from his government to sign the additional protocol.
While trying to placate the international community, Khatami also is under pressure from hard-liners not to give ground.
The front-page headline of hard-line newspaper Jomhuri-e-Eslami on Wednesday read: "Don't sign the additional protocol."
President Bush told reporters in Indonesia Wednesday he was grateful to the European ministers "for taking a very strong universal message to the Iranians that they should disarm."
"The Iranians, it looks like they're accepting the demands of the free world, and now it's up to them to prove that they've accepted the demands. It's a very positive development," Bush said.
Also Tuesday, Iran agreed to tell the IAEA the origin of traces of weapons-grade uranium that the agency's inspectors had discovered at two facilities, said diplomats in Vienna, where the agency is based. The diplomats spoke on condition of anonymity.
IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei has called those traces the most troubling aspect of Iran's nuclear activities. Iran says the contamination stemmed from equipment it imported, but it had been reluctant to name the country of origin.
Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov of Russia, which is helping Iran build its first nuclear reactor, said Wednesday his government was looking forward to receiving information from the IAEA on its expanded cooperation with Tehran.
"Russia is prepared to continue cooperating with Iran, including in the nuclear sphere, in strict compliance with international obligations," Ivanov said Wednesday, according to the Interfax and ITAR-Tass news agencies.
Israel's military intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. Aharon Zeevi-Farkash, warned Tuesday that if Iran completed its uranium enrichment program, it would be able to produce its own nuclear weapons without outside help within one year.
----
Iran halts uranium enrichment, gives access to nuke sites
October 22, 2003
By Ed Johnson
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20031021-112807-1168r.htm
TEHRAN - Iran agreed yesterday to suspend uranium enrichment and give inspectors unrestricted access to its nuclear facilities as demanded by the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency - a step that could ease the standoff over fears that Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons.
The announcement came after weeks of pressure on Iran to come clean by Oct. 31 on its nuclear program, which Washington thinks aims to build a nuclear arsenal. A senior Israeli adviser told The Washington Times yesterday that if the program was not stopped within 12 months, it would be too late.
The United States, which has led the charge for the U.N. Security Council to take action against Iran, gave a cautious welcome to the news from Tehran.
If Iran follows through with its promises, it "would be a positive step in the right direction," White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said. "Full compliance by Iran will now be essential."
Iran, which says its nuclear program aims only for electricity production, made the commitments as three European foreign ministers visited Tehran to press the demands by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Tehran did not say when it would take the steps, although a British official said it would likely be before Oct. 31.
Iran also agreed to hand over other information long sought by the IAEA, said diplomats in Vienna, Austria, where the agency is based. Most important, said the diplomats, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, Iran promised to account for the origin of traces of weapons-grade uranium that IAEA inspectors discovered at two facilities, sounding alarm bells in Vienna and Washington.
IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei has called those traces, found in environmental samples, the most troubling aspect of Iran's nuclear activities.
Iran says the contamination was on equipment it imported for peaceful nuclear purposes, but it resisted IAEA requests that it name the country of origin. Once the agency knows where the equipment comes from, it can test the truth of Iran's claims.
The head of Israel's military intelligence warned yesterday that if Iran completes its program for enriching uranium, it would be able to produce nuclear weapons without outside help by summer 2004.
Zalman Shoval, a former ambassador to Washington and now an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, gave a similar assessment at a meeting yesterday with reporters and editors at The Times.
"According to our intelligence assessment, unless something is done within the next year, a year from now it may be too late," he said. "They will already have a nuclear capability."
The United States has pushed fellow members of the IAEA board to declare Tehran in breach of the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Anxious to avoid sanctions that the United Nations would likely bring, Iran has allowed IAEA inspectors to view some sites, including at least one military facility, but for weeks has hesitated at making a full commitment to the IAEA demands.
The secretary of Iran's powerful Supreme National Security Council, Hasan Rowhani, told reporters after his meeting with the three Europeans yesterday that Iran would sign an additional protocol to the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty allowing inspectors to enter any site without notice.
"The protocol should not threaten our national security, national interests and national pride," he told reporters. In a statement, Iran said it would abide by the protocol even before it is ratified by parliament, as is required.
Mr. Rowhani said that for an "interim period," Iran will suspend nuclear enrichment - though he did not say for how long - to "create a new atmosphere of trust and confidence."
Jack Straw of Britain, Joschka Fischer of Germany and Dominique de Villepin of France said in Tehran that if Iran proves its nuclear program is only for energy production, they would make it easier for Iran to get nuclear technology.
The European ministers said in their joint statement that "the full implementation of Iran's decisions, confirmed by the IAEA director general, should enable the immediate situation to be resolved by the IAEA board."
•Staff writer David W. Jones in Washington contributed to this report.
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Iran Will Allow U.N. Inspections of Nuclear Sites
October 22, 2003
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/22/international/middleeast/22IRAN.html?pagewanted=all&position=
TEHRAN, Oct. 21 - Iran agreed Tuesday, after months of resistance, to accept stricter international inspections of its nuclear sites and to suspend production of enriched uranium, which can be used to develop nuclear weapons.
But Tehran gave no indication when it would suspend uranium enrichment or sign, ratify and carry out an additional agreement under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968 that would allow surprise inspections of its nuclear installations.
The accord was completed in Tehran during an unusual visit by three European foreign ministers, Dominique de Villepin of France, Jack Straw of Britain and Joschka Fischer of Germany.
The ministers expressed hope that it would help defuse a diplomatic crisis that pitted Iran against the International Atomic Energy Agency and, increasingly, the world because of concerns that Iran is determined to become a nuclear power.
In a news conference with the three ministers, Hassan Rowhani, a powerful middle-level cleric who has emerged as Iran's chief negotiator during the current crisis, said the one-and-a-half-page agreement would first have to be approved by Iran's elected Parliament.
He emphasized that the suspension of uranium enrichment would be for an "interim period."
In Washington, the State Department reacted skeptically to the agreement, with officials privately voicing concerns that Tehran would not fully comply. Officials there only grudgingly praised the work of their European colleagues.
"Frankly, I'd say there's a good reason for healthy skepticism about what Iran will actually do, as opposed to what it says," one senior department official said.
The international terms for compliance include unfettered access by officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency - the United Nations body that monitors nuclear programs around the world - to weapons development sites, as well as chemical samplings from places where enriched uranium suitable for weapons is being produced.
Bush administration officials dismissed the notion that a less confrontational approach by the Europeans had yielded more tangible results than the administration's policy of ultimatums. They insisted that the agreement merely buttressed the American policy, and said they had kept in touch with the Europeans throughout the initiative.
"The European mission didn't give the Iranians any daylight," the senior State Department official said. "I wouldn't call it a deal, because the issues that concern us weren't subject for compromise."
Still, the agreement was a victory for the Europeans and the culmination of two and a half months of diplomatic effort to convince Iran that it would be punished by an undivided world community if it did not comply with the International Atomic Energy Agency's strict demands.
It also underscores the emergence of a potentially powerful European alliance in the aftermath of the American-led Iraq war and occupation among Britain, which supported the war, and France and Germany, which did not.
As an incentive to Iran, the agreement recognized its right "to enjoy peaceful use of nuclear energy" in accordance with the nonproliferation treaty. Indeed, Mr. Rowhani said Europe and Iran were entering a "new phase" in which Europe was committed to help Iran develop its nuclear energy program and to seek ways to increase trade ties with Iran.
A policy that uses incentives in the nuclear field puts the European position at odds with that of the United States. The Clinton and Bush administrations have opposed Russia's project with Iran to build nuclear reactors at Bushehr on the Persian Gulf, arguing that Iran - a major oil producer - does not need nuclear energy and that activities at the site could indirectly help a nuclear weapons program.
In making the pledges, Iran seems to have been motivated primarily by a fear of international isolation and sanctions. Last month, in a vote that united Americans, Europeans and others, the 35-nation governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency ordered Iran to prove by Oct. 31 that it has no secret weapons program or face unspecified consequences at the Security Council.
In the agreement on Tuesday, Iran also committed itself to answer probing questions posed by the agency last month about the recent discovery of highly enriched uranium at two sites. A senior Iranian official said his government felt it had to break the confrontational relationship over its nuclear program that had developed with foreign countries, adding that the agreement opened a process that would lead to more cooperation with Europe.
While Iranian officials deny that they are building nuclear weapons, the United States, France, Britain and Germany are convinced that they are. The atomic energy agency has turned up disturbing evidence in recent months that points to a secret weapons program.
Senior Bush administration officials said the United States was keen to avoid a confrontation with Iran. Senior European and American officials said that could have forced still another clash between the United States and its allies in the Security Council and discouraged Iranian concessions at a time when some extreme voices in Iran are calling for a withdrawal from the nonproliferation treaty.
Even worse, those officials said, it could have forced the United States to take punitive action against a powerful Islamic country of 65 million people in a strategically important location between Iraq and Afghanistan.
For those reasons, the United States reluctantly endorsed the European initiative, with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell telling his European counterparts that what the United States wanted was an unambiguous document that left no room for negotiation or second-guessing, European officials said.
The European initiative grew out of a letter drafted by France and sent by the three ministers to Iran's foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, in August. It urged Iran to adopt a protocol to the nonproliferation treaty that provides for intrusive inspections on short notice, and to halt its uranium enrichment program.
In return, the letter acknowledged Iran's right to the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and raised the possibility of cooperation on technology, without specifically pledging help with a civilian nuclear energy program.
The agreement on Tuesday came swiftly, apparently enjoying the support of conservatives as well as reformers in Iran's divided leadership.
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Iran Vows To Curb Nuclear Activities
Europeans Win Deal On Rules, Inspections
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, October 22, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A57018-2003Oct21?language=printer
TEHRAN, Oct. 21 -- Iran reached an agreement Tuesday with three European foreign ministers to temporarily stop enriching and reprocessing uranium and to allow more aggressive inspections of its nuclear facilities to end the international dispute over its suspected nuclear weapons program.
In a joint statement with Britain, France and Germany, the Iranians pledged "full cooperation" with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to deal with all of its concerns about Iran's nuclear development activities.
If carried out, the agreement would head off a confrontation between Iran and the U.N. agency's leading nations, including the United States, which had given Tehran until Oct. 31 to comply with demands that it fully disclose its nuclear program and correct any violations of international law. It would also mark a diplomatic coup for the Europeans, who have pursued a policy of engagement with Iran in contrast to the Bush administration's harder line and threats of military action.
Suspending enrichment was one of three conditions the ministers had made before arriving here early Tuesday on their one-day mission. Iran also agreed to comply with international regulations by providing full information to the IAEA and by allowing a new and stricter regimen of inspections. The Iranians also repeated their denial that they were pursuing nuclear weapons -- despite evidence uncovered by IAEA inspectors in recent months that Iran had secretly sought to enrich uranium to a level that would allow it to produce bombs.
In return for Iran's agreement, the European foreign ministers stated that they recognized Iran's right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy and pledged new dialogue and cooperation with Tehran. They indicated that if Iran lived up to its commitments, the matter would remain with the IAEA and not be referred to the U.N. Security Council, where the Iranians fear the United States would press for punitive measures.
"We have achieved this morning important progress, and we found the basis for agreement in the three pending issues," French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin told reporters after the meetings. "This is, we hope, a promising start in which everybody has to play its part. . . . We are on the right track and we must all keep the momentum."
The lead Iranian official in Tuesday's negotiations, Hassan Rouhani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, said Iran agreed to the ministers' conditions to "express its goodwill and to create an atmosphere of new confidence and trust between Iran and other countries."
But Rouhani emphasized in answering a reporter's question that Iran's suspension of uranium enrichment was a temporary measure designed to demonstrate goodwill. He noted that Iran and the European ministers agreed that "peaceful nuclear technology is the inalienable right of Iran, and no one is able to take away this right from the Iranian nation."
While the foreign ministers expressed enthusiasm for the agreement, European officials privately acknowledged the possibility that Iran was simply stalling for time to continue a weapons program. They warned that Iran needed to follow up by convincing IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei that it was complying with all of the agency's requirements.
In Vienna, ElBaradei said in a statement that the Iranian announcement was an "encouraging sign" but that he hoped "Iran will deliver to the IAEA a complete declaration of all its past nuclear activities and an official notification of its readiness to conclude an additional protocol."
An IAEA official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: "Our number one priority is information about the history, scope and nature of their program. That is something the protocol is not going to help. That is something they need to produce in the next couple of days."
The United States was not mentioned in the two-page joint statement and came up only briefly at the ministers' news conference. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told reporters, "As far as other countries are concerned, their decisions are a matter for them," adding that he had "no reason to believe" other members of the IAEA board -- which includes the United States -- would not support the agreement if Iran fully complied.
German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer added, "All relevant third parties will understand this is really substantial progress if this is implemented."
In Singapore, where President Bush was in the midst of week-long visit to Asia, White House press secretary Scott McClellan cautioned that "what's most important is the implementation and the action, the follow-through on this," but said Iran's actions were positive overall.
"Today's announcement is progress," McClellan said. "It was the president who originally urged action by the international community to address this issue. The president has made proliferation of weapons of mass destruction a top priority. It's a serious matter. And now we're seeing the fruits born of our efforts."
In a speech 18 months ago, Bush labeled Iran as part of an "axis of evil" and warned that the United States would not tolerate Iran's construction of nuclear weapons. Pressure increased earlier this year after inspectors found enriched uranium at two Iranian facilities.
For the European foreign ministers, Tuesday's mission marked their first joint diplomatic initiative since the Iraq war, when Britain sided with the United States while France and Germany were strongly opposed. The foreign ministers, who have coordinated efforts on Iran since June, were clearly delighted that they were able to obtain an agreement and that they did so as a group. As de Villepin put it, "It is an important day for our countries . . . [and] it is an important day for Europe because we are dealing here with a major issue."
The Europeans ultimately want to persuade Iran to permanently dismantle its enrichment facilities in return for assurances that supplies of fuel for civilian uses of their nuclear facilities will be arranged. Officials said the exchange has been discussed in the past with Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi but did not come up in Tuesday's talks.
The agreement came after 31/2 hours of meetings with Iranian leaders -- including Rouhani, Kharrazi and President Mohammad Khatami -- at the Saad Abad palace in northern Tehran.
One European diplomat said Rouhani, a mid-level Muslim cleric and lawyer by training, emerged as a key figure in the deal. The Supreme National Security Council, which he heads, brings together senior figures in Iran's intelligence agencies, army and Revolutionary Guard, which are controlled by Muslim clerics in appointive positions, and in the presidency and Foreign Ministry, which are loyal to elected officials such as Khatami and his reformist allies.
"On core objectives, they're probably united -- a continuation of the nuclear program while staying out of trouble," the diplomat said.
Staff writers Mike Allen in Singapore and Colum Lynch at the United Nations contributed to this report.
-------- korea
North Korea Rebuffs U.S. Security Offer
October 22, 2003
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/22/international/asia/22NORT.html
SEOUL, South Korea, Wednesday, Oct. 22 - The official North Korean news agency published a commentary on Tuesday calling "laughable" an American offer to provide guarantees of multilateral security in exchange for the North's ending its nuclear weapons program.
President Bush said this week that he was willing to consider giving North Korea regional security guarantees, but not the bilateral nonaggression pact that it has sought.
The article from the news agency dismissed the offer.
"We have asked for the United States to stop its hostile policy and a bilateral treaty between North Korea and the United States, and not for some sort of security guarantee," said the agency. "It's laughable and doesn't deserve even any consideration that the United States gives a security guarantee on the condition that we drop our nuclear development."
--------
Bush Says U.S. Willing to Give N.Korea Guarantees
October 22, 2003
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-korea-north-bush.html
ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE (Reuters) - President Bush said Wednesday the United States and its partners were all willing to sign a document declaring ``we won't attack you'' so long as North Korea agrees to abandon its nuclear ambitions.
North Korea has dismissed the U.S. offer of multilateral security guarantees as laughable.
``I guess they're trying to stand up to the five nations that are now uniting in convincing North Korea to disarm and my only reaction is we'll continue to send a very clear message to the North Koreans,'' Bush said in Bali, Indonesia before flying to Australia.
Speaking with reporters later aboard Air Force One, Bush said the United States and its partners in the negotiations were ``all willing to sign some sort of document -- not a treaty -- that says, 'We won't attack you.' But he needs to abandon his nuclear program in a verifiable way.''
In a commentary published late Tuesday, the communist North's official KCNA news agency said Pyongyang wanted a bilateral treaty with the United States -- a reference to its desire for a non-aggression pact Washington has ruled out.
During a Bangkok summit of Asia-Pacific leaders that ended Tuesday, Bush significantly shifted policy by saying he was sharing ideas on how to give North Korea security guarantees short of a non-aggression treaty. All 20 other summit leaders backed this stance.
North Korea was not present because it is not a member of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum. But it lost little time in shooting down the idea.
``We have asked for the United States to stop its hostile policy and a bilateral treaty between North Korea and the United States, and not for some sort of security guarantee,'' said KCNA in a Korean-language commentary.
``It's laughable and doesn't deserve even any consideration that the United States gives a security guarantee on the condition that we drop our nuclear development.''
Bush defended the APEC discussions at a news conference on this Indonesian island, saying: ``We had a really good visit at APEC about how best to resolve the North Korean issue peacefully, how best to convince the North Koreans to disarm, at least abandon their nuclear ambitions, nuclear weapons ambitions.''
Asked about reports of at least one North Korean short-range missile test during APEC, Bush said that was not helpful, adding in an apparent reference to North Korean leader Kim Jong-il:
``...he wanted to have dialogue. We're having dialogue, and he wanted a security agreement and we're willing to advance a multi-party security agreement, assuming that he is willing to abandon his nuclear weapons designs and programs.''
Bush had some harsh words for Kim Jong-il. ``You can't respect anyone who would let his people starve and shrink in size because of malnutrition...It's so sad for the North Korean people.... It is unconscionable that that many people are starving in the 21st century... I feel strongly about failed leadership dashing the hopes of the people.''
Bush said Washington and its partners ``will stay the course'' despite Pyongyang's response.
South Korea and the United States joined China, Japan and Russia in an inconclusive first round of talks with North Korea on its nuclear ambitions in Beijing in late August. A second round has yet to be arranged, but diplomats expect one to be held next month or at least before the end of the year.
----
'N.K. reprocessed 2,500 fuel rods'
2003.10.22
By Kim So-young (soyoung@heraldm.com)
Korea Herald
http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/SITE/data/html_dir/2003/10/22/200310220014.asp
North Korea has reportedly completed reprocessing more than 30 percent of the 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods held at its main nuclear facility in Yongbyon, South Korea's Yonhap news agency said yesterday.
"South Korean and U.S. intelligence officials believe North Korea has reprocessed some 2,500 spent fuel rods," Yonhap quoted an unnamed high-level government official as saying.
Seoul and Washington estimated the North might have reprocessed a small number of spent fuel rods, but this is the first time that a specific figure has emerged on the North's nuclear reprocessing activities.
According to the news agency, the official said that almost three quarters of the reprocessing was conducted in the past two months, when the international community was intensifying diplomatic efforts to arrange a second round of six-way talks over North Korea's weapons development.
August's meeting in Beijing between the two Koreas, the United States, China, Russia and Japan ended without conclusion.
Another senior government official, who requested anonymity, declined to comment on the report, saying, "There are signs of Pyongyang's nuclear reprocessing but we are not sure how much progress has been made."
Prof. Koh Yu-hwan of Dongguk University in Seoul said, "It suggests that the North was trying to strengthen its negotiating position by increasing its nuclear capability."
Analysts said even if the report proved true, it would be unlikely to deal a serious blow to the international diplomatic process aimed at ending the nuclear crisis.
"Because the U.S. has continued to watch the North's nuclear activities, it will probably know how much nuclear reprocessing has been conducted. So the impact would be limited," said Koh.
Paik Hak-soon, a North Korea specialist at Sejong Institute in Seoul, presented a more positive view. "The report shows North Korea's recent claim to have finished reprocessing was exaggerated. The international community will accelerate diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis."
North Korea said early July that it had finished reprocessing all its fuel rods, which could yield enough plutonium for five or six atomic bombs, adding to the one or two it was believed to already have. But officials of Seoul and Washington dismissed the claim as a typical negotiating tactic of Pyongyang.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell said, "They've said things like that before."
North Korea has increased its nuclear boasts in recent weeks, culminating in last week's announcement that it would publicly display its nuclear capability.
But hopes of a peaceful settlement to the one-year-old nuclear crisis were boosted as U.S. President George W. Bush agreed on Monday to grant Pyongyang a written security assurance backed up by other regional partners, shifting from his hard-line stance that Washington would not reward Pyongyang's nuclear blackmail by offering a security guarantee.
The communist state has demanded a non-aggression pact from Washington as a condition to abandoning its weapons program, but the U.S. rebuffed the North's call, saying the option is "off the table."
-------- pakistan
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia in secret nuke pact
October 22, 2003
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20031021-112804-8451r.htm
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have concluded a secret agreement on "nuclear cooperation" that will provide the Saudis with nuclear-weapons technology in exchange for cheap oil, according to a ranking Pakistani insider.
The disclosure came at the end of a 26-hour state visit to Islamabad last weekend by Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler, who flew across the Arabian Sea with an entourage of 200, including Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al Faisal and several Cabinet ministers.
Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, the pro-American defense minister who is next in line to the throne after the crown prince, was not part of the delegation.
"It will be vehemently denied by both countries," said the Pakistani source, whose information has proven reliable for more than a decade, "but future events will confirm that Pakistan has agreed to provide [Saudi Arabia] with the wherewithal for a nuclear deterrent."
As predicted, Saudi Arabia - which has faced strong international suspicion for years that it was seeking a nuclear capability through Pakistan - strongly denied the claim.
Prince Sultan was quoted in the Saudi newspaper Okaz yesterday saying that "no military agreements were concluded between the kingdom and Pakistan during [Prince Abdullah´s] visit to Islamabad."
Mohammad Sadiq, deputy chief of mission for Pakistan's embassy in Washington, also denied any nuclear deal was in the works. "That is totally incorrect," he said in a telephone interview. "We have a clear policy: We will not export our nuclear expertise."
But the CIA believes Pakistan already has shared its nuclear know-how, working with North Korea in exchange for missile technology.
A Pakistani C-130 was spotted by satellite loading North Korean missiles at Pyongyang airport last year. Pakistan, which is estimated to have between 35 and 60 nuclear weapons, said this was a straight purchase for cash and strongly denied a nuclear quid pro quo.
"Both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia," the Pakistani source said, "see a world that is moving from nonproliferation to proliferation of nuclear weapons."
The Saudi rulers, who are Sunni Muslims, are believed to have concluded that nothing will deter the Shi'ite Muslims who rule Iran from continuing their quest for a nuclear weapons capability.
Pakistan, meanwhile, is concerned about a recent arms agreement between India, its nuclear archrival, and Israel, a longtime nuclear power whose inventory is estimated at between 200 and 400 weapons.
To counter what Pakistani and Saudi leaders regard as multiple regional threats, the two countries have decided to quietly move ahead with an exchange of free or cheap Saudi oil for Pakistani nuclear know-how, the Pakistani source said.
Pakistanis have worked as contract pilots for the Royal Saudi Air Force for the past 30 years. Several hundred thousand Pakistani workers are employed by the Gulf states, both as skilled and unskilled workers, and their remittances are a hard currency boon for the Pakistani treasury.
Prince Abdullah reportedly sees Saudi oil reserves, the world's largest, as becoming increasingly vulnerable over the next 10 years.
By mutual agreement, U.S. forces withdrew from Saudi Arabia earlier this year to relocate across the border in the tiny oil sheikdom of Qatar.
Saudi officials also are still chafing over a closed meeting - later well publicized - of the U.S. Defense Policy Board in 2002, where an expert explained, with a 16-slide Powerpoint presentation, why and how the United States should seize and occupy oil fields in the country's Eastern Province.
Several incidents have raised questions over the extent of Saudi-Pakistani cooperation in defense matters.
A new policy paper by Simon Henderson, an analyst with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, noted that Prince Sultan visited Pakistan's highly restricted Kahuta uranium enrichment and missile assembly factory in 1999, a visit that prompted a formal diplomatic complaint from Washington.
And a son of Prince Abdullah attended Pakistan's test-firing last year of its Ghauri-class missile, which has a range of 950 miles and could be used to deliver a nuclear payload.
President Bush was reported to have confronted Pervez Musharraf over the Saudi nuclear issue during the Pakistani president's visit to Camp David this summer, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage raised the issue during a trip to Islamabad earlier this month, according to Mr. Henderson's paper.
"Apart from proliferation concerns, Washington likely harbors more general fears about what would happen if either of the regimes in Riyadh or Islamabad became radically Islamic," according to Mr. Henderson.
GlobalSecurity.org, a well-connected defense Internet site, found in a recent survey that Saudi Arabia has the infrastructure to exploit such nuclear exports very quickly.
"While there is no direct evidence that Saudi Arabia has chosen a nuclear option, the Saudis have in place a foundation for building a nuclear deterrent," according to the Web site.
•Arnaud de Borchgrave, editor at large of The Washington Times, is editor at large of United Press International as well.
-------- russia
Russia to Build New Ballistic Missile
October 22, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Missiles.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- Russia will need another 10 to 15 years to build a next-generation land-based ballistic missile, so Soviet-era weapons will remain the core of the nation's nuclear forces during that period, a top general said in remarks published Wednesday.
The head of Russia's Strategic Missile Forces, Col.-Gen. Nikolai Solovtsov, told the military daily Krasnaya Zvezda that most Soviet-built ballistic missiles had already served their designated lifetime. But he added that test launches and modern diagnostics are allowing them to remain on duty for years to come.
``The lifetime of these missiles isn't over yet, and they will continue serving the Fatherland until 2015,'' Solovtsov said. ``The development of a new missile will take from 10 to 15 years, and we have this time in reserve.''
Solovtsov pointed at last year's successful test launch of an SS-18 missile that had served for 25 years and March's test-firing of a Topol missile following its 18-year service as proof of the Soviet-built missiles' capability.
He said his forces will also continue to receive the new Topol-M missiles, with another batch expected to go to a unit based near the Volga River city of Saratov. Their deployment, however, has lagged far behind earlier plans, and some analysts have warned that their numbers aren't sufficient to replace the aging weapons.
In an apparent move to soothe such fears, President Vladimir Putin said this month that Russia can modernize its aging strategic arsenal and maintain its nuclear deterrent potential for years, relying on fresh stockpiles of Soviet-built missiles.
Putin said that Russia has several dozen of what the West calls SS-19 Stiletto missiles, which were stockpiled without fuel and ``in that sense are new.'' He said they will gradually replace older missiles that are taken off duty.
Echoing Putin's statement, Solovtsov said, without mentioning the United States, that the Stilettos would be able to overcome planned missile defense systems.
Russia was unable to persuade the United States to maintain the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which Washington abandoned to begin development of the national missile defense system.
--------
Russia hopes nuclear deal will ease pressure over Iran power plant
MOSCOW (AFP)
Oct 22, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031022084940.6pbxunz8.html
Russia on Wednesday hailed Iran's pledge to open its nuclear programme to intrusive UN inspections as a "positive step" which should ease pressure on Moscow over its nuclear cooperation with the Islamic Republic.
"We welcome this decision, this is a positive step," Nikolai Shingaryev, the top spokesman for the Russian Atomic Energy Ministry, told AFP.
"Russia has come under certain pressure because of Bushehr...this agreement will certainly simplify and make our cooperation easier," he added, referring to the nuclear power plant which Russia is building for Iran.
On Tuesday, Iran promised the visiting foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany that it would show "full transparency" to the UN's nuclear watchdog and allow an intrusive inspections regime as well as halt uranium enrichment.
The deal was struck just 10 days before the end of October deadline for Iran to come clean about its nuclear programme.
Russia is building Iran's first nuclear plant, Bushehr, in a deal worth about 800 million dollars, that has provoked tensions with Washington because of US concerns that Tehran is using Russian technology to develop nuclear weapons.
Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov earlier responded more cautiously to Iran's acceptance of international demands, saying that Moscow was still awaiting official notification from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
"All this would remove the international community's concerns about Iran's nuclear programme," Ivanov said in a statement.
Top Russian officials who have negotiated with the Iranians for years say that they are never sure of a deal until the ink is dry.
The atomic energy ministry spokesman said he could not confirm Iranian officials' announcement that a separate agreement on the return of Russian spent fuel was ready for signature.
"I have no information that they're about to sign. I know that experts are conducting negotiations" but even under the best case scenario "fuel deliveries to Bushehr will not begin for a month or two," he said.
A top Iranian official said Tuesday that Tehran would sign a deal with Moscow soon promising to return supplies of Russian nuclear fuel used in the plant in southern Iran, opening the way to completion of the project.
Moscow officials have earlier claimed that negotiations over the Bushehr plant have broken down over Iran's demand for Russia to buy back the spent fuel -- a highly unusual request since spent fuel in such deals is almost always sent back for free.
Earlier this month Russia said it would push back by one year the launch of Bushehr to 2005, while denying suggestions the delay was forced by pressure from the United States or Israel.
The Vremya Novostei daily said the Iranian concessions were a relief for Moscow.
"The diplomatic success in Tehran will allow Russia to catch its breath and continue with the construction of the power station in Bushehr," said the newspaper.
But it also noted that Germany, France and Britain had reportedly promised to supply nuclear technology and fuel to Iran in return, "hardly reassuring for Russia which at this time of tension has enjoyed a quasi-monopoly in the Iranian nuclear market."
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
A question of fact and fission
US researchers say that a new breed of low-yield nuclear weapons could destroy targets with minimal 'collateral damage'.
Owen Dyer
22 October 2003
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_medical/story.jsp?story=455819
The Cold War - and the principle of mutually assured destruction - may be over, but research into nuclear weaponry continues apace. The US, for example, is to study four new types, according to an agenda leaked from last month's US Strategic Command meeting. These include an enhanced radiation ("neutron") bomb; a bunker-buster, the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP); a "mini-nuke" battlefield weapon with an explosive yield equivalent to 100 tons of TNT; and an "agent-defeat weapon" designed to incinerate anthrax spores or nerve gas. The weapons that have grabbed most headlines are the RNEP and the mini-nuke. In the public debate, these have been conflated into a single weapon, able to destroy buried dictators without collateral damage. In fact, there is no such device.
When Congressional supporters of the nuclear bunker-buster enthused about a bomb that could be safely dropped on a bunker in the middle of a city without harm to innocent people above ground, physicists reacted with scorn. At the depths attainable by a ground-penetrating bomb, said Professor Sidney Drell, the director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator, not even the smallest nuclear explosion could be contained underground. America has an earth-penetrating nuclear bomb, the B61-11. In tests, it has never penetrated more than 20 feet of earth.
Robert Nelson, a nuclear-weapons expert at Princeton University, says there is no novel technology around the corner that will bring an impressive leap in penetration. "The rules of long-rod penetration say a steel rod hitting concrete can penetrate about 10 times its own length. But even that would require an impact velocity liable to melt the casing or destroy the warhead."
Supposing scientists can burrow twice as deep as their best efforts to date, their bomb will detonate 50 feet underground. Proponents of the RNEP talk of attacking bunkers as deep as 1,000 feet. A bomb that could shatter a bunker 950 feet below it without broaching the ground 50 feet above would be a wonder weapon indeed.
In the 1960s, the US government carried out a series of tests known as Operation Plowshare, to study the feasibility of using nuclear weapons to build substitute harbours and canals if war or catastrophe destroyed existing facilities. These tests showed that a one-kiloton bomb had to be buried 250 feet deep to contain the blast. For five-kiloton devices, the minimum safe depth was 650 feet. Surface leaks were common - and those bombs were buried in sealed shafts. A falling bomb inevitably leaves a hole, making the scenario more akin to tests that left the shaft unsealed. These were known as "Roman candles".
Most nuclear weapons are designed to burst high above their target, so that terrain features cannot shield their victims from blast and heat. Then, a rising column of hot air sucks up irradiated dirt from the ground, which returns to earth as fallout. A Roman candle explosion ejects a plume of dust far more radioactive than typical fallout. It spreads horizontally in a powerful base surge. The effect is similar to that of the "dirty bomb" used by hypothetical terrorists.
"All this talk about safely containing explosions is a red herring," says Michael Levi, a science fellow at the Brookings Institution. "The politicians who support these weapons cling to this claim because it makes them seem more acceptable. Their opponents cling to it because it's so easily debunked as bad science, and makes a convenient stick with which to beat the whole project. But the scientists who are actually developing these bombs don't seriously claim they can be used without collateral damage."
In fact, when it comes to destroying bunkers, the weaponeers are relying on the proven recipe of sledgehammer force. "Current plans for the RNEP envisage a warhead as large as two megatons," says Levi. Opponents argue that since it could kill millions if used in an urban setting, the enemy need only place his bunkers in his cities and "self-deterrence" still applies. The agent-defeat weapon is also a bunker-buster, but is designed to destroy chemical and biological weapons stocks with heat. It could work but, like the RNEP, it would kill anyone living nearby.
The Pentagon has befriended the RNEP and the other projects, and the Bush administration also backs the weapons, which fit in with its recent announcement that it will no longer necessarily refrain from using nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states. But the germ of the idea dates back to the Clinton administration, and comes from the scientists themselves.
The early Nineties were hard for the nuclear labs. Demoralised by Salt (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks), Start (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, they faced the end of the Cold War. Then came the Gulf War and the smart bomb. Pundits began forecasting that precision-guided munitions could make whole classes of nuclear weapons redundant. Redundant weapons could mean redundant weaponeers.
In late 1991, two nuclear scientists published an article in Strategic Review entitled "Countering the threat of the well-armed tyrant: a modest proposal for small nuclear weapons". They argued that existing weapons were so destructive that no president would consider using them unless the US came under direct nuclear attack. The scientists proposed making less destructive nukes that could be more readily used. By blurring the distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons, they argued, the process of escalation could be made smoother, and the deterrent would gain credibility.
This argument horrified many on Capitol Hill, and in 1994 they passed the Spratt-Furst amendment, which banned the development of weapons of less than five kilotons' yield. But the projects never went away. Each year, the government has allowed research into low-yield weapons, arguing that studying the concept is different from developing the weapon. This May, Congress repealed the Spratt-Furst amendment. Andscientists will need to test devices such as the RNEP before they can certify them. Last week the US government reaffirmed at a UN conference in Vienna its opposition to ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Instead, the Bush administration is seeking funds to ensure that testing could be resumed within 18 months of a go-ahead from the government.
The mini-nuke, the bunker-buster and the agent-defeat weapon are positively cuddly compared to most weapons in the armoury. It suits the labs that their products become more acceptable. They want a bomb they can feel good about. And for the customer, the whole point of the self-deterrence argument is to build bombs you can use without feeling too guilty.
At first sight, the odd one out is the neutron bomb, designed for maximum radiation and a small blast. The idea was floated in the Eighties, but abandoned in the face of popular protest, after it was branded as the bomb that leaves cities standing but kills everyone in them. Its real purpose was to destroy invading Soviet armoured formations without killing millions of West Germans in the process, because it produced minimal fallout. It's a nuclear option that the South Koreans might find acceptable today.
Arguments for the new nuclear weapons change with the political weather. There is less talk of self-deterrence now, and more focus on buried weapons of mass destruction or Afghan-style terrorist tunnel hideouts. But the push from the labs is steady, because it is based on institutional need. "I don't think they fear losing their jobs, but they fear being shunted into non-nuclear work," says Levi. "They will always identify new weapons needs and gaps in the armoury. It's their job. They're like any scientists angling for a grant."
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- north carolina
Duke power tests controversial fuel
10/22/2003
News 14 Carolina
http://www.news14charlotte.com/content/local_news/?ArID=43822&SecID=2
The new fuel containing surplus weapons plutonium will be tested at the Catawba nuclear plant.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- An anti-nuclear group is railing against Duke Power's plans to test a new blend of fuel at its Catawba nuclear plant on Lake Wylie.
The new fuel contains surplus weapons plutonium. If the tests go well, Duke wants to use the fuel at its Catawba and McGuire plants beginning in 2005. The anti-nuclear group named Nuclear Information Resource Services said there should be an environmental impact study before the testing is done.
The group also claimed that Duke Power has no plans to dispose of the fuel waste after it is used in a reactor.
A commission will hear the concerns in December, then decide whether to recommend a hearing on the matter.
-------- tennessee
Tenn. Nuclear Reactor Now Makes Bomb Fuel
October 22, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-TVA-Tritium.html
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- The Watts Bar Nuclear Plant has resumed operation -- making it the only commercial nuclear station in the United States producing both electricity for homes and factories and isotopes for bombs.
The single-reactor station, owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority, was listed at 44 percent of full power and ascending Wednesday, said John Moulton, a TVA spokesman.
``It is operating as it should,'' he said.
Since early September, TVA workers have been installing tritium-producing rods in the reactor while it was being refueled; the plant went back on line Monday night.
Tritium, a hydrogen isotope that enhances the explosive force of thermonuclear weapons, is required for every warhead in the U.S. arsenal.
The government hasn't made tritium since 1988 when its production reactors at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina were closed for operational and safety problems. Meanwhile, the short-lived material was recycled from older weapons.
The Energy Department will begin tapping into its five-year tritium reserve by 2005 without a new supply, although arms control needs could change that.
Despite opposition from private and public sectors, federal and TVA officials say the Watts Bar plant is safe and secure.
``TVA is committed to safe, reliable nuclear operations,'' TVA Chairman Glenn McCullough said. ``And the production of tritium will in no way compromise that commitment.''
Spring City is about 50 miles south of Knoxville.
On the Net:
Tennessee Valley Authority: http://www.tva.gov/
-------- us politics
Senate panel examines Patriot Act
October 22, 2003
By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20031021-104435-4924r.htm
The Justice Department yesterday was criticized for its secretive nature regarding the Patriot Act and chastised by critics who question whether the act is being used to violate civil liberties.
The dismissal of concerns expressed by elected officials and U.S. citizens is "arrogant" and "condescending," said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont Democrat and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Congress established the Patriot Act nearly two years ago to give law enforcement the tools it wanted to track down terrorists. The act has drawn criticism from Capitol Hill and advocacy groups, ranging from the American Conservative Union to the American Civil Liberties Union.
"First Amendment rights or Second Amendment rights or Fifth Amendment rights or any others shouldn't be dismissed in a condescending way by the administration," Mr. Leahy said.
"We have enormous freedoms in this country. If we're going to protect those freedoms, we have to have confidence that the government will respect them," Mr. Leahy said.
Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch, Utah Republican, said he would hold a series of hearings on the Patriot Act to "cut through the rhetoric, confusion and distortion. ..."
Top law enforcement officials testified before the committee about the benefits of the Patriot Act, which Congress passed in response to the September 11 attacks.
Several bills in the House and Senate would revamp the law, which allows "sneak and peak" warrants that delay notices to those being searched, roving wiretaps and other investigative tools.
Several Republicans in the House and Senate have been critical of the act, but Democrats were the only panel members yesterday to criticize the law.
Bush administration officials said the public needs a better understanding of how the Patriot Act works.
"So much of what people are angry about doesn't concern the Patriot Act or doesn't involve it," said Patrick Fitzgerald, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois.
"Sometimes you hear the expression 'If a tree falls in the wood and no one hears it ...'; with the Patriot Act, a tree hasn't fallen but lots of people hear it loudly," he said.
Christopher Wray, chief of the criminal division of the Justice Department, said there is a "level of confusion in the public discourse about what is and is not part of the Patriot Act."
"The Patriot Act, for better or for worse, has become sort of a shorthand for every kind of complaint or criticism that anyone would have with respect to anything to do with terrorism," Mr. Wray said.
Most important, officials said the act removed legal barriers that prevented law enforcement officials from sharing information between intelligence and military communities. Its use has led to 280 criminal charges and 150 convictions.
Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., Delaware Democrat, agreed that criticism has been "overblown" and called the law a "good-faith effort." However, he said he is troubled by the Justice Department's lack of candor.
"At a time when government has increased authority to find out more information about individual citizens, the department has been less and less willing to share basic information about its activities," Mr. Biden said.
--------
BOOKS OF THE TIMES | 'IMPERIAL AMERICA'
A Double-Barreled Attack on American War Policy
October 22, 2003
By CHARLES A. KUPCHAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/22/books/22KUPC.html?pagewanted=all&position=
As the burdens of stabilizing Iraq mount, many Americans are wondering whether their government has gone off course. John Newhouse's indictment of President Bush's foreign policy thus appears at an opportune moment, offering a lucid and accessible account of how he says the administration has done more to imperil the United States than to enhance its security.
Mr. Newhouse begins with the ideas that inform policy, exposing the dangers in the Bush doctrine's twin pillars of preventive war and pre-eminence. By embracing the principle of prevention, Mr. Bush risks mayhem by setting a precedent that individual countries can decide for themselves when to start a war against a suspected threat.
The author says that a doctrine of prevention also hampers democratic oversight by making decisions of war and peace depend on intelligence information not open to public scrutiny. (Several of the intelligence reports that Mr. Bush made public to justify the Iraq war were of dubious reliability.) Mr. Newhouse additionally points out that Mr. Bush's penchant for prevention skews priorities, soaking up resources to rebuild Iraq that should be spent countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
A doctrine of American pre-eminence is similarly problematic. The United States does have uncontested military dominance, but Mr. Bush's exaggeration of "the role and utility of raw military power" has fueled his dismissive attitude toward allies. An illusory sense of omnipotence has also made the administration underestimate the importance of diplomacy, leading to the uncompromising stances that have cost the United States so much good will abroad.
Mr. Newhouse notes that America's standing abroad will begin to recover "only if and when Washington softens its approach to the world by becoming less unilateral and threatening and more inclined to operate with sensitivity to the views of others."
Mr. Newhouse next moves from principle to practice, cataloging the unwelcome effects of Mr. Bush's doctrinal excesses. His critique of the Iraq war contends that Mr. Bush predicated military action on faulty assumptions, bungled prewar diplomacy at the United Nations and failed to prepare for postwar reconstruction. The Democrats come in for their own criticism when he says they were "intimidated, reluctant to take on a president who had with some skill made national security the consuming issue."
In the strongest section of "Imperial America" Mr. Newhouse recounts the lost opportunities arising from Mr. Bush's fixation on Saddam Hussein. The list is long and troubling.
At its top is Pakistan, a country that "is likely to stand out in the years ahead as the single most dangerous place in today's world" because of a volatile mix of nuclear weapons, political instability, terrorist networks and Islamic radicalism, but Washington focused instead on the lesser danger that emanated from Baghdad. The same goes for North Korea. Despite Pyongyang's open efforts to build nuclear weapons, Mr. Bush played down that threat to keep Americans focused on the impending campaign against Iraq.
Meanwhile, Mr. Newhouse contends, the Bush administration missed a chance to recast relations with Iran, a country whose intellectual and social capital gives it the potential to anchor regional stability. After the events of Sept. 11, the Iranian government supported - although tentatively - the American campaign in Afghanistan, and moderates in Tehran were gaining ground against the radical clerics. Nonetheless Mr. Bush branded Iran a member of the axis of evil, undercutting the reformers and scuttling chances for rapprochement between Washington and Tehran.
These lost opportunities are all the more worrisome against the backdrop of the damage that Mr. Bush has done to the Atlantic alliance, Mr. Newhouse says. With the United States and its key partners in Europe already drifting apart before the Iraq war, it remains to be seen whether the alliance survives the strategic rift that has opened across the Atlantic.
Mr. Newhouse's account of the political and ideological sources of these strategic missteps is less compelling than his critique of American policy. He tends to assign a false uniformity to Mr. Bush and his advisers, lumping them together (except Secretary of State Colin L. Powell) as hawkish neoconservatives.
Mr. Newhouse insists, for example, that Mr. Bush "arrived in Washington a convinced unilateralist." But Mr. Bush hails from America's inward-looking heartland, explaining why, before Sept. 11, his isolationist instincts were far more pronounced than his appetite for global dominion. The heartland's distaste for imperial adventure is one of the main reasons Mr. Bush's popularity is now lagging.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz, may both be conservative hawks. But Mr. Rumsfeld, it has been reported, holds a more circumscribed notion of America's role in the world and shares little of Mr. Wolfowitz's enthusiasm for an expansive American effort to bring democracy and pluralism to the greater Middle East. Their disagreements over the scope of the American mission in Iraq contributed to the inadequacy of planning for postwar stabilization.
Mr. Newhouse might have drawn more heavily on his long and distinguished career as a journalist to explore these differences and shed more light on the internal workings of Mr. Bush's foreign policy team. The White House's tight-fisted approach to the flow of information keeps it on message but leaves the American people in the dark about how policy is formulated and how much influence is wielded by key players like Vice President Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser.
Americans need to know more about what goes on behind the scenes if they are to act on Mr. Newhouse's ominous warning that "American military power is constantly growing, although the country's overall security may be declining, if only because its priorities are skewed and unbalanced."
Charles A. Kupchan is a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
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White House Threatens a Veto of Its Own Spending Bill for Iraq
October 22, 2003
By DAVID FIRESTONE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/22/politics/22COST.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 21 - The White House threatened Tuesday to veto its own spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan if Congress made reconstruction aid a loan, taking its most forceful stand on the issue even as more lawmakers supported a reimbursement by Iraq.
After declining to threaten a veto last week before the Senate voted to lend up to $10 billion to Iraq, the White House surprised many people on Capitol Hill with its warning. Some Congressional officials said the administration might have been trying to signal its firm intentions to other countries that are gathering Thursday in Madrid for a conference on aid to Iraq.
Even though Congress was already preparing to drop the Senate loan provision next week, there was also strong evidence of smoldering sentiment against an expensive grant to Iraq, which the administration is struggling to extinguish. A few hours after the veto threat, the House approved a nonbinding reversal of its position last week and urged negotiators to require that Iraq repay the United States for up to $10 billion in aid, as well as improve veterans' health benefits.
The 277-to-139 vote, a stark contrast to the House decision last week to reject the loan provision in the $87 billion spending bill, lacks the force of law and is likely to have little effect on negotiators. But without House leaders' telling members how to vote, such measures can often be a useful barometer of Congressional sentiment.
Combined with the similar Senate vote last week, the House resolution suggested that majorities of both chambers differed with the president on the need to grant billions of dollars to Iraq, even if they ultimately decide under pressure to go along with his request. In the vote on Tuesday, 84 Republicans, including some of the most conservative members, joined almost every Democrat to support the loans.
"We have to borrow that $10 billion ourselves to give it to Iraq as a gift," said Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a conservative Republican from California. "Why don't we let them repay it after 20 years? If we put it in the form of a loan, that way our children won't have to repay this 20 years from now."
The question of whether to lend or grant aid to Iraq has become a touchstone of discomfort with President Bush's postwar policy in Iraq, and the White House has become increasingly insistent on getting its way in the final bill. Last week, without using the word "veto," Mr. Bush called on a series of wavering lawmakers and made it clear that he would not appreciate a vote for a loan.
The statement on Tuesday, after eight Republican senators defied him last week and helped form a majority in favor of a $10 billion loan, was the strongest threat to date.
"If this provision is not removed, the president's senior advisers would recommend that he veto the bill," Joshua B. Bolten, the White House budget director, wrote in a letter to Congressional leaders. "Including a loan mechanism slows efforts to stabilize the region and to relieve pressure on our troops, raises questions about our commitment to building a democratic and self-governing Iraq and impairs our ability to encourage other nations to provide badly needed assistance without saddling Iraq with additional debt."
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Karzai: Terror lingers in Afghanistan
10/22/2003
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2003-10-22-terror-afghanistan_x.htm
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - President Hamid Karzai acknowledged Wednesday that Afghans still "live in fear" nearly two years after the ouster of the Taliban regime, and alleged some forces within the government try to take advantage of the instability.
Speaking at a security conference in the capital Kabul that brought together regional governors and commanders, Karzai said the country remains plagued by the "evil of terrorism" and factional infighting.
"People are not happy with the security situation," he told an audience that also included officers from the NATO-led peacekeeping force and the U.S.-led anti-terror coalition. "People still live in fear."
Karzai said some government officials "create problems for the people" and called on the assembled leaders to "make sure that the people are happy with government officials."
Journalists were only allowed to listen to Karzai's opening remarks, and it wasn't known if he went on to chastise the regional commanders whose long-standing rivalries have often led to bloodshed across the country.
Earlier this month, some of the worst factional fighting broke out near the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, with one side claiming at least 60 had been killed. A cease-fire was negotiated with the help of Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali, and some 300 Kabul police have also been sent to the city to patrol checkpoints.
On Wednesday, Jalali said he welcomed the expansion of the NATO-led peacekeeping troops across the country, following a U.N. Security Council decision to extend their mandate beyond Kabul, and hoped it would improve overall security.
Karzai noted some positive steps taken by his administration, saying the central government has established better contact with regional officials and that salaries of government officials were being paid on time - at least in some provinces.
In the last 18 months, "the government has made successful achievements ... but it still faces failures and problems," he said.
-------- asia
U.S. and Singapore in defense talks
October 22, 2003
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20031021-093502-5287r.htm
SINGAPORE, Oct. 21 -- Singapore and the United States are to begin preliminary talks on an agreement for a strategic cooperation partnership in defense and security.
The two countries have also agreed to create a "Regional Emerging Diseases Intervention Center" to be based close to the National University of Singapore.
U.S. President George Bush, who visited Singapore Tuesday, issued a joint statement with Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, expanding upon the scope of current bilateral cooperation in areas of defense and security.
Channel News Asia said the two leaders discussed several topics, including counter-terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, joint military exercises and training, policy dialogues, and defense technology.
-------- britain
IRA Disarms Further After Britain Schedules N. Ireland Election
By Shawn Pogatchnik
Associated Press
Wednesday, October 22, 2003; Page A30
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61306-2003Oct21.html
BELFAST, Oct. 21 -- In an effort to break a yearlong political deadlock, Britain on Tuesday set a date for elections in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republican Army swiftly responded by disposing of more weapons. But Protestant leaders rejected the IRA move as inadequate to revive the power-sharing government.
Prime Minister Tony Blair's office said the long-delayed elections for the Northern Ireland Assembly would be held Nov. 26. The move was designed to open the way for restoration of a Catholic-Protestant administration in the British province.
John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general overseeing disarmament in Northern Ireland, later confirmed he had overseen the disposal of a substantial amount of the IRA cache, including automatic weapons and explosives, at a secret location Tuesday.
De Chastelain said the IRA had ordered him not to reveal specifics about the type or volume of weapons handled, or the method of disposal. But he said the volume was higher than in the October 2001 and April 2002 disarmaments.
Protestant leaders condemned the level of secrecy and called it a deal-breaker.
The Ulster Unionist Party leader, David Trimble, said the IRA had "foolishly imposed obligations of confidentiality" on de Chastelain. He urged the IRA to allow the general to reveal more and thereby "repair the damage that has been done to the process this afternoon."
Trimble said that unless the IRA offered more detailed commitments to disarm fully and cease being a threat to stability in Northern Ireland, he would not allow his party to revive any administration involving Sinn Fein, the political party linked to the IRA.
The crisis-prone coalition, built from the Good Friday peace accord of 1998, collapsed last October after police accused Sinn Fein's top legislative aide of helping gather intelligence on potential IRA targets. Critics said the outlawed group was keeping open the option of resuming the separatist campaign that claimed more than 3,600 lives from 1970 to 1997.
Two brief statements from the IRA confirmed the latest disarmament move but did not offer any of the promises sought by other parties to the 1998 deal. In particular, the Ulster Unionists have insisted the IRA stop recruiting and training, gathering intelligence on potential targets and beating up opponents in its power-base neighborhoods.
In a speech Tuesday, the Sinn Fein leader, Gerry Adams, offered his firmest commitment yet that the IRA would disarm and gradually fade away as a threat to Northern Ireland stability.
"The IRA leadership wants the full and irreversible implementation of the Good Friday agreement in all its aspects and they are determined that their strategies and actions will be consistent with this objective," Adams said.
-------- business
Stealthy, All-Weather Cruise Missile Deployed To B-52 Squadrons
Oct 22, 2003
Space Daily
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/missiles-03p.html
The Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM), developed by Lockheed Martin has been certified by both the JASSM Joint Program Office and the B-52 Systems Program Office to meet warfighter requirements and is now ready for operational use. This major milestone represents a dramatically increased capability for warfighting aircrews.
"JASSM provides the Air Force with kick-the-door-down capability," according to Gerry Freisthler, director of the Air Armament Center's Lethal Strike project office at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla.
"Shrinking force structure, increasing tasking, improving threats and the need to conserve precious lives and assets drive a demand for a standoff, precision strike capability in the conduct of 21st century air operations. JASSM combines several key attributes not available in other cruise missiles needed to satisfy these needs: cost effectiveness, accuracy, flexibility and responsiveness from a tasking perspective and high survivability."
JASSM brings new capability to the warfighter: survivability, lethality and long-range precision strike, at an affordable price. JASSM also offers unprecedented safety because it is an insensitive munition. JASSM is a 2,000- pound class weapon with a dual-mode penetrator and blast fragmentation warhead.
JASSM cruises autonomously in adverse weather, day or night, using a state-of-the-art infrared seeker in addition to the anti-jam Global Positioning System (GPS) to find a specific aim point on the target unlike the current generation of cruise missiles.
Its stealthy airframe makes it extremely difficult for enemy defenses to detect and engage. In addition to the B-52, the missile is planned for deployment on B-1, B-2, F-16 and F/A-18 aircraft and has a range greater than 200 miles.
Lockheed Martin recently delivered the 42nd JASSM to the U.S. Air Force B- 52 bomber community at Barksdale AFB, La., and at Whiteman AFB, Mo. This missile delivery, along with the supporting personnel training and technical data to support sustained JASSM operations, satisfies a Required Assets Available (RAA) prerequisite for an Air Force combat unit Initial Operational Capability (IOC).
The U.S. Government requested that 42 of the first 76 missiles delivered for Lot 1 go to the B-52 bomber community to fill its RAA need by the end of September 2003. Lockheed Martin fulfilled that request on September 24, 2003. This delivery marks the successful completion of a warfighter requirement documented in the Operational Requirements Document (ORD) and a Lockheed Martin commitment to the warfighter made more than four years ago.
"Lockheed Martin clearly demonstrated its commitment to the warfighter and to the success of the program by meeting the RAA," said Randy Bigum, vice president, Strike Weapons at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control.
"We accelerated our delivery in order to support the warfighters' critical need for cruise missiles. JASSM will likely be employed in the first strike of the first day of a conflict. Further, the missile will be employed against selected high-value heavily defended targets throughout the war. The missile's remarkable effectiveness reduces the number of weapons required to destroy a given target set."
Low Rate Initial Production of Lots 1 and 2 began in late 2001 and will continue through 2004. A Milestone III Full Rate Production decision is planned for early 2004. The U.S. Air Force expects to procure 3,700 JASSMs over the life of the program, while the U.S. Navy's initial procurement of 453 JASSMs starts in FY 2007.
JASSM is produced at Lockheed Martin's all up round facility in Troy, Ala.
"Our production crews have been building JASSMs in Troy since late 1999 and have been extremely successful in getting to production rates during EMD," said Mike Inderhees, JASSM program director at Lockheed Martin.
"We are very proud of the commitment we have seen from the entire JASSM team. The 20 JASSM key suppliers, our electronics and seekers production team in Ocala, Fla., and the Troy production team, responsible for production of the final assembly, test, and pack out, all delivered and made RAA commitments early. When the state-of-the-art facility reaches full-rate production of JASSM, it will produce approximately one missile each day and is currently scheduled to continue producing JASSMs until 2014."
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General Dynamics halts BAE merger talks
October 22, 2003
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20031022-092134-1070r.htm
LONDON, Oct. 22 -- General Dynamics reportedly has broken off transatlantic merger talks with BAE Systems after an intensive round with its British rival.
Although BAE has acknowledged talking to five prime American defense contractors about a merger, the discussions with General Dynamics were the most advanced, the Financial Times said. The breakdown comes after similar cooling of interest from Boeing and Lockheed-Martin.
There was no official word of the impasse. A BAE official would only say the company remained committed to expansion in the United States, where it now generates nearly a quarter of its revenues, either through continued internal growth or a large merger.
The decision to end talks came after a low-profile visit to London earlier this month by Nicholas Chabraja, General Dynamics' chief executive. The company is said to have expressed intense interest in BAE's profitable and fast-growing North American operations, but less enthusiastic about acquiring its British businesses, includng BAE's troubled Astute submarine and Nimrod patrol aircraft programs.
----
Democrats show Iraq gas price list in contract probe
October 22, 2003
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20031021-104448-5886r.htm
Democratic lawmakers released a letter from Iraq's national oil company yesterday, confirming it pays far less to import gasoline than Halliburton, the Texas contractor that buys petroleum goods for Iraqis with U.S. government money.
Halliburton said it has no choice but to charge Washington more because its contract with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers requires only short-term deals.
Iraq's State Oil Marketing Organization said it pays between 90 and 98 cents per gallon to buy oil from neighboring countries and transport it throughout Iraq.
Halliburton charges the government $1.59 and then receives a markup that could boost the price to $1.62 to $1.70, according to Democratic Reps. Henry A. Waxman of California and John D. Dingell of Michigan, who released information supplied by the Iraqi company.
Mr. Waxman and Mr. Dingell have persistently criticized Halliburton's role in Iraq, contending it is gouging the U.S. Treasury while profiting on a no-bid contract to restore the country's oil industry.
Vice President Dick Cheney formerly headed the company, whose KBR subsidiary has earned $1.59 billion so far in the Iraq oil contract. The Army Corps of Engineers said it soon will replace the Halliburton contract with two contracts awarded through competitive bidding.
Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall said in a written statement that KBR's costs are higher because the company's contracts for gasoline, transportation, depot storage or labor cannot last longer than 30 days.
"Simple economics dictate that companies who are not bound by these guidelines, and are able to negotiate price on a long-term contract basis, can negotiate lower prices," the statement said.
She added, "Based on the entire picture, to allege that KBR is overcharging for this needed service insults the KBR employees who are performing this dangerous mission to help bring fuel to the people of Iraq."
Miss Hall also noted the company's 2 percent add-on fee is less than the markup for products at a local gas station or supermarket.
The letter from the Iraqi company, which included a price list, was signed by its general manager, Mohammed M. Al-Jibouri. The list said the price of gasoline from next-door Turkey was about 98 cents a gallon, and other prices were as low as 90 cents, depending on the gasoline's point of origin and where in Iraq it was delivered.
Mr. Waxman and Mr. Dingell said in a letter to the Corps of Engineers that some of the money paid to Halliburton is from the Development Fund for Iraq. That is the successor to the Oil for Food Program, which the United Nations set up for humanitarian reasons during the dozen years Iraq was under international sanctions for failing to carry out U.N. resolutions.
The lawmakers contended that money from the fund has been "squandered by paying inflated prices to Halliburton."
Mr. Waxman and Mr. Dingell asked the Corps to investigate whether Halliburton is overcharging U.S. taxpayers, to seek reimbursement for any inflated amounts and, if overcharges were confirmed, to disqualify Halliburton from the planned replacement contracts.
Robert Faletti, a Corps spokesman, said the Halliburton contract is audited continuously, and no problems have been uncovered.
"If they are overcharging, we will take appropriate action," he said.
Mr. Faletti also confirmed that the humanitarian fund is used to help pay for the oil imports, but said this was a decision by the U.S.-run reconstruction authority.
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New Information May Bolster Questions on Halliburton
October 22, 2003
By NEELA BANERJEE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/22/business/worldbusiness/22hal.html?pagewanted=all&position=
The head of an Iraqi oil agency said yesterday that his group had been trucking in gasoline and other fuel to Iraq for considerably less money than Halliburton, which has so far received more than $700 million from the Army Corps of Engineers to stave off shortages there.
Separately, a report earlier this month by the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan public policy research arm, warned that the Corps of Engineers might be paying too much to import fuel.
The disclosures support assertions by two senior House Democrats, Representatives Henry A. Waxman of California and John D. Dingell of Michigan, that Halliburton may be overcharging American taxpayers and Iraqis. The lawmakers sent a letter to the head of the Corps of Engineers yesterday asking it to look into the price disparity between the Iraqi agency's imports and Halliburton's.
The letter also noted new information released by the corps that most of the money to buy the fuel had come from a fund established by the United Nations meant to provide humanitarian aid to Iraq. The fund is under American control.
"Although it initially appeared that Halliburton was gouging only American taxpayers," the lawmakers said in the letter to Lt. Gen. Robert B. Flowers, head of the Corps of Engineers, "it now seems that the company is overcharging the humanitarian Oil for Food program and the Iraqi people as well. This significantly compounds the implications of Halliburton's actions."
Halliburton, which is paid a fee of 2 percent of the cost of the fuel it delivers, has strongly denied the accusation of overcharging, if not the pricing cited by the lawmakers. It contends that it buys fuel by soliciting competitive bids and that the high cost stems from the price of transporting and distributing fuel in a volatile country. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American-led civil administration in Iraq, have so far stood by Halliburton.
But Iraq's State Oil Marketing Organization is now importing fuel, too, and from the same countries nearby as Halliburton. An Oct. 16 fax from the agency to the House Committee on Government Reform, where Mr. Waxman is the ranking Democrat, indicates that the Iraqis are bringing in gasoline at a much lower price than is Halliburton.
Halliburton said in response to the Congressional letter last week that it charges $1.59 a gallon for its gasoline imports, which includes the 2 percent profit margin. In the fax, the Iraqi marketing organization's general manager, Mohammed al-Jibouri, said that gasoline from Turkey costs $347 a metric ton delivered to Baghdad, which he said translates to about 98 cents a gallon.
Halliburton did not dispute that the Iraqis were buying fuel for a much lower price, saying instead that the nature of the company's contracts with the Corps of Engineers made it harder to get a better price from suppliers. The corps did not respond to an e-mail message seeking comment on the contract conditions.
Referring to a Halliburton unit working in Iraq, Wendy Hall, a Halliburton spokeswoman, said in an e-mail message from Houston that "contractually, KBR has been prevented from procuring fuel contracts for longer than a 30-day period."
"In addition," she said, "all services and their associated costs to execute the mission are subject to the same 30-day procurement limit, including trucks, trailers, depots and labor. Simple economics dictate that companies who are not bound by these guidelines, and are able to negotiate price on a long-term contract basis, can negotiate lower prices."
The Corps of Engineers has shown on its Web site that most of the money paid to Halliburton to import the petroleum products has until now come from the Development Fund for Iraq, established by the United Nations Security Council to give the American-led occupying authority control over money Iraq had earned under the Oil for Food program.
But in its supplemental financing package for Iraq, the Bush administration has asked Congress to approve $900 million for fuel imports.
The Congressional Research Service said in its memorandum, on Oct. 8, that the request for $900 million to import fuel to Iraq suggested that the Coalition Provisional Authority "is asking for substantially more money than is called for by current fuel prices in the Persian Gulf trading area."
Based in part on that memo, two other Democrats, Senators Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota and Ron Wyden of Oregon, have added an amendment to strip away $200 million for fuel imports from the Senate-passed version of the $20.3 billion supplemental finance bill. That would be in line with the $197 million to $249 million the Congressional Research Service memo says the government may be overpaying for fuel.
The memo includes a caveat that costs for delivery and particularly distribution could add greatly to the total price of fuel imports. And Halliburton has argued that the costs of its imports are high because it "incurs costs for transportation, storage, distribution, quality assurance and labor required to manage the operation." Halliburton also implied in its statement last week that security concerns contributed to the $1.59-a-gallon cost of gasoline.
American taxpayers foot most of the bill; Iraqis pay 4 cents to 15 cents a gallon at the pump.
"Based on the entire picture," Ms. Hall of Halliburton wrote in her e-mail message, "to allege that KBR is overcharging for this needed service insults the KBR employees who are performing this dangerous mission to help bring fuel to the people of Iraq. The drivers transporting the fuel face the real risk of being killed or wounded, and vehicles and contents being destroyed.''
The 2 percent fee, she added, "is less than the markup for products at a local gas station or supermarket."
Yet in an e-mail message to staff members of the House committee, the Washington office of the Coalition Provisional Authority suggested that Halliburton and the Iraqi marketing agency do not seem to have different security and distribution costs.
The message quoted Larry Rogers, deputy for program management at Team Rio, the Corps of Engineers-led project to rebuild the Iraqi oil industry, as saying that Halliburton and the Iraqi agency's oil "are generally being delivered to the same depots and distribution systems." The message also says that "fuel truck convoys are required to be escorted by coalition military forces regardless of ownership."
But Mr. Jibouri, the Iraqi marketing group's chief, said by telephone from Baghdad that the 98 cents a gallon it pays for the priciest gasoline it imports "includes everything."
"The contractor we sign with is obliged to buy the gasoline and deliver it into our depots," he said. "There are no extra costs."
What explains the difference between the Halliburton and Iraqi prices? "They are not actually accustomed to this business," Mr. Jibouri said. "They probably don't know the region that well. We know the area very well. We used to sell petroleum products to the people we now buy from."
-------- iraq
U.S. Reports Increase in Daily Attacks in Iraq
October 22, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The commander of U.S. forces in Iraq said Wednesday the number of attacks against American troops in Iraq is increasing.
During a press conference, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez said the average of 20 to 25 attacks daily had increased over the last three weeks ``to a peak of 35 attacks a day.'' He did not elaborate.
Ambush bombers struck Wednesday in the center of Baghdad and in the tense Sunni Muslim area west of the capital, as the commander of American forces reported an increase in attacks against occupation troops.
The Baghdad attack caused light casualties, a U.S. officer at the scene reported. Witnesses said four Americans were carried away on stretchers after a strike on a three-vehicle convoy on the western end of the flashpoint city Fallujah, but there was no comment from U.S. officials. Residents cheered and looted one of the vehicles.
In the north, U.S. troops of the 4th Infantry Division staged overnight raids around the cities of Tikrit and Baqouba. U.S. officers said an Iraqi major general, who was not identified, was seized in the Baqouba operation.
Ten suspects, including six ``targeted individuals,'' were detained in the Tikrit area, the military said.
In the southern city of Najaf, a small band of gunmen staged a midnight attack on the headquarters of a leading Shiite Muslim political organization, but no casualties were reported, said a spokesman for the group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI).
The spokesman, who identified himself as Abu Ahmed, said four of six attackers were captured and admitted they were loyalists of the Baath Party of ousted President Saddam Hussein.
During years of Shiite suppression under Saddam, the SCIRI group fueled opposition to the Baghdad government from exile. Since Saddam's fall last April, it has taken a prominent role in the postwar political transition inside Iraq.
The homemade bomb in Baghdad exploded as a three-Humvee convoy passed through a tunnel under Tayeran Square, already crowded at 6:45 a.m. The blast, whose sound reverberated through central Baghdad, lightly wounded two 1st Armored Division soldiers and damaged a Humvee, the division's Capt. Tommy Leslie said.
Local residents said U.S. Army convoys had been repeatedly targeted in the tunnel.
``It's always the same,'' said traffic policeman Adnan Khadim. ``They should stop using the tunnel.''
A U.S. Army Humvee could be seen burning on the western edge of Fallujah, where one American paratrooper was killed and six were wounded in an ambush Monday. Witnesses said a roadside bomb exploded Wednesday morning as the convoy passed.
The witnesses who saw Americans evacuated could not determine the extent of the injuries. After looting an abandoned vehicle, residents set it on fire as one man fired pistol shots into the wreckage in a sign of contempt.
Meanwhile, in Khaldiyah, just west of Fallujah, hundreds of Iraqis protested to demand the release of two women arrested in raids this week. Protesters said U.S. troops raided the home of a former Iraqi army officer but when they failed to find him, they detained his wife and mother. There was no comment from U.S. officials.
The continuing attacks on the U.S. occupation army came as Washington prepared for a conference in Madrid on Thursday and Friday to win international aid to rebuild Iraq -- help the Americans hope will eventually be accompanied by foreign troop reinforcements.
Sanchez acknowledged Wednesday that he was concerned over the coalition's rate of progress in restoring order.
``We are making progress, but we need to accelerate it, and accomplish it across all lines of operation -- economic, political, security,'' the U.S. commander said. ``Once we get economic progress and law and order capacity built in the country, that will go a long ways toward re-establishing a safe and secure environment in Iraq. If we get unemployed back to working, that will contribute to eliminating some of the anti-coalition forces throughout the country. Those are really key things.''
In Najaf, the SCIRI spokesman said guards returned fire after the main office came under attack around midnight Tuesday. The fighting lasted about an hour, and the situation in Najaf was reported calm Wednesday morning.
The alleged Baathist attack was a shift from the kind of violence troubling Iraq's majority Shiite community, whose newly resurgent political-religious organizations have been vying for power and control of mosques.
In the latest development in inter-Shiite violence, Iraqi police backed by U.S. coalition troops raided a mosque before dawn Tuesday in the holy city of Karbala, arresting dozens in a clampdown on Shiite Muslim militants.
The Karbala trouble began a week ago over ownership of a bus, but reflects a power struggle between armed followers of militant Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who demands an immediate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, and gunmen loyal to religious leaders who take a more moderate stand toward the Americans.
Al-Sadr's group occupied a mosque in the shrine city amid clashes that officials of the U.S.-led coalition said left three Iraqis dead and 50 wounded.
Endorsed by Karbala's senior clerics, Iraq's interim Governing Council decided to take action against the al-Sadr forces, said interim Interior Minister Nori al-Badran.
The raid went smoothly, he said. ``All the gunmen surrendered with their weapons. Twenty-one people were arrested. Another 20 guarding outside the mosque were arrested, too.''
Associated Press writers Tarek al-Issawi in Fallujah and Katarina Kratovac in Tikrit contributed to this report.
--------
In Shiite Slum, Army's New Caution
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 22, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A61584-2003Oct21?language=printer
BAGHDAD -- Lt. Denny Vigil points the barrel of his M-4 carbine out the driver's side door of a Humvee. His eyes scan the storefronts and the rooftops. He and his men used to stop and walk through the busy markets of Sadr City, Baghdad's vast Shiite Muslim slum. But now they stay buttoned up in their vehicles with mounted machine guns and go out on patrol only with M1-A1 Abrams tanks leading the way.
"The older people were giving me that look, 'What's the need for all this?' " Vigil said on the move one day last week. "They know something is going on."
Everything changed for the Army's 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment 13 days ago, when a U.S. patrol was ambushed by hundreds of armed men presumed to be followers of Moqtada Sadr, the young Shiite cleric who has denounced the U.S. occupation of Iraq and called for creation of a Shiite state.
Despite the Oct. 9 encounter, which killed two Americans and two Iraqis, the regiment's commanders say they believe they are still winning a war against Sadr for the hearts and minds of 2 million residents packed into a garbage-strewn quarter of Baghdad named for Sadr's father, a revered cleric assassinated in 1999, allegedly by Saddam Hussein's government. But there is little question that the climate in Sadr City is different than it was during the regiment's first six postwar months here, which passed without a combat fatality.
"We used to walk around, talk to the kids, drink [tea] with the old guys. Not no more," said Sgt. Gary Frisbee.
In important ways, the tenuous state of affairs in Sadr City has become a microcosm of the Bush administration's efforts throughout Iraq. The ambush, and the car bombing of an Iraqi police station on the same day, have overshadowed six months of civic works and what military officials regarded as slow but steady progress. The situation here also highlights the fine line the military must walk in all parts of Iraq between aggressive deterrence against myriad adversaries and excessive force that angers the Iraqi people.
"We remind the commanders all the time that this is a thinking man's war," said Maj. George Sarabia, executive officer of the regiment's 2nd Squadron. "The center of gravity is the attitude of the Shia population. What the enemy is trying to do is get us to overreact."
Like U.S. military forces across much of Iraq, Sarabia's squadron is spread thin, trying to secure Sadr City, an area measuring 3-by-41/3 miles, with 800 troops supported by a 160-soldier military police company. The squadron employs 60 Iraqi interpreters who accompany every patrol and has two Iraqi Americans who work for the Pentagon and have government clearance to translate sensitive documents and interpret during interrogations.
"If you have 2 million people, and 1 percent is against you, that's 20,000 people," Sarabia said. "If only one-tenth of 1 percent is against you, that's 2,000 -- they still outnumber us."
A Show of Force
The morning after the Oct. 9 ambush, three mortar shells landed on Camp Marlboro, the cigarette factory that serves as the squadron's headquarters. Within an hour, U.S. military commanders sent 20 tanks rumbling through the streets of Sadr City in a show of force. Two companies of 14 tanks each and one company of 14 Bradley Fighting Vehicles have since been attached to the squadron.
When community leaders met with commanders the day after the ambush and asked them to cease patrols in Sadr City for two days so that people could mourn the two Iraqis killed when U.S. forces returned fire, U.S. commanders refused. "Nobody will tell us how to go about providing a safe and secure environment," Sarabia said.
Last week, Sadr's followers took over a building used by Sadr City's newly created district council, one of nine such advisory groups in Baghdad that occupation officials say are important first steps toward self-governance. The Sadr followers declared the building home to a new Shiite government.
Within hours, the military had the building surrounded with armored vehicles. By mid-afternoon, with the building cordoned off, the Americans used part of the newly reconstituted Iraqi police force to detain the squatters.
Sarabia, 37, a West Point graduate with a master's degree from Princeton, said he believed most people in Sadr City welcomed the iron-fisted approach toward Sadr's militiamen. He said citizens see them as thugs and intimidators. But with tanks moving on the ground and armed helicopters in the sky, it remains to be seen how the military's show of force will play in the streets.
"We got a lot of bad looks yesterday, down in that area where the Cav got ambushed," Sgt. Steven Fennell said Friday morning during a patrol by the 549th Military Police Company. "It's just hard for me to believe that some people either don't want your help or don't realize that you're not here to hinder them in any way."
Fennell and his fellow MPs can drive through Sadr City without tank escorts because their Humvees are armored. Still, they ride with their weapons fully loaded and at the ready.
On Friday, their first stop was the Iraqi police station that was struck by the car bomb on the day of the ambush. Its courtyard was still strewn with wreckage.
"Do they have enough weapons here at this station?" Sgt. Jauquin Reyna asked through his Iraqi interpreter.
"Not enough," replied the Iraqi officer in charge. "And we don't have enough pistols to protect ourselves."
"Tell them we appreciate what they've done, and we want to support them as much as possible, and we'll continue to come by and monitor," Reyna directed his interpreter. Before leaving, he asked the Iraqi officer if anyone at the station had any idea who was responsible for the bombing.
"We have no idea about that -- people who want to spoil everything," the officer said.
Commanders readily acknowledge that the U.S. military's handle on Sadr City is less than firm. Not only do they still not know who was responsible for the bombing at the police station, they also do not know precisely who orchestrated the sophisticated ambush, though they say they believe it was carried out by Sadr loyalists.
Motioning Humvees to Stop
That attack began when a group of women and children motioned to a patrol of Humvees to stop. As soon as several soldiers got out of the vehicles, which had mounted machine guns, Iraqi men with AK-47 assault rifles fired several shots at them. When the soldiers returned fire, jumped back inside their vehicles and started to drive away, hundreds of Iraqis on the street, in alleys and on rooftops opened fire with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades.
Staff Sgt. Christopher Swisher, who was commanding the lead vehicle, was shot in the head almost immediately and killed. Pvt. Sean Silva, in the second vehicle, was also killed when he was shot in the head. Four others were wounded, but all three vehicles somehow made it out of a 600-yard gantlet of fire.
Frisbee, in the third vehicle with Vigil, remembered waiting to die. "I knew it was over, it was just a matter of when," he said. "You're busying yourself, because you're just waiting for the bullet to hit you. It felt like it took two hours to get down that road."
In fact, Frisbee was hit by a bullet. It struck the Kevlar plate in his body armor.
"It was a setup from the get-go," said Capt. Stacey Corn, the patrol's troop commander. "We've been here for six months. They've had a long time to plan. They've 'reconned' us -- they knew when we saw women and children asking for help, we're going to stop."
Corn said he now feels betrayed by ordinary Iraqis, who were on the street that night but did nothing to warn the patrol. Before that, he said, Iraqis had gone out of their way to warn U.S. soldiers about far less serious threats.
'We Are Making Headway'
No one in the 2nd Squadron saw the ambush coming. The soldiers had spent their first six months in Sadr City following a textbook strategy that combined civic works with regular patrols aimed at building bridges to the community.
Maj. Arthur Vidal, who heads the 411th Civil Affairs Battalion, has a long list of more than $2 million in rehabilitation projects completed in Sadr City, including 13 soccer fields, six athletic complexes, numerous police stations and government buildings, and a Bechtel Corp. project called Operation Quick Fix that rehabilitated 100 schools.
"We have made a positive impact, but we're not foolish enough to think that everyone loves us," Vidal said. "People are still looking for what we're doing. And we are making headway. You can see it any night on the soccer fields right behind us. A street that was strewn with dead donkeys, garbage and God knows what else is now filled with athletic facilities -- and is cleaned up regularly."
Some of his men have doubts. "The continuing problem that we have is selling the work that we're doing and selling our side of the story," said Staff Sgt. Peter Farnum. "The people who are out there trying to discredit us are doing an incredible job. They're very much down at the local level, and it's very difficult when all of the mosques are broadcasting anti-American stuff."
Information is a constant problem. The rumor mill here is particularly strong, and informants often hide their motivations for turning people in. When rumors filled the streets on Oct. 9 that a car bomb had been spotted in the vicinity of the headquarters for Sadr's followers in Sadr City, U.S. troops in Humvees responded immediately. That, in turn, triggered immediate rumors that the Americans were surrounding the Sadr headquarters -- and may have led to the ambush that followed that night.
"Did Moqtada Sadr say, 'We're going to have an ambush'?" Sarabia said. "It doesn't really work that way. Maybe this is a precursor to something larger -- it's hard to say. But we just don't want to lash out on some hunch. Everybody's got a theory, and they usually have an ax to grind. We can be patient."
"It's a fight," added Capt. William Poole, commander of the 549th Military Police Company, "between Moqtada Sadr and the coalition. So far, I think we're winning, but it's a very tenuous thing."
-------- israel / palestine
Israel to Keep Building Barrier Despite U.N. Censure
October 22, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast.html
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel vowed Wednesday to press on with construction of its vast barrier cutting into Palestinian territory in the West Bank despite a U.N. resolution demanding it be torn down.
``The fence will continue being built and we will go on taking care of the security of Israel's citizens,'' Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Israel Radio, reaffirming the position of Israel's right-leaning government.
Late Tuesday, the U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling the sprawling network of fences and walls a ``contradiction to international law'' and ordering Israel to ``stop and reverse'' its construction on Palestinian lands.
Olmert said the Israeli government would defy what he called ``the dictates of an automatic, hostile, inconsiderate and misguided (U.N.) majority that always acts against Israel.''
Israel says it is a security fence to keep out suicide bombers. Palestinians call it a new ``Berlin Wall'' that cuts deep into territory they want for a state. The United States, Israel's chief ally, has expressed misgivings about the project.
The U.N. resolution said the barrier could imperil efforts to reach a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as called for in a U.S.-backed peace plan, which has been stalled by persistent tit-for-tat violence.
Two days after deadly air strikes in Gaza, Israeli forces killed three militants in the West Bank Wednesday, including a local leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). It vowed a ``painful response with bombs and bullets.''
Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat told Reuters: ``The Israeli statement reflects an Israeli determination to continue violating international law and continue the path of occupation and settlement rather than peace and reconciliation.''
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said in an interview last week that Israel would complete the barrier -- which will eventually run 350 km (210 miles) -- despite a U.S. threat to reduce $9 billion in loan guarantees to the Jewish state.
Washington is concerned the project prejudges borders that should be decided in negotiations.
U.N. VOTE
Arab states took the dispute to an emergency session of the 191-nation General Assembly after the United States last week vetoed a similar measure in the 15-nation Security Council.
Tuesday's vote on the resolution was 144-4 with 12 abstentions. The United States and Israel voted ``no.''
Unlike the U.N. Security Council, the General Assembly is not empowered to pass resolutions that are legally binding and acts more as a bellwether of world opinion.
The vote capped six hours of haggling between European Union and Arab governments over the text of the measure, which initially had been drafted by Palestinian U.N. envoy Nasser al-Kidwa and took a harsher line against Israeli actions.
U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte said last week the measure he vetoed was biased against Israel.
EU diplomats said Tuesday's resolution was far more balanced since it condemned a suicide bombing that killed 21 people in the Israeli city of Haifa on October 4. It also criticized Israeli settlement building and land confiscation.
Wednesday, Israeli forces focused on the West Bank after air strikes in the Gaza Strip Monday in which hospital officials said 10 Palestinians were killed, most of them civilians. The Gaza attacks drew international criticism.
Soldiers shot dead a PFLP member in Hebron and another militant in Qalqilya, the army and Palestinian sources said. Military sources said troops later shot dead a gunman after he wounded two Jewish settlers in an ambush in Hebron.
Israeli tanks and troops also rolled into the West Bank city of Ramallah overnight, encircling a mosque and firing at stone-throwers before withdrawing several hours later. Medical officials said 16 Palestinians were wounded.
--------
Israelis, Palestinians Differ on Strike
Associated Press
Wednesday, October 22, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61305-2003Oct21.html
JERUSALEM, Oct. 21 -- The Israeli military and Palestinian witnesses offered conflicting versions Tuesday of an airstrike in the Gaza Strip, as thousands of mourners called for revenge for the deaths of seven Palestinians purportedly killed in the attack.
Palestinians said the dead were civilians killed by an Israeli missile fired into a crowd at the Nuseirat refugee camp. Their flag-wrapped bodies were carried on stretchers through the shantytown as the crowd chanted a threat to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon: "Sharon, wait, wait, you have opened Hell's gate."
Explaining the airstrike, one of five Monday that killed a total of 11 people, Israel said helicopters fired two missiles at a car carrying militants of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, and that two men inside were killed. The army released a video showing two missiles hitting the car about a minute apart. No one appeared to be near the vehicle.
"We will not allow munitions to be launched when there is a massive gathering of people," said a senior air force officer.
The grainy video showed a crowd gathering around the car about two minutes after the second strike, and the video ended 40 seconds later. The Palestinians said a third missile caused the deaths. The military said 10 more minutes were recorded but did not release the footage.
-------- mideast
Sudan peace deal near
October 22, 2003
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20031022-104852-7850r.htm
KHARTOUM, Sudan, Oct. 22 -- The Sudanese government and the separatist Sudan People's Liberation Army agreed Wednesday to reach a peace deal to end the civil war by December.
Deputy President Ali Othamn Taha and SPLA leader John Garang said they were committed to sign a peace deal at the end of the year after talks with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powel at the Kenyan resort town of Nivasha.
Powell, who arrived in Kenya Tuesday, said President George W. Bush will host the peace signing ceremony at the White House.
Washington has been deeply involved in Sudanese peace talks taking place in Kenya.
Powell said the U.S. administration will not let the antagonist parties miss the opportunity to achieve peace in Sudan.
Khartoum and the SPLA have reached an initial agreement to give southern Sudan's inhabitants the right of self-determination after a six-year transitional period.
The SPLA under Garang, a former Sudan army officer, has been fighting against the Muslim-dominated government in Khartoum for secession of the mainly Christian and Animist southern part of the country.
-------- space
China Launches Satellite Developed with Brazil
REUTERS CHINA:
October 22, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/22614/newsDate/22-Oct-2003/story.htm
BEIJING - Less than a week after putting its first man into space, China launched a satellite yesterday jointly developed with Brazil to study the Earth's surface, the official Xinhua news agency said.
State television said the launch was a success and the satellite had achieved orbit.
The satellite, the second of four scientific research satellites China and Brazil are planning, was launched atop a Long March IV B carrier rocket from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in the northern province of Shanxi.
Last week, China became just the third nation behind the United States and the former Soviet Union to successfully send a man into orbit. Its Shenzhou V capsule landed safely in Inner Mongolia on Thursday after circling the globe 14 times.
China and Brazil launched their first Earth Resources Satellite, developed at a cost of $300 million, in October 1999 to gather information on the environment, agriculture, urban planning and water pollution.
The satellite launched yesterday, also aimed at collecting environmental data, would be controlled by China for one and a half years and by Brazil for the remainder of its two-year life span, the China Daily said.
-------- spies
CIA declined intelligence, former official says
October 22, 2003
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20031021-104441-3039r.htm
The CIA and the Iraq Survey Group failed to pursue information that Iraq smuggled uranium to Iran five years ago, according to a former State Department official.
The former Reagan administration official, Michael Ledeen, said in an interview that the CIA also blocked the Pentagon from pursuing contacts with an Iranian informant who provided information that "saved lives" of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
The reason the CIA did not want to pursue the leads or have any contacts with two Iranian exiles is that the information and meetings were brokered by Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian exile who was a key figure in the 1980s Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages deal, Mr. Ledeen said.
Mr. Ledeen was a Pentagon and National Security Council staff consultant at the time.
"The CIA never spoke to the people who claim to have [smuggled the uranium] and never went to the people who had the information," said Mr. Ledeen, a counterterrorism adviser to President Reagan's first secretary of state, Alexander Haig. "There was no investigation of this."
Mr. Ledeen said David Kay, the CIA's representative to the Iraq Survey Group, searching for Saddam Hussein's hidden weapons, was told of the uranium smuggling and planned to probe it, but the CIA dissuaded the investigators from pursuing the lead.
Mr. Ledeen said he knows Mr. Ghorbanifar and views him as a credible source of valuable information about the inner workings of the Iranian government.
A man in Iraq identified only as "an Iraqi Shi'ite" learned of the uranium smuggling from several people involved in the Iraqi government effort, Mr. Ledeen said.
The Iraqi Shi'ite contacted Mr. Ghorbanifar, who in turn contacted Mr. Ledeen. The Iraqi was pursuing the information with the hope of getting a reward the U.S. government has announced it is offering to people who help find hidden arms.
The information came from several Iraqis who say they are suffering from radiation sickness as a result of handling an unspecified amount of uranium sent to Iran five years ago.
U.S. officials said the CIA is reluctant to investigate claims about uranium because of the recent furor over intelligence regarding reports of Saddam trying to buy uranium from Niger.
Regarding the Afghanistan intelligence, Mr. Ledeen said that in December 2001, two Pentagon officials met with another Iranian informant in Rome who provided detailed information on Iranian government activities against the United States in Afghanistan.
The information was used by the Pentagon to protect troops and conduct operations against al Qaeda and Taliban forces.
"The information saved American lives," Mr. Ledeen said.
A CIA spokesman denied Mr. Ledeen's claim on the uranium but admitted the agency does not trust Mr. Ghorbanifar.
"We aggressively pursue all legitimate leads on weapons of mass destruction," chief CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said.
"It is true that we have no interest in meeting Mr. Ghorbanifar since he long ago was proven to be a fabricator and someone who sought to peddle false information for financial gain," Mr. Harlow said.
Mr. Ghorbanifar was a central figure in the Reagan administration's covert operation to provide arms to Iran in exchange for Tehran's help in winning the release of U.S. hostages held by Muslim terrorists in Lebanon.
The operation led to resignations of senior officials and numerous congressional and legal investigations.
"I think the main reason [the CIA] didn't go look for these people [who claim to have smuggled the uranium] is because it was preferable not to find them," Mr. Ledeen said.
"But whatever their motives, the president is badly served by this kind of behavior."
A U.S. official said the CIA looked into the information but found nothing that would substantiate it.
--------
Players: William J. Luti
Iraq War Planner Downplays Role
Conservative Strategist Denies Running Stealth Intelligence Operation
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 22, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A61603-2003Oct21?language=printer
In normal times, the chief of the Pentagon's office for Middle Eastern policy toils in obscurity, a third-level functionary hardly noticed inside the building, let alone outside it.
Not so Deputy Undersecretary William J. Luti. The day-to-day manager of the Defense Department's Iraq policy, he has the highest profile of anyone to ever hold his post .
A recent Google search uncovered 1,340 Internet hits mentioning him, many of them depicting him as a stealthy Svengali of Iraq policy, operating at the center of a network connecting Vice President Cheney, former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith -- all people for whom Luti has worked in the past seven years. Some Web sites associated with fringe political player Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. attack him in lurid terms as an "ignoble liar" and "Satan."
The critics are especially suspicious of his Office of Special Plans, which was created last year. The purposely ambiguous title -- it was an office to work on policy for invading Iraq -- gave rise to speculation that Luti was running a shadowy intelligence operation intended to second-guess the CIA and provide the Pentagon with findings that supported its policies. The office has since been closed.
"The conspiracies out of this are quite stunning," Luti said in a recent interview in his crowded office in an unfashionable inner corridor of the Pentagon. "We are a consumer of intelligence rather than a provider."
He insists that he is not as influential as some of his critics suspect. "To paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of my power are greatly exaggerated," he said.
He has been attacked, he said, because "we work tough issues, we work controversial issues." But he insisted he does not preside over a secret miniature version of the CIA. "For the umpteenth time," he said, showing a bit of exasperation, "we do policy work." What that means, he said, is developing defense policy options and monitoring their implementation -- not collecting intelligence, planning wars or implementing policy.
But he also seems to have attracted attention because of his zealous manner. "I know he's a lightning rod," said Richard Shultz, Luti's doctoral thesis adviser at Tufts University. "That's partly because he is so passionate, and partly because he is so devoted to policies that have been divisive."
Defense intelligence experts say Bruce Hardcastle, a senior Defense Intelligence Agency official for Middle Eastern affairs, began avoiding meeting with Luti after sharply disagreeing with him over the past 12 months about the imminence of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
"It's very difficult to inform people who already know it all," said one Pentagon official familiar with the strained relationship between Luti and Hardcastle.
"Basically, he [Luti] didn't like other people's information if it didn't agree with his opinion," a former DIA analyst agreed.
Hardcastle declined to comment for this article.
Overall, Luti said of his critics, they are "either confused, malicious, or both."
He added, "Policy people and intelligence analysts perform different functions, but what's important is that they work together, not that they agree on everything."
Those critical views are hardly universal. John Trigilio, a former DIA official who works with Luti on defense policy issues, described him as "a straight shooter, professional, honorable," and called the notion that he manipulated intelligence "ridiculous." Adm. William J. Fallon, who commanded Luti when Luti was skipper of the USS Guam, remembers him as an extremely competent leader who did not skew data.
"I've heard the allegation, and I've kind of chuckled at it," said Fallon, who recently became commander of the Atlantic Fleet. "I never saw anything along those lines."
Luti's 26-year Navy career was an unusual mix of sea duty and high-level Washington policy positions. After serving as a weapons officer for EA-6B Prowlers -- aircraft that jam enemy electronics -- he studied strategy and diplomacy at Tufts University. He went there for a master's degree, "but he was such a damned good student that we admitted him to the doctoral program," recalled Shultz, an authority on international politics and military operations.
In the early 1990s, while deputy director of the chief of naval operations' executive panel, a civilian advisory group, Luti became interested in the views of one member, strategy guru Albert Wohlstetter. A mentor to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, Defense Policy Board member Richard N. Perle and several other prominent conservative defense thinkers, Wohlstetter became Luti's entree into their world.
From there, while still in the Navy, Luti became a congressional fellow in the office of then-Speaker Gingrich. His time there, in part spent working on legislation related to arming and training Bosnian Muslims, again brought him into contact with interventionist conservatives.
"We were talking with people like Perle and Wolfowitz about doing the right thing in Bosnia," recalled Randy Schuenemann, who then was a foreign policy aide on the Hill, and later, as a lobbyist for an organization that advocated toppling Hussein, worked with Luti on Iraq issues.
Gingrich, who has stayed in touch with Luti through meetings of the Defense Policy Board, described his former employee as "very smart, very aggressive, slightly impatient, and . . . with a very deep feeling that the world is more dangerous than many of his colleagues in the Pentagon, in the services, understand."
Luti's last major Navy assignment was as captain of the USS Guam, an aging helicopter carrier with a crew of 700. "Guam was one of the oldest ships in the fleet," recalled Fallon, but Luti kept it in "marvelous condition."
When the Bush administration came into office, Luti was asked to work for Cheney on Middle East policy. A few months later, he retired from the Navy to take his current position.
He was in Cairo on Sept. 11, 2001, and, with commercial traffic stopped, got back to the United States aboard an Air Force KC-135 refueling jet. On the way home, he recalled, the plane flew over New York City, escorted by F-16 fighters, and the pilot lowered a wing so those aboard could get a full view of the smoke plume rising from the rubble of the World Trade Center.
When the jet finally landed, he recalled, "we had this war on our hands." Since then, he has had a total of 12 days off.
-------- un
U.N. Resolution Condemns Israeli Barrier
October 22, 2003
By KIRK SEMPLE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/22/international/middleeast/22NATI.html
UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 21 - The General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a resolution late on Tuesday demanding that Israel tear down the barrier it is building in the West Bank to deter terrorist attacks.
The barrier, according to the resolution, is "in contradiction to relevant provisions of international law" and its route could imperil the Middle East peace plan, known as the road map, which envisions a two-state solution to the crisis. The measure passed by a vote of 144 to 4, with 12 abstentions. The United States voted against it.
A group of Arab and Islamic nations, led by the Palestinians, brought the issue to the General Assembly after the United States vetoed a similar Security Council resolution last week.
The resolution approved Tuesday night demanded that Israel "stop and reverse the construction of the wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory."
The passage of the resolution reaffirmed a pattern in which the United States protects Israel in the Security Council, while the General Assembly overwhelmingly passes nonbinding resolutions critical of Israel. General Assembly resolutions carry only symbolic weight, unlike those passed by the Security Council.
The vote came at the end of several days of back-room negotiations over an earlier version of the resolution and a second resolution, dropped just before the vote on Tuesday night, that would have requested an opinion from the International Court of Justice, based in The Hague, on whether Israel is legally obligated to halt construction of the barrier and tear down the existing portions.
The Arab and Islamic states dropped the second resolution when they realized they would not win a commanding majority of the votes on that issue, diplomats said.
Throughout Monday and Tuesday, members of the European Union haggled among themselves and with the Arab and Islamic states over the resolutions.
Following the vote last week in the Security Council vote on the barrier - in which France and Spain voted for the resolution condemning it and Germany and Britain abstained - the Europeans sought to vote in unison this time and forestall further divisions among the mediators who are trying to shepherd the road map. The mediators, known as the quartet, include the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations.
The Arab and Islamic ambassadors secured the European Union's support by agreeing to amend the resolution to include a condemnation of Palestinian suicide bombings, "extrajudicial killings" by the Israelis, and the Oct. 16 bomb attack on an American diplomatic convoy in the Gaza Strip that killed three American security officers.
Russia also voted for the resolution. The United States, Israel, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands voted against it.
Before the vote, Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, called the negotiations that led to the final resolution a "humiliating farce."
Israel says it is building the barrier - a network of fencing, concrete walls, barbed wire and guard posts - to stop suicide bombers entering Israel from the West Bank. But Palestinians condemn the barrier as a land grab and an attempt to create a political border. They say it does not hew along its length to the so-called Green Line, the boundary between Israel and the West Bank, but cuts into the West Bank and surrounds some towns.
The vote came several hours after a top United Nations official reported that construction of the barrier had accelerated during the past month, and demanded that Israel dismantle it. On Oct. 1, Israel's government approved construction of new barriers, significantly expanding the scope of the contentious project.
The United Nations official, Kieran Prendergast, under secretary general for political affairs, said at a meeting of the Security Council that halting the barrier's construction would "assist in building support among the Palestinian people for the peace process," which had sunk to "a low point."
In explaining its position during a debate on Monday, the United States said it would not support any resolutions against Israel "unless they take into account the complex security situation on the ground and include a condemnation of terrorist bombings and the groups that perpetrate them," Deputy Ambassador James Cunningham told the General Assembly.
The diplomatic wrangling that led to the vote on Tuesday night culminated in an extraordinary scene of energetic brokering in the hallway outside the General Assembly, as the Arab and Islamic ambassadors huddled in one corner, the Europeans huddled in another and Italy's ambassador, Marcello Spatafora, shuttled between the groups.
With reporters and aides nearby, the groups tried to hammer out a compromise that would satisfy both blocks.
A majority of the European Union urged the Palestinians and their supporters to drop the second resolution regarding the International Court of Justice, arguing that the subject of the barrier would politicize the court and, therefore, contaminate it, several diplomats said.
Though the court would be permitted to handle requests for advisory opinions from the General Assembly, the resolution's opponents argued that the measure was "a distortion of what the ICJ is for" and an attempt to "use the ICJ as a political stick to beat the Israelis," one diplomat said.
Furthermore, some diplomats argued, bringing the court into the mix would only complicate the Middle East crisis further, diplomats said.
And several diplomats noted the inherent redundancy, if not contradiction, in passing a resolution declaring the illegality of the barrier while at the same time passing another that seeks a judgment on the same issue.
--------
U.N. Assembly Calls for Halt Of Israel Wall
Associated Press
Wednesday, October 22, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61697-2003Oct21.html
UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 21 -- The U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a resolution Tuesday demanding that Israel halt construction of a barrier intended to cut it off from the West Bank and dismantle the portion already built.
The barrier, which Israel argues is needed as protection from suicide bombers, has come under stiff criticism because it dips into the West Bank and cuts through Palestinian villages.
General Assembly resolutions are not legally binding, unlike those adopted by the Security Council. But the votes of the 191-member assembly are considered a gauge of world opinion.
After hours of haggling over the text of the resolution, the assembly voted 144 in favor and four opposed, including the United States. There were 12 abstentions.
In return for support from the European Union, the Palestinians and other Arab and Islamic nations agreed to drop a second resolution that would have asked the International Court of Justice at The Hague, Netherlands, for an advisory opinion on the barrier's legality.
The resolution's backers also agreed to add a condemnation of Palestinian suicide bombings, "extra-judicial killings" by the Israelis, and the Oct. 16 bomb attack on a U.S. diplomatic convoy in the Gaza Strip that killed three American security officers.
The resolution says that the barrier violates the Armistice Line of 1949 and demands that Israel halt construction and dismantle the part it has completed.
-------- us
TROOP STRENGTH
Pentagon Says It Will Call Up Added Reserves
October 22, 2003
By THOM SHANKER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/22/politics/22TROO.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 21 - Senior Pentagon officials said Tuesday that more National Guard and Reserve forces would be notified in coming weeks that they might have to serve in Iraq next year. The announcement was made amid complaints from Congress and the families of part-time troops about the stress of lengthy deployments.
Gen. Peter Pace of the Marines, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the current thinking was that no additional reservist combat brigades, each numbering 5,000 troops, would be alerted beyond those already told they will serve.
"I am sure that we are not looking at any more combat units from the Guard or Reserve other than those already notified," General Pace said at a news briefing. "That does not mean that there is not going to be more Reserves and Guard. There will be units that do logistics and the like that need to be notified."
That work, called combat support and combat service support, is critical to operations. Such duty in Iraq often subjects troops to front-line fire.
General Pace said that recommendations would go to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in two to three weeks and that no final determination had been made on numbers of reservists or on overall required forces for Iraq next year.
Pentagon officials said that Mr. Rumsfeld was briefed on the troop rotation plans as recently as Saturday and that the call-ups of support troops from the Guard and Reserves could affect dozens of units with hundreds of members in each.
Those officials emphasized that the anticipated call-up would be smaller than it would be if additional full combat brigades had to be mobilized. Large-scale alerts and mobilizations risk further protests from Capitol Hill and from families of those part-time soldiers whose lives are interrupted by a return to military service for 12-month tours on the ground in Iraq.
Some Pentagon planners said they had considered ways to avoid any additional call-up of National Guard and Reserve forces but realized that, at a minimum, logistics units would be required in the next rotation of forces for Iraq.
For rotation next year, the Pentagon has activated 10,000 troops from the Arkansas and North Carolina Guards and notified 5,000 from Washington that they may be needed.
The final decision on how many troops go to Iraq will depend on the number of other foreign troops available next spring, on the size and effectiveness of Iraq's new military forces and on the violence on the ground, Pentagon officials have said.
If American combat troops are needed to replace American forces due to come home in the spring, current plans call for a mix of fresh Army and Marine active duty forces, Pentagon officials said.
--------
Army Reports Some Absences From a Trial Leave Program
October 22, 2003
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/22/national/22AWOL.html
ATLANTA, Oct. 21 - Pentagon officials disclosed on Tuesday that 28 soldiers who were granted a 15-day leave from the war in Iraq as part of an experimental program had not reported back to duty.
More than 2,300 soldiers in the program have returned without problems. But at least one stated that he was tired of combat and was not returning to Iraq, Army officials said. Several others skipped their flights, apparently without contacting superiors.
"The military is concerned," said Lt. Col. Bob Hagen, an Army spokesman, in a telephone interview from Baltimore. "We're in the process of investigating each absence to see if there is a legitimate reason why the soldier did not show up."
Army officials cautioned against jumping to conclusions, saying that many of the missing soldiers might have been granted extensions by individual commanders and would be cleared once the paperwork caught up.
But if a soldier lacks such permission and does not return to duty, he could be classified as AWOL, or absent without leave, and face a court-martial and imprisonment, Colonel Hagen said.
The news of the missing soldiers was reported on Tuesday in The Washington Post.
The program began last month in an effort to boost morale for soldiers whose tour of duty in Iraq has been extended to a year. It is rare for the Army to pluck soldiers out of combat zones and return them to the continental United States for a quick burst of R & R.
Every day, at the Baltimore-Washington International Airport, the hub of the leave program, soldiers dressed in faded fatigues still covered in desert dust step off planes.
They are told when to return to Baltimore for a flight back. They are also told to notify Army officials ahead of time if there is a problem. Then they are sent off on 15 days of leave, to use however and wherever they choose, without having to check in with superiors.
Some soldiers in the leave program have volunteered to go back early. Several others have been granted extensions to tend to sick parents, newborn babies or other pressing family business. The extensions are approved by company commanders and then forwarded to higher officials, a process that can take several days.
One soldier lost his identification while he was at home and could not get into the airport, missing his return flight, Colonel Hagen said. Another had his house burn down.
"Soldiers are human beings, not robots," he said. "There may be a whole gamut of reasons why these soldiers haven't reported back."
In Iraq and Kuwait, the troops are briefed on what they can and cannot do in the leave program.
Juan Castillo, an artillery specialist who returned to Iraq last week after 15 days in Florida, said he was told by an Army chaplain "don't do anything I wouldn't do."
Col. Paris Mack, chief of the Army's Rest and Recuperation Task Force, said she was not surprised that a few soldiers had not returned.
"We anticipated that we would have a few no-shows," Colonel Mack said. "The numbers are quite small at this point."
Janice H. Laurence, editor of the journal Military Psychology, said, "The bigger story is you don't have major defections." Dr. Laurence said the Army has been studying why soldiers go AWOL and the types of people likely to disappear.
Colonel Hagen said the Army did not plan to end or change the leave program. He described it as a two-week well-deserved "sanity check."
-------- propaganda wars
U.S. Soldiers Bringing Media to Tikrit
By KATARINA KRATOVAC
Associated Press Writer
Oct 22, 2003
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ_MEDIA?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
TIKRIT, Iraq (AP) -- The media revolution that has filled the vacuum left by the destruction of Saddam Hussein's propaganda machine has so far bypassed the former ruler's hometown.
But Abdul Khader - an engineer working near an antenna and transmitter tower on the ruins of a former ministry building - is hoping to change that, with the help of U.S. soldiers.
In the first days after Saddam was overthrown in early April, Iraq was left without any newspapers. State-run television and radio stations went off the air.
Soon after, several freewheeling papers, radio and television outlets sprung up. People were suddenly able to buy satellite dishes and watch international channels of their choice, or listen to local radio stations now denouncing Saddam as a ruthless dictator.
But the media advancing across Iraq's larger cities missed Tikrit and the predominantly Sunni province that surrounds it.
"Media were basically nonexistent" when the U.S. troops arrived here, said Maj. Josslyn Aberle, spokeswoman for the 4th Infantry Division, which controls much of northern Iraq.
That's something U.S. soldiers are working to change.
"We want to get the message out to the Iraqi people, what we are doing to improve their lives," says Maj. Joe Cox, from the 4th Infantry Division headquarters.
Cox, from Ozark, Ala., heads a four-man team in charge of getting local media outlets - from newspapers to TV - up and running in Tikrit.
The antenna that was linked to Saddam's information ministry and spewed his propaganda across Tikrit was bombed in U.S. air raids. Whatever was left was looted in the nationwide unrest that followed the regime's collapse.
A first step was setting up the transmitter in Tikrit, 120 miles north of Baghdad, to carry radio and television signals from the U.S.-backed Iraqi Media Network to people across the northern Salah Ad Din province of 1 million residents.
For the past two months, Cox's team has supplied Abdul Khader's tower and has one radio and television station functioning from the Tikrit University building in this town of 120,000. The costs exceeded $100,000.
"We started from scratch, buying digital cameras, studio equipment," said Capt. Chris Ambrosio, of Garland, Texas.
Three weekly newspapers are distributed in Tikrit but are published in Baghdad because there is no printing press here. One of them, the Salah Ad Din, is the most "genuinely" Tikriti paper, dealing with local news, Cox says. The two others, Al-Youm and Al-Sabah, distributed in the neighboring provinces, are viewed as mouthpieces of the U.S. troops.
Although all the papers are funded by the U.S. interim administration at a cost of $17,000 per paper per week, Cox maintains they herald a free and independent media.
"There is no censorship. We only ask two things: you can't incite violence and your stories must be fair and balanced," said Cox, adding that criticism of the coalition forces by the papers' staff is welcome.
"When we leave, we want the Salah Ad Din to be a self-functioning paper," he said. "If I ever come back to visit Iraq, I would like to see the editor and the newspapers still working."
That won't be so easy. The entire area has been a hotbed of anti-American sentiment, and local journalists have been warned for working with coalition forces.
The chief editor of Salah Ad Din was threatened twice and later moved his family to Baghdad for safety.
Rasul Halil, one of three Iraqi policemen guarding the transmitter, points to a potholed wall from an attack five days ago when unknown assailants opened fire from behind the garbage dump. No one was wounded.
Back in the engineer's office, only the AM and FM radio signals work. The television transmitter brought in last week worked for only one hour before it broke down and Abdul Khader is waiting for a replacement.
"There is so much I need but it is a beginning, a new world," he said. "I am working for my country's sake, not for the Americans."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- homeland security
Electrical Towers May Be Targets
Reuters
Wednesday, October 22, 2003; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62882-2003Oct22.html
LOS ANGELES, Oct. 21 -- Environmental extremists could be involved in the attempted sabotage of two giant electricity transmission towers on Monday, the head of a California police department said Tuesday.
Officials said a man fled after he was discovered late Monday afternoon apparently removing nuts and bolts at the base of a transmission tower near Anderson in northern California.
About two hours earlier near Klamath Falls in Oregon, about 150 miles north of Anderson, someone was discovered tampering with the base of another transmission tower, police and utility sources said.
"I think it is more than just a coincidence. It certainly has the overtones of some sort of domestic terrorist activity," Anderson Chief of Police Neil Purcell Jr. said, adding he had turned the investigation over to the FBI.
Purcell said the three men who saw the man at the transmission tower near Anderson described him as an overweight white male with long gray hair and a beard and wearing wire-rimmed glasses. He fled in a vehicle with Washington state plates.
The Western Area Power Administration, a federal agency, owned the transmission tower, part of a 115-kilovolt power line that carries electricity from two nearby hydropower dams.
WAPA spokeswoman LaVerne Kyriss said the agency had repaired the tower and considered the incident was "very serious."
The earlier incident in Oregon involved a transmission tower owned by Portland-based PacifiCorp, a unit of Scottish Power Plc.
--------
TSA to Check Plane Inspections
Lawmakers Demand to Know How Box Cutters Got Aboard
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 22, 2003; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61656-2003Oct21.html
After learning that box cutters and other potentially dangerous items were stashed on four Southwest Airlines planes for weeks before being found, the Transportation Security Administration said yesterday that it has begun a review to ensure that airlines conduct thorough daily inspections of aircraft.
The TSA, seeking to assure travelers that the aviation security system can be trusted, announced the inspection review as part of a broader internal investigation begun after packages of box cutters, matches, bleach and simulated explosives were found on two Southwest planes last week.
On Monday, the government said Nathaniel T. Heatwole, 20, of Damascus, Md., put the packages on the planes to bring public attention to air security lapses. He was charged with carrying concealed weapons on an aircraft.
Prosecutors said Heatwole, whose attorney declined to comment yesterday, sent an e-mail to the TSA's contact center after placing the items on the planes in September. The packages weren't found by airline employees until last week. Prosecutors also said Heatwole put dangerous items on two other Southwest flights in February but they were not discovered by airline employees until April. In all four incidents, Southwest employees found the items hidden in aircraft lavatories while performing routine maintenance, the U.S. attorney's office in Baltimore and TSA officials said.
"There's a single review looking at the contact center, looking at the sequence of events of this fellow, Heatwole," TSA spokesman Brian Turmail said. "One of the things we're going to be asking is, 'Are the air carriers properly following through in the inspection requirements each morning and are the measures in place appropriate?' We don't know the answers to that."
Airlines are required to thoroughly inspect every commercial aircraft daily by turning over seat cushions and opening compartments in overhead bins and lavatories, Turmail said. The inspections must be completed by "someone familiar with the layout of aircraft cabins," he said, but who is assigned is up to the airlines. Often, flight attendants or other airline personnel such as mechanics or station managers do the work, he said.
The TSA's contact center has installed software that will flag messages received by the agency's contact center that mention illegal activity. Such messages will be turned over to law enforcement officials, the TSA said.
Members of Congress demanded to know how Heatwole, a student at Guilford College in Greensboro, N.C., would have been able to get the dangerous items past security checkpoints while flying between Baltimore-Washington International and Raleigh-Durham International airports six times this year, as authorities allege.
Turmail said the TSA will not specifically review lapses at the two airports.
One question that remained yesterday was why the TSA and federal investigators did not respond earlier to the April discovery. The TSA said it was notified by Southwest employees as soon as they found the items and the agency, in turn, notified the FBI.
An FBI spokesman declined to comment. Vicki DeLuc, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office in Baltimore, declined to say what was found on planes in April. Heatwole's hearing in U.S. District Court in Baltimore is scheduled for Nov. 10. He was not given an opportunity at his court appearance on Monday to enter a plea.
The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation plans to hold a hearing in the coming weeks about aviation security, a spokeswoman said yesterday. In the House, Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), chairman of the Government Reform Committee, called for an inquiry into the TSA's passenger-screening and training procedures.
"This case represents the most serious security breach in TSA's short history," said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.). "TSA must conduct a top-to-bottom review of its security measures and procedures, and Congress will rightly hold hearings."
Rather than prosecute Heatwole, the government should hire him as a consultant to show the TSA where security loopholes exist, Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) said yesterday. Heatwole's alleged actions are "a giant warning signal to the Transportation Security Administration," Markey said in a prepared statement.
-------- justice
Ashcroft Briefed Regularly on Inquiry Into C.I.A. Leak
October 22, 2003
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/22/politics/22LEAK.html?hp
WASHINGTON, Oct. 21 - Attorney General John Ashcroft's top aides have regularly briefed him on key details in the investigation into the disclosure of a C.I.A. officer's identity, including the identities of those interviewed by the F.B.I., a senior Justice Department official told members of Congress on Tuesday.
Mr. Ashcroft's regular, detailed briefings suggest that he has taken a more hands-on role in the politically charged investigation than the department had acknowledged. Senate Democrats said the arrangement threatened to compromise the independence of the investigation, a contention that Justice Department officials rejected.
Mr. Ashcroft has been given all the details needed "for him to understand meaningfully what's going on in the investigation," Christopher Wray, a political appointee who heads the Justice Department's criminal division, said at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee under sharp questioning from several Democrats who want Mr. Ashcroft to recuse himself from the case.
That information, Mr. Wray said, includes the names of those interviewed since the Justice Department opened its investigation three weeks ago into whether senior Bush administration officials illegally leaked the identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer to the syndicated columnist Robert Novak. The officer's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, has been a vocal critic of the administration's Iraqi policies, and Mr. Wilson has suggested that the White House publicized his wife's work at the C.I.A. in an effort to intimidate him.
Mr. Ashcroft and his aides have stressed repeatedly that the department's career attorneys are being left to run the investigation free of political hindrance.
But Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said he was troubled to learn from Mr. Wray at Tuesday's hearing that the attorney general is receiving regular reports on the status of the inquiry and has been told whom the F.B.I. is interviewing. Mr. Schumer said the attorney general's close personal and political ties to the White House pose a potential conflict if Mr. Ashcroft knows the White House officials investigators plan to interview.
"When the line prosecutors know that the attorney general knows what they are doing, it could hamper their independence," Mr. Schumer said in an interview. "It means someone is watching over them, and that's not what we want in a case like this. It has a chilling effect, and it makes the case for Ashcroft recusing himself stronger."
But Mr. Wray, who was recently confirmed by the Senate, oversees John Dion's investigation. Mr. Wray said he had personally briefed the attorney general on the case, but he rejected the suggestion that political pressure could compromise the investigation.
"I can assure you that it has been made painfully clear to everyone involved that no punches are to be pulled in this investigation and that anybody who thinks that we are going to be pulling any punches in this investigation doesn't know the lawyers and the agents working on this investigation very well," he told Mr. Schumer.
The exchange reflected an intense acrimony between Democrats and senior Justice Department officials at the four-hour hearing where Democrats attacked both the leak investigation and the government's use of the antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act.
At the hearing, Mr. Wray and two top federal prosecutors said that the Patriot Act was a vital tool for the Justice Department to gain and share intelligence about terrorist suspects. Senator Orrin G. Hatch, the Utah Republican who heads the judiciary committee, blamed "intellectual babbling" and distortions and misrepresentations by opponents of the measure for public unease about it.
Several Democrats acknowledged that although they have misgivings over whether the law went too far in sacrificing civil liberties, they believed some of the public debate over the issue came from public confusion and occasional misinformation.
But Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the panel, said Mr. Ashcroft has fueled that problem by attacking critics of the Patriot Act in ways that the senator said he found "arrogant, dismissive and condescending."
-------- police
Anger after police racism film
Wednesday, 22 October, 2003
BBC UK
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3212442.stm
One officer is shown wearing a Ku Klux Klan mask in the programme Campaigners and police officers have expressed shock after the broadcast of an undercover TV documentary on racism among recruits.
The Secret Policeman, shown on BBC One on Tuesday, featured video of one officer dressing up in an improvised Ku Klux Klan hood, and others using terms such as "nigger" and particularly "Paki" on a regular basis.
Evidence uncovered in the documentary - at a police training centre in Cheshire - has now led to the suspension of seven police officers, from three different forces.
The BBC was criticised for the undercover techniques used in the programme, but producers insisted it was the only way to gather the evidence.
Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) described the BBC programme as "truly shocking".
Reporter Mark Daly recorded one officer, Pc Rob Pulling of North Wales police, apparently saying he would kill an Asian person "if I could get away with it" and a string of other racist comments.
Pc Pulling also said Hitler had had the "right idea" but had gone about it in the wrong way.
In the wake of the programme it emerged Greater Manchester Police (GMP) had suspended a further two officers, and Cheshire Police also confirmed they had taken an officer off duty.
Earlier this week GMP suspended three officers, while North Wales Police suspended one, as a result of the allegations to be made in the programme.
John Stalker, a former assistant chief constable with Greater Manchester Police, described Pc Rob Pulling as a "cowardly bigot" whose poisonous views bordered on the criminal.
Officers suspended
"Those were racially-aggravated opinions. He looked at home with a hood on his head.
"What I would like to see is that the police force has actually learnt something from this."
Mr Phillips said: "This is not just a matter of a few recruits who can be trained out of their behaviour.
"This shows a pattern of behaviour which is widespread, and though officially condemned, is tacitly condoned by their peers."
Mr Daly, 28, joined GMP as a trainee officer and secretly filmed recruits at Bruche National Training Centre in Warrington, Cheshire.
Damaging property
Mr Daly, from Glasgow, was arrested in August after the police received an anonymous tip-off alleging an undercover journalist had joined the force.
The reporter was arrested on suspicion of obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception and damaging police property. He is due to answer bail next month.
Reporter Mark Daly was arrested in August
In a statement ahead of the film, GMP said: "Greater Manchester Police is firmly committed to taking further action against any other officers who are shown on the programme making racist comments.
"We are disappointed that, despite repeated requests, we have not yet received a copy of the programme from the BBC to enable us to take immediate action."
Pc Pulling was also recorded insulting the murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence, saying he had deserved to die and referring to his parents as "spongers".
Little faith in service
In a statement, Scotland Yard called the remarks about the murder of Stephen Lawrence "callous".
It said: "It is small wonder that his parents, Doreen and Neville Lawrence, have little faith in the police service."
Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) president Chris Fox said while the group condemned racism, the public should not make generalisations based on the documentary.
The BBC programme would have "eroded public confidence" in the police, said Chief Inspector Leroy Logan, chairman of the Metropolitan Police Black Police Association.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Study Finds Hundreds of Thousands of Inmates Mentally Ill
October 22, 2003
By FOX BUTTERFIELD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/22/national/22MENT.html
As many as one in five of the 2.1 million Americans in jail and prison are seriously mentally ill, far outnumbering the number of mentally ill who are in mental hospitals, according to a comprehensive study released Tuesday.
The study, by Human Rights Watch, concludes that jails and prisons have become the nation's default mental health system, as more state hospitals have closed and as the country's prison system has quadrupled over the past 30 years. There are now fewer than 80,000 people in mental hospitals, and the number is continuing to fall.
The report also found that the level of illness among the mentally ill being admitted to jail and prison has been growing more severe in the past few years. And it suggests that the percentage of female inmates who are mentally ill is considerably higher than that of male inmates.
"I think elected officials have been all too willing to let the incarcerated population grow by leaps and bounds without paying much attention to who in fact is being incarcerated," said Jamie Fellner, an author of the report and director of United States programs at Human Rights Watch.
But, Ms. Fellner said, she found "enormous, unusual agreement among police, prison officials, judges, prosecutors and human rights lawyers that something has gone painfully awry with the criminal justice system" as jails and prisons have turned into de facto mental health hospitals. "This is not something that any of them wanted."
Reginald Wilkinson, director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, said the "mere fact that this report exists is significant."
"Some people won't like it, and the picture it paints isn't pretty," Mr. Wilkinson said. "But getting these facts out there is progress."
Many of the statistics in the study have been published before by the Justice Department, the American Psychiatric Association or states. But the study brings them together and adds accounts of the experiences of dozens of people with mental illness who have been incarcerated.
The study found that prison compounds the problems of the mentally ill, who may have trouble following the everyday discipline of prison life, like standing in line for a meal.
"Some exhibit their illness through disruptive behavior, belligerence, aggression and violence," the report found. "Many will simply - sometimes without warning - refuse to follow straightforward routine orders."
Where statistics are available, mentally ill inmates have higher than average disciplinary rates, the study found. A study in Washington found that while mentally ill inmates constituted 18.7 of the state's prison population, they accounted for 41 percent of infractions.
This leads to a further problem - mentally ill inmates who cannot control their behavior are often, and disproportionately, placed in solitary confinement, the study found.
Solitary confinement is particularly difficult for mentally ill inmates because there is even more limited medical care there, and the isolation and idleness can be psychologically destructive, the report says.
Medical care for mentally ill inmates is often almost nonexistent, the study says. In Wyoming, a Justice Department investigation found that the state penitentiary had a psychiatrist on duty two days a month. In Iowa, there are three psychiatrists for more than 8,000 inmates.
There is no single accepted national estimate of the number of mentally ill inmates, in part because different states use different ways to measure mental illness.
The American Psychiatric Association estimated in 2000 that one in five prisoners were seriously mentally ill, with up to 5 percent actively psychotic at any given moment.
In 1999, the statistical arm of the Justice Department estimated that 16 percent of state and federal prisoners and inmates in jails were suffering from mental illness. These illnesses included schizophrenia, manic depression (or bipolar disorder) and major depression.
The figures are higher for female inmates, the report says. The Justice Department study found that 29 percent of white female inmates, 22 percent of Hispanic female inmates and 20 percent of black female inmates were identified as mentally ill.
One reason some experts have suggested for the higher numbers among female prisoners is that psychologists and psychiatrists working in prisons tend to be more sympathetic to women, finding them mentally ill, while they tend to evaluate male inmates as antisocial or bad.
But Mr. Wilkinson said, "I think the differences are real; more female inmates are mentally ill." He suggested that prisons were seeing more severely mentally ill inmates now "only because the volume is greater," meaning that the number of people in prison has increased.
--------
Report on State Prisons Cites Inmates' Mental Illness
October 22, 2003
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/22/nyregion/22PRIS.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Nearly one of every four New York State prisoners who are kept in punitive segregation - confined to a small cell at least 23 hours a day - are mentally ill, according to a new report by a nonprofit group that has been critical of state prison policies.
One in five of the roughly 5,000 prisoners punished with that isolation have a serious drug problem, the report said. But despite graphic evidence that the most acutely ill prisoners in punitive segregation, or lockdown, often grow only more troubled and violent, the state Department of Correctional Services, which runs the state's 70 prisons, rarely does anything to help them, said the report, released yesterday by the group, the Correctional Association of New York.
To the contrary, when inmates in punitive segregation try to hurt or kill themselves, the department's policy is to punish them with additional lockdown time, according to the report. About half of the 258 inmates interviewed by the report's authors said they had attempted suicide in prison. Many prisoners spend years under lockdown.
The findings of the association, an inmate-advocacy group, are based on state records, the authors' visits to 29 state prison lockdown units and interviews with hundreds of prisoners, correction officers and prison supervisors. The association, established in 1844, is authorized by state law to visit prisons and interview inmates and employees.
The Correctional Services commissioner, Glenn S. Goord, declined to comment yesterday on the report's specific conclusions and recommendations, which include changing prison rules so that emotionally disturbed inmates who misbehave would be treated instead of sent to isolation. Instead, Mr. Goord accused the Correctional Association of proffering "phony issues," and criticized the report's principal author, Jennifer Wynn, as unprofessional.
But in interviews, several prison experts, psychiatrists and state officials who are familiar with the report agreed with its conclusion that the prison system is unprepared to properly treat mentally and physically ill inmates.
Yesterday, an independent report by Human Rights Watch found that as many as 25 percent of prisoners nationwide are mentally ill.
"The 25 percent is very much like it is for other states; there are probably some that are even worse, and it's a scandal," said Michael L. Perlin, a professor at New York Law School who has studied prison mental health issues. "It reflects a mentality that we should have discarded a century ago."
Professor Perlin, who sits on the Correctional Association's advisory board, said Commissioner Goord, who has dismissed criticism of punitive segregation in the past, should heed the association's findings. "There should be a tremendous obligation on the part of New York's authorities to deal with this frontally and forthrightly," he said.
In the association's 51-page report, the authors paint a grim portrait of the lockdown units in some state prisons. They describe observing one inmate alone in his cell, smeared with his own feces; another inmate sprawled on the floor because his wheelchair was confiscated for security reasons; a prisoner with AIDS, dying and barely able to lift his head; and dozens of others with symptoms of acute psychoses or covered in scars from self-inflicted cuts.
"These are serious human-rights abuses," said Robert Gangi, the Correction Association's executive director. "There are people who die needlessly in New York State prisons because they are put in there when they are mentally ill, and they kill themselves."
He added, "The state's political leaders should recognize how important a matter this is."
Using nearly $200 million in federal grants, New York has built 10 prisons with 3,788 beds since 1997, solely for punitive segregation, Mr. Gangi said. Beyond those units, there are more than 20 "segregated housing units" in the state's seven maximum security prisons, as well as lockdown cells in separate blocks within other prisons.
About 7.6 percent of the 65,000 inmates in the state prison system were in lockdown in April, according to the report.
The report said department records indicate that the average prisoner in 23-hour lockdown remains there for five to six months before returning to the general prison population. (One hour a day is allowed for what is called recreation in a small, empty outdoor cage.) But in interviews with inmates, the association reported their average stay to be three years. Most punitive segregation is solitary confinement; some units house two inmates.
In an interview in May 2000 in DOCS Today, a departmental newsletter, Commissioner Goord said segregated housing units "had an immediate and positive effect on the system" by reducing inmate assaults on correction officers.
But Dr. Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist who has studied the effects of isolation on mentally ill inmates, said that when dealing with mentally ill and drug-addled inmates, what is good for the prison system is not good for public safety.
"The paradigm is that if we punish them enough, they will change their behavior," Dr. Grassian, whose research is cited in the report, said yesterday. "There's too great a tendency to label their behavior as willful. You put them in situations that are more and more stressful, their behavior will become worse."
He added, "Most of these people get out at some point, and then they become a danger to all of us."
Despite repeated cases of inmates hanging and starving themselves while in punitive segregation, and despite repeated criticism from the State Commission of Correction, an oversight agency with little authority to force the department to change its rules, New York prisons are not much different from those in many other states.
"This is an issue for every prison system," said Michael P. Jacobson, a former New York City correction commissioner who is a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Punitive segregation costs less per prisoner than less restrictive prison blocks because it requires fewer officers and relatively less space for programs and activities. In its report, the Correctional Association accused the department of sending too many inmates into punitive isolation for infractions like smoking cigarettes or "horseplay."
Mr. Jacobson said, "You have to be very selective about who goes in" lockdown cells, "and you have to be very careful about watching them once they're in."
In its report, the Correctional Association recommended creating an oversight body with authority to inspect lockdown units, a body similar, in fact, to the Board of Correction, which sets minimum standards for inmate populations in New York City jails and monitors them.
After receiving an advance copy of the Correctional Association's report, in August, Mr. Goord, the Correctional Services commissioner, accused Ms. Wynn, the report's principal author, of using the Correctional Association's privileged status to communicate with a particular inmate, and he banned her from entering the prisons beyond the visiting area. Since then, he has imposed new limits on how many association employees may visit a prison, prohibited association interviews with prison staff and declared access to all segregated housing units off limits.
Jeffrion L. Aubry, a Democratic state assemblyman from Queens and chairman of the Committee on Corrections, said he plans to introduce a bill in January that would prohibit inmates with serious mental illnesses from being sent to lockdown and require them to receive treatment instead.
"I've been in the S.H.U.'s," he said, recalling how he was temporarily locked in a segregated housing unit during a tour of a state prison. "I'm not surprised they have a negative impact on inmates."
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U.S. Erecting a Solid Prison at Guantánamo for Long Term
October 22, 2003
By NEIL A. LEWIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/22/national/22GITM.html
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba - The detention facility here for prisoners captured mostly in the Afghanistan war is increasingly taking on a permanent air as the authorities are building a hard-walled traditional prison alongside the corrugated metal units that have housed detainees for nearly two years.
Although the International Committee of the Red Cross has taken the unusual step of publicly criticizing the United States for the open-ended nature of the detention, officials here say they are planning changes that will allow for the long term. Col. Jerry Cannon, who is in charge of the prison facility, said in a recent interview here that he was revising some of the security procedures at the camp with the expectation that it would continue to hold prisoners for some years.
The hard-walled prison will be ready next spring, said Lt. Col. Pamela Hart, the public affairs officer for the Joint Task Force that administers the detention camp and supervises prisoner interrogations. "This will be a permanent structure and will be able to house approximately 100 prisoners," Colonel Hart said.
The camp currently houses about 660 detainees in varying degrees of security. The new prison could be where prisoners sentenced by military tribunals would serve their terms. Although the rules for tribunals include the possibility of capital punishment, Colonel Hart said there were no plans to build an execution chamber.
None of the detainees sentenced to prison terms or execution could be taken into the United States to serve their sentences because upon arrival, they would immediately gain new rights and avenues to challenge their detentions. Officials chose Guantánamo as a location where United States constitutional protections would not apply, and two federal courts have agreed that the naval base here is not legally part of the United States.
The detention camp, known as Camp Delta, is separated from the rest of the base by bluffs. Camp Delta is divided into four sections. The first three, which house the majority of the detainees, are maximum security, but there are slight variations in the privileges afforded inmates, depending on how cooperative they are with interrogators and jailers, officials said.
In Camp 1, for example, the inmates have books. Prisoners in all three maximum-security camps are kept one to a cell and are allowed out an average of three times a week for 20-minute periods for a shower and recreation, usually kicking a soccer ball in an enclosed area.
About 120 men who are deemed the most cooperative are in Camp 4, a medium-security facility where they live together in a dormitory and are allowed to congregate.
The Red Cross has raised no objections about the physical conditions at the camp. But Christophe Girod, the Washington representative of the Red Cross, recently broke the group's public silence and said in an interview that the open-ended situation in which the detainees are kept was intolerable. Mr. Girod said the uncertainty the detainees faced was a major factor in the high rate of attempted suicides and the incidence of clinical depression.
Cmdr. Louis Louk, the officer in charge of the detention camp's hospital, said recently that about one in five detainees was being medicated for clinical depression.
Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, the commander of the Joint Task Force, said the detainees were still being held because there was still much valuable intelligence to be gathered from them. About 68 have been returned to their countries.
The authorities have begun to allow tours for members of news organizations at Camp Iguana, where three juveniles are being held. Colonel Hart said the three boys were believed to be 16 to 18 years old based on their physical characteristics.
Camp Iguana is more like a house than a cell in its appearance, and the boys are tutored every day in their native language, Pashto, in several subjects including mathematics, she said.
The Red Cross and some human rights groups have argued that detaining juveniles is unnecessary.
A security assessment team just completed a two-week inspection of the camp after the arrest of three staff members on suspicion of espionage. The team of about two dozen people sent from the United States Southern Command based in Miami left last Friday after delivering a report and recommendations to General Miller.
Colonel Hart said that while it might take some time for new procedures to be put in place, there were already fresh regulations that require staff members leaving the camp, even temporarily, to have their computers inspected before departure.
All three of the men arrested on suspicion of espionage are believed to have been discovered with classified or secret material on their computers. Two of those arrested were translators, one an Air Force enlisted man and the other a civilian contract employee. The third was the camp's Muslim chaplain, Capt. James Yee, also known as Youseff Yee. All are suspected of trying to carry messages from inmates to unspecified others.
The assessment team was assigned to determine if there was any widespread conspiracy to infiltrate the camp.
-------- terrorism
Rumsfeld Questions U.S. in Terror Fight
October 22, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Rumsfeld-Terrorism.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld questioned whether the United States was doing enough to win the war on terrorism, citing ``mixed results'' in the fight against al-Qaida in a pointed memo to top Pentagon officials.
Rumsfeld said the U.S.-led coalitions would win in Afghanistan and Iraq, but not without ``a long, hard slog.'' He wrote that the United States ``has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis'' but has made ``somewhat slower progress'' tracking down top Taliban leaders who sheltered al-Qaida in Afghanistan.
``My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?'' Rumsfeld wrote.
The memo, dated Oct. 16 and first reported by USA Today on Wednesday, offered a much more stark assessment of the global war on terrorism than contained in Rumsfeld's public statements.
``It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog,'' he wrote.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan, traveling with President Bush in Australia, reacted by voicing support for Rumsfeld. ``That's exactly what a strong and capable secretary of defense like Secretary Rumsfeld should be doing,'' said McClellan.
``The president has always said it will require thinking differently. It's a different type of war,'' McClellan said.
Bush talked about the war on terrorism with reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Canberra, where he planned to discuss it with Prime Minister John Howard.
``I've always felt that there's a tendency of people to kind of seek a comfort zone and hope that the war on terror is over,'' Bush said. ``And I view it as a responsibility of the United States to remind people of our mutual obligations to deal with the terrorists.''
Rumsfeld's spokesman, Larry Di Rita, told reporters Wednesday the memo was meant to raise ``big questions that deserve big thinking'' and preserve a ``constant sense of urgency'' about where the war on terror is heading.
On the battle against the terror network blamed for the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Rumsfeld wrote: ``We are having mixed results with al-Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them -- nonetheless, a great many remain at large.'' They include the group's top leader, Osama bin Laden, and his right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Rumsfeld wrote ``we are just getting started'' in battling Ansar al-Islam, an Iraq-based terrorist group linked to al-Qaida.
Di Rita said the memo was another in a series of provocative questions that the secretary regularly raises with Pentagon brass.
Three members of Congress who met with Rumsfeld Wednesday morning said the defense secretary gave them copies of the memo and discussed it with them.
``He's asking the tough questions we all need to be asking,'' said Rep. Jim Turner, D-Texas.
``Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror,'' Rumsfeld wrote. ``Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?''
Madrassas are Islamic religious schools. Rumsfeld and other U.S. officials say some schools run by radical groups indoctrinate students to join in an anti-American holy war.
Rumsfeld's memo raises the possibility of creating ``a private foundation to entice radical madrassas to a more moderate course'' and questions how to block the funding of the extremist schools.
Sounding a theme Rumsfeld has voiced repeatedly in the past two years, the memo says the Defense Department is too big and slow to effectively fight small groups of terrorists.
``It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror,'' Rumsfeld wrote. ``An alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere -- one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.''
Rumsfeld also suggested the United States may need to do more to ``stop the next generation of terrorists.''
``The U.S. is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists,'' Rumsfeld wrote. ``The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.''
--------
France Trains for Subway Gas Attack
October 22, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-France-Exercise-in-Terror.html
PARIS (AP) -- Victims writhed in agony, police wrestled a suspected terrorist to the ground, deadly gas spread through the subway and rescue workers in white chemical suits rushed to the scene.
Training for a nightmare officials hope will never come, but fear nonetheless, Paris police and rescue services carried out their first full-scale exercise Thursday to test their response to a chemical attack.
The simulation started on time, just before midnight, with suspected terrorists spilling a liquid that simulated the release of gas in the Invalides Metro and suburban train station on Paris' Left Bank.
Pretend victims, wearing signs around their necks which listed their symptoms, littered the platform and a train that had pulled in. The station is close to Les Invalides, a gold-domed former hospital that houses Napoleon Bonaparte's tomb.
The imaginary attack, which was to involve 500 police and rescue service officers, illustrated the extent to which the French consider themselves a potential terrorist target. Over the past two years, police have dismantled alleged terror cells and uncovered potential attack plots.
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who was to attend the exercise, said the simulation came out of a request law enforcement had made to President Jacques Chirac.
``This exercise is a way of being ready, even if there is no specific threat,'' he told the National Assembly on Wednesday. Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin was also scheduled to attend.
The simulation will be followed by some 50 similar exercises around France next year, Sarkozy said.
Trying to make the exercise as real as possible, police officials updated reporters on their progress as the simulation unfurled. After about an hour, police announced that tests had determined that the toxic gas had been identified as sarin. That was, of course, make-believe but sarin has already been proven to be a deadly threat.
The nerve agent, developed by the Nazis, was used in a 1995 attack on the Tokyo subway by doomsday cult Aum Shinri Kyo that killed 12 people and sickened thousands. The assault was one of the worst acts of urban terrorism until the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.
Police said the simulation, which has been in the works for months, was designed to test a plan, dubbed Piratox, put in place last year for dealing with a terror attacks with chemical weapons. France also has plans for dealing with attacks with biological and nuclear weapons.
The exercise, the first of its kind in the French capital, comes less than a week after France reduced its terror alert status to the lowest level, signaling that the risk of attacks has receded. But officials and experts say France needs to remain on guard.
Last December, French authorities dismantled what they said was a terror cell with ties to Chechen rebels and al-Qaida that planned bomb or toxic gas attacks in France and Russia.
``It's about time we had one of these exercises,'' said Francois Heisbourg, director of the Foundation for Strategic Research think-tank. While France has proved itself capable of coping with natural disasters, it has not had to deal with terror attacks with mass destruction weapons.
``It's one thing to be technically well prepared ... It's another to be operating in an urban environment, in very confined spaces, having to worry about people and traffic,'' Heisbourg said in a phone interview.
Police in London staged a similar exercise on the Underground there in September, decontaminating scores of ``casualties'' from a simulated chemical weapons attack.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Protest targets Bush Iraq policy
October 22, 2003
By Derrill Holly
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20031021-094015-9123r.htm
Organizers of the largest antiwar demonstration in the nation's capital since April are hoping President Bush's slipping poll numbers reflect growing dissatisfaction with U.S. policy on Iraq.
When protesters converge in the District on Saturday, they will be met by officers from law-enforcement agencies who expect the number of participants in a peace rally and march to exceed 40,000.
"Bush was hoping that the antiwar movement, no matter how strong it became before the war, would become merely a blip on the political radar screen," Brian Becker, a spokesman for the International A.N.S.W.E.R. steering committee, said yesterday.
The group said people would come from 38 states and Canada to participate in the protest, which was organized by International A.N.S.W.E.R. and United for Peace and Justice.
"We honor and support our troops, but we are deeply opposed to the mission on which President Bush has sent them," said Stephen Cleghorn of the District, a member of Military Families Speak Out.
Mr. Cleghorn said his stepson is serving with the Army in Baghdad.
"We've got word that there may be more than 40,000. We expect it's going to be a big day," said Sgt. Scott Fear, a spokesman for the U.S. Park Police.
Park Police officials have canceled days off for their officers. In addition to foot patrols, additional horse and motorcycle units also will be assigned for the events.
Though the largest event is expected to occur Saturday afternoon on the grounds of the Washington Monument, other small parks located throughout downtown Washington are expected to be used as staging areas for groups of demonstrators.
"If there is any civil disobedience, then obviously the United States Park Police will be prepared to make mass arrests," said Sgt. Fear.
In the past, those have occurred when demonstrators have attempted to access Lafayette Park, which for generations served as a preferred location for groups wishing to protest government policies in sight of the White House.
According to Sgt. Fear, International A.N.S.W.E.R. organizers have been working with authorities and do not expect demonstrators gathered under their banner to engage in acts of civil disobedience. But Sgt. Fear said yesterday that small groups committed to independent actions may attempt such protests.
Metro Transit Police will be increasing patrols near five stations closest to the Mall. The Metropolitan Police Department also will be involved, using its network of surveillance cameras in the area to monitor the crowd.
Organizers are stressing their intent to exercise their constitutionally guaranteed rights of free speech, expression and assembly.
"A key component of this demonstration is a march to the White House and a march to the Justice Department," said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice.
She added that the National Lawyers Guild will have observers at many locations to monitor police response to the demonstrator's movements.
----
Ex-US Navy "floating time bombs" of pollution head for Britain: activists
GENEVA (AFP)
Oct 22, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031022120222.kgo4xahy.html
Four old US Navy ships being towed across the Atlantic to be scrapped in Britain are "floating time bombs" carrying several hundred tonnes of hazardous waste, environmental groups warned on Wednesday.
The rusting hulks contain about 350 tonnes of toxic chemicals, 620 tonnes of asbestos and 470 tonnes of old fuel oil and represent a major pollution risk, the Basel Action Network (BAN), a network of groups including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, said.
"We have a situation where their condition plus the pollutant load means floating time bombs are heading Europe's way," James Puckett of BAN told journalists.
The first two ships left Chesapeake Bay on the US east coast two weeks ago and are being hauled in tandem by tugboats to north-western Britain, crossing French and Belgian territorial waters on their way, Puckett added.
They are due to arrive in Teesside on November 5, where they are likely to be dismantled by a local shipyard while lying in a river estuary, increasing the risk of pollution, according to BAN.
"The permits to construct a dry dock do not yet exist," Puckett said.
BAN said Washington's decision this month to reverse the previous US administration's freeze on scrapping vessels abroad highlighted the need for ships to be included in an international agreement which regulates the export of industrial waste.
Concerns about pollution from shipping are riding high in Europe, and single-hull tankers carrying heavy fuel oil were banned from European Union ports under new rules adopted on Tuesday.
----
Dissatisfied with air security, activists test it
10/22/2003
By Fred Bayles,
USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-10-22-air-security-activists_x.htm
College student Nathaniel Heatwole says he smuggled box cutters aboard airliners as an act of civil disobedience. Steve Elson, a former federal agent, says he's being patriotic by showing how easy it is to get questionable items through airport security.
The two represent a small but growing number of activists who risk jail time to illustrate security lapses they say could allow terrorists to attack passenger jets. Federal officials say the activists are publicity hounds whose stunts hurt security efforts, but the protesters are finding some support, even among members of Congress.
Heatwole "has helped bring public attention to what has quietly been brushed aside in Congress," says Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., chairman of the House of Representatives' aviation subcommittee. Mica says other government agencies have uncovered security failures, but "the subject gets more public attention when an outsider does it."
According to court papers, Heatwole sent an e-mail to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) on Sept. 15 that identified himself and detailed how he smuggled potential weapons onto six Southwest Airlines flights between Raleigh-Durham, N.C., and Baltimore-Washington International Airport.
The e-mail went unnoticed until box cutters, bleach, molding clay and matches were found last week in the lavatories of two jets. Since then, the TSA has said it is changing how it monitors the thousands of e-mails it receives each day.
The TSA says 1,018 people have been arrested for attempting to bring banned items onto planes since February 2002, when it took over airport security. The agency doesn't have figures on how many were ultimately charged or convicted - or how many were testing the security system for flaws.
TSA spokesman Brian Turmail says most passengers who are stopped simply forgot to examine their luggage for banned items.
"Then there are those who, for whatever reason, decided to game the system," Turmail says. "A lot of these gamers are in some ways the computer hackers of the air transportation system."
Some say they have a more serious purpose. Elson, a former Navy commando and former security specialist for the Federal Aviation Administration, warned FAA officials and Congress before Sept. 11, 2001, that it would be easy for terrorists to take over an airliner. The 9/11 terrorists used box cutters to commandeer four passenger jets and launch suicide missions that killed more than 3,000 people.
Elson sends daily e-mails to federal officials, journalists and fellow critics of airport security. He has helped at least 15 television stations demonstrate gaps in luggage screening by using lead-lined film bags to shield suspicious objects from airport X-rays. Elson, however, avoids breaking the law. Instead of smuggling a gun or bomb in the luggage, he places a hair dryer or apple, items with shapes and masses that approximate those of a handgun or a grenade.
"My first rule is do no harm," he says. He points out lapses to airport screeners.
People who test the system "are putting themselves at tremendous risk, but they know something stinks and they'd like to clean it up," says Brian Sullivan, a retired FAA security agent.
Average travelers are becoming more aware - and angry - about perceived flaws in airport security, says Andrew Thomas, a business consultant and author of Aviation Insecurity, a book on the history of airline security.
"It strikes a more visceral personal cord with people," Thomas says. "They think: 'I'm an American. I pay taxes. I pay a lot to fly. This stuff should be safe especially after what happened on 9/11.' "
Some see this activism as part of a broader trend. Louis Clark, executive director of the Government Accountability Project, a watchdog group that supports whistleblowers, says the number of cases brought to his organization has tripled in the past two years.
"There is this dramatic increase since Sept. 11, particularly in issues of security and health issues," Clark says. "I've heard people say Sept. 11 has jogged them into a greater sense of ethics and responsibility for their society."
But the TSA hardly considers Heatwole and others who test security as heroes.
"Regardless of motivation, those who choose to game the system are diverting resources away from the war on terror and putting passengers at risk," Turmail says
--------
DU protesters found NOT GUILTY of trespass at weapons assembler
Alliant 28 found not guilty by jury of citizens
Wednesday 22 October
by Steve Clemens
From The Pulse of the Twin Cities,
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA;
From: Nukewatch
On Friday, October 17, 2003, a six-person jury of citizens from Hennepin County declared that International Law can trump the local private property/no trespass law. At the height of the recent war against Iraq, on April 2, 2003, 28 Minnesotans "crossed the line," entering the world headquarters property of Alliant TechSystems Corporation in Edina with the express purpose of conducting a "citizens weapons inspection."
The letter they carried demanded that they have access to the books and records of Alliant TechSystems Corporation (ATK) to see if they had completed any studies on the medical and environmental effects of the depleted uranium munitions they produce.
The defendants contended that there is significant evidence that the depleted uranium penetrator munitions produced by ATK containing U-238, a radioactive substance with a half-life of 4.5 billion years, is a prime suspect in escalating rates of cancers and birth defects among residents of southern Iraq and US troops who served in the first Gulf War.
On April 2, 2003, 28 activists crossed the line and entered Alliant TechSystems. On October 17, 2003 a public trial was held and all 28 were found not guilty.
Using provisions from the U.S. Constitution and International Humanitarian Law, the defendants successfully argued that the "manufacture, sale, stockpiling, as well as the use of weapons containing this radioactive waste (depleted uranium) is illegal.
The U.S. Constitution declares that International Treaties signed by the government become "the supreme law of the land." The Hague and Geneva Conventions and its protocols and subsequent treaties are clear that weapons which cannot discriminate between civilian and military or combatants are prohibited from not only use but also from manufacture and sale. The Nuremberg Tribunals were the vehicle victorious Allied countries used to judge and punish German military, political, and corporate leaders for war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity after WWII. The Nuremberg Principles were incorporated into the Charter of the United Nations, a treaty which in now "supreme law" in the U.S. when it ratified it. The 7th Principle declares that "complicity with a Crime Against Humanity or a War Crime" is a crime under International Law. Because of the increasing evidence mounting about the indiscriminate nature of this weapon, the defendants argued they were compelled to act.
All 19 of the remaining defendants (9 original defendants pled "guilty" because they were unable to devote a week out of their work/school schedules to a jury trial) testified on Thursday, clearly moving the jury as well as fellow defendants. Steve Clemens introduced the provisions from International Law and he and three other defendants told accounts of what they had seen first hand in visits to Iraq since the 1991 war. Dr. Gene Ott testified about some of the medical consequences he suspects are the results of exposure to the use of these radioactive weapons. The most moving testimony came from a first-time activist.
Wendi Nauheimer had never been in a demonstration before. One week before this witness against ATK took place, she told Marv Davidov, the longtime peace and justice activist, "They [ATK] killed my brother, Patrick."
Wendi testified that her brother, a US Marine for 11 years, returned from the desert area of Iraq and Kuwait after "cleanup" of the area where depleted uranium weapons were used with sores on his body. He developed an aggressive form of leukemia and died in 1995, leaving a widow and two young children. Before he died, he told his family, "Something happened to me in that desert." Wendi believes her brother's death is at least partially due to the exposure to radiation he received from the waste left by depleted uranium penetrator munitions manufactured by ATK and sold to the Army and Air Force and used in that war.
Another defendant, Katie Gray Brown, testified that her brother-in-law is dying from cancers she believes were caused by the radioactive nature of the shrapnel which lodged near his spine during the first Gulf War. The defendants included six Roman Catholic nuns who testified how our nation's spending on the military has deprived many needy people in our inner cities.
Sister Char Madigan pled with the jury to join her in working to move from "money-wealth to commonwealth." She said that ATK cannot hide what it is doing for profit behind "private property" laws but must be exposed and held accountable like the tobacco companies and Enron.
Jane Evershed, a local poet and artist told of being arrested for protesting apartheid in South Africa. Today, that evil system is gone and she believes that some day soon, so will the evilness of depleted uranium weapons be evident to the majority and we will rid ourselves of it as well.
Phil Steger, Director of the Friends For a NonViolent World handled the difficult task of the opening and closing arguments, winning praise from the prosecutor. Because all of the defendants were there without an attorney by their choice, Phil's eloquence was all the more appreciated by the other defendants since this was his first trial.
Although most defendants were motivated by their Christian faith, Kathleen Ruona, a proclaimed atheist, spoke movingly of "species arrogance" in that the deadly radiation released by these illegal weapons threaten not only humans but other plant and animal life as well. Marv Davidov, a Jewish activist thundered like one of the Hebrew prophets of old as he decried the racism of our society and then told of his 30-plus year campaign to stop the production of landmines, cluster bombs, and depleted uranium weapons made by Honeywell Corporation and now by the spin-off of that company into ATK. Because of the large and frequent demonstrations against the weapons they were making, Honeywell divested itself of that division.
Marv and "Alliant Action," as well as the newly-created "Philip Berrigan Depleted Uranium Coalition," will continue to work to convert ATK from its present production of "swords" into "plowshares" which can better all humankind. Weekly vigils, begun in 1995, will continue by the entrance to ATK. Come join us!
Nukewatch P.O. Box 649 Luck, Wisc. 54853 Phone: 715-472-4185 Fax: 715-472-4184 www.nukewatch.com
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