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NUCLEAR
Paper left out voice of protesters
Thousands Protest Against German Nuclear Waste
Report: Iran 'vigorously' pursued programs to produce WMDs
Iran to agree to nuclear inspections
Agency Says Iran Will Accept Tough Nuclear Inspections
Iran to Allow Stringent Nuke Inspections
AP: Iraqi Scientist Not Working on Bombs
North Korea may have produced nukes without tests : US report
Multinational gas project may exclude N Korea: report
CIA: N. Korea Doesn't Need Nuclear Tests
CIA Says N.Korea Already Has 'Validated' Nuke
Military Chief Warns of Rogue Missile Attacks
Scientists lobby for mini-nukes
Crossing the nuclear line
US military spending bill lifts ban on low-yield nuclear weapons
DEP: Radioactive rocks no threat to Mt. Olive
Report details radiation exposure
Bill Includes Funds to Study Indian Point
Troubled Ohio nuclear plant set for restart
N-waste fate maybe sealed by Utah
$401 Billion Voted to Boost Defense
Citing abuse, US Senate Republicans halt Iraq weapons probe
Frist Freezes Senate Probe of Prewar Iraq Data
MILITARY
France Presses U.S. on 6 at Guantánamo
Iraqi Intel Top-Notch Study sheds light on resistance
Another Copter Down in Iraq;
U.S. Grip Loosens in the Sunni Triangle
Israelis Kill 4 in Gaza Strip
With a U.S. Nod, Turkey Says It Won't Send Force to Iraq
Air Force rules out death in spy case
Air Force Spy Case Draws Fire
Wounded Numbers
Seven Thousand Wounded US Soldiers
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Without a clue
9/11 Panel Issues Subpoena to Pentagon
9/11 White House Subpoena Omits Classified Briefings
U.S. Warns of Al Qaeda Cargo Plane Plot
Alert Warns of Attacks Using Hijacked Cargo Jets
Court Upholds a Post-9/11 Detention Tactic
Judges Strike Down Law on Religion in Prison
OTHER
Marietta dentist uses technology
China Begins Giving Free H.I.V./AIDS Drugs to the Poor
ACTIVISTS
Envoy: Myanmar's Suu Kyi Refuses Freedom
War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy
Military Families Speak Out Against War
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Paper left out voice of protesters
Phil Steger
November 8, 2003
Minneapolis Star Tribune
http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/4197099.html
Despite the poor treatment in the press, Minnesotans will want to know the important implications of the "not guil-ty" verdict given to 19 citizens who peacefully entered Alliant Techsystems Corp. property on April 2 (StarTribune, "Protestors cleared of tresspassing charges," Oct. 21).
Unfortunately for all except Alliant Techsytems, the Star Tribune dismissed us as faceless, voiceless, "protesters." It quoted only one person -- corporation spokesperson Bryce Hallowell -- saying, "The protesters knowingly and willfully took actions with the express purpose of being arrested."
It will be important for Minnesotans to know, whatever Hallowell may say from Alliant Techsystems headquarters, that our actual intention, testimony and evidence, and the jury's actual verdict established the exact opposite of this.
Permit me to set the record straight.
We entered Alliant Techsystems because it leads the world in the manufacturing and marketing of ammunition made from radioactive nuclear waste -- ammunition given the PC name "depleted uranium." The United States used more than 300 tons of this ammunition in the first Gulf War.
We believe that the pollution from used uranium munitions manufactured and sold by Alliant Techsystems is partially, if not largely, responsible for the deaths of more than 9,000 Gulf War vets between 1991 and 2000, and for the more than 250,000 permanent disabilities that the Veterans Administration reported were filed during the same period.
We believe this same radioactive material manufactured by Alliant Techsystems is responsible for the death and suffering of people we know.
One defendant's brother, a Marine, went to Kuwait after the 1991 war and came back with open sores on his skin. His family's efforts to get answers were dismissed. He died in 1995 of "rapid-fire" leukemia.
Another defendant's brother-in-law returned from Iraq with a piece of "friendly-fire" shrapnel in his back. He is fighting off the third cancer to attack his body since his return.
Others of us have walked through children's leukemia wards in Iraq packed with terminal children, or paged through the photo records compiled by Iraqi obstetricians of grotesquely mutated newborns delivered since the end of the Gulf War.
We went to Alliant Techsystems Corp. to deliver to Paul David Miller, its CEO, letters that listed the international laws which we believe the manufacture of depleted uranium violates, and which called for the immediate release of all their records pertaining to the health risks of post-use uranium exposure. We signed the letters "Minnesota Citizens' Weapons Inspection Team."
We went to Alliant Techsystems because we believed international law -- including the Geneva Conventions, and the Nuremburg principles -- compels all citizens to act when they believe that crimes against humanity are taking place.
A jury of ordinary Minnesotans found our beliefs to be "reasonable" and in "good faith." This is why it found us not guilty of trespass.
It is crucial for the whole, American public to examine the long-term, permanent health and environmental impacts of radioactive munitions known as "depleted uranium," and to compel corporations that do not wish to cooperate with this essential investigation to do so anyway.
Minnesotans, especially, need to seriously examine the indiscriminate impacts of uranium weapons on U.S. troops and innocent people. This is because the world's leading producer of uranium munitions is in Edina. The place where they were manufactured was in Arden Hills. And one of the places where they were tested was in Elk River.
Families of Gulf War vets who have died from leukemia, who have given birth to deformed children, or who are fighting off new, aggressive cancers, as well as the families of men and women now stationed in Iraq will want to pay particular attention to Alliant Techsystems Corp. and to our case. The press has a responsibility to make it possible for them to do so.
Phil Steger is executive director of a St. Paul nonprofit organization.
-------- europe
Thousands Protest Against German Nuclear Waste
November 8, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-germany-nuclear.html
DANNENBERG, Germany (Reuters) - Thousands of Germans rallied Saturday in a noisy but peaceful protest against the transport of reprocessed nuclear waste to a storage site.
Police counted about 3,000 demonstrators in the northern town of Dannenberg, while organizers said up to 6,000 took part in the rally also attended by farmers on about 100 tractors.
The demonstrators whistled and cheered as they listened to speeches demanding an immediate halt to the transport of nuclear waste to a storage site in Gorleben, north of Hanover, but there was none of the violence of protests in previous years.
``We will continue to defend ourselves because we want to prevent a looming catastrophe for the next generation,'' anti-nuclear campaigner Jochen Stay said in a statement.
The center-left government in which Greens are junior partners agreed with industry in 2000 to phase out all reactors by around 2025. Power firms are also obliged to build on-site storage facilities for waste to avoid the unpopular transports.
A train carrying 12 containers with 1,300 tons of treated waste is set to leave the French reprocessing plant of La Hague Sunday evening. The waste will be loaded onto trucks in Dannenberg and is expected to arrive in Gorleben Wednesday.
The shipments to Gorleben have become the object of a ritual confrontation between police and anti-nuclear activists. Some 15,000 police were needed to guard the route in 2001 in the largest peacetime security operation in post-war German history.
Security costs have reached $23 million in past years.
Last year, protesters disrupted the passage of a train carrying the nuclear waste by setting tires on fire on the tracks and chaining themselves to the rails.
Police said they expected less trouble this year, but are still planning tight security particularly for the last stretch of the transport and up to 13,000 officers are on standby.
-------- iran
Report: Iran 'vigorously' pursued programs to produce WMDs
By Reuters
08/11/2003
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/358399.html
WASHINGTON - Iran "vigorously" pursued programs to produce nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and sought help from Russia, China, North Korea and Europe, a CIA report said on Friday. "The United States remains convinced that Tehran has been pursuing a clandestine nuclear weapons program," according to a semi-annual unclassified report to Congress on the acquisition of technology relating to weapons of mass destruction.
"Iran sought technology that can support fissile material production for a nuclear weapons program," said the report, covering the period Jan. 1 to June 30.
Satellite imagery showed Iran was burying a uranium centrifuge enrichment facility at Natanz, a town about 160 km south of Tehran, probably to hide it in case of military attack, the CIA report said.
Iran says its uranium enrichment program is only for the peaceful generation of electricity and not for atomic weapons. Earlier this week, it said it had handed over to the UN nuclear watchdog drawings of equipment to help prove that.
The CIA said it was concerned about uranium centrifuges discovered at Natanz capable of enriching uranium for use in nuclear weapons.
Iran was believed to be pursuing nuclear fuel from both uranium and plutonium, the report said. A heavy water research reactor pursued by Iran "could produce plutonium for nuclear weapons," it said.
The report had only one paragraph on Iraq, noting that the U.S.-led war that toppled Saddam Hussein occurred during that period. "A large-scale effort is currently underway to find the answers to the many outstanding questions about Iraq's WMD and delivery systems," it said.
Critics have suggested the White House may have exaggerated the threat Iraq posed due to weapons of mass destruction, used to justify the war, because no such weapons had been found.
The report also briefly discussed North Korea's nuclear ambitions. In late February, Pyongyang restarted its five-megawatt nuclear reactor, which could produce spent fuel rods containing plutonium.
In April, North Korea told U.S. officials that it had nuclear weapons and signaled its intent to reprocess the spent fuel for more. "We continued to monitor and assess North Korea's nuclear weapons efforts," the CIA said.
Syria has a nuclear research center at Dayr Al Hajar and broader access to foreign expertise provides opportunities to expand capabilities, "and we are looking at Syrian nuclear intentions with growing concern," the report said.
The threat of terrorists using chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear materials "remained high" during the first half of 2003, the CIA report said. But terror groups would probably continue to favor conventional tactics like bombings and shootings, it said.
Documents and equipment recovered from Al-Qaida facilities in Afghanistan showed that Osama bin Laden had "a more sophisticated unconventional weapons research program than was previously known," the report said.
Al-Qaida also had ambitions to acquire or develop nuclear weapons, it said. Also it was possible that Al-Qaida or "other terrorist groups" might try to launch conventional attacks against the chemical or nuclear industrial infrastructure of the United States to cause panic and economic disruption.
China has over the past several years taken steps to improve on nonproliferation, "but the proliferation behavior of Chinese companies remains of great concern," the report said.
While China in 1997 agreed to end nuclear cooperation with Iran, the CIA said it remained concerned that some interactions continued.
The report also said the possibility of contacts between Chinese entities and entities associated with Pakistan's nuclear weapons program could not be ruled out.
----
Iran to agree to nuclear inspections, suspend uranium enrichment: ElBaradei
VIENNA (AFP)
Nov 08, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031108161348.zsoim3rf.html
Iran will next week give the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) letters agreeing to surprise United Nations inspections of its nuclear facilites and confirming it will suspend the enrichment of uranium, the IAEA director general said Saturday.
"I was told by Dr Rowhani we will be getting a letter next week on the additional protocol, which is a positive step. We will also be getting a letter on suspending enrichment, which is also a positive step," the head of the UN's nuclear watchdog, Mohamed ElBaradei, said after meeting with Iranian security chief Hasan Rowhani.
----
Agency Says Iran Will Accept Tough Nuclear Inspections
November 8, 2003
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iran-nuclear.html?hp
VIENNA (Reuters) - The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said on Saturday Iran promised to hand over two crucial letters making official its acceptance of tougher nuclear inspections and a suspension of its controversial uranium enrichment program.
``Next week we will get the letter for conclusion of the Additional Protocol,'' International Atomic Energy Agencychief Mohamed ElBaradei told reporters after a more than 90 minute meeting in Vienna with the head of Iran's Supreme National Security, Hassan Rohani.
ElBaradei also said Iran had promised a letter formally announcing the uranium enrichment suspension next week.
When asked when the uranium enrichment will be stopped, Rohani said through an interpreter: ``In the next week I will announce that.''
Washington, which accuses Iran of covertly developing the capacity to build atomic weapons, branded Iran part of an ``axis of evil'' with North Korea and pre-war Iraq. Iran denies it wants an atomic weapon and insists its nuclear program is peaceful.
Rohani's meeting with ElBaradei came days before the IAEA was expected to circulate among Vienna diplomats its latest report on nuclear inspections in Iran, a report ElBaradei said would detail more failures by Iran to report required information to the United Nations.
This report will be discussed at the November 20 meeting of the IAEA's 35-nation Board of Governors.
Asked about that report on Saturday, ElBaradei said ``it is a factual report about what we have seen.''
Iran promised to deliver a letter formally declaring its intention to sign the Additional Protocol to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which Iran has signed.
SNAP INSPECTIONS
The protocol, created after the 1991 discovery of Iraq's secret atomic weapons program, would give the IAEA the authority to conduct more intrusive, short-notice inspections of declared and undeclared sites to flush out any secret weapons-related activities.
Iran must give the IAEA the letter before the IAEA board meeting in order for the board to approve Tehran's intention to sign the protocol. Only then Iran can sign it.
Although it will take some time for Iran's parliament to ratify the protocol, Tehran has said it would allow the tougher inspections before ratification.
On October 21, Iranian officials told the foreign ministers of Germany, France and Britain that Tehran would not only sign the Additional Protocol but would temporarily stop enriching uranium as a confidence-building measure.
This had been requested of Iran in the IAEA board's tough September 12 resolution that set an October 31 deadline for Iran to give the IAEA a full declaration of all nuclear activities.
Enrichment is a process of purifying uranium to make it useable as nuclear fuel or in weapons.
But almost a week after the announced enrichment freeze, Iran admitted it had yet to take effect. One Western diplomat said the fact that Iran has not yet suspended its enrichment program was a ``very bad sign.''
Diplomats told Reuters there had been disagreement with Iran on what constituted suspension. The French, Germans and British want all enrichment operations halted, whereas Iran wants only to halt its enrichment centrifuges and continue research work.
Rohani said on Saturday Tehran would abide by the deal reached with French, German and British foreign ministers.
Rohani was appointed by Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and was originally viewed as a hard-liner. But he is increasingly seen as representing the middle ground between Khamenei and the reform-minded President Mohammad Khatami.
----
Iran to Allow Stringent Nuke Inspections
November 8, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Nuclear-Agency-Iran.html
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- Iran will firm up pledges next week to allow snap inspections of suspect nuclear sites and announce when it will suspend uranium enrichment, the head of the U.N. nuclear agency and a top Iranian official said Saturday.
Working to deflect the possibility of international sanctions, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, met with Hasan Rowhani, the head of Iran's Supreme National Security Council.
ElBaradei told reporters afterward that Rowhani reaffirmed Iran's commitment to allowing more intrusive inspections of its nuclear facilities and suspending uranium enrichment. Iran made those pledges under pressure to prove it is not trying to make nuclear arms but had not specified a time frame.
``Next week, we will get a letter from Iran on the conclusion of the additional protocol,'' which -- if approved by Iran's parliament -- would allow IAEA inspectors to probe nuclear activities hitherto off-limits, ElBaradei told reporters. Rowhani also promised a letter next week ``on Iran's agreement to suspend all enrichment activities and reprocessing activities,'' ElBaradei said.
Asked for a firm date on the start of a moratorium on uranium enrichment, Rowhani said he would announce that next week.
``Iran is determined to make sure that the international community is assured of the peaceful nature of its (nuclear) programs,'' he said.
The meeting between ElBaradei and Rowhani came only days before ElBaradei is to release a report to the IAEA board of governors on Tehran's nuclear activities.
Diplomats familiar with the agency, who asked for anonymity, said the IAEA would likely receive the two letters by Monday, in time for ElBaradei to include them in his report.
The IAEA board plans to meet Nov. 20 to scrutinize the report and weigh charges by the United States and its allies that Iran is running a clandestine weapons program.
If the board meeting decides that the report justifies declaring Tehran in violation of the Nonproliferation Treaty, meant to stop the spread of nuclear arms, it would refer the issue to U.N. Security Council, which could impose sanctions.
Under international pressure, Iran gave the agency what it said was a complete declaration of its nuclear activities just days ahead of an Oct. 31 deadline.
Tehran promised weeks ago to suspend its enrichment activities, a key concern.
It maintains that it has enriched uranium only to non-weapons levels, as part of purely peaceful nuclear programs meant to generate electricity.
While acknowledging IAEA finds of traces of highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium on its enrichment centrifuges, it says the ``contamination'' originated outside Iran and was inadvertently imported with the equipment bought abroad.
Diplomats say the United States and its allies will seize on any ambiguity in ElBaradei's report concerning enrichment and other suspicious activities in pushing at the board meeting to have Iran declared in noncompliance with the Nonproliferation Treaty.
Rowhani on Saturday suggested that the United States would not have much of a case.
``All remaining questions have been answered by Iran,'' he said, asserting that both he and ElBaradei ``concluded that ... (Tehran) has completely disclosed its past (nuclear) activities.''
Asked if that was so, ElBaradei said that his agency has had ``satisfactory cooperation'' with Iran but suggested that work remained to be done, saying that ``full transparency'' on the nature of Iran's nuclear program had not yet been achieved.
``I think we are moving together to try and resolve all remaining issues,'' he said.
IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky said that the agency ``could not pass judgment ... until we have independently verified the accuracy'' of the evidence provided by Iran on its nuclear activities, adding: ``That could take months.''
From Vienna, Rowhani was to fly to Moscow. A senior State Department official in Washington said earlier this week on condition of anonymity that Russia may be ready to halt a $800 million deal with Tehran to build a reactor for a power plant if Iran backtracks on its commitment to clear up suspicions about its nuclear activities.
-------- iraq / inspections
AP: Iraqi Scientist Not Working on Bombs
November 8, 2003
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Death-of-a-Scientist.html?pagewanted=all&position=
http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGA9WSVYRMD.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- An Iraqi scientist killed in the U.S. invasion and now linked by arms hunter David Kay to possible nuclear weapons research was working on an advanced gun, not atomic bombs, fellow physicists say.
They and eyewitnesses also say Khalid Ibrahim Sa'id was killed not when he tried to ``run a roadblock,'' as asserted by Kay, but when a U.S. tank crew blasted his civilian car without warning on an open street.
These accounts of the physicist's research and death, provided by 10 Iraqis and supported on key points by U.N. arms inspectors, challenge a core element of Kay's testimony Oct. 2 to congressional committees in Washington.
The Associated Press asked Kay's Iraq Survey Group to better detail its allegations about the late scientist, but the ISG repeatedly declined. The U.S. weapons hunters also have not disclosed any basis for such allegations to U.N. inspectors, although they had been expected to do so under U.N. resolutions.
President Bush endorsed Kay's work again Oct. 28, telling reporters his chief weapons investigator ``continues to ferret out the truth.'' But Sa'id's longtime colleagues and friends sharply disagree, calling what they read in Kay's report ``lies.''
``Sa'id is a good catch for David Kay because he is silent. He can't defend himself,'' said nuclear scientist Sabah Abdul Noor, a friend for 30 years.
Those challenging the American's allegations include physicists known not to have supported Saddam Hussein's ousted Baath Party regime or its work in the 1980s on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
Kay's mixed CIA-military Iraq Survey Group, staffed with weapons specialists, was deployed here to try to substantiate claims made by the Bush administration to justify the March invasion -- assertions that Baghdad still possessed prohibited chemical and biological arms and had resumed its nuclear weapons program.
In his Oct. 2 interim report, Kay acknowledged that his teams had found no such weapons or nuclear program.
Instead, he shifted the focus to Iraqi ``aspirations,'' ``intentions'' and ``capabilities.'' In his 700-word nuclear section, that focus fell largely on Khalid Sa'id.
Kay told congressmen that beginning around 2000, Sa'id ``began several small and relatively unsophisticated research initiatives that could be applied to nuclear weapons development.'' His report did not describe that research, however, and said, ``These initiatives did not in and of themselves constitute a resumption of the nuclear weapons program.''
It then added that ``regretfully'' the scientist was killed on April 8, as U.S. troops entered Baghdad, ``when the car he was riding in attempted to run a Coalition roadblock.''
``To begin with, this is a lie,'' Noor said.
He and other scientist friends said they learned how Sa'id died from his family and others, an account corroborated by three eyewitnesses in AP interviews.
That morning, the friends recounted, the Nissan Patrol utility vehicle carrying Sa'id, his driver and another man turned onto the main avenue of south Baghdad's Khadra district, for the physicist to check on his empty, shuttered home. They apparently were unaware that advancing U.S. tanks had reached Khadra, and a tank stood at the far end of the avenue.
``Anything that moved, they would shoot,'' said Mohammed Hassan, 36, an avenue resident who said he saw Sa'id's vehicle approaching. ``People were running madly here and there with their children. People on foot were shot here,'' another witness, Jamal Abbas, 40, told the AP as he stood on the Khadra curbside. People tried to signal Sa'id's car and another one to stop, but it was too late, the witnesses said. From a few hundred yards away, they said, the tank crew fired its cannon at both vehicles.
At least one shell struck the Nissan and turned it into an inferno, killing the driver and third man, and fatally wounding Sa'id, they said. He died four hours later in a hospital, friends said. The driver's body was left burning in the melting vehicle.
The witnesses said there was no ``Coalition roadblock'' for the Nissan to run, as asserted by Kay. ``There was no justification at all for this. There wasn't any resistance here in Khadra,'' Hassan said.
Asked specifically, ISG spokesman Kenneth Gerhart in Washington declined to identify the basis for the roadblock story.
As for Sa'id's recent research, physicists who observed it or worked with him said he had been trying, since 2000, to develop an electromagnetic or particle gun -- unrelated to nuclear weapons. Such an advanced gun would, for example, fire its load at incoming aircraft.
Noor, a materials specialist, said he sometimes visited the gun project and consulted with Sa'id.
Sa'id, in his early 60s, was educated in the United States and at Britain's University of Reading, where he obtained a Ph.D. in solid-state physics. He was described by friends as a man of great energy, obsessed with his work and ``Baathist to the bone.''
He did have a background in nuclear weapons research; like Noor and many other Iraqi physicists, he was involved in Iraq's effort in the 1980s to develop a bomb, a program that failed and was dismantled after the 1991 Gulf War by inspectors of the U.N.-affiliated International Atomic Energy Agency.
Those U.N. inspectors kept watch on such scientists in the 1990s. Sa'id was not found to be working on prohibited projects during that period, a senior IAEA official told the AP from agency headquarters in Vienna, Austria. He asked that his name not be used because of the diplomatic sensitivity of the issues.
In fact, in the lead-up to war earlier this year, the IAEA reported it never found evidence Iraq had resumed nuclear weapons work at all after early 1991.
Another longtime colleague, physicist Hamed M. al-Bahili, said he saw a film record of Sa'id's final project, showing model gun ``engines'' on stands in a small lab. Al-Bahili called it a failure. ``They spent 2 1/2 years on it, so much money on it.'' Noor said the work ``was in a primitive stage.''
Molecular physicist Abdel Mehdi Talib, Baghdad University's dean of sciences, was a longtime friend of Sa'id's and next-door neighbor in Khadra, where many scientists live. He laughed as he read Kay's allegations, with its almost exclusive emphasis on Sa'id, saying his friend had fallen decades out of date on nuclear physics.
``What was Khalid, a one-man band? Playing the drums, the harmonica?'' said Talib, recently elected dean by his colleagues in part because of his anti-Baathist background.
The university's physics department head, another longtime associate and anti-Baathist, also scoffed at Kay's contention.
``This paragraph is completely wrong,'' Baha Toama Chiad said.
Kay's ISG declined to explain why it chose to link this single scientist's recent work to possible nuclear weapons development.
Kay focused on Sa'id at another point in his congressional testimony as well, saying it was suspected the dead physicist had been ``considering a restart of the centrifuge program'' -- Iraq's failed 1980s project to produce enriched uranium as bomb material.
His colleagues were visibly startled as they read this allegation of Kay's because, they said, Sa'id had never worked on enrichment. ``I know men who did work on centrifuges, and they never mentioned such a thing,'' Noor said.
In Vienna, the IAEA official agreed. He said Sa'id had not worked on the old centrifuge program, or any enrichment activities. His belated involvement in centrifuge development, without support of pre-1991 specialists, ``would be very illogical, like reinventing the wheel,'' the official said.
The ISG's Gerhart declined to specify any basis for the purported centrifuge link. ``The ISG is not commenting on its findings or operations to the media at this time,'' he said.
Another leading physicist, Nabil Fahwaz of Baghdad's University of Technology, said repeated, unsubstantiated U.S. allegations of a revived Iraqi nuclear weapons program have been ``so very wrong. ... After 1990 there was no activity.''
-------- korea
North Korea may have produced nukes without tests : US report
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Nov 08, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031108202831.76wl1v8u.html
North Korea may have already produced nuclear weapons and bypassed the need for what would be politically explosive weapons tests, the CIA says in newly released intelligence documents.
"We assess that North Korea has produced one or two simple fission-type nuclear weapons and has validated the designs without conducting yield-producing nuclear tests," said the Central Intelligence Agency in a report to Congress.
Pyongyang may have carried out a series of high explosive tests short of a full atomic tests in order to validite the designs for the bombs, the CIA said, referencing press reports.
"With such tests, we assess that North Korea would not require nuclear tests to validate simple fission weapons," the documents said.
"There is no information to suggest that North Korea has conducted a successful nuclear test to date."
The revelation was contained in a documents sent to Congress in August, but only just released publicly. The data was in the form of answers to questions posed by Senators in a hearing earlier this year.
Further data on North Korea's nuclear weapons program, which has sparked a year-long showdown with Washington, was contained in a classified annex to the assessment.
In previously publicly available assessments, the CIA has said that Pyongyang has the capacity to make "several more" nuclear bombs in addition to the one or two it has estimated to have already produced.
----
Multinational gas project may exclude N Korea: report
08 November 2003
AFP
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_asiapacific_business/view/56244/1/.html
SEOUL : A multinational project to pipe Russia's Siberian natural gas into China and the Korean peninsula will exclude energy-starved North Korea, a news report said Friday.
A three-year joint feasibility study by Russia, China and South Korea concluded that gas pipelines should bypass North Korea due to hefty costs and safety reasons, the Seoul-based JoongAng Ilbo newspaper said.
"The route to run through North Korea requires more investment and operational costs than others and also raises security issues as it passes through the inter-Korean military border," an official told JoongAng.
The study, set to be announced next week, instead suggested that the pipelines from a natural gas field in Irkutsk, eastern Siberia should link up to South Korea through China and the Yellow Sea.
The consortium of South Korea, Russia and China meets in Irkutsk on Wednesday to discuss the joint feasibility study results, and seeks to sign a deal at a meeting in Moscow on Friday, it said.
But Seoul officials said more talks would open in March next year.
Seoul had pushed for natural gas pipelines to run through North Korea because the project could help ease Pyongyang's chronic energy shortages and settle a nuclear crisis over its nuclear ambitions.
North Korea has sparked US-led international concerns over its reactivation of a mothballed nuclear power plant capable of producing weapons grade plutonium.
Some officials in Seoul propose to offer natural gas to North Korea in return for ending the communist state's nuclear program.
The three-nation natural gas project was first proposed in 1995. The feasibility study began in 2001. Construction is expected to start in 2004.
South Korea expects to annually import around seven million tons of natural gas from Russia over the next 30 years from 2008 when the project is completed.
--------
CIA: N. Korea Doesn't Need Nuclear Tests
November 8, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-NKorea-Nuclear.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The CIA has concluded that North Korea has been able to validate its nuclear weapons designs without a nuclear test, the agency disclosed to Congress.
The intelligence service believes that conventional explosives tests, conducted since the 1980s, have allowed the North Koreans to verify their nuclear designs would work. The agency believes North Korea has one or two nuclear weapons similar to what the United States dropped on Hiroshima during World War II; a minority of U.S. analysts believe the communist country may already have made more.
CIA officials do not describe the precise mechanism by which the North Koreans could have verified their designs. The explanation to Congress provides the rationale behind the agency's conclusion that North Korea already has a nuclear weapon.
The relatively simple fission weapons that North Korea is believed to have produced would presumably detonate a precisely built shell of conventional high explosives around a plutonium core, and the tests may have involved the designs of that shell.
A CIA spokesman declined last week to expand on the agency's conclusions.
North Korea has suggested it may conduct a nuclear test to demonstrate it is a nuclear power. But U.S. officials are not sure that the North Koreans would expend a nuclear weapon if they have only a few.
``A North Korean decision to conduct a nuclear test would entail risks for Pyongyang of precipitating an international backlash and further isolation,'' the CIA says. ``Pyongyang at this point appears to view ambiguity regarding its nuclear capabilities as providing a tactical advantage.''
The CIA's conclusion was reported in an unclassified letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee in August. That letter, along with similar communications from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the FBI and State Department, was obtained by the Federation of American Scientists, a watchdog group that focuses on security and intelligence matters.
North Korea's nuclear program, which the United States demands an end to, has been the focus of intense diplomatic activity in the region.
North Korea frequently issues threats but has also taken part in six-country talks regarding its programs. U.S. officials believe North Korea, long in a dire economic state, regards nuclear weapons as a way to exact aid and concessions from the rest of the world.
U.S. intelligence officials have acknowledged uncertainties about North Korea's weapons programs. The Defense Intelligence Agency, in its letter to the Senate committee, said a once-feared North Korean missile, the Taepo Dong 1, now appears to be only a research and development platform that is not intended for operational use.
North Korea remains ready, however, to test the Taepo Dong 2 -- a newer, long-range missile that may be capable of reaching the United States, the DIA says.
The defense agency vaguely suggests that such a test could take place either from North Korean soil or ``perhaps in another country'' that the agency did not name, although Iran and North Korea are known to have cooperated on missile projects in the past.
In their political analyses, the American intelligence agencies said the government of Kim Jong Il appears unlikely to crumble from within, although they differed on who would succeed Kim if he died.
``We lack reliable insights into the internal dynamics of his regime, however successor(s) to Kim would most likely come from the military,'' the DIA said.
The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research says that the successor would probably be one of Kim Jong Il's two sons -- Jong Nam, 32, or Jong Chol, 22.
``Because the two have different mothers, there are tensions between their families. To our knowledge, neither has moved through the grooming process far enough to dominate the other. We are unaware of any possible successor who is not a blood relative,'' the State Department says.
--------
CIA Says N.Korea Already Has 'Validated' Nuke
November 8, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-security-korea-cia.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - North Korea appears to have built one or two nuclear weapons it could be confident would work even without a test nuclear blast, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has told Congress.
``We assess that North Korea has produced one or two simple fission-type nuclear weapons and has validated the designs without conducting yield-producing nuclear tests,'' the CIA said in written replies to questions from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
The CIA's Aug. 18 statement was made public recently by the Federation of American Scientists on its Web site (www.fas.org/irp/congress/2003-hr/021103qfr-cia.pdf).
Some experts said Friday they had expected Pyongyang to carry out a test blast just as India and Pakistan did in 1998 to show the world they were members of the nuclear club, but the CIA's statement suggests this is not necessary.
``Testing would confirm (the existence of a nuclear capability) but it's not changing what they already believe,'' said Daniel Pinkston, a North Korea expert at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California.
North Korea is widely reported to have been carrying out nuclear weapon-related tests, short of blasts, since the 1980s to develop what it now says is a nuclear deterrent that is ready to use.
``Pyongyang at this point appears to view ambiguity regarding its nuclear capabilities as providing a tactical advantage,'' the spy agency said. A test nuclear explosion could spark an international backlash that would isolate the reclusive Communist state further, the agency added.
Robert Norris, who has tracked North Korea's nuclear program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said it was not surprising Pyongyang had reached this point.
``They've been working on this for several decades,'' he said.
David Albright, a physicist who is president of the Institute for Science and International Security, said the CIA statement suggested a belief the North had already ``weaponized'' a nuclear device that could be dropped from a plane or delivered by missile.
North Korea's envoy in Britain told Reuters in an interview Thursday the North possessed a ``nuclear deterrent capability ... powerful enough to deter any U.S. attack.''
The latest crisis in U.S.-North Korean relations began in October 2002, when U.S. officials said the North had been pursuing a clandestine nuclear-weapons program that violated its international commitments.
The State Department said Friday it was optimistic about chances for a fresh round of six-way talks on North Korea's suspected nuclear arms program after Secretary of State Colin Powell met a key Chinese diplomat.
The Chinese official, Vice Foreign Minister Wang Yi, told reporters after his talks with Powell that Beijing was working to set up a new round of discussions among officials from the United States, the two Koreas, Japan, Russia and China.
-------- terrorism
Military Chief Warns of Rogue Missile Attacks
November 8, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-nato-meyers.html
ORLANDO, Fla. (Reuters) - Gen. Richard Meyers, chairman of the U.S. joint chiefs of staff, warned NATO allies on Saturday that conventional forces were vulnerable to cruise missile attacks from rogue, non-state militants, saying ``it won't be long before that threat is upon us.''
Meyers spoke behind closed doors to the Defense and Security Committee of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, meeting in Florida.
The media was barred from the speech but in a recording obtained by Reuters, Meyers presented the threat from cruise missiles and short-range ballistic missiles as a hole in U.S. and allied defenses that could be exploited by ``non-state actors,'' which he did not further identify.
``You don't hear about the cruise missile threat, but if you think about it, cruise missiles, can be made to have very low radar cross sections, so they're hard to see,'' said Myers.
``They fly typically low to the ground, they fly relatively fast and they carry significant warheads, especially if you think about biological weapons or radiological weapons or even conventional weapons, for that matter, and they can be launched from almost anything -- from the back of trucks,'' Meyers said.
``I only hope that people realize that this is a real threat. Short-range ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, are prevalent in many countries,'' he said. ``It won't be long before that threat is upon us.''
Myers did not say what groups he meant when he spoke of ``non-state actors'' but he was believed to be referring to groups like al Qaeda.
A spokesman for the general later told Reuters that Meyers was not referring to any specific or imminent threat, and that the United States does not believe opposition forces in Iraq have access to cruise missiles.
Meyers raised the issue of cruise missiles during a question and answer period following his speech, which urged NATO members to streamline their national debates and make rules for deployment more flexible in the face of new threats posed by non-state militants.
``Only a small fraction of our forces are truly deployable. Without the political will, without the commitment to make the forces truly deployable, NATO will become increasingly marginalized,'' Meyers said.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Scientists lobby for mini-nukes
Los Alamos team gives plausible reasons for their use, others oppose the idea
By Ian Hoffman,
Tri-Valley Herald STAFF WRITER
Saturday, November 08, 2003
http://www.trivalleyherald.com/Stories/0,1413,86~10669~1753585,00.html
Introducing a new euphemism to the nuclear lexicon -- "reduced collateral damage" weapons, or RCDs -- four University of California scientists say low-yield nuclear weapons could help dissuade rogue nations from mounting nuclear or biological attacks on the United States or its allies.
In the latest edition of the policy journal Comparative Strategy, the four scientists at Los Alamos weapons lab deliver one of the most sober, reasoned arguments to date in favor of new military missions for the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
In a sense, it's a bit late. On Friday, House lawmakers overwhelmingly approved a new defense bill clearing the Bush administration to begin designing new, low-yield nuclear arms. The bill and a companion spending bill to fund weapons research will likely clear the Senate within two weeks and reach the president's desk by Thanksgiving.
President Bush is assured of winning the most sweeping nuclear agenda since the Reagan era -- eliminating a ban on mini-nuke development, open-ing a competition to design a nuclear earth penetrator, cutting delays in restarting nuclear testing, resurrecting Cold War-era design teams for other new weapons and building a plutonium bomb factory.
"They got it all," said Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Alamo, a leading Democratic voice on weapons and nonproliferation policy. "In the aggregate, the administration has the ability to go off and do what they've yearned to do since Day One -- design a new generation of low-yield nuclear weapons."
On first blush, RCDs are a repackaging of several weapons ideas dating as far back as the 1950s for smaller nuclear explosives and for bombs that squeeze more energy out of fusion than splitting the atom.
But by combining those ideas with the high accuracy of laser or satellite guidance systems, then sinking the weapon several yards into rock or earth, Los Alamos scientists suggest the United States would have a viable tool for threatening underground command bunkers and weapons storage facilities that are hard to attack by conventional means.
That's not new. But it's the first time that weapons scientists have delivered a technical analysis of the benefits of a low-yield earth penetrator in unclassified literature.
In essence, earth-penetrating RCDs would use rock and soil to send powerful shock waves at a target underground while absorbing some of the giant flare of blast and heat that make nuclear detonations so indiscriminantly lethal.
The result is a powerful, seismic hammer that is 10 to 50 times more effective than existing nuclear weapons for crushing underground structures while causing roughly a tenth of the civilian deaths. That's because almost all U.S. nuclear weapons detonate at or above the surface.
By comparison, a 1-kiloton penetrator would crush an underground bunker as easily as a 50-kiloton weapon detonated at the surface. The 1-kiloton weapon would carve a football-field size crater and send a huge wave of potentially lethal radioactive dirt surging upward and outward for more than a mile. But unlike the 50-kiloton weapon, it won't knock down more than a square mile of buildings, make clothes burst into flame 11/2 miles away and cause potentially lethal burns 31/2 miles away.
"In general, you're going to gain an order of magnitude from high precision and another order of magnitude from penetrating into the ground," said lead Los Alamos author Bryan Fearey, but without most of the above-ground human deaths.
While critics worry the Bush administration is fixated on low-yield weapons for their usability in war and before war as tools of preemptive attack, Fearey and his colleagues suggest that's nonsense. RCDs, they said, are aimed at persuading adversaries not to mount a nuclear, chemical or biological attack, thinking the United States would never attack their hiding points underground for fear of the massive civilian casualties above ground.
"The nuclear threshold has always been and will always remain high," they wrote. "Any decision to use nuclear weapons has always been, and will always continue to be, an agonizing one for any U.S. president, even in the direst of circumstances."
Scientists who are critical of the Bush administration's plans say the Los Alamos paper is a glass-half-full outlook on new H-bombs.
"It's a very interesting paper," said Michael Levi, an analyst at the Brookings Institution.
"It's a useful contribution. And if this is the first step in the various communities doing technical analysis on this issue, it can only yield positive results."
At the same time, "reduced collateral damage" is quite a euphemism, Levi and other scientists said.
"The fact that the collateral effects are reduced does not make the collateral effects acceptable," Levi said.
"We're still talking about tens of thousands of casualties," said Robert Nelson, a physicist and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The Los Alamos paper also includes a series of unsubstantiated claims and questionable omissions. The scientists suggest, for example, that a class of RCD weapon can neutralize underground stores of chemical or biological agents. In fact, many computer simulations suggest that unless a nuclear weapon detonates inside an underground chemical weapons storage bunker, it could barely heat the chemicals and instead blast their toxins to the surface.
But the largest omission is the paper's failure to mention that every current U.S. nuclear weapon has one or more low-yield settings, adjustable either by a feature colloquially known as "dial-a-yield" or by a pair of hand tools. Many could be turned into earth penetrators, if needed, without designing new weapons that might have to be tested.
"It's simply inaccurate to characterize the whole arsenal as high-yield. It's just not true," said Nelson.
Bob Peurifoy, a former Sandia labs weapons-design manager, says the Los Alamos scientists seem to be more interested in more money and resuming nuclear testing than a straightforward assessment of the current arsenal.
"I know how to give you most of those yields today with a pair of wire cutters and a wrench," Puerifoy said. "It also doesn't take a rocket scientists to figure out you could put a precision-guidance system on any of our nuclear weapons. Even I could do that and I'm just a poor, old retired engineer."
Los Alamos scientists also gloss over a key point. They suggest that U.S. pursuit of new weapons won't necessarily impact the nation's other nuclear plans at all. Stanford physicist Sidney Drell, a longtime adviser to the U.S. nuclear weapons program, says that's simplistic and a big flaw.
"Are they saying what we do has no effect on the world? That's just nonsense," Drell said. "You can always find some scenario where you can get a limited military advantage from new weapons But you have to balance that against what you're doing to your security, especially if it invites other countries to go nuclear. We have to be able to reduce our reliance on these weapons, not make new missions for them."
Contact Ian Hoffman at ihoffman@angnewspapers.com .
----
Crossing the nuclear line
Saturday, November 08, 2003
Brattleboro Reformer
http://www.reformer.com/Stories/0,1413,102~8854~1753361,00.html
The Bush administration is pursuing an alarming expansion in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The $6.1 billion plan, which faced final approval from the U.S. House Friday, would take U.S. atomic weapons development in troubling directions.
The proposal goes far beyond maintaining the existing U.S. nuclear missiles and bombs. It plunges the United States back into the business of building atomic bombs for the first time in almost a decade. Indeed, the money Congress is poised to appropriate for nuclear weapons research and maintenance is 50 percent more than what the country spent on building atomic weapons during the height of the Cold War.
The plan's most alarming segments involve $7.5 million for research on "bunker busting" bombs -- battlefield nukes capable of penetrating deeply buried military sites. It's possible that atomic bunker busters would be more effective than existing conventional weapons, but their use would cross a moral line that no nation has crossed since the age of atomic terror opened over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Use of even tactical nuclear weapons would invite retaliation with larger nukes or other weapons of mass destruction such as poison gas or biological agents.
Other funds expected to be approved will restart research into the so-called neutron bomb, an enhanced radiation weapon that kills people while reducing the damage to distant buildings. International protests stopped the United States from developing the neutron bomb a quarter century ago. Ironically, the neutron bomb was originally designed chiefly to kill tank crews -- who might otherwise be sheltered from blast effects by their vehicles' armor. But as the last two Iraq wars have proven, tanks can be destroyed with devastating precision by the existing tank-busting aircraft like the A-10 Warthog, or missiles fired from helicopters.
The administration's purpose in restarting a program to build new nuclear weapons is murky, but the long-term diplomatic and ethical quagmire the effort will cause is starkly clear.
If the United States, with all its formidable conventional military might, claims that it needs new nuclear weapons, it will be nearly impossible to stop other countries from rushing ahead with their own atomic programs. The result of Bush's policies will be more nuclear proliferation and less national security.
President Bush wants to restart nuclear bomb testing in just 18 months, but Congress delayed that alarming ambition for 24 months. And while Congress approved spending a half-billion dollars more on nuclear weapons next year than it did for 2003, lawmakers also trimmed Bush's budget request. Apparently, even some Republicans doubt the proposals' military need or affordability.
Congress, though, should have eliminated Bush's most disturbing proposals. The push for bunker-busting nukes should land in the trash, and the plan to restart atomic bomb testing should be nixed.
--------
US military spending bill lifts ban on low-yield nuclear weapons development
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Nov 08, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031108123108.zc415zbb.html
A record 400 billion dollar military spending bill approved by the lower house of US Congress allows the United States to renew research and development of low-yield nuclear weapons.
The 2004 defense authorization bill, passed by the House of Representatives by a vote of 362-40 on Friday, is expected to be approved by the Republican-led Senate next week, then go to President George W. Bush to be signed into law.
The bill lifts a decade-old ban prohibiting research and development of nuclear warheads with explosive forces of less than five kilotons, which administration officials say will assist the United States in destroying buried bunkers and stockpiles of chemical or nuclear weapons.
They say the lighter weapons would cause less damage to surrounding areas and would not throw up massive amounts of nuclear debris.
The bill would provide US nuclear laboratories with six million dollars to explore new nuclear bomb designs and 15 million dollars to study modifying existing high-powered nuclear weapons so they can destroy buried bunkers.
It also would authorize spending 34 million to accelerate improvement of a nuclear test site in the western state of Nevada.
The spending bill also provides a pay raise for military personnel, improves disability benefits for veterans, and allows the military to conduct weapons tests closer to marine mammal habitats.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new jersey
DEP: Radioactive rocks no threat to Mt. Olive
By Eugene Mulero
11/08/03
Morristown, NJ Daily Record
http://www.dailyrecord.com/news/articles/news9-Radioactiverocks.htm
MOUNT OLIVE - A handful of rocks emitting low levels of radioactivity were found inside a garbage truck Friday morning at the Morris County Transfer Station on Gold Mine Road.
New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection experts and officials from Morris County's Municipal Utilities Authority dumped all garbage inside the truck at the tipping point of a waste transfer station in Mount Olive to identify the radioactive contents. After careful examination, DEP officials determined that a handful of rocks were emitting low levels of thorium, a radioactive substance naturally found in found in rocks, soil, water, plants and animals, DEP spokeswoman Amy Cradic said.
"We found rocks that had low levels of radioactivity. The contents were isolated, and they posed no threats to public safety," Cradic said.
The rocks will be disposed properly by the county's MUA, said Glenn Schweizer, MUA executive director .
The truck, which carried a combination of soft and hard waste, left the transfer station on Oct. 31 and arrived later that day at the Alliance Landfill in Pennsylvania. During a routine scan of the garbage, it was found that the truck emitted a considerable amount of radioactivity, Cradic said. Workers at the landfill rejected the truck, and it returned to the transfer station in Mount Olive.
Workers at the transfer station held the truck for several days, waiting for the radiation to dissipate, which is common practice, Schweizer said.
During a test on Nov. 6, the truck still showed a considerable radioactive reading, prompting transfer station workers to contact local police, firefighters and DEP officials.
Officials examined the truck and, by Friday morning, discovered the rocks responsible for the radioactivity.
"My understanding is that it was a low detection," Schweizer said.
Schweizer said that officials are still trying to figure out where the rocks came from so they can eliminate them and prevent future radioactive concerns.
Exposure to moderate levels of thorium can lead to increased cancer risk, Cradic said.
Eugene Mulero can be reached at @gannett.com or (973) 428-6633.
-------- new york
Report details radiation exposure
Contamination called long-lasting
By JERRY ZREMSKI
News Washington Bureau
11/8/2003
http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20031108/1050932.asp
WASHINGTON - Significant radiation contamination could have remained for years after nuclear weapons work stopped in at least eight industrial sites in Western New York, the federal government reported Friday.
Most dramatically, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health said workers at Linde Ceramics in the Town of Tonawanda could have been exposed to cancer-causing radiation anytime between 1940 and 1997. The government previously had said the site was dangerous only when weapons work took place there from 1940 to 1950, and during a 1996-97 cleanup.
Similarly, workers at Ashland Oil in the Town of Tonawanda could have been exposed to radiation anytime between 1944 and 1998, while workers at Bliss and Laughlin Steel of Buffalo could have faced a potential danger anytime between 1948 and 1998.
The report gave no indication of how many additional people might have been exposed to radiation - or how many might have come down with cancer - but thousands have worked at the sites over the years.
"This long-overdue report confirms what we have suspected all along," said Rep. Louise M. Slaughter, the Fairport Democrat who represents an area that includes many of the Western New York sites, and who released the report. "Most former nuclear facilities in Western New York remained contaminated long after their contracts with the Atomic Energy Commission ended."
The report also indicated that workers at the West Valley Demonstration Project could have been exposed to radiation anytime between 1966 and the present.
Long-lasting radiation also could have hurt workers at four other local plants: Bethlehem Steel in Lackawanna, Seaway Industrial Park in the Town of Tonawanda, Titanium Alloys Manufacturing in Niagara Falls and Simonds Saw and Steel in Lockport. The report offered no specifics on how long contamination could have lasted at those sites.
There was too little information to determine whether long-lasting radiation exposure occurred at two other Niagara Falls sites: Carborundum Co. and Hooker Electrochemical.
And the report said there was no long-term risk at the Linde Air Products and Utica Street Warehouse sites in Buffalo, and at the Electro Metallurgical site in Niagara Falls.
Nationwide, the report said 97 sites had potential for "significant residual contamination" long after the end of the Manhattan Project, America's initial effort to build nuclear weapons.
"A site was assigned to this category if there was documentation indicating the radioactive material was present in quantities or forms which could have caused or substantially contributed to the cancer of a covered employee," the report said.
An earlier "progress report" indicated that only 12 percent of the former nuclear sites had significant potential for contamination, but the final report showed that 44 percent did.
Losing a lung to cancer
Sites such as Linde pose the greatest concern, said Richard Miller, a policy analyst at the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit watchdog group that has been following the issue.
Linde produced uranium metal and nickel by milling a particularly potent ore, which produced a fine black radioactive dust, he said.
"The type of residuals you would get from that would be not just uranium, but also radon and radium, and they are very potent long-term carcinogens," Miller said.
Roger J. Curtiss of the Town of Tonawanda said he found that out firsthand three years ago when he lost a lung to cancer.
Curtiss, who worked at the Linde plant from 1951 to 1993, said there were many signs of trouble at the plant.
"They always went around with a Geiger counter," he said. "They said there wasn't a problem, but a bunch of the wells were contaminated."
Curtiss also remembers a fine black dust that clung to the rafters for decades and fell to the floor whenever there was a loud noise.
"They never did get it cleaned up," Curtiss said, noting that the building was eventually demolished.
That building came down in the late 1990s as part of a multimillion-dollar federal cleanup that then-Rep. John J. LaFalce, D-Town of Tonawanda, advocated.
Bill extends compensation
Pressed by former employees at such plants, Congress in 2000 approved a bill granting former nuclear workers and their families $150,000 in federal compensation if it can be proved that the worker developed cancer because of exposure to radiation.
Many workers criticize that program, saying it takes the government forever to determine whether they are eligible for the payment. Moreover, that program covers only workers who were at those plants at the time of the nuclear weapons work.
That has to change, said Slaughter, who is sponsoring a bill that would extend the compensation to workers who joined those facilities later.
"Workers were exposed without their knowledge or consent to Cold War radioactive materials at these plants long after their mission for the government had ended, and those with cancer have waited long enough," Slaughter said.
Rods made on weekends
The report also provides some insights into the details of the Manhattan Project and its blithe treatment of deadly materials.
It describes uranium being rolled into rods at Bethlehem Steel's rolling mill on weekends when steel wasn't being made. The same sort of work took place at Simonds Saw and Steel in Lockport, which Miller described as "a pigsty when they shut it down."
Meanwhile, at Titanium Alloys in Niagara Falls, workers burned uranium ores in a furnace. And at Ashland Oil in Tonawanda, workers buried 8,000 tons of uranium ore left over from the Linde site.
e-mail: jzremski@buffnews.com
--------
Bill Includes Funds to Study Indian Point
November 8, 2003
By MAREK FUCHS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/08/nyregion/08NUKE.html
Congress is expected to pass a measure next week to provide $1 million to research ways to make up for energy that would be lost if the Indian Point nuclear power plant in Westchester County were closed.
Representative Nita M. Lowey announced the measure, which is contained in the energy and water appropriations bill for 2004, and said the research would be done by the National Academy of Sciences and would take about a year to complete. She said researchers would look at a variety of alternatives, including conservation, windmills and the feasibility of importing energy.
Indian Point can produce up to 2,000 megawatts of electricity at any one time for Westchester County and New York City, enough for about two million homes. For years, opposition to the plant was limited to antinuclear and environmental activists, but when one of the planes that attacked the World Trade Center flew by the power plant, opposition to it became widespread. A plan to evacuate the area in the case of a malfunction or an attack on the plant was thought by many to be inadequate but was approved by the federal government in July.
Richard L. Brodsky, a state assemblyman and longtime plant opponent, said the issue of replacement, while an important part of the discourse, always runs the danger of being blurred with that of safety.
"The answer to the accusation that this plant is going to kill people," said Mr. Brodsky, "is not to say, `Well, what about the long-term electric needs of the area.' "
Spokesmen for both the Democratic and Republican sides of the House Appropriations Committee said that since a conference committee agreed on the bill, the passing of the financing was a foregone conclusion.
Ms. Lowey said that a year from now, the results of the research could be turned over to public officials to serve as a guidepost for change.
"The governor can respond, the county executive can respond and it will be pretty hard for people to argue what they've been arguing all along, that without Indian Point, prices will go way up and your lights will go out," Ms. Lowey said.
-------- ohio
Troubled Ohio nuclear plant set for restart
Davis-Besse shut down when severe corrosion was found on nuclear reactor
By GARY STOLLER
USA TODAY
Saturday, November 8, 2003
http://www.marionstar.com/news/stories/20031108/localnews/607790.html
Ohio's Davis-Besse nuclear power plant, the only one in the USA shut down twice for more than a year each time because of safety problems, is gearing up to restart, perhaps by the end of this month.
FirstEnergy, its owner and operator, admits mistakes were made in the past but says equipment and maintenance improvements and management changes will ensure the plant runs safely in the future.
Consumer advocates and nuclear safety watchdogs remain concerned.
Davis-Besse, located next to Lake Erie about 20 miles east of Toledo, hasn't operated since it shut down for refueling in February 2002. A FirstEnergy inspector found that the nuclear reactor head was corroded from boric acid in coolant water, leaving a hole that had gone undetected for years by the company and Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspectors. It was the most severe corrosion ever found, NRC officials say.
Two plants -- Oregon's Trojan and Connecticut's Yankee - closed permanently in the 1990s after corroded components were found in steam generators, which were too expensive to replace.
In a report last month, Hubert Bell, the NRC's inspector general, faulted the agency's headquarters, regional managers and local inspectors for failing to recognize the significance of boric acid leaks and corrosion at Davis-Besse. Bell said the NRC allowed FirstEnergy to postpone an inspection to detect cracking in the reactor head "to lessen the financial impact that would result from an early shutdown."
The only material preventing a major release of radioactive coolant into a containment building was a 3/8-inch-thick stainless steel liner, Bell said. Nuclear physicist David Lochbaum says such a release could have caused the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history. The worst occurred in 1979, when a reactor partially melted down at the Three Mile Island facility near Harrisburg, Pa., sending radiation into the atmosphere. "Ohio was lucky," says Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nuclear safety watchdog group. "Had the stainless steel failed, the accident would have been worse than TMI."
George Mulley, Bell's senior assistant for investigative operations, agrees and says the corrosion at Davis-Besse ranks as the second-worst event in the USA.
FirstEnergy spokesman Todd Schneider says that's speculation. The company doesn't think the problems at Davis-Besse would have led to a major accident, he says.
FirstEnergy, a holding company for seven electric utilities serving 4.3 million customers in Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, took over Davis-Besse in 1997 when it acquired Centerior Energy, a holding company for Toledo Edison. Toledo Edison owned and operated the plant in 1985 when it was shut down because of problems with systems feeding water to the reactor.
Like most of the nation's 103 operating nuclear plants, Davis-Besse, which first opened in 1977, is more than 20 years old. Akron, Ohio-based FirstEnergy operates two other nuclear plants, Perry in Perry, Ohio, and Beaver Valley in Shippingport, Pa.
The company came under fire in August when its power plants and transmission lines were some of the earliest to fail during a multistate blackout in the Northeast. Power failures in FirstEnergy's system "couldn't be responsible for causing such a widespread outage," Schneider says.
As for the Davis-Besse shutdown, "We didn't do a good job of diagnosing the situation," he says. "But we've spent the last 19 to 20 months repairing equipment and changing management, procedures and policy."
FirstEnergy says it has spent about $500 million for repairs and replacement electricity. Besides replacing the damaged reactor head, the company installed the country's first coolant-leak detection system and made 122 equipment modifications.
Advocacy group Ohio Citizen Action and Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, whose district includes FirstEnergy customers, say the company shouldn't be allowed to operate Davis-Besse.
"The plant never should be allowed to reopen with FirstEnergy in charge," says Shari Weir of Ohio Citizen Action, a consumer group with about 100,000 members. "If the hardware is fixed at Davis-Besse and FirstEnergy is out of the picture, we would not object to the plant operating."
In February, Kucinich, a candidate for the Democrat nomination for president, filed a petition to revoke FirstEnergy's operating license at Davis-Besse. He said FirstEnergy violated NRC rules, failed to observe safety standards and "fraudulently misrepresented plant conditions in order to continue to operate the plant in an unsafe manner."
NRC acting Chairman Brian Sheron doesn't agree. "While serious violations did occur at the Davis-Besse facility, the violations in and of themselves do not warrant revocation of the license," he wrote Kucinich in September. Past problems have been or are being addressed by FirstEnergy, he said.
"We're not going to restart the plant until it can run safely and reliably," Schneider says. He says the company has added "17 or 18" managers to enhance safety.
Lochbaum, on the other hand, says the Union of Concerned Scientists is more concerned with NRC's oversight. "The company has done a lot to physically modify the plant and fix its procedures," he says. "Our concern isn't with Davis-Besse restarting on Monday and a problem arising on Tuesday. But we are concerned that if safety slides back to a lesser level, the NRC must be as effective as possible to stop a slide."
FirstEnergy is "95 percent there" for reopening, Schneider says.
The NRC hasn't scheduled a final inspection of the facility and won't comment on any start-up dates. The agency will meet with FirstEnergy on Wednesday to discuss problems that remain and then will decide how to proceed, says NRC spokesman Jan Strasma.
He says several hardware and electrical system issues must be resolved, and the agency is continuing to address "safety culture issues" at the plant. "We still have a lot of work to do, and they have a lot of work to do," Strasma says.
-------- utah
N-waste fate maybe sealed by Utah
SATURDAY November 08, 2003
By Dan Harrie dharrie@sltrib.com
The Salt Lake Tribune
http://www.sltrib.com/2003/Nov/11082003/utah/109300.asp
The state's top radiation regulator said Friday authority to approve or block a proposal to dispose of 30 million pounds of radioactive waste in Utah could shift from the federal government to the state in coming months.
Dane Finerfrock, director of the state Division of Radiation Control, said the Nuclear Regulatory Commission project manager over federal cleanup of the uranium mill tailings at Fernald, Ohio, told him "it was probably unlikely that all of the technical issues [related to the cleanup] would be resolved" before Utah receives new oversight responsibility for the Envirocare facility in Tooele County. That transfer of authority, which has been in the works for some time, is expected in March.
"In the end, it may turn out that we have to be in the position, or we will be in the position to decide whether this is an acceptable disposal activity at Envirocare," Finerfrock told the state Radiation Control Board.
Such a transfer of authority could make moot the current controversy involving proposed federal legislation to redefine the Fernald materials, which could be the first step in approving removal of the waste to Envirocare's landfill, about 80 miles west of Salt Lake City.
Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, waded into the fray last July when he sent a letter to congressional leaders supporting the proposed amendment and suggesting that storage of the waste at Envirocare would be safer and less costly, as well as providing income to a "significant Utah company."
Bishop, a former Envirocare lobbyist who acknowledged his letter was drafted by a lobbyist with "ties" to Envirocare, has taken heat in the past month from environmentalists, editorial pages and a few elected officials.
Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, has come out in opposition to moving the Fernald waste to Utah, as has former Gov. Mike Leavitt and, more recently, current Gov. Olene Walker, both Republicans.
During an interview Friday on radio station KCPW, Walker made it "very clear" she opposed the plan to move the Ohio tailings to Envirocare, said station co-manager Blair Feulner, host of the program on which Walker appeared. "She said she did not want to make Utah a 'dumping ground,' " he said.
Additionally, Walker responded to a call-in question by state Democratic Chairman Donald Dunn by saying she would agree to work with the minority party to send that message to Bishop.
Bishop this week said he was collecting information from experts and agencies to determine whether he should re-evaluate his support of the proposed Envirocare contract.
In particular, he said he might change his stand if he was persuaded that the Ohio tailings were as "hot" as "Class C" radioactive waste currently banned under Utah law. However, the state's laws and rules apply only to certain parts of the Envirocare landfill. Other sections are controlled by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Wastes as much as 100 times as radioactive as the Ohio tailings have been permitted at Envirocare, but those materials pose a health hazard for years, rather than centuries, as is the case with the Fernald tailings.
"I'm still not convinced it would fall under Class C classification but we're still looking at it," Bishop spokesman Scott Parker said Friday. "We're looking at every experts' opinions we can collect, [but] there's no official change."
Finerfrock on Friday stated in the clearest terms yet that if subject to state rules, the Fernald waste would be banned as "Class C" waste. He said it was approximately 10 times more radioactive than allowed under Utah law for that particular radioactive isotope, Radium 226.
"It is an exception to what's going on there right now" at Envirocare, said Dianne Nielson, director of the state Department of Environmental Quality. "There are a lot of people who are very concerned about this waste."
However, she said the state and its citizens will have the opportunity to weigh in on any proposal to move the waste to Utah. "I'm sure if the state determines it isn't going to be managed safely, it would take every action possible to make sure it wouldn't go forward."
But the state currently has no official position on the proposal -- a wait-and-see attitude that was reinforced Friday by the state Radiation Control Board.
The board took no stand on the Ohio waste, saying it was premature to jump in.
"I think we just need to listen to what we hear coming and see where things go," said Chairwoman Karen Langley, a health physicist. "Everybody's eyes are open and that's an important thing -- people are looking at it."
-------- us politics
$401 Billion Voted to Boost Defense
House Provides for Pay Raises, Benefits, More Sophisticated Arms
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 8, 2003; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13803-2003Nov7.html
The House approved a $401 billion military spending bill yesterday, providing a pay raise for troops, new benefits for veterans and money for more sophisticated weapons.
Before the 362 to 40 vote, Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) said the authorization bill would prepare the country for a new "era of terrorism and high technology," in which the Cold War dragon may be dead but "there are a lot of poisonous snakes out there."
The measure, expected to clear the Senate next week, outlines Pentagon spending for the coming year and sets policies on a variety of matters, including research on nuclear weapons and treatment of the environment. Supporting the bill were 144 Democrats and 218 Republicans; 39 Democrats and one independent opposed it. Two Democrats voted present.
Lawmakers said it was essential to include a 4.15 percent pay raise for military personnel. The bill also would reduce the amount that service members must pay for housing and would phase out the payments by 2005.
"We need the pay raise" to attract recruits and help alleviate "the strain on our troops," said Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.) .
There were sharp divisions, however, on nonmonetary elements in the bill. Republicans and Democrats sparred over how to treat veterans' disability benefits. Under current law, about half a million retirees must give up a dollar in retirement benefits for every dollar they receive in disability compensation. Under the authorization bill, any veteran who is 50 percent disabled would not have retirement benefits deducted, a change that would cost the government $22 billion over the next decade.
Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.), chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee, called the change "historic" and said, "This is not an insignificant cost."
But many Democrats said the change did not go far enough, leaving hundreds of thousands of veterans still facing a tax on retirement benefits. "The vast majority of disabled veterans are left out," said Rep. Lane Evans (D-Ill.). "This is an attempt to divide and conquer veterans."
The bill would exempt the military from aspects of the Marine Mammal Protection and Endangered Species acts. The armed forces would be allowed to conduct tests near critical habitats with less oversight from other departments such as Interior. The military would operate under a looser definition of "harassment" of whales, dolphins and porpoises. The new law also would allow the military to manage and define what a critical habitat is, rather than conform to detailed guidelines from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
"There's no land to work around anymore," Hunter said of military training needs.
But even some Republicans said the exemption went too far, and environmental groups criticized the measure. Gerald Leape, vice president of the National Environmental Trust, called the provision "a gaping new loophole that is sure to be abused."
"Does anybody trust Donald Rumsfeld to save the whales?" Leape asked, referring to the secretary of defense.
The bill also seeks to settle a two-year dispute over the Pentagon's acquisition of 100 Boeing Co. refueling tankers. Boeing supporters, including Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), had pushed to lease all 100 planes, which would make the government's contract less expensive in the short term but more costly over time. They encountered resistance from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.), who prevailed in forging a deal in which 20 tankers will be leased and 80 purchased.
Under the plan the Pentagon would have to spend $2.4 billion more than had been set aside for fiscal years 2008 to 2010, as well as $1.4 billion later, but taxpayers would save $4 billion over the long term.
----
Citing abuse, US Senate Republicans halt Iraq weapons probe
Saturday, 08-Nov-2003
Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet)
http://www.prolog.net/webnews/wed/ae/Qus-iraq-weapons-probe.Rhap_DN8.html
WASHINGTON, Nov 8 (AFP) - The leader of US Senate Republicans has suspended a politically damaging inquiry into possible inadequacies or misuse of pre-war intelligence on Iraq, saying it was being manipulated "to politically wound the president of the United States."
The announcement by Senate Majority leader Bill Frist in a floor speech Friday capped a heated political row in the upper congressional chamber triggered by a leaked Democratic memorandum outlining a strategy for using the probe for political gain.
"At this moment of peril in our nations history, as our intelligence agencies and our armed forces in the Middle East are at war against our mortal enemies, those responsible for this memo appear to be more focused on winning the White House than they are on winning the war against terror," thundered the Tennessee Republican.
He demanded that the author of the document, a member of the Democratic staff on the Senate Intelligence Committee, step forward and identify himself or herself, and the intended recipient of the memo.
Committee Democrats are also being asked to disavow what Frist called "this partisan attack" on the panel's integrity.
Frist said the author must also issue a personal apology to committee chairman Pat Roberts for "the manipulative tone and injurious content of this document."
"Only with the fulfillment of the three steps mentioned above will it be possible for the committee to resume its work in an effective and bipartisan manner -- a manner deserving of the confidence of other members of the Senate and the Executive Branch," the majority leader concluded.
The inquiry, which has never acquired the status of an official investigation, grew out of the failure by the administration of President George W. Bush to discover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, whose alleged presence in the country was used to justify the invasion.
In their queries, senators have been trying to determine whether the CIA and other US intelligence agencies seriously misjudged the importance of Iraqi clandestine weapons programs and whether members of the Bush administration deliberately hyped and twisted intelligence to suit their political agendas.
The ill-fated memo that hit the media circuit last Wednesday urged Senate Democrats to identify "the most exaggerated claims" made by members of the Bush team in the run-up to the war and contrast them with the intelligence estimates that have since been declassified.
It also advised Democrats to be prepared to launch their own investigation into the pre-war intelligence "once we identify solid leads the majority does not want to pursue."
To make matters more personal, the document implied that committee Democrats had succeeded in making Chairman Roberts carry water for them.
"The fact that the chairman ... co-signs our requests for information is helpful and potentially crucial," the memo stated.
Seeing himself cast as a Democratic Trojan horse, Roberts, was not amused.
"It was a direct assault on a concept of oversight that is the product of some of our countrys most trying days," the Kansas senator said.
Senator John Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said he was "really disappointed" by the decision to suspend the probe.
But he and other Democrats insisted the Republicans were trying to make a mountain out of a molehill. They said the memo had been written by Democratic staffers and had never been given any serious consideration by lawmakers.
"I just want to make sure that we have a full 100 percent investigation, WMD in Iraq, pre-war intelligence and was there any use or misuse of that by the executive branch," Rockefeller told MSNBC television.
The White House and its allies in Congress have been resisting any wide-ranging probe of pre-war intelligence and its use, fearing it could be hurt Bush's reelection chances next year.
----
Frist Freezes Senate Probe of Prewar Iraq Data
By Walter Pincus and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, November 8, 2003; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14010-2003Nov7.html
Angry about a leaked Democratic memo, the Republican leadership of the Senate yesterday took the unusual step of canceling all business of the committee investigating prewar intelligence on Iraq.
Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) called on the author of the memo -- which laid out a possible Democratic strategy to extend the investigation to include the White House and executive branch -- to "identify himself or herself . . . disavow this partisan attack in its entirety" and deliver "a personal apology" to Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence.
Only if those steps are taken, Frist said, "will it be possible for the committee to resume its work in an effective and bipartisan manner -- a manner deserving of the confidence of other members of the Senate and the executive branch."
Roberts followed Frist on the floor and said that unless the Democratic members "properly" address the issue, "I am afraid that it will be impossible to return to 'business as usual' in the committee."
A committee meeting scheduled for yesterday was canceled, and none has been scheduled for next week, according to a senior committee staff member.
Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.), the committee's ranking Democrat, said he was "really disappointed" with the Republican action. "Whose advantage is it to derail asking the tough questions on prewar intelligence and the use and misuse of it?" he asked.
The GOP move follows a month of extraordinary maneuvering by Democrats and Republicans to take political advantage of the committee's look at how the intelligence community collected and analyzed intelligence on Iraq over the past decade.
Rockefeller, prodded by the Democratic leadership, did not want the blame for any exaggerations of the threat posed by Iraq to rest largely with the CIA; instead he wanted the panel to investigate the separate question of how the administration used the information it was given.
The memo that set off yesterday's events was written by a committee Democratic staff aide and laid out for Rockefeller possible steps that could be taken by Democrats to press their approach. It also proposed publicizing any limitations the Republican majority put on the inquiry and exposing what it termed "the senior administration officials who made the case for a unilateral, preemptive war."
Rockefeller has said he did not share the memo with other Democrats on the committee or with the Senate leadership.
Yesterday, Frist appeared to close the door entirely on the Democrats' wishes. After discussions with Roberts, the majority leader said that "the committee's review is nearly complete" and "we have jointly determined the committee can and will complete its review this year."
"They can't do that," Rockefeller said, noting that hundreds of pages of requested documents have recently been promised by the State Department and Pentagon and more interviews have been scheduled.
In addition, he noted that the final report from David Kay, who heads the CIA's search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, has not been completed. "What can we say about prewar intelligence without Kay's report?" Rockefeller asked.
-------- MILITARY
-------- europe
France Presses U.S. on 6 at Guantánamo
November 8, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/08/national/08GITM.html
PARIS, Nov. 7 (Reuters) - France said on Friday that it had demanded clear information from the United States on why six French citizens are being held on the American military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that it planned to send another delegation there.
The six were arrested in early 2002 and are held by the United States military as "enemy combatants," not prisoners of war who would be granted a wide range of protections under international law.
About 660 suspected members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda are being held at Guantánamo after being captured during the war in Afghanistan.
"We are asking that the U.S. authorities provide us with precise information regarding why they arrested these prisoners and what they are charged with," Herve Ladsous, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said of the six French prisoners at a news briefing.
"We are going to suggest to the United States the possibility of a new mission to Guantanamo," Mr. Ladsous said, adding that nothing had yet been decided in terms of a date.
France has kept a relatively low public profile on the fate of the six, though French officials flew to Guantánamo twice in early 2002, soon after the arrests, and have maintained contact ever since.
A United Nations human rights body has already described the detention of Frenchmen and Spaniards in Guantánamo as illegal.
-------- iraq
Iraqi Intel Top-Notch Study sheds light on resistance
By Knut Royce
WASHINGTON BUREAU
November 8, 2003
Newsday
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-usmili083531397nov08,0,4130073.story?coll=ny-nationalnews-headlines
Washington - In a conclusion that bodes ill for U.S. troops, an Army study asserts that the Iraqi military, though inept in the battlefield during the conventional phase of the war, excelled in intelligence, shadowing virtually every movement of coalition troops - a skill, military analysts say, that is being carried over into the current guerrilla conflict.
Defense analysts said the most significant aspect of the study - a "lessons learned" prepared by a blue-chip team of Army War College officers and civilian specialists - for the current conflict is the observation that Iraq's battlefield intelligence, though low-tech and blind from the air, was top-notch.
"This is critical to what is going on right now," said retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner, who has taught strategy at the National War College. "That's how they know where the Americans are right now and how to get to them. They're shadowing our units."
The study also concludes that superior military technology allowed outnumbered coalition forces to overwhelm the Iraqi Army while incurring relatively few casualties because the Iraqis were demoralized and poorly trained and led.
But it warns against projecting similar results using small forces relying on technological advantage against a more skilled enemy - challenging an evolving doctrine supported by top Pentagon civilians, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, that the U.S. military should be streamlined, speedy and intelligence-driven. Many Army officers feel that radical transformation could harm their combat ability.
"Without Iraqi ineptitude, even 2003 technology could not have enabled a force this size to prevail at this cost. ... To assume that precision and information will always permit small forces to succeed would be high risk," says the 20-page study, dated Aug. 18 and obtained by Newsday this week.
The study, based on on-site visits to Iraq and 176 interviews with coalition forces and Iraqi prisoners of war, as well as primary-source documents, said that Iraqi intelligence "used low-tech means to assemble picture[s] sufficient to move paramilitaries [and] multiple Republican Guard divisions in ways that imply timely knowledge of our whereabouts."
It said that the Iraqi scouts shadowed virtually all allied movements and communicated positions up the command chain using phones and couriers, often resulting in accurate anticipation of coalition offensives. Iraqis were able to redeploy divisions through paths they knew to be undefended. In Nasiriyah, Marines captured "a detailed, accurate sand table of U.S. positions," the study discloses, indicating precise, real-time knowledge of allied movements. A sand table is a miniature model of a battlefield.
"That sand table, that's a big deal," said W. Patrick Lang, who became familiar with the Iraqi military while directing the Defense Intelligence Agency's Mideast division during the Iran-Iraq war and Desert Storm. "You don't do sand tables unless you know what you're doing. It tells you Iraqi military intelligence was functioning pretty well."
Ultimately the intelligence was of little combat value because of the woeful condition of the Iraqi Army, which had disintegrated during the United Nations sanctions and was no match for the coalition's precision firepower.
Many of Iraq's divisions, including a division from the vaunted Republican Guard, had had virtually no live-fire training in the preceding 12 months. Regular Army morale was "largely broken" before allied ground troops swept into Iraq. Officers, according to the report, "abandoned troops in the heat of battle."
But when some of the Iraqi units stood ground, especially from the Special Republican Guard and paramilitaries, they fought stubbornly. On April 5, when a 3rd Infantry brigade entered Baghdad with hundreds of tanks and fighting vehicles, "every vehicle [was] hit by [rocket propelled grenade] fire."
Defense analysts generally praised the report. "It's a very significant report," Lang said. One of its surprising findings, he said, was the conclusion that Iraq never intended to destroy its oil fields but may have tried to bluff the allies with such a threat "to deter us from invading." Some analysts have concluded that Iraq may also have bluffed possession of weapons of mass destruction to deter invasion.
----
Another Copter Down in Iraq;
6 GIs Killed U.S. Official Blames Apparent Enemy Fire; Week's Toll a Record
By Anthony Shadid and Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 8, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14111-2003Nov7?language=printer
TIKRIT, Iraq, Nov. 7 -- A U.S. Army helicopter ferrying soldiers to a base in northern Iraq crashed Friday morning on the banks of the Tigris River after it apparently was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade, killing all six soldiers on board, military officials and witnesses said.
The deaths, along with those of two U.S. soldiers in the northern city of Mosul, brought to 29 the number of soldiers killed in action in the first week of November, the highest one-week toll since the fall of president Saddam Hussein's government in April. Meanwhile, Turkey announced that it would not send troops to join American forces.
U.S. military officials here said that evidence and witnesses' accounts suggested the UH-60 Black Hawk was brought down by hostile fire, the second downing of a U.S. military aircraft in less than a week. "It was something launched from the ground," said Lt. Col. Steve Russell, a battalion commander with the 4th Infantry Division who was at the scene. "It appears it was downed by enemy fire."
The incident provided another example of the growing boldness and lethality of the still-shadowy guerrillas battling the U.S.-led occupation. While U.S. military officials have said the resistance fighters pose no threat to the American mission in Iraq, the top U.S. military commander has described the guerrillas as a "determined enemy."
The helicopter, an Army workhorse, was flying 300 feet above the ground with another Black Hawk when it went down, just minutes from the headquarters of the 4th Infantry Division in Tikrit. It broke into at least two large pieces, witnesses said, and its charred and twisted wreckage sprayed about 100 yards.
Two medical helicopters arrived at the scene within an hour, but the military said no one aboard the helicopter survived. The dead were identified as a four-person crew from the 101st Airborne Division and two soldiers from Department of the Army headquarters at the Pentagon.
Several fires burned for hours along the riverbank as armored vehicles and firetrucks raced to the scene. At least two AH-64 Apache helicopters circled overhead and more than a dozen soldiers spread across the site, which was overgrown with brush and five-foot reeds and sheltered by a sandy bluff.
"We heard the explosion. Then we went into the street and we saw smoke and fire," said Abu Ahmed Ali, 31, a Tikrit resident whose house perches on the bluff and who, like others, celebrated the downing. "The explosion shook our house."
The timing of the attack raised questions about the intelligence capabilities of the guerrillas, who in the past two weeks have staged a succession of high-profile attacks in Baghdad and the region north and west of the capital.
The helicopter was shot down less than an hour after Gen. John P. Abizaid, the head of U.S. Central Command, arrived in Tikrit on another Black Hawk with Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the commander of the 4th Infantry Division, and two other generals from Central Command. Abizaid went on with his tour, visiting Balad south of Tikrit, then going to U.S. headquarters in Baghdad. Last month, guerrillas shot down a Black Hawk near Tikrit hours after Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz left the town for the northern city of Kirkuk. One soldier was wounded in the crash.
The U.S. military responded to Friday's attack with a show of force in Tikrit, a city about 90 miles northwest of Baghdad where Hussein's clan has its roots. Before midnight, two Air Force F-15s dropped 500-pound bombs on the spot where the attack may have been launched, and artillery fired several rounds near the site.
U.S. forces, backed by tanks and armored personnel carriers, destroyed vacant houses said to have been used by attackers in the past, and the military reimposed an 11 p.m. curfew on a nearby neighborhood. Under cover of darkness, soldiers from the 4th Infantry staged raids and arrested at least eight people.
"We've lost six of our comrades today. We're going to make it unequivocally clear what power we have at our disposal," said Col. James Hickey, commander of the division's 1st Brigade.
The U.S. military said it had not determined whether the Black Hawk was brought down by mechanical failure or an attack. But Tikrit residents who witnessed the crash said they heard a dull thud, then saw the helicopter point downward and begin to wobble uncontrollably. A fire was seen inside the passenger compartment, and a stream of white smoke trailed from the rotor, witnesses said, before the helicopter crashed into the west bank of a muddy bend in the Tigris.
While still investigating the cause, military officials in Tikrit, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they believed a rocket-propelled grenade brought down the 64-foot-long Black Hawk, which can carry 11 soldiers in addition to the crew.
The helicopter's engine and transmission were charred but largely intact, they said, suggesting that the craft had been hit by a grenade rather than by a heat-seeking missile, which would have locked on to those parts of the aircraft. The officials, citing witnesses, also said no trail was seen from the projectile, which would be consistent with a grenade rather than a surface-to-air missile.
The officials said they thought the grenade was fired from the river's east bank. While the ability to shoot down a helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade is not necessarily a sign of expertise, officials said, it does indicate a degree of training. Such attacks bedeviled U.S. troops in Vietnam and, more recently, Somalia.
The crash came six days after an SA-7 surface-to-air missile brought down a CH-47 Chinook helicopter in a field west of Baghdad, killing 16 soldiers headed for a short break. It was the deadliest attack since U.S. forces invaded Iraq in March.
In response to that attack, the helicopters that were attacked Friday may have been flying lower than normal, making them less vulnerable to a surface-to-air missile but more vulnerable to a rocket-propelled grenade.
In addition, U.S. commanders this week banned Chinooks from carrying passengers during daylight hours, according to a senior defense official in Washington.
The Chinook, which can carry up to 33 passengers in addition to three crew members, is slower than a Black Hawk, but its large size and heavy-lift capability make it a critical part of the U.S. arsenal. "The new ban will pose a challenge for moving personnel around," the official said.
This week's attacks provided a stark example of the guerrillas' growing ability to inflict casualties on U.S. troops. Since Hussein's government collapsed on April 9, guerrillas have graduated from hit-and-run attacks with assault weapons, to rocket-propelled grenades and improvised mines, to the use of bombs remotely triggered by cell phones, to mortar attacks on U.S. bases, including headquarters in Baghdad.
The precise nature of the resistance forces remains unknown, even as their campaign has escalated. U.S. officials have blamed the attacks on Iraqis loyal to Hussein, foreign fighters and religious militants from within Iraq. But their degree of coordination -- if any -- remains largely a matter of speculation, as does the exact number of fighters each group commands.
In Mosul, a relatively quiet northern city, two U.S. soldiers were killed over a 24-hour period. One of the two died and six were wounded Friday morning when guerrillas attacked a convoy with rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire. A day earlier, a soldier was killed and two were wounded when a roadside mine exploded near their convoy.
U.S. military officials have denied needing more troops to cope with the guerrilla campaign. Military planners had hoped that other countries would contribute troops to the occupation, and some foreign forces are already patrolling much of southern Iraq. But that hope was dealt a blow Friday when, as expected, Turkey announced it would not send troops to relieve U.S. forces here.
Turkey, NATO's only Muslim member, has agonized over the role it would play in Iraq, which borders Turkey to the south. In March, it barred U.S. troops from attacking Iraq from Turkish soil. Then last month, after intense bargaining, it agreed to send troops.
Members of Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council, however, objected to a Turkish deployment, fearful of the precedent that might be set by the dispatch of troops by a neighboring country.
The Black Hawk downed Friday belonged to the 101st Airborne in Mosul and was ferrying soldiers to the U.S. base in Tikrit. It was flying south along a route commonly used by approaching helicopters.
Odierno, the region's commander, visited the site Friday afternoon. In a somber scene, he met with battalion commanders, one of whom carried a piece of debris under her arm.
Russell, one of the commanders, said he believed guerrillas were targeting helicopters, which are a crucial line of transportation for a military forced to deploy across a country the size of California.
"We certainly see they are targeting helicopters. That's been firmly established in the last several weeks," he said. "What it shows is that when there appears to be a target of opportunity, those targets will be taken by the enemy."
In Tikrit, residents celebrated as they watched from their homes overlooking the Tigris as the helicopter burned. "This is proof that the resistance can drive out the occupiers," said Hamid Jassim, a 45-year-old resident, standing near graffiti that read, "Everyone dealing with the Americans should be killed."
Down the street, as U.S. soldiers patrolled the neighborhood, Marwan Hussein gazed at the crash site through binoculars.
"Everyone feels happy, from nursing babies to the elderly," he said. "This makes everyone happy in Iraq."
-------
U.S. Grip Loosens in the Sunni Triangle
Tactical Shift In Iraq Leaves Power Vacuum
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 8, 2003; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14024-2003Nov7?language=printer
THULUIYA, Iraq, Nov. 7 -- American troops patrol less frequently, townspeople openly threaten Iraqi security personnel who cooperate with U.S. forces, and the night belongs to the guerrillas.
That is the reality in this little town 60 miles north of Baghdad, U.S. and Iraqi officials say, and it reflects a shifting balance of power in U.S.-occupied central Iraq. Resistance forces move with impunity in Thuluiya and throughout the so-called Sunni Triangle, despite repeated raids on suspected hide-outs and arms caches.
Since June, when attacks on U.S. forces began in earnest, the average number of ambushes has more than doubled, soaring from about 12 a day to 37 in late October before falling to 29 last week, according to Col. William Darley, an Army spokesman.
Today in Tikrit, 45 miles west of here, for the second time in a week, guerrillas shot down a U.S. helicopter. Despite the immediate appearance of airborne reinforcements, the perpetrators escaped.
There is a growing power vacuum in central Iraq, where support for Saddam Hussein was strongest and where much of the population depended on jobs in his government and vast security apparatus and on the favored political status he accorded to the country's Sunni Muslims. The danger of permitting this wide-open state of affairs to persist, Iraqi officials say, is that it will spread and increase the confidence of enemies of the occupation.
"The weaker the grip of the U.S., the bigger the gap in power, and the increasing perception that the Americans are vulnerable boosts the morale of those who want to destabilize and expand a reign of terror," said a senior Iraqi cabinet official in Baghdad. "This perception creates unease among those who cooperate with the United States."
"I wouldn't say we are winning," said Lt. Brian Caplin, a U.S. officer in charge of Thuluiya's branch of the Civil Defense Force, an Iraqi unit set up to buttress security throughout central Iraq.
One reason the U.S. military presence is at a particularly low ebb is that commanders are trying not to provoke incidents during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. On the eve of the beginning of Ramadan, Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the commander of the U.S. division operating in most of the Sunni Triangle, said during a telephone briefing with Pentagon reporters that his troops would respect Ramadan by lifting curfews, reducing their presence in cities and generally showing "increased sensitivity to local traditions."
This tactical retreat has caused some grumbling among troops who say they fear it will be misinterpreted by their adversaries as a sign of weakness. But commanders tend to dismiss those worries.
"We have not stopped offensive operations," said a senior officer based near here. "We are still conducting raids on known targets, we are still conducting combat patrols and [bomb-detection] sweeps, and we are still doing engagements with the locals."
Since the end of the Iraq war, U.S. forces have tried a variety of tactics to bring order to the Sunni Triangle -- a section of Iraq running west and north of Baghdad. In Fallujah, one of the most hostile towns in central Iraq, units have alternately tried large-scale raids, search-and-seizure operations, handouts of soccer balls, monetary compensation for killings and, most recently, major crackdowns. Troops have ringed Auja, Hussein's native village, with barbed wire and are forcing all males over the age of 15 to obtain identity cards. In Baghdad, American forces have tried to carry out joint patrols with police but have largely abandoned them because of attacks.
None of the U.S. tactics in Thuluiya has worked. In June, the town was the target of a massive helicopter and tank sweep as troops raided houses in a search for Hussein sympathizers. Of more than 400 detainees netted in the raid, called Operation Peninsula Strike, two remain in custody, according to Iraqi police.
When U.S. commanders took a softer approach, funding repairs to schools and the police station and recruiting local policemen to provide security, attacks continued. A father killed a son who had informed on behalf of the Americans. Attacks on U.S. soldiers at a bridge prompted the Americans to bulldoze a swath of date palms and fruit trees along a major roadway. U.S. troops carried out sporadic raids; eight Thuluiya residents have been detained in the past two weeks, residents say.
Efforts to get Iraqis to handle security in town foundered under a wave of mistrust. The police have been all but sidelined. "The Americans don't have confidence in us," said one officer, who declined to give his name for fear of getting fired. "They think we know who is doing the attacks but are not telling them."
The officer and his comrades said U.S. commanders no longer meet with local leaders in town but invite them to their base at a large airfield north of the town. Since a wave of car bombings last month in Baghdad, no U.S. official has visited the police station, they said. "The Americans are afraid," the officer said.
Enlistees in the Civil Defense Corps have supplanted the Iraqi police. The 94-man unit -- scheduled to expand to 200 members by next month -- is supposed to aggressively pursue attackers. Unlike the police, who are armed with pistols, the corps members carry AK-47 rifles. But they received only a week of training, Caplin, the U.S. commander, said. Many members are in their teens and have little experience with weapons.
They have been employed mainly to guard a hospital and a fuel depot. When they accompany U.S. forces on raids, they serve primarily as interpreters. "We explain to the people why the Americans have come to their house," said Capt. Khalaf Jassem, the Iraqi corps commander and a veteran of the Iraqi army.
He said Thuluiya residents are hostile to the corps, and the unit is unwilling to patrol the town on its own. "They call us the American brothers," Jassem said.
One former corps member, who identified himself only as Abu Hamis, said he had joined the corps for money and left because he had been shot at twice while guarding the fuel depot. He had also become a pariah in his neighborhood. "They say I am a traitor, that I inform for the Americans. Everyone knows everyone here, and it is hard to go against your neighbors," he said.
He was standing at a pharmacy on Thuluiya's main street, where customers gathered to pick up medicines and to dispense complaints about the Americans and their allies. "No one should spy on us. If they do, they are worse than the Americans," said Muthana, a pharmacist. "It is against Islam, it is against everything. We tell the civil defense agents so."
He said that once night falls, Thuluiya's streets are bare and "anyone can come in and out." The town, which lies at a sharp bend in the Tigris River, is heavily cultivated with date palms. "The trees are no friend of the Americans either," he said.
Everyone at the drug store insisted that attackers came from outside Thuluiya. But no one seemed to suggest that whoever was assaulting U.S. forces was unwelcome.
"We hate the Americans," said Hawan Mohammed Khalaf, a car dealer who said his date and orange grove had been bulldozed by U.S. troops. He said that guerrillas travel around Thuluiya by car and motorcycle. "Even if I wanted to stop them, I couldn't," he said.
Does he want to?
"I am a farmer, not a fighter," he said.
Staff writer Thomas E. Ricks in Washington contributed to this report.
-------- israel / palestine
Israelis Kill 4 in Gaza Strip
Palestinians Say Boy, 10, Was Shot While Trapping Birds
By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 8, 2003; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13805-2003Nov7.html
JERUSALEM, Nov. 7 -- Israeli security forces killed at least four Palestinians, including a 10-year-old boy, in several disputed incidents Friday in the Gaza Strip, according to an Israeli military spokesman and Palestinian security and hospital officials.
Palestinian sources said the boy, Mahmoud Gayed, was trapping birds with a group of friends near the Karni border crossing with Israel at about 11 a.m. when he was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers.
An Israeli military spokesman cast doubt on the Palestinians' version of events, without directly refuting it. The spokesman said that at about the same time and place, Israeli soldiers spotted "three suspicious figures carrying electric wires and tubes usually used to plant explosive devices." When it appeared that the trio was trying to hide or plant the devices, soldiers opened fire and hit one of the suspects, he said.
In the area where the shooting occurred -- a buffer zone near the border fence -- there have been 15 incidents of Palestinians attacking Israeli civilians and soldiers in the past month, the spokesman said. "The area which they were in . . . is well known among Palestinians -- both terrorist organizations and the Palestinian population -- and that's why they don't enter such areas. It's an area that if it's used at all, it's used to attack Israeli military targets."
Today's bloodshed came as the Israeli military said it was easing living conditions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a goodwill gesture to Ahmed Qureia, the temporary Palestinian prime minister who has been asked by the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, to form a government. Arafat and Qureia have been at loggerheads for weeks over who will be appointed interior minister and who will control Palestinian security forces, which has stalled the appointment of a cabinet.
Among the steps Israel reported taking were approving 15,000 Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip for work in Israel, relaxing travel restrictions in most of the West Bank and reopening all West Bank cities except Nablus and Jenin. Israel made similar moves this year when Mahmoud Abbas was serving as Palestinian prime minister, but Palestinians and many Israelis called the gestures cosmetic.
Like the killing of the 10-year-old, two earlier incidents in which Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip were also murky.
In the first, which apparently began about 10 p.m. Thursday and carried over into Friday morning, Palestinian security sources said two members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades came under fire from Israeli soldiers as they were sneaking toward the border east of Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip.
The gunmen retreated to a nearby house, where they were killed at about 1 a.m. in a firefight with Israeli soldiers, the Palestinians said. The men were identified in an al-Aqsa statement as Nazim and Mohammed Najar, brothers aged 31 and 20.
An Israeli army spokesman said that he was unaware of the firefight at the house and that Israeli soldiers recorded no hits in the initial encounter.
In the second incident, which also occurred early Friday morning, Palestinian witnesses and security sources said Israeli troops entered the Mughazi refugee camp in south-central Gaza and surrounded an area, apparently on a mission to capture someone, and began to fire in what the witnesses described as a random manner. They said a fighter from the radical Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, returned fire and was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers.
The dead man was identified in a Hamas statement as Moamen Megary, 22.
An Israeli military spokesman said that around the same time and place, Israeli soldiers on a mission to stop Palestinians from planting mines came under fire from a group of Palestinians and returned fire. He said soldiers reported killing two Palestinians in the incident.
-------- mideast
With a U.S. Nod, Turkey Says It Won't Send Force to Iraq
November 8, 2003
By DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/08/international/middleeast/08TURK.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 7 - With the quiet blessings of the White House, Turkey said Friday that it was withdrawing its offer to deploy troops to help stabilize Iraq. The decision ended a lengthy and almost entirely futile effort by the Bush administration to solicit large numbers of foreign troops to bolster the American presence.
With the announcement, the administration's effort, presented by the president in early September, appears to be close to a complete failure. India and Pakistan both have declined, at least for the time being. South Korea has said it may be willing, but is concerned about reducing its own troop levels at a moment of heightened tension with North Korea. Japan has approved sending some troops for noncombat missions, but has yet to deploy them.
There are 24,000 non-American troops in Iraq, but almost half of them are British, and few countries have agreed in recent months to join the effort.
Turkey's decision was conveyed to the administration in a telephone call Thursday evening between Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and the Turkish foreign minister, Abdullah Gul. It appears that in the conversation, Mr. Powell gave Mr. Gul an easy way out, perhaps reflecting second thoughts within the administration about the advisability of asking for Turkey's help. "The secretary said that given the situation, given the sensitivities involved, maybe it's not the time," Richard A. Boucher, the State Department spokesman, said on Friday.
In recent weeks, the administration's early enthusiasm for troops from Turkey, the only NATO member with a Muslim majority, waned as it became clear that Iraq's American-appointed Governing Council was deeply opposed to the deployment.
Iraq was once part of the Ottoman Empire and suffered under the heavy hand of its Turkish rulers. In recent months, Iraqi Kurds in the north have objected strongly to the presence of Turkish forces, some of which have been operating just on the Iraqi side of the border.
Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has said repeatedly that he would not send troops to Iraq except at the invitation of the Iraqi Governing Council. In recent weeks, however, L. Paul Bremer III, the director of the occupation in Iraq, told the White House that the council would not approve.
Mr. Bush and his national security team have been sharply criticized for seeking Turkey's help. Iraqis, Democratic presidential candidates and even some within the administration have faulted the strategy. By the middle of last month, as the depth of feelings became clear, Mr. Bush's top aides said they were inclined to let the whole matter fade away.
Among the critics was Richard Haass, who was the head of policy planning at the State Department until he left this summer.
"We've now done damage to the relationship with Turkey twice," said Mr. Haass, who is the president of the Council on Foreign Relations. "First, we asked them to help during the war, and they weren't ready. And now we asked them again, and the Iraqis weren't prepared.
"The bigger fault or flaw is why anyone in the U.S. asked Turkey in the first place. We never should have invited in one of the neighbors. The opportunity for mischief is too great."
Mr. Boucher portrayed the conversation on Thursday night as cordial, saying Mr. Powell thanked Mr. Gul "for the positive response that they had given" to the American request. "And they agreed they would work together on the reconstruction of Iraq," he said. "But for the moment, this deployment is not going forward."
By the time the final decision came today, administration officials had backed away from their prediction in September that Mr. Bush's appeal would draw 10,000 to 15,000 foreign troops to Iraq. Instead, they have focused on financial contributions for reconstruction and on retraining former Iraqi military forces and police officers to handle security problems.
-------- prisoners of war
Air Force rules out death in spy case
November 08, 2003
By Guy Taylor
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20031107-115304-1307r.htm
One of the two translators suspected of spying at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba will face a court-martial on charges of espionage and aiding the enemy but will not be sentenced to death if convicted, military officials said yesterday.
Senior Airman Ahmad I. al Halabi, who served as a translator at Guantanamo for nine months before his arrest in July, faces 20 charges, including four accusing him of espionage and one of aiding the enemy. But the Air Force general presiding over the court-martial "did not refer the case as a capital case," the Air Force said.
A statement issued by the Air Force's Air Mobility Command said the court-martial, or military criminal trial, is expected to be conducted at Travis Air Force Base, Calif., although a date has yet to be determined.
Twelve of the initial 32 charges against Airman al Halabi have been dropped, the officials said.
Airman al Halabi, 23, who is from Detroit but was born in Syria and is engaged to a Syrian woman, has been accused by the Air Force of trying to pass classified information about the Guantanamo prison camp to an unspecified "enemy" in Syria.
At the time of his arrest July 23 at Jacksonville Naval Air Station, Fla., he is said to have had in his possession 180 letters written by detainees at U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Airman al Halabi's attorneys have said he is innocent.
He is being held at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., while the espionage probe continues at Guantanamo, which the United States is using as a jail for more than 600 al Qaeda and other terrorist suspects held in the war on terrorism.
The maximum sentence for Airman al Halabi "would be life in prison," an Air Force spokesman said. And a lesser sentence could be "a dishonorable discharge, total forfeiture of all pay and allowances, reduction to the grade of airman basic, the lowest grade and a fine."
The spokesman said the decision not to pursue the death penalty was made by Air Force Maj. Gen. Paul W. Essex, who based it on a specific set of criteria outlined by the military's manual for courts-martial.
"If it had been a capital case, the two charges that qualified the accused for death sentence were the aiding-the-enemy charge and the espionage charge," the spokesman said.
The other translator accused in the Guantanamo spy probe is a civilian, Ahmed Fathy Mehalba, a U.S. citizen of Egyptian descent. Arrested Sept. 29 in Boston after returning from a visit to Egypt, he is being held in Massachusetts pending trial in a federal criminal court.
Mr. Mehalba, 31, who pleaded not guilty last month, is charged with lying to federal agents by denying that computer disks in his possession contained classified information from Guantanamo. One of the disks reportedly contained a list of names mentioned during interrogation sessions with Guantanamo detainees.
Also charged is U.S. Army Capt. James J. Yee, who served as a Muslim chaplain for the detainees at Guantanamo. While initially accused of spying, Capt. Yee, 35, who used the name "Yousef," has been charged with two counts of mishandling classified information, but not espionage.
-------- spies
Air Force Spy Case Draws Fire
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 8, 2003; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14011-2003Nov7.html
Lawyers for Ahmad I. Halabi, the Air Force translator at the Guantanamo Bay prison who was charged with espionage this week, bitterly criticized the military yesterday for what they said was a shoddy investigation of their client and unfair treatment of him.
The crux of most of the 20 counts filed against Halabi, 23, is that he had in his possession and on his computer highly classified documents about the alleged al Qaeda and Taliban detainees at the naval facility in Cuba where he worked and about operations there. But his attorneys said yesterday that they have serious questions about whether many of the documents are classified.
Prosecutors have in recent weeks declared many innocuous documents in the case to be secret and have said many documents previously designated secret were mistakenly classified, Halabi's attorneys said. This raises the question of how a supply clerk with almost no training in classified work could have understood the rules on handling sensitive data, they said.
"If senior field-grade (military lawyers) cannot understand or figure this out, how could Senior Airman Halabi have any clue about anything that the government now claims he possessed was 'classified?' " Halabi attorney Donald Rehkopf Jr. asked in a letter to Air Force officials this week.
Halabi is one of three people who worked at the prison to be charged with breaches of security. All three are accused of possessing classified material without authorization. Halabi could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted.
Military officials could not be reached for comment last night.
In the letter, Rehkopf said that to prepare for the court-martial of his client, his attorneys needed to speak to at least 21 of the Guantanamo Bay prison's 660 inmates, a request that may conflict with the military's strict control over access to the detainees.
Rehkopf added in the letter that officials were "intentionally perverting" the process of turning over information to defense attorneys by improperly demanding that they provide detailed reasons for needing the information.
-------- us
Wounded Numbers
Posted by: Mike Ewens
Nov 08, 03
antiwar.com/blog
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/comments.php?id=P242_0_1_0
As of today, the official wounded count stands at 2230. As usual though, gov't numbers are untrustworthy. From the Stars and Stripes:
"It is unmistakable that Iraq is still a war zone," Miller [R- NC visiting Landstuhl in Gernmany] said. He said there is an average of 35 attacks a day against soldiers and 95 percent of those soldiers survive their injuries, he said. . . . The delegation made a stop at the military hospital in Landstuhl, which has treated more than 7,000 injured and ill servicemembers from the Iraq war. The congressmen met with several injured soldiers, one whose arm had been amputated by a rocket-propelled grenade, and another who was injured by a homemade bomb.
It is unclear how many of the 7,000 are soldiers with illness unrelated to combat. Nonetheless, this number is significantly higher than anything reported elsewhere. The fact that these numbers involve only soldiers flown to Germany indicates that injuries are far from minor.
Finally, the Stars and Stripes again suggests that the official wounded number is dramatically deflated. An increased flow of wounded into Germany has created the need for a new staging area to care from them all:
The decision to build a new structure comes as the steady flow of patients from Iraq continues, with Landstuhl Regional Medical Center receiving an average of 44 patients a day.
A little bit of math shows that if this average goes back to, say May 1st, then the total number of wounded/ill is actually 8,000. Perhaps a phone call to CentCom will clear this up.
Thanks to CJ Watson for the leads.
----
Seven Thousand Wounded US Soldiers Treated at One Hospital in Germany
Congressional delegation stops to visit patients at Landstuhl
Marni McEntee Stars and Stripes European edition
11/8/2003
http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=17821&archive=true
The Representatives on the trip to Germany included: Thaddeus McCotter, R-Mich.; Jeb Bradley R-N.H.; Todd Akin, R-Mo.; Ed Case, D-Hawaii; Steve Pearce, R-N.M., and Brad Miller, D-N.C.
Landstuhl, Germany - Six U.S. congressmen visiting Iraq to study small-business opportunities got a close-up look at the danger facing U.S. soldiers and its aftermath at a military hospital in Germany.
The delegation of four Republicans and two Democrats happened to be in midair Sunday on a C-130 transport plane over Iraq when word of the deadly Chinook crash came to the pilots in the cockpit, Rep. Todd Akin, chairman of the House small-business subcommittee, said during a news conference Tuesday.
Akin, R-Mo., said the trip, which included visits to troops in Baghdad, Balad, Tikrit and Kirkuk, helped the representatives understand the perils troops face as well as the progress they are making.
The Chinook crashed after witnesses reported seeing a missilelike object hit the aircraft. Fifteen soldiers were killed and 21 were injured. The injured soldiers are being treated at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany and Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.
Most of the time, the representatives were traveling via Black Hawk helicopters, said Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C.
"It is unmistakable that Iraq is still a war zone," Miller said. He said there is an average of 35 attacks a day against soldiers and 95 percent of those soldiers survive their injuries, he said.
"There is nothing isolated about it," he said of the attacks.
Tensions among the group were a little higher when they were flying in blackout conditions at night.
"After we knew the Chinook had gone down and we flew at night in a darkened helicopter, we knew this was a dangerous place and we're at war," said Democrat Ed Case of Hawaii.
However, he said: "Whatever increased risk we faced, it was nothing compared to what the frontline troop goes through every day."
The delegation made a stop at the military hospital in Landstuhl, which has treated more than 7,000 injured and ill servicemembers from the Iraq war. The congressmen met with several injured soldiers, one whose arm had been amputated by a rocket-propelled grenade, and another who was injured by a homemade bomb.
"The impression that you get is that you're just so proud of these young people who are doing something that our country has made a habit of doing for many, many years," Akin said. "They're basically the life-support system of a new, struggling country."
Akin said the trip brought home to the delegation the realities of the war on terrorism, though "it comes at a cost."
As of Monday, 376 U.S. servicemembers have died since the beginning of military operations in Iraq, according to the Defense Department. On Tuesday, the death toll increased to 377 when a 1st Armored Division soldier was killed in a roadside bombing.
mcenteem@mail.estripes.osd.mil
[Note: As of November 8, 2003, the count of US service members killed in Iraq was 392.]
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Without a clue
November 8, 2003
Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/11/07/1068013399245.html
America's two-year investigation of deadly anthrax attacks has come up empty-handed. If the chief suspect didn't do it, who did? Marian Wilkinson investigates.
When the US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) first embarked on a secret project to train a team that could lead the hunt for deadly biological and chemical weapons in enemy territory, it turned to a little-known private company with excellent connections to the Pentagon. That company, Science Applications International Corporation, offered up one of its best experts to fill the contract, Steven J. Hatfill, an ingenious doctor with impressive credentials in the field of bio-terrorism.
As the senior DIA officer in charge of the project, Esteban Rodriguez, put it, Hatfill was "this ultimate biological weapons expert".
For more than two years, Hatfill worked under contract for the front-line US defence agencies on bio-terrorism, including the DIA, the US Special Forces and the Defence Threat Reduction Agency, a defence official told the Herald. Hatfill would continue to work on the Pentagon projects until May 2002, months after the FBI's Washington office began questioning him over the biggest bio-terrorist crime in US history, the mailing of a series of letters laced with a deadly strain of the anthrax virus.
The anthrax letters were sent through the postal service to two senators and some of the country's top news media in the weeks after September 11. The attack left five people dead and 22 ill but no one has been charged.
Today, Hatfill, stripped of his security clearances, is unemployed. His scientific reputation is in tatters. FBI agents on what's called the Amerithrax investigation tailed him around the clock for more than a year. Bloodhounds searched his home, his phones were tapped, his emails read and his friends interrogated. A former colleague turned out to be an FBI informant.
But Hatfill, described as "a person of interest" in the anthrax investigation by the US Attorney-General, John Ashcroft, over a year ago, has not been charged. Indeed, the FBI investigation has deeply split the small, elite world of bio-terrorism experts in the US. In the Pentagon, some defence officials are still accusing the FBI of having "a mindset" against him. One defence official said: "The guys around here say certainly he has the knowledge and expertise to do it but he is the last guy who would."
Martin Hugh-Jones, one of the US's top anthrax researchers, at Louisiana State University where Hatfill briefly worked, has said "Hatfill is just a jerk and an idiot and is paying for it". He said he was "willing to bet" he didn't do it.
The scientist who helped steer the FBI towards Hatfill, Dr Barbara Hatch Rosenberg of the Federation of American Scientists, says she has no regrets. "I know I've gotten a lot of flak. I don't care about that," she said, stressing that she never named Hatfill as a suspect. "My whole point was to make certain they were investigating some evidence that I learnt about from people with more knowledge than I in the case but who couldn't talk."
A new FBI agent in the Washington office, Michael Mason, took over supervision of the investigation in August. In one of his first public statements he distanced the FBI from the naming of Hatfill, saying, "Whether or not we bring the person or persons that are guilty to justice, this has been a remarkable investigation."
Mason's comments masked splits in the FBI over the course of the two-year investigation that has interviewed more than 6000 people and involved hundreds of agents. The second anniversary of the attacks last month was marked by the release of three inconclusive books on the case and several lawsuits, including one lodged by Hatfill for unspecified damages against FBI agents and against Ashcroft.
The FBI, through a spokesman, says the Amerithrax investigation is still "very active" and at least one witness said new documents have recently been subpoenaed. There is no evidence that the FBI has dropped its interest in Hatfill.
BUT behind the raging debate about whether Hatfill is guilty are very murky and disturbing questions for the US defence establishment. Was the perpetrator of the biggest bio-terror attack on US soil one of its own who strayed, as one scientist put, "off the reservation"? And was the motive criminal, personal or an attempt to shock the Government into pouring money and resources into bio-terrorism defence?
Suspicion that the killer was a defence scientist began when tests revealed the anthrax genetically matched the "Ames" strain of the virus. That strain was used in research at two US defence establishments, the Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah and its Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Maryland, where Hatfill had worked. But the Ames strain, discovered in 1981, had also been sent around the country and the world for research purposes, so this hardly narrowed the field of suspects.
What intrigued investigators was how the anthrax had been refined. The most deadly letters were sent to Daschle, a Democrat senator, then the majority leader, and Pat Leahy, the head of the judicial committee that oversees the Department of Justice and the FBI.
The anthrax in these was extraordinarily highly processed or "weaponised", as one scientist said. It made the anthrax powder so light that the tiniest amount could become airborne when disturbed and infect the victims' lungs, bypassing their natural defences. When a minute amount leaked from the letters as they went through the mail in Washington DC it killed postal workers, even though they never opened the letters.
Dr Dick Spertzel, who worked for years at the US Army's lab at Fort Detrick, says the anthrax sent to the senators came from a sophisticated laboratory.
"This is not something that a person could casually make," Spertzel told the Herald. "And I contend that you can't do this in a clandestine fashion so it had to be made in a country that was complicit in its production - and that narrows the field."
But Spertzel, who has worked with Hatfill, is one of the few experts who does not believe the perpetrator was a US scientist. A former UN weapons inspector who is still convinced Saddam Hussein kept an active bio-weapons program, he is convinced Iraq is the most likely anthrax source. And the failure of the WMD search in that country has not dissuaded him.
"The FBI spent a year and a half trying to duplicate the product and failed by their own admission," said Spertzel. "It think I know what's being done in America and there is nothing resembling this."
Dr Martin Hugh-Jones, while deferring to Spertzel's military expertise, disagrees. "The betting is still that it's domestic and I have no reason to doubt that. My working model is that somebody came across some weaponised material being used in a trial and appropriated a small amount of it." Who was it? "I have my suspicions and I start with some of my best friends."
How Hatfill became a key target of the FBI investigation is intriguing. When he left the US Army's lab at Fort Detrick he was hired by the defence contractor SAIC. One close associate was a retired military scientist, Dr Bill Patrick. Now in his 70s, Patrick is one of the fathers of the US bio-terrorism program and runs a consulting company called Bio Threats Assessments.
When SAIC assigned Hatfill to work on his first important contract in 1999, he hired Patrick to write a paper on how to respond to bio-terrorist attack. One scenario Patrick scoped out was the effect of two grams of anthrax being sent through the mail.
By early 2001, Hatfill was working at SAIC on a secret project for the Defence Intelligence Agency. His job was to train teams to go in and secure possible weapons sites, take samples and test for deadly toxins.
About the same time, Patrick gave a series of lectures to meetings of defence scientists on the threat of biological warfare. For impact, he would take glass bottles of simulated weaponised anthrax to the talks.
Patrick told a conference in February 2001 such a powder "must produce very small particles, on the order of 1 to 3 microns. Particles this small can avoid your respiratory tract's defence mechanism, get down in your lung sacs and cause a deep-seated infection. Such a powder ... is difficult to prepare but once a terrorist has it, dissemination is easy."
Bio-terrorism was the hot new issue and by August 2001, Hatfill, partly through his association with Patrick, found his status as an expert soaring. He was in demand by the Pentagon. But he was also making enemies. That month, a colleague at SAIC began reporting back to the company on what he claimed were Hatfill's dark secrets.
Hatfill refuses to talk to reporters but a close friend said he probably deliberately misled the informant. "Steve would feed him a line of s---, not realising the guy was feeding it all to the FBI and the CIA."
If true, this proved to be a huge mistake. SAIC was a critical defence contractor. The informant's report was passed to the Government and Hatfill was called in for a polygraph. His security clearance, vital for his work, was suspended.
A month later, the US was thrown into turmoil by the September 11 attacks. On September 18 the first of the anthrax letters was posted from Trenton, New Jersey. On October 10 the most deadly letter, with the weaponised anthrax, was sent to Daschle's office. The letters carried the slogan "Death to America - death to Israel", casting suspicion on either al-Qaeda or Iraq. But within weeks those suspicions turned inward, especially as one of the letters carried the warning "Take penacilin now".
Once the search went domestic, Hatfill's clash over his security clearance put him under scrutiny. By last year he was under intense investigation. Other defence scientists were also questioned and given polygraphs. Patrick, especially, was offended that anyone would doubt his integrity.
In the end, no evidence appears to have linked either with the crime. Indeed, says Hatfill's lawsuit, the evidence shows he was working overtime at SAIC when the letters were posted hundreds of kilometres away. What the FBI discovered was that Hatfill had lied about his PhD and embellished his past military service. But while suspicious, it was not a hanging offence. His friends are still declaring him innocent.
Daschle hopes the FBI will solve the case but recently expressed his doubts. "They tell me they have good leads, they're making progress and they are confident they will solve the case." But he, too, has noted that two years on, the FBI has not yet made an arrest.
Toxic trail
September 11, 2001: Terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.
September 18: An anthrax-filled letter is sent to NBC News in New York. Other letters are sent to the news media over the next two weeks.
October 5: Bob Stevens, a photo editor with American Media, is the first victim to die.
October 15: A letter with more lethal anthrax is opened in Senator Tom Daschle's office.
November 9: The FBI posts its profile of the suspect as a domestic loner.
March 4, 2002: Hatfill is forced to leave his job with a defence contractor when his security clearance is finally revoked. He is now under scrutiny by the FBI.
August: Hatfill is described as a "person of interest" in the anthrax investigation by US Attorney-General John Ashcroft.
August 11: Hatfill calls a public press conference to declare his innocence.
August 26: Hatfill, unemployed, sues FBI and Ashcroft.
----
9/11 Panel Issues Subpoena to Pentagon
November 8, 2003
New York Times
By PHILIP SHENON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/08/politics/08TERR.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 7 - The federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks stepped up pressure on the Bush administration to cooperate by issuing a subpoena on Friday to the Pentagon.
Members said they were still weighing a subpoena to the administration for Oval Office documents President Bush received in the days before Sept. 11, 2001, although the panel chose not to issue one today.
The 10-member panel said in a statement that it had encountered "serious delays" in obtaining information from the Defense Department. It voted to subpoena the Pentagon for documents, tapes and transcripts involving the actions of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad, on the morning of Sept. 11, as the suicide hijackings were being carried out. The Defense Command is responsible for protecting American airspace.
"In several cases we were assured that all requested records had been produced but we then discovered, through investigation, that these assurances were mistaken," the panel said. "We are especially dismayed by problems in the production of the records of activities of Norad and certain Air Force commands on Sept. 11."
Commission members say they are trying to determine how Norad responded to the first reports of the hijackings and whether the military could have done anything to prevent the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, possibly by using fighter jets to shoot down the passenger planes.
Members of the panel, which is known formally as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, say they also want access to information about communications between Norad and Air Force One, on which President Bush was traveling on Sept. 11.
The Pentagon referred questions about to the subpoena to Norad headquarters in Colorado, and spokesmen there had no immediate comment.
Members of the commission said the panel - in a separate, close vote - had decided in a closed meeting here on Friday against an immediate subpoena to the administration for the Oval Office intelligence reports.
They would not say whether the vote on the commission, which has five Democratic members and five Republican members and which was created last year by Congress, followed partisan lines.
But they said the issue of a subpoena, which would technically be served on the Central Intelligence Agency, which prepares the intelligence reports, would be revisited within days if the White House failed to meet the panel's demands for access to copies of the highly classified reports, known as the President's Daily Brief or P.D.B., that Mr. Bush and his top aides received in the days and weeks before Sept. 11.
"There is a clear message today to the White House and the C.I.A. and the rest of the agencies that we're dealing with," said Timothy J. Roemer, a Democratic member of the commission and a former member of the House of Representatives from Indiana.
"The commission is very serious about getting access to the P.D.B.'s and extremely interested in maintaining our credibility and independence," he said in an interview. Mr. Roemer, who was a member of the joint Congressional committee that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks last year, said that a White House offer made this month for partial access to the Oval Office documents was "completely unacceptable."
The White House refused to provide copies of the daily intelligence reports to the joint Congressional committee last year, citing executive privilege and the need to prevent leaks of highly classified material.
The White House acknowledged last year, in response to news reports, that one of the daily Oval Office intelligence reports in August 2001, the month before the terror attacks, referred to the possibility that Al Qaeda would hijack passenger planes.
Last month, the chairman of the federal commission, Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, said that the White House would be unable to assert executive privilege with his panel in denying document requests and that he was willing to subpoena the intelligence reports if they were not made available.
The subpoena to the Pentagon today was the second that the commission has issued and reflected the panel's growing antagonism with the Bush administration, which had initially opposed the creation of an independent commission to investigate law-enforcement and intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks. The first subpoena was issued last month to the Federal Aviation Administration.
Another Democratic member of the commission, Richard Ben-Veniste, a Washington lawyer, said in an interview that the panel's inability to obtain documents from Norad had seriously set back the work of the panel.
"The result of Norad's noncompliance will be to delay hearings which we had previously scheduled for January and which will require a significant amount of staff backtracking," he said. "The information that we need bears not only on the events of 9/11, which we are charged with reconstructing in a complete and accurate manner, but it also bears on the level of preparedness of our nation's air defenses."
In its statement, the commission said it had alerted Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld about the panel's problems in obtaining documents related to the Sept. 11 attacks, and that Mr. Rumsfeld had "pledged to do everything in his power to address the commission's concerns - he has already taken strong steps to back up this pledge."
The commission said that its problems in obtaining Pentagon documents were "not general" and that "other components of D. O. D. have provided vital assistance to the commission."
--------
9/11 White House Subpoena Omits Classified Briefings
Bush Administration Has Resisted Granting The Sensitive Documents
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 8, 2003; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13970-2003Nov7.html
An independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks announced yesterday that it will issue a second subpoena for documents from the Bush administration, but the legal demand does not include classified intelligence briefings that have been the focus of an ongoing dispute with the White House.
The new subpoena, for Pentagon records about U.S. air defenses on the day of the attacks, follows a demand last month for similar material from the Federal Aviation Administration. The commission said in a statement that it "has encountered some serious delays in obtaining needed documents from the Department of Defense" and that "records of importance to our investigation had not been produced."
The Pentagon said in a statement that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has pledged cooperation and "has directed that the department be responsive to help ensure the commission can meet its deadlines."
But the commission acted more cautiously in its more visible fight with the White House, which has focused on access to President's Daily Brief documents prepared for President Bush. The documents include a briefing from Aug. 6, 2001, containing information about possible attacks by Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. The administration has steadfastly resisted granting access to the documents, citing national security concerns.
During a closed meeting Thursday night, the commission rejected a proposal by former representative Timothy J. Roemer (D-Ind.) to immediately subpoena the CIA for access to the briefings, several members said. But sources said the panel also rejected an offer from the White House that would have restricted access to the briefings to a small group including the panel's chairman, former New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean (R).
The result was a continuation of the stalemate between the commission and the White House. Kean and other commission members have said repeatedly in recent weeks that further delays would threaten the panel's ability to finish its work by the May 27 statutory deadline. Kean pointedly warned in news interviews two weeks ago that the commission would consider subpoenas targeting the White House if its demands were not met.
Kean said in an interview yesterday that he remains optimistic.
"I think the White House has an interest in resolving these final issues just as we do," he said. "Hopefully by next week we can have an agreement. . . . We just have to work through the details."
Bush has promised to work with the commission on its request but has stopped short of saying whether the White House would hand over any documents. A White House spokeswoman did not return a telephone call yesterday.
Roemer and several other members declined to reveal details of the votes by the commission, which has largely deliberated in secret and has consistently sought to appear unified in public. But Roemer said the failed vote to subpoena the CIA was "very strong" and would "hopefully serve to send a message that we need a better offer from the White House."
The commission's continued disputes with the administration over access to information have become a distraction for the panel, which was created by Congress late last year and has been hobbled by delays since then. Some relatives of Sept. 11 victims have sharply criticized the commission for not acting more aggressively in its quest for information.
Kristen Breitweiser, whose husband, Ronald Breitweiser, was killed in the World Trade Center attacks, said: "It's really sad that 11 months into this, they are still doing negotiations.
"They need to be able to say they did everything in their power to get every document and every piece of information they needed, and so far they can't say that. If my husband had been killed in a car accident, I would know more about what happened than I do about this."
In its statement about the Pentagon subpoena, the commission said the missing information is related to "certain Air Force commands" and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which dispatched fighter jets in response to the hijacking of four commercial airliners used in the attacks. The commission's dispute with the FAA also involved documents from NORAD and other materials related to whether air defenses were activated quickly enough.
The Pentagon said that it has provided more than 38,000 pages of documents to the commission so far and that about 130 people have been involved in honoring the requests. The commission has received about 2 million records total from the Bush administration.
Some administration officials have complained privately that many of the commission's requests have been unfocused and overly broad, but panel members have said they intend to be exhaustive to ensure that nothing is missed.
Richard Ben-Veniste, a commission member appointed by Democrats, said the delay in obtaining documents from NORAD will force the commission to postpone one of its hearings scheduled for January.
"Our ability to conclude the work within the deadline given would require complete cooperation by the relevant agencies of goverment," he said. "To the extent that we have setbacks and delays, it makes our job much more difficult and makes the looming deadline more difficult to meet."
-------- homeland security
U.S. Warns of Al Qaeda Cargo Plane Plot
November 8, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Terror-Warning.html?hp
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The latest warning from the Homeland Security Department that Al Qaeda may be plotting an attack is renewing calls for stricter security on cargo planes.
The department advised law-enforcement officials Friday night of threats that terrorists may fly cargo planes from another country into such crucial U.S. targets as nuclear plants, bridges or dams, Homeland Security spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said.
Leon Laylagian of the Coalition of Airline Pilots Associations security committee, said the government must take air cargo security as seriously as it takes air passenger security.
Laylagian said it's essential for Congress to pass a spending bill that would also allow cargo pilots to carry guns in the cockpit, something passenger pilots now are allowed to do.
``There's urgency to get that passed,'' he said.
Separately, the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia said it would close its diplomatic missions in that country Saturday for an undetermined period because of credible information terrorists are about to carry out attacks.
The United States also warned that Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan may try to kidnap American journalists working in that country.
``The U.S. intelligence community remains concerned about al-Qaida's interest in carrying out attacks on us overseas,'' Roehrkasse said.
A federal official said the information about the cargo planes came from a single source overseas.
``It has not yet been corroborated,'' the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. ``We're in the process of trying to corroborate this information.''
``We also remain concerned about threats to the aviation industry and the use of cargo planes to carry out attacks on critical infrastructure,'' the official added.
Homeland Security and the FBI prepared an advisory alerting state and local authorities to the threat, Roehrkasse said. The advisory also was being directed to officials responsible for security at such facilities as nuclear plants, bridges and dams, he said.
Connecticut's homeland security director, Vincent DeRosa, said state officials have been in contact with the Millstone nuclear power complex in Waterford about the threats. He said the state will not raise its terror alert level, but will focus on increasing security at the plant.
``The more we do on a day-to-day basis, the less likely it is that we'll have to raise the alert level,'' DeRosa said.
Roehrkasse said the national color-coded alert will remain at yellow, the middle level on the five-color scale and indicating an elevated risk of terrorist attack.
He noted that cargo carriers already have security measures in place.
Critics have said the Transportation Security Administration, part of the Homeland Security Department, hadn't done enough to make cargo planes safe. Those criticisms intensified when a New York shipping clerk packed himself in a crate and was flown undetected to his parents' home in Dallas.
The government is considering regulations to plug holes in air cargo security, which has received less attention than airline passenger security since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
Only a small percentage of freight is checked before being shipped in cargo or passenger planes. Neither air marshals nor armed pilots are aboard cargo planes, and freight-handling areas at airports are not as secure as passenger terminals.
On the Net:
Transportation Security Administration: http://www.tsa.gov
Homeland Security Department: http://www.dhs.gov
--------
Alert Warns of Attacks Using Hijacked Cargo Jets
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 8, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13976-2003Nov7.html
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security warned government and industry officials last night to be on guard against al Qaeda operatives hijacking cargo jets in Canada, Mexico or the Caribbean and then flying them into this country to attack nuclear plants and other critical infrastructure.
The warning is based on information from a single individual, and a U.S. official familiar with his reports said: "We haven't had the opportunity to fully judge his credibility." But intelligence officers deemed the information believable enough to justify the strengthened security warning, the official said.
Last night's advisory from the two federal agencies follows yesterday's decision to temporarily close the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia because of fears of an imminent attack. But officials said the two warnings are unrelated. While U.S. officials are gravely concerned about attacks in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere overseas, "attacks in the U.S. cannot be ruled out," last night's bulletin said.
The new domestic advisory elaborates on others in recent weeks warning that al Qaeda might try to hijack commercial jets and then fly them into the United States to attack sites on the ground. This directive raises the prospect of cargo-delivery planes being used to attack nuclear plants, bridges and dams.
Intelligence officials say al Qaeda believes jets operating in nations bordering the United States are more vulnerable to being hijacked than those flying here. The officials cite the intense security consciousness at U.S. airports.
Some critics of the Homeland Security Department, including a number of congressional Democrats, say the agency has been slow to tighten the inspections of packages loaded into commercial cargo jets. But they have not focused as heavily on the danger of cargo aircraft being hijacked and used in aerial suicide attacks.
"A growing body of credible intelligence indicates al Qaeda continues to develop plans for multiple attacks against targets in the U.S. involving commercial aircraft," said one bulletin two months ago.
It drew attention to scenarios of "hijacking airliners transiting near or flying over the continental United States, but not destined to land at U.S. airports."
-------- prisons / prisoners
Court Upholds a Post-9/11 Detention Tactic
By Edward Walsh
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 8, 2003; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13975-2003Nov7.html
Upholding a tactic used by the Justice Department after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday that the government has authority to detain people for the purpose of having them appear before a grand jury as witnesses.
The ruling by the New York-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit reversed a lower court's finding that the federal "material witness" statute applies only to post-indictment criminal proceedings and not to grand jury investigations.
The Justice Department hailed the ruling. "The court's decision recognizes the important principle that witnesses whose testimony is material to criminal proceedings, including grand juries, may be detained when that detention is reasonable and necessary," Attorney General John D. Ashcroft said in a statement.
But defense lawyers said they fear that the court ruling will encourage law enforcement officials to expand use of what they said has been a rarely used tactic in grand jury proceedings.
"I have never known the government, when granted broad powers, not to use it," said Diana D. Parker of the New York Council of Defense Lawyers.
U.S. District Judge Shira A. Scheindlin ruled in May 2002 that the Justice Department overreached its authority when it arrested Osama Awadallah, a college student of Jordanian descent, as a "material witness" in the investigation of the terrorist attacks. Less than three months later, in another case, a second district court judge in New York reached the opposite conclusion, ruling that the government had legally imprisoned as "material witnesses" dozens of men who authorities believed might be able to provide important information to grand juries investigating terrorism.
Widespread use of the material-witness statute has been one of the most controversial aspects of the Justice Department's investigation of terrorism since the 2001 attacks. In some cases, detainees have spent long stretches in jail without testifying. Critics have said the government has misused the statute as a detention tactic.
The Justice Department long declined to reveal how many people it had detained under the statute before telling the House Judiciary Committee in a May report that the number was nearly 50.
The material-witness statute, last updated by Congress in 1984, empowers the government to arrest a person whose testimony is deemed "material in a criminal proceeding" when it is shown that it is not practical to obtain the testimony by subpoena. The key issue in yesterday's appeals court ruling was whether the term "criminal proceeding" applies to grand jury proceedings as well as criminal trials and other post-indictment proceedings.
The appeals court said that the legislative history of the statute showed that Congress clearly intended the law to cover grand jury proceedings. "When Congress enacted [the statute] -- and until the district court ruled otherwise in this case -- there was a settled view that a grand jury proceeding is a 'criminal proceeding' for purposes of the material witness statute," the court said.
The appeals court also rejected the lower court's finding that imprisoning a material witness for a grand jury investigation raised serious constitutional questions under the Fourth Amendment's "unreasonable search and seizure" provisions.
Awadallah, who lives in San Diego, was arrested by FBI agents there after his first name and an old telephone number for him were found on a piece of paper in a car that was abandoned at Dulles International Airport by two hijackers of the American Airlines flight that crashed into the Pentagon. He was eventually transported to New York, held in four different jails and charged with perjury after he testified before a grand jury 20 days after his arrest.
A trial on the perjury charges was delayed pending the outcome of the government's appeal of the lower court ruling that Awadallah had been illegally detained.
Research editor Margot Williams contributed to this report.
--------
RELIGION JOURNAL
Judges Strike Down Law on Religion in Prison
November 8, 2003
By ADAM LIPTAK
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/08/national/08RELI.html
A federal law meant to protect prisoners' religious rights is unconstitutional, a three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Cincinnati ruled yesterday. The judges ruled that the law amounted to an endorsement of religion by the government, violating the establishment clause of the First Amendment.
The decision is at odds with recent ones from federal appeals courts in Chicago and San Francisco. The split among the courts, and the nature and history of the law itself, makes review by the Supreme Court a distinct possibility, legal experts said.
The law requires courts to review restrictions on religious practices in prison with heightened skepticism. A much broader earlier law, itself an effort to overturn a 1990 Supreme Court decision that required only deferential review of all sorts of general laws that hinder religion, was largely struck down by the Supreme Court in 1997, on states' rights grounds.
The new law, enacted in 2000, was supported by an unusual coalition of religious and civil liberties groups. It was limited to two areas, prisoners and zoning. Though there has been substantial litigation in the federal district courts about the zoning provisions, with mixed results, no appeals court has yet ruled on that aspect of the law.
The case decided yesterday by the panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit was brought by four men who said that Ohio prison officials had interfered with their access to religious literature and chaplains, with their ability to conduct religious services and with their freedom to dress as required by their faiths.
The plaintiffs are John W. Gerhardt, who said he was a minister in the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, which believes that the races should be separated and is affiliated with the Aryan Nation; John Miller, who said he was a follower of Asatru, a polytheistic faith that includes Thor in its pantheon of gods; J. Lee Hampton, who said he was a witch in the Wiccan faith; and Jon B. Cutter, who said he was a Satanist.
Prison officials said in court papers that the federal law allows "inmate gangs to claim religious status in order to insulate their illicit activities from scrutiny."
Yesterday's decision was not based on states' rights but on the First Amendment's prohibition on the establishment of religion by the government. In the 1997 Supreme Court decision striking down the earlier law on federalism grounds, only Justice John Paul Stevens suggested that it was vulnerable to attack on establishment-clause grounds.
The judges in yesterday's decision agreed, ruling unanimously that the law "has the effect of encouraging prisoners to become more religious in order to enjoy greater rights." The judges are Ronald Lee Gilman and Karen Nelson Moore, both of the Sixth Circuit, and Arthur J. Tarnow, a visiting Michigan trial court judge.
David A. Goldberger, a law professor at Ohio State University and a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said his clients intended to seek review from the full court or the Supreme Court.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- health
Marietta dentist uses technology
By Tim Brust
Marietta Times
Saturday, November 08, 2003
http://www.mariettatimes.com/business/story/118202003_biz01mttadentist.asp
Gandee Licklider was in high school when she started carefully planning her career options. She knew she was interested in medicine, so she wanted to learn everything she could. One day, she asked a local dentist, Dr. Leroy Ash, if she could shadow him at his office from time to time. Her experiences helped her develop a love for dentistry.
"He let me observe a lot," she said.
Licklider said she became the first female dentist in Marietta a few years ago when she finished her education and joined River City Dental Group. In August, she opened her own practice at 510 Second St., Marietta.
Licklider said she learned dentistry could not only involve medical principles. She also discovered there was an artistic side to it as well. Cosmetic dentistry often involves conceptualizing how a patient's appearance can be improved. Executing that plan also allows for interpretation and artistry.
When she opened her practice, Licklider decided to include state-of-the-art equipment. Rocking chairs in the waiting room are about the only things in the office that aren't 21st century technology.
Digital technology allows charts and records to be stored on a hard drive instead of filing cabinets.
"It includes everything a paper chart would," she said.
The paperless office extends to X-rays as well. A normal X-ray on film takes five to eight minutes to develop. Digital technology allows the X-ray image to be displayed on a flat panel monitor almost immediately. Patients also can see the monitor. Images can be enlarged to show what the dentist is pointing out.
Another advantage to digital dentistry is that the X-ray machine uses 85 percent less radiation. Licklider said transferring the image to film requires a longer exposure time than digital images.
Licklider said she always had her sights set on her own practice. She credits her parents, especially her mother, for inspiring her.
"My mom is a pretty independent person," she said.
Her parents, Garold and Margie Greenlees, she said, allowed her to make her own decisions and supported her.
Her husband has also been very supportive, too. John Licklider gave up his job to become the office manager. He said his background in computers has helped put the technical aspects of the office together.
"We just decided it was the most important thing to us," he said.
He said he thinks patients enjoy the family atmosphere they provide at the office. He said patients often comment on his wife's gentle and caring attitude toward them.
Children especially enjoy one of the advantages of technology. Each patient room has a TV screen.
"That's been a big hit with everyone," John Licklider said.
John Licklider said the practice is the only dentist's office in the area that they know of that is completely paperless.
Dr. Gandee Licklider
Office address: 510 Second St., Marietta.
Specialties: General dentistry, cosmetic dentistry.
Office opened: Aug. 1.
Employees: 4.
Hours:
Monday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.,
Tuesday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.,
Thursday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and
Friday, 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.
The finishing touches are being put on an addition that will add about 50 percent more floor space to the office.
Gandee Licklider said that will include space for staff, office space and another hygiene room. She said in the future, it may also be space for another dentist.
--------
China Begins Giving Free H.I.V./AIDS Drugs to the Poor
November 8, 2003
By JIM YARDLEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/08/international/asia/08CHIN.html
BEIJING, Nov. 7 - The Chinese government has started providing free treatment for poor people with H.I.V. and AIDS and plans to expand the program next year until every poor person who has tested positive is receiving medical help, a top Health Ministry official said in a speech this week.
The speech on Thursday by Gao Qiang, the executive deputy health minister, confirmed anecdotal reports from AIDS sufferers in central China, who say health workers began handing out free anti-retroviral drugs several months ago in Henan Province, a region ravaged by AIDS.
Mr. Gao's speech, released by the official New China News Agency, was hailed by Chinese and Western AIDS workers as a significant step for a country that has come under intense criticism for its earlier handling of the disease. Even so, AIDS activists warned that China must do far more than give out medicine, and H.I.V.-positive patients in Henan cautioned that problems were already arising with the free drug program.
"It's a very positive thing, but we are not yet there," said Henk Bekedam, the World Health Organization representative in Beijing.
Mr. Bekedam said the free drug program was the latest example of what appears to be a new, more proactive attitude toward AIDS taken by China's senior leaders. This week, Beijing was host to one major international AIDS conference, while an AIDS meeting led by former President Bill Clinton will be held here on Monday. China also recently received a $98 million grant, largely to fight AIDS, from the Global Fund.
"It's undeniable that at this very moment China has made some major steps forward in the fight against H.I.V.," said Mr. Bekedam, who heard Mr. Gao's speech.
Exactly how many people have H.I.V. or AIDS in China is a matter of debate. Beijing has been slow to discuss the problem, and its official figures tend to be lower than the estimates of health professionals. Mr. Gao, speaking at an economic forum, said China now had 840,000 people with H.I.V., a figure he attributed to a joint international survey. But some doctors in China suspect that a million people were infected in Henan Province alone after local officials promoted a blood-selling operation in the early 1990's.
Chinese officials and AIDS experts estimate that 150,000 to 200,000 people have already died of AIDS in China.
Mr. Gao said 80,000 people had tested positive for AIDS in China. By the end of the year, he said, 5,000 people should be getting the free medical treatment. Then, according to the New China News Agency, "the free treatment would be available for all poor H.I.V. carriers and AIDS patients next year."
What is not clear is who qualifies as poor in a country where many people live on a few hundred dollars a year. Mr. Gao said the central and local governments planned to spend $850 million to improve and expand prevention and control programs in the provinces. He also said $272 million would be spent on upgrading blood-testing stations in central and western China.
"It's not a very clear definition of who are poor people," said Dr. Cheng Feng, director of the China office of Family Health International, a worldwide nonprofit organization with an emphasis on AIDS/H.I.V. prevention and care. "I'm not sure what that means."
The free drug program began several months ago in Henan, where thousands of poor farmers sold their blood to make money but were unknowingly infected with H.I.V.
Three H.I.V.-positive residents from Henan said in recent interviews that some people taking the free medication had shown improvement, while others had experienced intense side effects like nausea, dizziness and vomiting. Another major problem, they said, is that local health officials are not educating patients on how to use the drugs or what sort of side effects to expect. Nor are they conducting follow-up exams.
As a result, many patients have stopped taking the medication. Experts say China has begun manufacturing some anti-retroviral drugs, but only ones no longer under patent. China is negotiating with pharmaceutical companies to lower the price of newer, patented drugs, and Mr. Clinton has been working to broker a deal.
The difficult job of building the necessary health care infrastructure to treat such a major AIDS problem is the immediate challenge for China. The inadequacy of its heath care system was exposed during the SARS outbreak earlier this year.
But many experts and activists believe that SARS, and the lessons the government learned, is one reason that senior leaders are no longer trying to ignore the country's AIDS problem. Even so, many activists believe that China's top leaders, including President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, must make high-profile gestures, as they did during the SARS crisis, when Mr. Wen visited SARS medical workers.
"It is a very encouraging sign that China has finally come to terms with providing treatment and care to people with H.I.V./AIDS," said Chung To, whose Chi Heng Foundation helps pay educational costs of AIDS orphans in central China. "However, providing them with medicine is not the solution; it's not the end. It has to be more than that."
Jing Jun, director of the Tsinghua University Center for AIDS Research and Training, which is the host for the conference with Mr. Clinton, agreed that the health infrastructure needed improvement, but he said he hoped that the promise of free medication would encourage people to undergo testing.
Without the promise of free treatment, he said, many people are reluctant to endure the stigma attached to the disease. "It will encourage people to come forward for voluntary testing," he said. "Why should people come out and be tested positively and get nothing?"
-------- ACTIVISTS
Envoy: Myanmar's Suu Kyi Refuses Freedom
By AYE AYE WIN
Associated Press Writer
Nov 8, 2003
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/MYANMAR_SUU_KYI?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
YANGON, Myanmar (AP) -- Detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi will not accept freedom until all those arrested with her five months ago are released, a U.N. human rights envoy said Saturday.
The Nobel Peace laureate is under house arrest. Her detention began after a bloody clash in northern Myanmar on May 30 between her supporters and a pro-junta mob.
U.N. Envoy Paulo Sergio Pinheiro said 35 people remain in jail in connection with the May incident. In addition there are eight senior officials of her National League for Democracy party held under house arrest, he said.
The U.N. envoy said Suu Kyi told him that "she will not accept any privilege or freedom of movement before all the people detained since May 30 including her eight colleagues (are) released."
Pinheiro met with Suu Kyi at her lakeside home Thursday during his weeklong mission to investigate human rights in the military-ruled country.
After the May clash, Suu Kyi was detained at an undisclosed location under emergency security laws. She was later allowed to go to her Yangon residence, which she apparently remained unable to leave. But Pinheiro said he was told by authorities that she is "not held under any security law." The government has not publicly confirmed this.
It was not clear if that meant Suu Kyi was free to leave her home or whether she was being held under some non-security law.
"She wants an independent investigation of the (May 30) incident. She wants accountability and justice but not revenge," Pinheiro said.
Pinheiro has been the only person allowed to meet with Suu Kyi other than U.N. special envoy to Myanmar, Razali Ismail, and Red Cross officials.
Her detention has provoked widespread international criticism of the junta, which has refused to give up the power it seized in 1988 despite calling elections in 1990 and losing them to Suu Kyi's party.
Razali initiated reconciliation talks between Suu Kyi and the junta in October 2000 but the process ground to a halt after the May 30 incident in which dozens of opposition members are said to have been killed, according to dissident accounts. The government says only four people died.
Pinheiro also called for the unconditional release of about 1,300 political prisoners in Myanmar, many of them old and ailing, who have been in jail for up to 15 years.
He interviewed 19 of them this week at the notorious Insein prison.
"I told the authorities that it is a shame to keep all these people... It is outrageous to have people of 75 years in prison after 10,15 years. I am embarrassed to meet those people another time. They are supposed to be in their homes with their families not in Insein. It is unacceptable," he said.
Pinheiro dismissed criticism that he has failed to bring about any change in Myanmar.
"I am not a fairy with a magic wand, nor a superman," he said.
----
War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy
by Norman Solomon
Saturday 08 November 2003
http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/1950/
:: Prepared text of speech at the Brazilian Social Forum, November 8, 2003 - Belo Horizonte, Brazil ::
"When a country - particularly "a democracy" - goes to war, the passive consent of the governed lubricates the machinery of slaughter. Silence is a key form of cooperation, but the war-making system does not insist on quietude or agreement. Mere passivity or self-restraint will suffice to keep the missiles flying, the bombs exploding and the faraway people dying."
I am very glad to be here to participate in the Brazilian Social Forum.
For me and the grassroots activists who I work with every day in the United States, many events have caused us to feel discouraged during the last few years. But I have often remembered words that I heard in early 2001 at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre. Speaking there, Eduardo Galeano mentioned a statement that he saw written on a wall on a street in a South American city. The statement said: "Let's save pessimism for better times."
To people on this planet who are striving to overcome the destructive priorities of neoliberalism, the transition that has occurred in Brazil this year offers hope. We see in the present day that the struggles of millions of people, for years and decades, can bring uplifting changes that once seemed very unlikely or even impossible.
But in the United States - and for the people elsewhere in the world who have been in the main line of fire of U.S. policies - the times have gotten worse in recent years.
I live in California, a state where a bad actor can become governor. And I live in a country where the presidents are bad actors.
In Washington, the job description for presidents is to act like humanitarians while functioning as world-class exploiters and thugs.
Ten months ago, I visited Baghdad while accompanying Denis Halliday, the former United Nations assistant secretary general who had been director of the UN's "oil for food" program in Iraq. I felt in January that I was at the scene of a crime against humanity - a crime that had not yet occurred, but that was being proudly proclaimed on the agenda of the leaders of the U.S. and British governments.
Before the launching of cruise missiles and two-thousand pound bombs against Baghdad and other heavily populated urban areas, before the "cluster munitions" that would be scattered across cities and towns in Iraq, before the depleted uranium shells that would be fired with the subsidies of U.S. taxpayers - before the all-out unleashing of the Pentagon's lucrative firepower - there were the weapons of mass deception.
In the cross-hairs of these weapons of mass deception were any people who could perhaps be persuaded to be gullible. The propaganda armaments were endless phony claims about seeking diplomatic solutions. The propaganda armaments were speeches at the United Nations where President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell fervently presented false claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda. But most of all, the arsenals of propaganda - enabling the war on Iraq to proceed - were the news media.
And in many ways, the most powerful technique of deception continues to be silence about truth.
In the United States, very few prominent journalists are willing to mention that President Bush has the blood of many Iraqi children on his hands after launching an aggressive war in violation of the U.N. Charter and the Nuremberg principles established more than half a century ago.
Anti-democratic news media are hostile to history. And so, the same propaganda machinery says little about the suffering that results from the class war constantly waged by the wealthy - and avoids telling much about the human consequences of militarism.
The writer Mark Twain once said that "None but the dead are permitted to speak truth." And often that seems literally to be the case.
In the United States, certain vital statements by Twain - who's often considered to be the nation's greatest writer - are excluded from corporatized media culture.
- A hundred years ago, he wrote: "Who are the oppressors? The few: the king, the capitalist and a handful of other overseers and superintendents. Who are the oppressed? The many: the nations of the earth; the valuable personages; the workers; they that make the bread that the soft-handed and idle eat."
- He wrote: "Why is it right that there is not a fairer division of the spoil all around? Because laws and constitutions have ordered otherwise. Then it follows that laws and constitutions should change around and say there shall be a more nearly equal division."
- And he wrote: "I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land."
In current times, for the government that is pleased to proclaim itself "the world's only superpower," the media bias that prepares the path for war must avoid certain inconvenient realities of history. One of those realities, for the U.S. media, has been the profound verdict rendered 58 years ago at trials in the German city of Nuremberg.
Despite such deafening media silences this year, the fact remains that judgments at Nuremberg and precepts of international law forbid launching an aggressive war - an apt description of what the U.S. government inflicted on Iraqi people in the spring of 2003.
"We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it," said Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson, a U.S. representative to Nuremberg at the International Conference on Military Trials at the close of World War II. He added that "no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy."
When a country - particularly "a democracy" - goes to war, the passive consent of the governed lubricates the machinery of slaughter. Silence is a key form of cooperation, but the war-making system does not insist on quietude or agreement. Mere passivity or self-restraint will suffice to keep the missiles flying, the bombs exploding and the faraway people dying.
We now face an emboldened regime in Washington which sees military actions as reliable solutions.
To devote billions more dollars to weaponry while so many people are hungry and dying from preventable diseases is a sin and a crime.
No part of the world is spared the impacts. The excellent news agency Inter Press Service reported in late September that "levels of U.S. military aid to Latin America have more than tripled over the last five years." The news agency added: "At a time when the region's economies are stagnating or even shrinking, throwing millions more people into poverty, total U.S. military aid to Latin America now almost equals the amount of money Washington is devoting to social or economic development there."
The backing for the U.S. war on Iraq and the occupation of that country cannot be understood apart from the economic imperial designs known as "neoliberalism" and "globalization" - the eagerness to create optimum conditions for investment and maximally profitable trade arrangements.
Today - despite all that has been revealed and all the splits that have developed among U.S. elites about the occupation of Iraq - the media supporters of it include the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. We should consider what the esteemed journalist Friedman had to say in his 1999 book titled "The Lexus and the Olive Tree." He wrote: "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."
That declaration was written in a spirit of enthusiastic approval. The visions of hegemony - with their geopolitical, economic, cultural and media components - are driven by the specter of a kind of "united corporate states of the world" ... a world in which the preeminent sovereignty belongs to the likes of American Express and Citicorp and McDonalds and Burger King and Monsanto. And Disney and CNN.
Seriously distorted reporting tells us that the leaders in Washington are eager to achieve peace. But this is true only in the context of subjugation.
The U.S. government wants peace - on its own terms.
The man with a boot on another person's neck may speak loudly of desiring peace. So does the Israeli government as it maintains a brutal and flagrantly illegal occupation of Palestinian territory, now in its 37th year.
As the Prussian general Karl von Clausewitz remarked two centuries ago: "A conqueror is always a lover of peace."
Last weekend, the shooting down of a helicopter in Iraq resulted in the deaths of 16 members of the U.S. armed forces.
On Monday [November 3] the organization that I'm part of, the Institute for Public Accuracy based in the United States, released a statement from a California resident, Fernando Suarez del Solar, whose son Jesus Alberto Suarez del Solar Navarro died in Iraq on March 27, a week after the start of the war. The bereaved father said: "These attacks are the tragic result of the illegal occupation of Iraq by the U.S. military. Our young people are exposed to death every day. They are wounded in faraway lands for the whims and lies of President Bush.... The military does all kinds of things to recruit Hispanics, African Americans and poor Anglos. How many children of congressmen or CEOs are in Iraq?"
But the U.S. news media cannot accept very much of such candor. The debates about policies are tactical, not fundamental. Certain perspectives - prevalent in elite circles and promoted by most government officials - are heard again and again. Other outlooks, questioning not only the strategic wisdom but also the moral basis of government policies, are heard only once in a while.
In the mass media, the power to include and exclude is the power to shape and manipulate public opinion. As dominant media corporations grow larger in size and fewer in number, the major means of mass communication are engaged in a "corporatization of consciousness."
And in times of war, there is often a parallel militarization of consciousness. In a country with democratic forms of government, this is what makes possible the manipulated consent of the governed for war based on lies.
Now, the occupation of Iraq is imposing new economic models of privatization for the benefit of U.S. corporate interests. This is neoliberalism at gunpoint.
Iraq has an estimated 112 billion barrels of oil under the sand. The news media of the United States like to pretend that the oil there has little or nothing to do with the war and the occupation. But can anyone seriously believe that the U.S. government would have 130,000 troops in Iraq today if that country did not have a single drop of oil reserves?
Thirty-six years ago, the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. identified the U.S. government as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." That statement was accurate in 1967. And it is accurate in 2003.
So, too, we are still living with the truth that Dr. King expressed as he said: "When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered."
The struggle over media and the flow of information - whether in the United States or Brazil or anywhere else - is inseparable from the battle for democracy. It is impossible for democratic participation to breathe freely while the heavy weight of capital sits on the windpipe of open expression and wide-ranging debate.
It is necessary but it is not enough to ensure freedom of speech. All people must also have the freedom to be heard. Otherwise, "free speech" can be - and often is - the freedom to speak to the walls.
The major news outlets are like walls with cracks. Every day the confining structures of big media loom large.
Yet we have countless opportunities to find, utilize and widen the cracks in the corporate media's barriers to democratic communication. Meanwhile, we need to grow non-corporate media institutions capable of effectively promoting social change.
Steadily worsening concentrations of ownership and the hefty clout of advertising combine to severely limit the range of information and debate in news media. Ongoing pressures - economic, ideological and governmental - constrain the work of mainline journalists, whose efforts routinely suffer from skewed priorities and self-censorship.
Self-censorship is a huge problem in our societies with freedom of the press. As George Orwell observed: "Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip."
The profit-driven ideology of the "free market" is in sync with the agendas of top management and advertisers. The tilt against truly independent media and wide-ranging discourse is extreme when corporations are the owners who hire the managers who hire the journalists and producers.
While no individual or single organization can take on more than a fraction of the necessary endeavors, the overall work to create a democratic media environment must run a wide gamut. Popular movements now face the imperative of struggling for democratic media.
Sustained efforts to challenge the corporate media and support independent media outlets can reinforce each other with continuous synergy - to establish, sustain and expand progressive movements' media organizations; to spread deft criticism of rancid mass media; to push for better reporting and much wider debate in mainstream media; to fight for structural reform of government agencies so that the airwaves can be reclaimed by the public; to lambast, debunk and satirize the insidious junk that so often passes for journalism and cultural uplift.
In the long run, no campaign for basic media reform can succeed apart from broader social-justice movements - and vice versa. The degradation of journalism and mass entertainment is entwined with pervasive corporate power that severely damages virtually every facet of political and social life.
Media criticism becomes profoundly useful in combination with media activism. Too often we've held onto theories about what is and is not possible. But analysis and action become much more powerful when they constantly inform each other - when assessments shift due to on-the-ground experiences that benefit not only from the results of trial and error but also from insightful up-to-date analysis.
We've discovered that it's not nearly enough to put out a powerful expose or release a cogent analysis in a few print outlets or on some web pages or on a few radio stations - or to briefly surface in a large national media venue. Such achievements, while important, are insufficient. They need to draw strength from each other - while simultaneously finding ways to reach broader audiences, including via mass media, where there are cracks in the corporate walls.
Some journalism students are taught the noble theory that journalists should "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted." But under corporate control, news media outlets are routinely engaged in comforting the already comfortable and afflicting the already afflicted.
On an ongoing basis, major news outlets participate in class warfare, from the top down. And they often condemn those who engage in class warfare from the bottom up.
In many countries, the routine is for the mass media - the daily newspapers, the biggest magazines, the radio and TV networks, the cable stations - to side with those who "have" against those who "have not."
In the United States, every daily newspaper has a Business section. Not one has a Labor section. Apparently the dominant media assumption is that wealth creates all labor, instead of the other way around.
Popular movements urgently need to boost the resources and improve the coordination of their media work. It should be possible to attain the creative advantages of sharp analysis, institutional growth, coordinated planning and agile cooperation while encouraging a decentralized, democratic, grassroots approach to social action.
Right now the cracks in the media walls are much too thin and much too scarce. The long haul of our struggle involves bringing down the institutional barriers that, in effect, "soundproof" much of the media world and suppress the voices of those without privilege.
Any campaign for media democratization will encounter massive opposition from those who own the big newspapers and large magazines and the radio and television networks. And they're determined to also dominate the Internet as much as possible.
The corporate media are committed not only to their exorbitant profits but also to propagandizing the society to accept an economic order based on fundamental injustice.
We can have corporate domination of media or we can have genuine democracy - but we cannot have both.
Under the ownership of enormous corporations, heavily influenced by the main sources of advertising revenue, often functioning in tandem with state power - the major media outlets cast a massive shadow over our lives, wherever we live.
Every day, when the voices of the rich and powerful dominate what is loudly broadcast and widely publish, the media managers are doing what they're paid to do.
But it is possible to create democratic media. Possible - and absolutely necessary.
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Military Families Speak Out Against War
By T.A. BADGER
Associated Press Writer
November 8, 2003
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-ap-war-protest,0,4811118.story?coll=sns-ap-nation-headlines
SAN ANTONIO -- Families with husbands, sons and other relatives serving in Iraq gathered in drizzling weather Saturday in this military-dependent city to voice their opposition to the way in which the U.S.-led war is being handled.
"This is how I show my support," said Candance Robison, whose husband, Army 1st Lt. Mike Robison, is serving with the 82nd Airborne Division in Fallujah, Iraq, the heart of anti-American insurgency.
"If my husband got killed and I hadn't done everything I could to bring him home, I'd never forgive myself," said Robison, 27, a mother of two from the Dallas area.
She and others stressed that they wholeheartedly support troops stationed in the Middle East. Their complaint is with the decision-makers in Washington.
"It's our job and our duty to question our government and hold it accountable for what they're doing over there," said Shannon Sharrock, of Temple.
Sharrock, a Baylor University law student, said her heart stopped when she heard that a Black Hawk helicopter from the 101st Airborne Division had gone down Friday and that everyone on board was killed.
Her husband, Capt. Joseph Sharrock, is a Black Hawk pilot attached to the 101st Airborne.
"He called at 3:30 this morning to make sure I knew that he's OK," said Sharrock, a 1997 West Point graduate and former Army helicopter pilot. "He knew all six aboard that helicopter."
A CNN-USA Today poll released Thursday found that 54 percent of Americans disapprove of the way President Bush is handling Iraq. The same poll in August found that 57 percent supported the president's performance.
The two dozen Texans who voiced their opposition Saturday said the shift in national sentiment has made it easier for them to speak up without being branded as anti-American.
But Sharrock said she still can't share her beliefs with many friends at Fort Hood, where her husband's unit is based.
"They think you can't speak against the war without speaking out against the troops," she said. "I'm against the war, therefore (to them) I'm unpatriotic."
The family members said their soldiers know they are campaigning against the war, and support their right to dissent.
"Our politics are on opposite ends of the spectrum," Robison said of herself and her husband, "but he's coming over a little my way."
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