Archive By Date | Today's Links to Search By
Activists' News | Nuclear | Depleted Uranium | Military | Police
Alternative Energy Etc. | From Subscribers
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 chapl