Archive By Date | Today's Links to Search By
Activists' News | Nuclear | Depleted Uranium | Military | Police
Alternative Energy Etc. | From Subscribers
NUCLEAR
Iran to Suspend Uranium Enrichment Soon
Iranian Vow on Atom Issue
Iran Says Will Finally Suspend Uranium Enrichment
CIA: North Korea Verifies Nuclear Designs
US warns North Korea off power plant threat
North Korea's Bomb: Untested but Ready, C.I.A. Concludes
Landmark at Rocky Flats falls
CIA believes N. Korea has Hiroshima-type weapon
Nuclear hiring power: Able grads in demand
Report on N-sites may boost workers' claims
Allegations laid out against Envirocare
'No President has lied so baldly and so often and so demonstrably'
9/11 panel subpoenas NORAD, not CIA
When Resolve Against Bush Melts
Senators on Intelligence Panel Clash on Talk Show
Gore Accuses Bush of 'Big Brother' Policy
FREEDOM AND SECURITY
MILITARY
A Career Ends and a Trial Begins Over Plague Vials
Elite forces attack intelligence blunder
Reality-check with China
U.S. Troops Raid Tikrit In Hunt for Guerrillas
In a Delicate Balancing Act, U.S. Woos Iranian Group in Iraq
Alternatives to Iraqi Council Eyed
U.S. Detains 18 for Attack That Came Close to Wolfowitz
For Iraq Police, a Bigger Task but More Risk
Secret missile test seen on TV
Capture of Islamic Jihad Leader Sparks Clashes in Mideast
Israel Approves Prisoner Swap; Palestinian Announces Cabinet
Deadly explosions rock Riyadh
Car Bomb Explodes At Saudi Complex
Al Qaeda Blamed in Deadly Attack on Saudi Homes
Marine order warns reserve unit of likely Okinawa deployment
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Editorial - Corrupting the Patriot Act?
ENERGY AND OTHER
States Planning Their Own Suits on Power Plants
ACTIVISTS
Military Families Protest Way War Is Run
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- iran
Iran to Suspend Uranium Enrichment Soon
November 9, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iran-Nuclear.html
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran said Sunday that it will suspend uranium enrichment in the coming days, a move it has promised to take amid pressure to prove it is not trying to make nuclear weapons.
It was the firmest timetable yet by Tehran to carry out the step, which the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency has been seeking for weeks. Iran has also said that this week it will firm up its promise to allow snap IAEA inspections of its nuclear facilities.
``Within the next few days uranium enrichment will be suspended,'' Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said.
Enriching uranium is a process that creates fuel for nuclear plants but also can be used to build weapons.
Tehran says it has enriched uranium only to non-weapons levels, as part of purely peaceful nuclear programs meant to produce power as its oil stocks decline. The United States accuses Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons and has pressed for the IAEA to declare Iran in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Traces of weapons-grade uranium have been found on enrichment centrifuges at two Iranian facilities, but Iranian officials say the imported equipment was contaminated abroad before Iran received it.
On Nov. 20, the IAEA board of governors will weigh a report by the agency's director, Mohamed ElBaradei, on Iran's nuclear activities. If the board decides that the report justifies declaring Tehran in violation of the Nonproliferation Treaty, it will ask the U.N. Security Council to get involved. The council, in turn, 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.
Iran has also said it will sign an additional protocol to the NPT, though when that will occur remains unclear. Asefi said Sunday that ``within the next few days Iran's willingness to accept the additional protocol will be announced by Iran's representative to the IAEA.''
--------
Iranian Vow on Atom Issue
November 9, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/09/international/middleeast/09IAEA.html
VIENNA, Nov. 8 (Reuters) - Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Saturday that Iran had promised to hand over two crucial letters making official its acceptance of tougher nuclear inspections and a suspension of its uranium enrichment program.
After a more than 90-minute meeting here with the leader of Iran's national security agency, Hassan Rohani, Dr. ElBaradei said a letter accepting a protocol for tougher nuclear inspections would come next week. He said Iran had also promised a letter formally announcing the uranium enrichment suspension.
The meeting came as the I.A.E.A., a United Nations agency, is preparing its latest report on nuclear inspections in Iran, which Dr. ElBaradei said would detail more failures by Tehran to report required information to the United Nations.
----
Iran Says Will Finally Suspend Uranium Enrichment
November 9, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iran-nuclear.html
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran, suspected by Washington of covertly working on an atomic bomb, said on Sunday it would suspend its disputed uranium enrichment program in the coming days, a promise first made last month but yet to be fulfilled.
``Iran will announce and consequently suspend its uranium enrichment in the coming days,'' Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said at a weekly news conference.
Tehran pledged on Saturday to give the U.N. nuclear watchdog letters next week making official its acceptance of tougher nuclear inspections and a suspension of its uranium enrichment program, but said nothing about the timing of the suspension.
Diplomats in Vienna, where the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is located, have told Reuters they were losing patience with Iran for stalling the suspension of uranium enrichment activities, which Washington believes are at the heart of a secret atomic weapons program.
Last year, President Bush branded Iran part of an ``axis of evil'' with North Korea and pre-war Iraq. Iran denies it wants an atom bomb and says its nuclear ambitions are peaceful.
On October 21, Iranian officials told the foreign ministers of Germany, France and Britain that Tehran would not only sign the Additional Protocol permitting tougher U.N. inspections, but would temporarily stop enriching uranium to build confidence.
The IAEA board of governors had requested this suspension twice, first in June and again in a 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 usable as nuclear fuel or in weapons.
Although it was assumed that the suspension would take place immediately, it did not. It turned out there was disagreement on what the suspension should entail.
The French, Germans and British wanted all enrichment operations halted, whereas Iran wanted only to halt its enrichment centrifuges and continue research work.
But on Saturday IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei told reporters Iran had agreed to a ``suspension of all enrichment-related activities,'' which clearly implies more than simply shutting down enrichment centrifuges, but includes related research and development work.
IRAN TO BAR IAEA FROM INSPECTING SOME SITES
Separately, Hassan Rohani, head of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, spoke to Iran's state television in Vienna and said Tehran would give the IAEA a letter this week confirming its intention to sign the Additional Protocol.
This addendum to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which Tehran signed in 1970, would give IAEA inspectors the right to conduct more intrusive, short-notice inspections of declared and undeclared nuclear sites.
The protocol was created after the 1991 discovery of Iraq's secret atomic weapons program. The IAEA experts realized at the time that in order to track down secret weapons activities, they must visit facilities not listed as official nuclear sites.
However, Rohani made it clear that Iran's acceptance was not unconditional and that the IAEA would not have access to facilities it says are not related to its nuclear industry.
``In this letter, it will also be stressed that the agency has no right to inspect places which are not related to Iran's nuclear activities,'' Rohani said.
A Western diplomat told Reuters in Vienna this went against the IAEA board's request that Iran ``immediately and unconditionally'' sign the protocol. He added that Rohani's statement raised questions about whether Iran really intends to open its nuclear program or not.
-------- korea
CIA: North Korea Verifies Nuclear Designs
By JOHN J. LUMPKIN
Associated Press Writer
Nov 9, 2003
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_NKOREA_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
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.
----
US warns North Korea off power plant threat
Washington cautions Pyongyang not to seize consortium assets
Pakistan Daily Times - AP
Sunday, November 09, 2003
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_8-11-2003_pg4_1
WASHINGTON: The United States warned North Korea on Thursday not to seize the assets of an international consortium if it suspends a plan to build a nuclear power plant on its soil.
A North Korean foreign ministry spokesman earlier said the consortium, led by the United States, European Union, South Korea and Japan, could be prevented from taking equipment, documents and other items out of the Stalinist state.
"North Korea is obligated to allow the safe removal of equipment from the site," said State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli.
"KEDO has reminded North Korea of its obligations in this regard, and we expect it to comply." The Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO) was set up to build the plant under a now-ruptured 1994 anti-nuclear pact between Washington and Pyongyang.
But the multi-billion dollar project looks set to be halted as a nuclear showdown rages with the Stalinist state. After a two-day meeting in New York, the consortium said Tuesday it would announce a decision on the fate of the project by November 21.
The United States had demanded at least a suspension of the project, despite reservations from South Korea that such a move could enrage North Korea and dent prospects for new talks on the North's attempts to build nuclear weapons. The project was mandated under the 1994 US-North Korea Agreed Framework, which Washington considers was broken by Pyongyang's renewed attempts to develop weapons.
Under the deal North Korea froze a plutonium processing facility in return for regular fuel oil shipments from the United States. South Korea and Japan were to pay for the bulk of the reactor construction. The US government cut the fuel shipments to North Korea late last year and has withheld funds for the consortium.
The project to build two 1,000-megawatt light-water nuclear reactors was originally scheduled for completion this year. But experts say there it could not be finished before 2008 or 2009. -AFP
North Korea using reactor issue as leverage for future
SEOUL: North Korea's threat to seize equipment and technical data from two nuclear power plants being built there is aimed at gaining leverage in future six-nation talks on its nuclear weapons development, a South Korean minister said Friday. "I don't think this will affect the six-nation talks," South Korea's Unification Minister Jeong Se-hyun said at a press briefing. "I think it is part of developing a negotiating card for future six-nation talks." On Thursday, North Korea said it will block the United States and its allies from removing equipment and technical data from the two nuclear power plants. It also demanded full compensation for the project. The communist state made its announcement days after a US-led group tentatively agreed to suspend the US$4.6 billion project in retaliation for the North's atomic weapons programs.
-----
North Korea's Bomb: Untested but Ready, C.I.A. Concludes
November 9, 2003
By DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/09/international/09KORE.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Nov. 8 - The Central Intelligence Agency has told Congress that it now believes that North Korea has mastered the technology of turning its nuclear fuel into functioning weapons, without having to prove their effectiveness through nuclear tests.
The C.I.A. report goes beyond previous public statements suggesting that North Korea probably built one or two weapons - and perhaps several more in recent months - but left open the question of whether the country had the technology to detonate them.
The C.I.A.'s notification to Congress, sent in mid-August, reports that while North Korea could conduct such a test, it was probably avoiding one to avoid "precipitating an international backlash and further isolation." But for the first time, the agency has publicly stated that the North's technology is advanced enough that a public test - like those conducted in the Soviet Union in the 1950's, in China in the mid-1960's and in India and Pakistan in the 1990's - is unnecessary.
The agency's new assessment came in a series of written, unclassified responses to questions posed by members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
The conclusion, if accurate, would give credence to recent statements by North Korean officials that they already possessed a working "nuclear deterrent," and to their assertion that it was too late for the Bush administration to stop it from becoming a full-fledged nuclear power.
The C.I.A.'s judgment complicates the diplomatic task facing Mr. Bush as the United States moves toward another round of six-nation talks with the North, probably occurring next month. President Bush has said that the United States is prepared to offer, with other nations, some form of security guarantees to North Korea in return for its agreement to disarm.
American intelligence officials admit that they do not know exactly how much weapons-grade fuel North Korea has produced this year, in the period since it expelled international inspectors.
One senior official said on Saturday that the significance of the C.I.A.'s conclusion is that "we may never know for sure how many weapons they manufactured and then hid away in some tunnel." Even if North Korea agrees to give up both its production facilities and the weapons it has already produced, a step many Korea experts in the administration believe is unlikely, "How would we ever know that we've gotten all of it?" the official asked.
The statement in the C.I.A. reply to questions posed by senators, which is based on material that has not been released, was submitted on Aug. 18, and now made public. It is written in the arcane language of nuclear intelligence.
"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 report to the committee said. It noted news reports that the North had conducted "high-explosive tests since the 1980's in order to validate its nuclear weapons design(s)."
Those tests, it suggested, made it unnecessary to stage a full nuclear explosion to be confident that the designs would work.
The full document, and another assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency, were posted on the web site of the Federation of American Scientists (www.fas.org), an independent group that analyzes arms control and other issues. The D.I.A. report also concludes that Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, appears to have a "secure" hold on power.
It concludes that the chances for the re-unification of the Korean Peninsula, divided since the Korean War ended a half century ago, are "low" in the next five years, and that if Mr. Kim were displaced, he would likely be replaced by a military official.
The conclusions give little cause for optimism among those in the Bush administration who hope - as the Clinton administration did - that the government would collapse because of North Korea's deep economic troubles.
On July 1, a month and a half before the report to the Senate, the New York Times reported that American satellites had been studying an advanced nuclear testing site in an area called Youngdoktong, and that the C.I.A. had told allies that they believed the North was working on designs there that would produce a compact nuclear warhead that could fit onto a missile.
Since then, a number of officials have said they believe there is a weapons laboratory adjacent to that facility; it may be there that much of the work the C.I.A. described has been conducted.
The unclassified version of the statements sent to the Senate make no reference to the size of the nuclear weapons that the North can now produce, or weather they could be fitted onto the country's missiles, including those that can reach Japan and beyond. Nor does it disclose what nations may have helped the North.
Decades ago, the country received early aid on its nuclear program from China, which is now working with the Bush administration to prevent North Korea from going nuclear. Several years ago it reached a deal with Pakistan that swapped North Korean missile technology for Pakistani nuclear aid; many experts believe it was the Pakistani connection that allowed North Korea to make the final leap.
Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, has denied his country is currently helping North Korea, but he has been vague when asked about any past assistance. He repeated those denials last week.
Pakistan's aid was chiefly related to a second, secret nuclear project in North Korea, involving the production of highly enriched uranium, that intelligence agencies concluded probably has not yet produced a weapon. It was the discovery of that project that touched off the latest nuclear crisis with North Korea, beginning a year ago.
It is unclear if Pakistan or other nations have given recent help to the older North Korean project, which involves producing weapons from the plutonium extracted from spent nuclear fuel.
Pakistan and India each conducted nuclear tests in 1998, and the United States responded by imposing sanctions on both. It removed them later, in Pakistan's case after it offered help after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The documents submitted to the Senate also suggest how difficult it is to gather reliable intelligence about North Korea. In the section about Mr. Kim's hold on power, the Defense Intelligence Agency says, "We lack reliable insights into the internal dynamics of his regime and note there are no obvious successors if he should be deposed."
"We have low confidence in our assessments of prospects for instability" of the North's political structure, the report adds. "We are more confident in our assessments of the North's military capabilities."
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- colorado
Landmark at Rocky Flats falls
By Annette Espinoza
Denver Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 09, 2003
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~53~1754533,00.html
A water tower that could be seen as far away as Denver International Airport was toppled Saturday at Rocky Flats.
The 155-foot water tower was a landmark for many people who worked at or drove past the 6,000- acre former nuclear weapons complex 15 miles northwest of Denver.
"It is a symbol for the site," said Bill Badger, a spokesman for Kaiser-Hill Co.
The company has a $7.2 billion contract to remove all buildings, concrete pads, roads and other infrastructure. So far, it has removed 315 structures out of 805. Next year, the company plans to clear at least four structures per week, Badger said.
By December 2006, the cleanup is expected to be completed. The site will then be managed as the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge.
"We're ahead of schedule and under budget," said Frazer Lockhart, senior site manager with the U.S. Department of Energy.
Rocky Flats produced more than 70,000 "pits," or plutonium triggers, for the nation's nuclear warheads during the Cold War. In 1989, Rocky Flats was ordered closed.
On Saturday, the water tower - along with the last guard tower that stood 45 feet tall and had bulletproof glass and slots for M-16 rifles, and a ventilating stack for Building 881 - were all destroyed.
The white water tower was the highest structure on-site and had six legs supporting it. A security camera sat on top. The tower once held 300,000 gallons of water taken from Ralston and Gross reservoirs.
The tower was built in 1952, the year Rocky Flats opened, and was operating by 1953, Kaiser-Hill officials said.
As several deer roamed a safe distance away, workers from Controlled Demolition Inc. carefully prepared to topple the tower by using approximately 20 pounds of C4, a plastic explosive, Department of Energy officials said.
Then, the countdown began.
Onlookers included Kaiser-Hill Co. workers and officials with the Energy Department.
"It's an important step in the cleanup," Lockhart said of the demolition.
There was a loud boom as the explosive detonated, then the tower fell with a thud. Black smoke rose after the impact.
"I thought it was going to bounce," said Nancy Tuor, a Kaiser-Hill operating officer.
The water tower will be cut up and sent to a recycling center, Badger said.
-------- kansas
[Horrible thought. et]
Nuclear hiring power: Able grads in demand
Job market glowing for K-State students who work the reactor
November 9, 2003
By Matt Moline
The Capital-Journal
http://www.cjonline.com/stories/110903/kan_nuclear.shtml
MANHATTAN -- For more than four decades, Kansas State University's nuclear reactor has generated a succession of valuable scientific research projects -- from neutron radiography to food irradiation experiments.
But in the last two years, the facility has become known on campus for another kind of generation -- job generation for graduates of KSU's department of mechanical and nuclear engineering.
According to reactor manager Mike Whaley, the national demand for nuclear engineers could easily double in the next 10 years -- up from the 500 job openings that will be available to new engineering graduates nationally this spring.
"If there's any way you can get that word out, we really would like to catch the high school students out there," Whaley said. "Besides, nuclear engineering is not too complicated, it pays well and it's kind of fun."
Five years ago, the nuclear engineering program at KSU appeared destined for the scrap heap, based on alarming student enrollment declines, Whaley said.
Undergraduate enrollment in the nuclear program had dropped from a pre-1980s peak of 60 students to fewer than 15 in 1997. Currently, about 40 students are majoring in the department's nuclear studies option, while 300 are enrolled in the more traditional mechanical engineering curriculum.
Whaley attributes much of the impetus for the sudden nuclear studies turnaround to the Bush administration's push for more atomic power plants in the United States as a way of staving off electrical power shortages in upcoming decades.
Whaley whets the appetites of prospective students by pointing out that starting salaries for new nuclear engineers with bachelor's degrees are likely to top out at about $45,000 next spring.
"Most people think if you're a nuclear engineer, you're making bombs or making electricity," he said. "But with the nuclear option here you get to choose what you want to do in fields like medical therapy and imaging. Frankly, it's a parent's dream."
KSU nuclear engineering junior Clell Solomon, of Wichita, decided to enter the nuclear engineering program after taking a tour of the campus reactor as a high school student.
"I was visiting the campus and when I saw the reactor, it was like, 'This is where I'm going to school,'" Solomon said.
Although Solomon won't graduate until spring 2005, he has already earned a license as an operator of the K-State reactor, a TRIGA Mark II model that went online in October 1962.
"It's just neat to conceptualize what you're really doing," Solomon said. "You're controlling all these subatomic reactions that you can't even see, and to have all that power, it's just really amazing."
The K-State reactor normally operates at about 10 watts of power -- about the equivalent of a home refrigerator light bulb. However, short bursts of power inside the underwater core can go as high as 250 kilowatts, resulting in a dazzling blue glow to observers, Solomon said.
The facility provides for a wide range of research activities, including irradiation tests to destroy insect pests and bacteria in food and grain products.
The reactor also is set up for the production of radioactive isotopes, which have provided medical breakthroughs in the treatment and early detection of cancer in humans.
The reactor's neutron radiography capabilities have been used to test images of corrosion or small cracks inside metal structures, such as jet engine turbines, water movement through concrete and insect tunnels in soil.
Matt Moline is a free-lance writer in Manhattan. He can be reached at moline@networksplus.net.
"Operating a nuclear reactor is a lot like driving a car. The first time you take the wheel, you're really afraid you might make a mistake. And there's definitely a learning curve associated with it. The more you do it, the better you get -- just like with a car. Is operating a reactor easier than playing video games? A lot easier."
-- Kansas State University nuclear engineering student Clell Solomon, of Wichita
-------- new york
RADIOACTIVE LEGACY
Report on N-sites may boost workers' claims
By PATRICK LAKAMP and LOU MICHEL
Buffalo News Staff Reporters
11/9/2003 e-mail: plakamp@buffnews.com and lmichel@buffnews.com
http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20031109/1037421.asp
A new federal report could strengthen compensation claims by former industrial workers, like Joseph D. Dudek of Cambria, who worked in contaminated Western New York factories after atomic weapons activities ceased in the 1940s and '50s.
But they still do not expect to collect.
"I doubt if I'll see a settlement," said Dudek, who traces his colon cancer to his 20-plus years at Simonds Saw & Steel in Lockport. "The way they're dragging their feet, who knows how long it will still take? I'm 76, you know."
Dudek is among those who have been denied benefits under a federal program to compensate cancer-stricken atomic workers or their survivors. The program pays $150,000 only to those who worked during a company's tenure as a nuclear contractor.
He worked at the steel production facility from July 1961 until March 1983 - starting at the company five years after its atomic work ended.
Now, a report from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health says cancer-causing radiation could have remained at the site and at least seven others in the region for many years after weapons work stopped.
"I used to work all around the mills where they rolled rods of radioactive material," Dudek said. "The trouble is, they never told anyone what they had done or that the areas were still dangerous. I worked right next to where the rods had been produced."
But when Dudek sought compensation, he was denied.
"They never gave me nothing," he said. "They said I wasn't in the time period. That's why I wasn't eligible."
Judith Anne Cinelli, whose late husband, Frank, had worked at the Linde Ceramics plant in the Town of Tonawanda, was also denied benefits.
Her husband died of lung cancer in 1998 at the age of 60. His father, also a former Linde worker, also died of cancer.
She said her husband's extended exposure to the radioactive particles between 1960 and 1971 - a decade after Linde's nuclear work ended - caused his cancer.
"There was a lot of dust in the plant that was never cleaned," she said.
Rep. Louise M. Slaughter, the Fairport Democrat whose district includes many of the Western New York sites, is sponsoring a bill that would extend compensation to those who worked in the facilities after the nuclear work ended.
What can former workers expect to see?
Ralph Krieger, a former president of Local 8-215 of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union who worked at the Linde plant for 33 years, called the report "a major step forward."
"However, is it answering all the questions needed to get this program in line? It's not so far," Krieger said.
The report said workers at the Linde plant in the Town of Tonawanda could have been exposed to cancer-causing radiation anytime between 1940 and 1997. Previously, the government had said the site had been dangerous only from 1940 to 1950, while weapons work was done there, and during a 1996-97 cleanup.
Workers at Ashland Oil in the Town of Tonawanda could have been exposed to radiation anytime between 1944 and 1998, while workers at Bliss & Laughlin Steel, Buffalo, could have faced a potential danger anytime between 1948 and 1998.
Workers also could have been hurt by long-lasting radiation at four other local plants: Bethlehem Steel in Lackawanna, Seaway Industrial Park in the Town of Tonawanda, Titanium Alloys Manufacturing in Niagara Falls and the West Valley Demonstration Project in Cattaraugus County. The report offered no specifics on how long those locations might have remained contaminated.
Investigations could not find enough information to determine any long-lasting radiation exposure at two other Niagara Falls sites: Carborundum Co. and Hooker Electrochemical.
The report said Linde Air Products and Utica Street Warehouse sites in Buffalo, and the Electro Metallurgical site in Niagara Falls posed no long-term risks.
Robert Simmons, 69, of Lockport, a former Simonds Steel worker, said he hasn't bothered to apply for compensation.
He started work just as Simonds' nuclear work was ending.
"I don't believe I'll ever see a dime," Simmons said. "If I had an idea it might be worth the trouble, I might do it. All they do is give you the runaround, so I didn't even bother."
He took a medical retirement in 1980 and now spends between $300 and $400 a month for eight prescriptions. He has a heart problem and sometimes has difficulty breathing.
He wonders how he could prove exposure to radiation caused his medical problems.
"I don't know why it wouldn't explain it," he said. "I worked there for 25 years.
"You're not going to get nothing," he said. "And I'm not going to spend what little money I have to hire a lawyer and sue the federal government. Ever sue the federal government?"
Krieger said he has encouraged workers to seek compensation, no matter how skeptical they might be.
"Hang in there," he said. "We are working on it. We have to persevere. Not all issues are won in an instant. This is a very complex issue."
Though Dudek's cancer is in remission, he has related health difficulties.
"It's mostly bowel problems, but the doctors said I'd have to live with that the rest of my life. There's nothing they can do," Dudek said. "I get diarrhea so bad there are times I can't go anywhere. You never know when it is going to happen."
Dudek accused the government and company of failing to act responsibly by not letting workers know they were being exposed to radiation.
"Somebody should have said something. Those particles spread all throughout the plant," Dudek said. "I worked with guys who earlier had produced them rods. They'd have to dress in protective clothing and change every day."
Cinelli said contamination has exacted an awful toll.
"My husband's father, Nicholas, had worked at Linde. He actually worked on the Manhattan Project and died at the age of 54 from cancer. He weighed 60 pounds when he died," she said.
"Frank's brother Joe also worked at Linde and has had lung, prostate and lymphoma cancer. He's still alive, but not doing real well. It has been an ongoing battle for over 10 years for him," Cinelli said.
-------- utah
Allegations laid out against Envirocare
Whistle-blowers say safety and environmental violations occurred at Envirocare's facility in Tooele County. (Steve Griffin/The Salt Lake Tribune file photo)
By Judy Fahys - fahys@sltrib.com
SUNDAY November 09, 2003
The Salt Lake Tribune
http://www.sltrib.com/2003/Nov/11092003/utah/109472.asp
Three whistle-blowers secretly told the federal government last year about alleged health, safety and environmental lapses at their job site, Envirocare of Utah.
The workers described dozens of possibly illegal activities at the Tooele County landfill, such as when supervisors directed them to use sand instead of clay to contain the landfill's radioactive and hazardous waste and to bulldoze contaminated waste over a torn liner -- alleged violations of the company's duties under government laws and contracts.
Utah U.S. District Judge Bruce Jenkins recently unsealed the suit after lawyers for the federal government declined to intervene.
Envirocare, which denies the accusations, says the federal government backed out because the former workers have no case against the "highly regulated" and continually inspected company.
But the U.S. Attorney's Office in Salt Lake City won't explain its decision. Said spokeswoman Melodie Rydalch: "We never really talk about declinations."
Many questions remain about the lawsuit, filed under the Civil War-era federal whistle-blower law called the "False Claims Act." Advertisement
What's clear is that the work logs of Roger Lemmon are at the case's heart.
Lemmon, who was fired by Envirocare for what the company claims were safety violations, died unexpectedly a few weeks after the lawsuit was filed under seal more than a year ago. The two other accusers, Kyle Gunderson and Patrick Cole, employees of the Envirocare heavy equipment subcontractor Broken Arrow, have left the state.
Their attorneys, a legal team headed by Jim Jardine, would not disclose plans for the case.
"It would be premature to say anything but no comment," said Jeffrey Appel, one of the whistle-blowers' attorneys.
No response: The Salt Lake Tribune contacted the three federal agencies whose interests are being fought for in the case -- the U.S. Defense Department, the Energy Department and the Environmental Protection Agency -- but they did not respond.
The agencies have spent tens of millions of dollars to permanently dispose of environmental cleanup waste at Envirocare, the nation's only privately owned and operated landfill for hazardous and low-level radioactive waste.
That the agencies have so little to say about the allegations is no surprise to Michael Kohn, general counsel for the Washington, D.C.-based National Whistleblower Center. He has handled false-claims cases for workers employed at nuclear reactors and by Energy Department contractors. "If the government will be perceived as not doing its job," he said, "they have an interest in not seeing the case go forward."
Alleged violations: Notes taken in the five months before Lemmon was fired Oct. 31, 2000, show he had logged 66 incidents in which Envirocare allegedly failed to meet various terms of its federal contracts, sometimes at the explicit direction of supervisors. He and the other whistle-blowers told federal attorneys about alleged violations including:
- Seven times when sand was used instead of clay for what regulations require to be a protective cap intended to resist water and wind for at least 200 years. On Sept. 20, 2000, Lemmon noted that he had met with four managers who instructed him to "try not to go too deep on sand" when covering layers of waste that required impermeable clay.
- Eight instances when there were spills of contaminated material that supervisors chose to ignore, rather than clean up, as required. On Aug. 29, 2000, a truck spilled polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) but crews just sprinkled sand on it rather than scooping it up and properly disposing of it. A week earlier, supervisors did nothing to deal with 20 gallons of leachate that had spilled outside a protective berm, according to the whistle-blower complaint.
- Six times when waste shipments lacked required paperwork identifying the contents and providing handling instructions but they were disposed of anyhow.
- Four times when worker safety protections failed. One time, the exposure to contamination was so severe, a worker was removed from the area, the complaint says.
- Sixteen occasions when landfill layers were laid down improperly. Lemmon described several instances where large debris was strategically buried in dirt-only cells so inspectors would not notice the permit had been violated, according to the complaint.
- Five instances when contaminated waste was left uncovered for more than half a day and exposed to desert rain and wind.
Under government contracts, lapses such as these must be reported even if no one is immediately hurt. After reporting, the company still may be subject to fines and other penalties.
Although they may look like red tape, such violations have more practical implications: They alert regulators to possible problems with the protections they have engineered into their contracts to ensure the disposal site's long-term integrity and, ultimately, the safety of the environment.
Dane Finerfrock, now director of the Utah Division of Radiation Control, said his agency had to keep quiet during the time the federal government's lawyers were looking at the case. Although the whistle-blowers indicated many state environmental standards were violated, despite what the state calls a comprehensive inspection program, Utah regulators still have no plans to attempt to confirm the allegations.
Craig Thorley, general counsel for Envirocare, said his company is "heavily regulated" and that regulators are on site "all of the time."
"We don't think there is any merit to this complaint," he said. "We think that is why the government didn't join in, and, if it goes forward, we will vigorously contest it."
Lemmon's widow, Jolene Maynes, is equally resolved about her husband's motives.
"Roger was a stickler for the rules," she said, "and a lot of people didn't like him for sticking to them."
It was the federal government's rules that Lemmon had in mind when he first took his case, with the help of his lawyers, to the U.S. attorney. Like false-claims accusers everywhere, he and the other Envirocare whistle-blowers filed their lawsuit on behalf of the federal government.
They used a law enacted during President Lincoln's administration, when suppliers were defrauding the Union by selling crates filled with sawdust instead of muskets and billing two or three times for the same horses, according to the Taxpayers Against Fraud Web page. Since President Reagan updated the law in 1986, the 3,954 whistle-blower cases brought under the False Claims Act have recovered $6.4 billion for the government, the page says.
Citizens who succeed in a false-claims case can expect 15 percent -- and in some cases 30 percent -- of the sums recovered through their civil suit.
In the Envirocare case, the whistle-blowers provided inside information about a government contractor that was allegedly failing to properly fulfill federal contracts to dispose of radioactive and hazardous waste from cleanup sites.
As part of those long-term, multimillion-dollar deals, a contractor is obliged to comply with the laws governing its licenses and permits, as well as any other requirements specified in the contract.
The contract terms help ensure the government is spending taxpayer money on safe disposal that will stay intact for at least 1,000 years, the span considered the minimum needed to ensure the health and safety of people and the environment. Envirocare is licensed to handle a large variety of short- and long-lived radioactive material, including uranium and small amounts of plutonium.
It is up to the state and federal government to make sure that contractors such as Envirocare meet those obligations.
And the company boasts that regulators have not found much to complain about.
"Our compliance with health and safety is the biggest thing we do," said company owner Khosrow Semnani in a recent meeting with The Tribune. "And we take pride in it."
In a letter to The Tribune the following week, he called his company "a state of the art facility, which state and federal audit reports and regulatory reviews show is safe and compliant."
Envirocare has a lot staked on a clean safety record because the federal government accounts for roughly 80 percent of its business -- a lot of money for a private company that took in about $140 million last year.
Located on a rail spur about 80 miles west of Salt Lake City, the company has taken steps to expand its state and federal licenses so that it can accept more kinds of waste with greater levels of radioactive hazard, including waste from an Energy Department Superfund cleanup site in Ohio.
Good oversight reports also are important for the federal agencies sending waste to Envirocare. They face ceaseless pressure from communities and Congress to swiftly dispose of the millions of tons of contaminated waste that remains at the nation's many environmental cleanup sites. Envirocare is the sole, nongovernment solution available for most of them, a solution typically cheaper than government-owned disposal sites.
Given the importance of good marks from the government, it is no surprise that Envirocare issued a news release in the fall 2000 to tout the results of a recent inspection, a review conducted around the time the whistle-blowers were taking notes on the regulatory lapses they were allegedly seeing.
Lemmon was overseeing some government-disposal operations at Envirocare for about a year when he was injured in a fall from a truck that unexpectedly jolted forward while he was unloading pallets on a winter night.
Maynes described her late husband as "a hard worker," strong and "a very straightforward, honest person." Lemmon died in August 2002 at age 45 and Maynes is raising their three young boys on her own.
"He definitely wasn't a quitter," she said. "He tried to make the best of things."
-------- us politics
'No President has lied so baldly and so often and so demonstrably'
By Andrew Gumbel
09 November 2003
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=461946
"The intelligence process is a bit like virginity," says Ray McGovern, who worked as a CIA analyst for 27 years. "Once you prostitute it, it's never the same. Your credibility never recovers.
"Watching what has happened with Iraq over the past several months has been like watching your daughter being raped."
Such is an indication of the extraordinary depth of feeling within the US intelligence community as the Bush administration's basis for the war in Iraq - the weapons of mass destruction, the dark hint of links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'ida - has been shown to have been built on air.
Mr McGovern worked near the very top of his profession, giving direct advice to Henry Kissinger during the Nixon era and preparing the President's daily security brief for Ronald Reagan. Now he is co-founder of a group of former CIA employees called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or Vips for short.
What the Bush White House has done, he believes, is far worse than the false premise that dragged the United States into the Vietnam War - a reported second attack on a US destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin which later turned out not to have taken place. "The Gulf of Tonkin was a spur-of-the-moment thing, and Lyndon Johnson seized on that. That's very different from the very calculated, 18-month, orchestrated, incredibly cynical campaign of lies that we've seen to justify a war. This is an order of magnitude different. It's so blatant."
Mr McGovern accuses Mr Bush of an extraordinary act of chutzpah - taking advantage of his authority as President of the United States to make people believe there must be something to his insistent allegations that Iraq possessed potentially devastating weaponry.
"Many of us felt there had to be something there ... If this had been another country, one would have written a convincing analysis that this guy is lying through his teeth, that there are no weapons in Iraq. But people thought, the President can't say he knows something if he doesn't. That was persuasive, in a way.
"Now we know that no other President of the United States has ever lied so baldly and so often and so demonstrably ... The presumption now has to be that he's lying any time that he's saying anything."
It will, Mr McGovern believes, take a change of president and a change of CIA director to even begin to repair the damage done by what he sees as an overt politicisation of the intelligence business. But even that may not be enough.
"Unless what has happened in the past year and a half is recognised as a scandal, in which the CIA has been badly abused, then there's no hope," he said. "I pin my hopes mostly on the press these days. Turns out, surprise surprise, that even the US press doesn't like to be lied to."
----
9/11 panel subpoenas NORAD, not CIA
By Shaun Waterman
November 09, 2003
UPI Homeland and National Security Editor
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20031107-070415-2790r.htm
WASHINGTON, Nov. 7 (UPI) -- The commission set up to investigate the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has voted to issue a subpoena to the North American Aerospace Defense Command, but rejected a proposal to subpoena the daily intelligence briefings that the president receives from the CIA.
"Unfortunately NORAD has not complied with our long-standing document requests," said Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste.
He said that after a series of field inquiries and interviews with NORAD personnel, commission staff had realized, "quite recently" that "the materials (NORAD) had previously provided were incomplete."
"Our staff will have to backtrack, re-interview people and duplicate effort," said Ben-Veniste. He said the failure would cause "significant delays" to the commission's work, and might mean the postponement of a hearing planned for January.
That hearing, like an earlier one in June, dealt with the immediate response of federal agencies and the military to the news on Sept. 11, 2001 that several aircraft had been hijacked and one of them flown into the World Trade Center.
Last month the commission issued a subpoena to the Federal Aviation Administration for material covering their response. Commission spokesman Al Felzenberg said the subpoena to NORAD -- the military entity responsible for the defense of the nation's skies -- covered similar issues.
At stake is the vexed question of whether a swifter response might have made it possible to shoot down the other hijacked planes that were subsequently crashed into the WTC and the Pentagon.
A NORAD spokesman, Lt. Col. Roberto Garza said they had given the commission all relevant documents. He said that 20 tapes of conversations involving NORAD personnel had been given to the commission, and the only material that was not handed over were another 28 tapes that were either blank or duplicates of the ones that had been handed over.
"We were surprised (by the subpoena)," he said. "We support the commission, we want to help them."
Commissioner Tim Roemer, a former Democratic congressman, told United Press International that the commission had also voted down a proposal to issue a subpoena to the CIA to obtain the so-called Presidential Daily Briefings, or PDBs, that the agency produces.
Roemer would not give further details of the vote.
The commission's mandate gives the chairman, former GOP New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean, and his deputy, former Indiana Democratic congressman Lee H. Hamilton, the right to issue subpoenas after consulting other commissioners, but without a vote.
The PDBs, which are distributed early every morning to the president and a handful of top aides, summarize the most important threats to the nation. They are considered among the most secret and sensitive national security documents of all.
Roemer said that the commission had asked for PDBs and other presidential documents going back several years. He said they were essential if the commission was to complete its task of finding out what went wrong.
"We need to know what advice and warnings presidents Bush and Clinton might have received about al-Qaida," he said, "and what advice and warnings the intelligence community was issuing."
Media reports earlier this year suggested that an August 2001 PDB had warned about al-Qaida's plans to hijack U.S. jetliners.
Kristen Breitweiser, who lost her husband Ron in the attacks and who campaigned tirelessly alongside other victims' relatives for the commission to be established, said she was disappointed.
"These documents show the flow of information within the government, the chain from the bottom to the top," she said. "Something went wrong, the nation was unaware and undefended that day. If we want to find out what went wrong, we have to examine every link in the chain to find out where the break was."
Roemer said that the commission requested the documents on July 3. He said that there had been several weeks of negotiations with the White House about access to them. He said that so far, the commission was dissatisfied with the White House's posture.
"The offer that was on the table yesterday was too restrictive and threatened our independence," said Roemer, "It begs the question, 'what are they trying to hide?'"
"We don't want a repeat of the Warren Commission," he said, referring to the widely derided investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. "There must be no question marks, no asterisks, no stains on our report.
"The only way to ensure that is if the commission, not the White House or anyone else, decides who gets to see the documents we need."
Commission members and staff said the matter would remain a priority until it was resolved.
"The independence of the commission and its credibility in the eyes of the American people is essential. Personally, I am hopeful that a compromise can be reached which preserves that," said Ben-Veniste.
Neither Ben-Veniste nor Roemer would discuss details of the negotiations, or say what the White House offer was. But Ben-Veniste laid out what he said was a compromise.
"I have proposed that a subcommittee be established to review these ultra-sensitive materials. That's the minimum that would be acceptable to me personally."
"It's not a perfect arrangement," he went on, "it's a compromise, but we need to move forward given the urgency of our timetable."
The commission must report before a legislatively mandated deadline of May 27, 2004.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan told UPI that the administration was working with the commission, and had offered them "unprecedented cooperation."
"There are a number of ways we can provide the information the commission needs," he said, but he declined to give further details.
The New York Times reported Friday that the White House had offered to let the commission chairman and his deputy see the documents.
"Their offer was more restricted than that," said a commission source, asking not to be identified.
When asked about the reasons for the delay in handing over documents, McClellan said, "We don't want to do anything that might jeopardize national security or harm the war on terror."
Roemer responded by pointing out that the commission's requests related to the period before Sept. 11, when the war on terror had not yet begun, and that all commission members had security clearances high enough to see the documents.
Felzenberg said that there were some continuing problems with the rest of the Pentagon's response to document requests, but these were of a different order.
"They're practical questions," he told UPI, "connected with the physical transfer of this material. It's just a matter of getting things from here to there. We expect these to be solved very soon."
In a statement Friday evening, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone, who is coordinating the department of defense's response to the commission, said, "If there are any indications that a scheduled document delivery might not be met, the secretary (of defense, Donald Rumsfeld) expects that relevant department officials will inform me or him of that fact, and advise as to whatever resources may be needed to meet the schedule."
----
When Resolve Against Bush Melts
Hill Usually Defers to Commander in Chief on Military Issues
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 9, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16914-2003Nov8.html
In a seeming display of political independence, the Republican-controlled Senate defied President Bush in mid-October and voted to convert $10 billion of his proposed aid package to Iraq into a loan. Two weeks later, senators quietly converted the reconstruction money back into an outright grant, without so much as a roll call vote.
Bush's victory underscored a fundamental dynamic of the Republican-controlled 108th Congress: The president virtually always prevails on military and national security issues, despite the public's deepening skepticism about U.S. policy in Iraq. Lawmakers may defy him on domestic issues directly affecting their constituents -- such as rules limiting overtime pay. But when the president bears down hard, especially on international matters, their defiance almost always melts.
"You get, in effect, the equivalent of a French poodle that occasionally yaps at its master and bares its teeth, but if there's something of consequence to the administration, particularly when it comes to international affairs, it's going to back down," said Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
In recent interviews, several senators said they felt they had no choice but to reverse course and approve the Iraq reconstruction money as a grant, given Bush's insistence that Iraq not be saddled with further debts. Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) said he still believes a loan "was the right way to go," but added: "The power of the veto is pretty substantial, particularly on something that's time-sensitive."
During a White House meeting with senators, the president became visibly angry and pounded the table to make his case, participants said. "In the face of the president's very, very strong position, it seemed to me something Congress should yield on," said Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.).
The turnabout was notable for some senators. Specter earlier had delivered a floor speech criticizing grants to Iraq, which he compared to a bankrupt corporation. "I can't remember when I last did that," he said, referring to his reversal.
Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said negotiations over wartime spending are "different than, say, the negotiations on the drug bill or Medicare. The president has a special role because of being commander in chief."
In recent weeks, Congress has shown a willingness to challenge the administration on some domestic issues, such funding for Amtrak or proposed merger rules for the Federal Communications Commission. But on issues related to war, said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.), it's more a question of "deference."
"We made our best case [for loans instead of grants], and the president challenged us, and we felt he should prevail," Hutchison said.
Some Democrats viewed the back-and-forth on the loan question as a sort of Kabuki dance, in which Republicans could appear sensitive to voters' concerns without defying the president in the end. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said it allowed them to act as though they were doing "what the people wanted back home," only to yield to the White House on an unrecorded voice vote with only a half-dozen senators in the chamber.
"They didn't want a roll call vote for obvious reasons," said Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), who orchestrated the policy reversal in negotiations with the House. "Nobody wanted to vote against it."
----
Senators on Intelligence Panel Clash on Talk Show
November 9, 2003
By BRIAN KNOWLTON,
International Herald Tribune
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/09/politics/09CND-IHTI.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 9 - The Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a senior Democratic member of the panel clashed in unusually sharp and public ways today in a dispute that has interrupted the committee's review of prewar intelligence on Iraq.
The dispute stems from the leak of an internal draft memorandum by a Democratic staff member. The memo suggested that because the committee's inquiry was focusing on the work of intelligence agencies, and not on how the White House used intelligence, Democrats should be ready to disavow the panel's findings and "pull the trigger" to demand an independent investigation.
Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who is the chairman of the committee, said on "Fox News Sunday," "I was stunned by this memo, shocked by this memo."
In a voice shaking with anger, he said that the Democratic memo jeopardized a 30-year history on the committee - one of the most sensitive in Congress - of nonpartisan activity. "What this memo has done," he added, "is really poisoned the well."
Mr. Roberts was particularly vexed, he said, that Democrats had generally failed to renounce the substance of the memo. "I'm very upset about this," he said.
But Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, a senior Democratic member, replied that Republicans were using their outrage over the memo - which he and other Democrats said must have been stolen - to avoid addressing its central point.
The uproar, he said, "should not be allowed to change the subject from the refusal of the Republicans to look at the use of intelligence by the administration - and that's what the issue is."
The Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, has suspended the committee's work - which Mr. Roberts said today was 90 percent complete - until Democrats disavowed the memo, named its author and apologized to Mr. Roberts. The panel, Dr. Frist said, had been "harmed by a blatant partisan attack."
Mr. Roberts said the inquiry would be completed. But he added, "Somebody has to disavow this memo or else it's going to be very difficult to put this committee back together again."
Mr. Levin showed little inclination to do so.
He said that the administration had issued such "exaggerated" statements about the risk it said Iraq had posed to the world that "they took us to war."
If Republicans refused to examine those statements, he said, he would not disavow the option to call for an independent review.
----
Gore Accuses Bush of 'Big Brother' Policy
Nov 9, 2003
By JENNIFER C. KERR
(AP)
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20031109/D7UNC2200.html
WASHINGTON (AP) - Former Vice President Al Gore accused President Bush on Sunday of failing to make the country safer after the Sept. 11 attacks and using the war against terrorism as a pretext to consolidate power.
"They have taken us much farther down the road toward an intrusive, 'big brother'-style government - toward the dangers prophesied by George Orwell in his book '1984' - than anyone ever thought would be possible in the United States of America," Gore charged.
Gore, who lost the disputed 2000 presidential election to Bush, said terrorism-fighting tools granted after Sept. 11 amount to a partisan power grab that have led to the erosion of the civil liberties of all Americans.
He brought the crowd to its feet when he called for a repeal of the Patriot Act, which expanded government's surveillance and detention power, allowing authorities to monitor books people read and conduct secret searches.
(AP) Former Vice President Al Gore gestures during a speech on Sunday, Nov. 9, 2003 in Washington. Gore... Full Image Gore chided the administration for what he said was its "implicit assumption" that Americans must give up traditional freedoms in order to be safe from terrorists.
"In my opinion, it makes no more sense to launch an assault on our civil liberties as the best way to get at terrorists than it did to launch an invasion of Iraq as the best way to get at Osama bin Laden," Gore said.
In both cases, Gore said, the administration has "recklessly put our country in grave and unnecessary danger."
He also said the administration still has "no serious strategy" for domestic security - charging that there aren't sufficient protections in place for ports, nuclear facilities, chemical plants and other key infrastructure.
His speech before a crowd of about 3,000 people was sponsored by the liberal activist group Moveon.org, which earlier this year held an online presidential primary in which Howard Dean finished first.
The second sponsor, the American Constitution Society, is a national organization of law students, professors, lawyers and others that says it seek to counter what it characterizes as the dominant, narrow conservative vision of American law today.
----
FREEDOM AND SECURITY
Remarks By Al Gore
November 9, 2003
From: Wes Boyd, MoveOn.org
Thank you, Lisa, for that warm and generous introduction. Thank you Zack, and thank you all for coming here today
I want to thank the American Constitution Society for co-sponsoring today's event, and for their hard work and dedication in defending our most basic public values.
And I am especially grateful to Moveon.org, not only for co-sponsoring this event, but also for using 21st Century techniques to breathe new life into our democracy.
For my part, I'm just a "recovering politician" -- but I truly believe that some of the issues most important to America's future are ones that all of us should be dealing with.
And perhaps the most important of these issues is the one I want to talk about today: the true relationship between Freedom and Security.
So it seems to me that the logical place to start the discussion is with an accounting of exactly what has happened to civil liberties and security since the vicious attacks against America of September 11, 2001 -- and it's important to note at the outset that the Administration and the Congress have brought about many beneficial and needed improvements to make law enforcement and intelligence community efforts more effective against potential terrorists.
But a lot of other changes have taken place that a lot of people don't know about and that come as unwelcome surprises. For example, for the first time in our history, American citizens have been seized by the executive branch of government and put in prison without being charged with a crime, without having the right to a trial, without being able to see a lawyer, and without even being able to contact their families.
President Bush is claiming the unilateral right to do that to any American citizen he believes is an "enemy combatant." Those are the magic words. If the President alone decides that those two words accurately describe someone, then that person can be immediately locked up and held incommunicado for as long as the President wants, with no court having the right to determine whether the facts actually justify his imprisonment.
Now if the President makes a mistake, or is given faulty information by somebody working for him, and locks up the wrong person, then it's almost impossible for that person to prove his innocence -- because he can't talk to a lawyer or his family or anyone else and he doesn't even have the right to know what specific crime he is accused of committing. So a constitutional right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness that we used to think of in an old-fashioned way as "inalienable" can now be instantly stripped from any American by the President with no meaningful review by any other branch of government.
How do we feel about that? Is that OK?
Here's another recent change in our civil liberties: Now, if it wants to, the federal government has the right to monitor every website you go to on the internet, keep a list of everyone you send email to or receive email from and everyone who you call on the telephone or who calls you -- and they don't even have to show probable cause that you've done anything wrong. Nor do they ever have to report to any court on what they're doing with the information. Moreover, there are precious few safeguards to keep them from reading the content of all your email.
Everybody fine with that?
If so, what about this next change?
For America's first 212 years, it used to be that if the police wanted to search your house, they had to be able to convince an independent judge to give them a search warrant and then (with rare exceptions) they had to go bang on your door and yell, "Open up!" Then, if you didn't quickly open up, they could knock the door down. Also, if they seized anything, they had to leave a list explaining what they had taken. That way, if it was all a terrible mistake (as it sometimes is) you could go and get your stuff back.
But that's all changed now. Starting two years ago, federal agents were given broad new statutory authority by the Patriot Act to "sneak and peak" in non-terrorism cases. They can secretly enter your home with no warning -- whether you are there or not -- and they can wait for months before telling you they were there. And it doesn't have to have any relationship to terrorism whatsoever. It applies to any garden-variety crime. And the new law makes it very easy to get around the need for a traditional warrant simply by saying that searching your house might have some connection (even a remote one) to the investigation of some agent of a foreign power. Then they can go to another court, a secret court, that more or less has to give them a warrant whenever they ask.
Three weeks ago, in a speech at FBI Headquarters, President Bush went even further and formally proposed that the Attorney General be allowed to authorize subpoenas by administrative order, without the need for a warrant from any court.
What about the right to consult a lawyer if you're arrested? Is that important?
Attorney General Ashcroft has issued regulations authorizing the secret monitoring of attorney-client conversations on his say-so alone; bypassing procedures for obtaining prior judicial review for such monitoring in the rare instances when it was permitted in the past. Now, whoever is in custody has to assume that the government is always listening to consultations between them and their lawyers.
Does it matter if the government listens in on everything you say to your lawyer? Is that Ok?
Or, to take another change and thanks to the librarians, more people know about this one the FBI now has the right to go into any library and ask for the records of everybody who has used the library and get a list of who is reading what. Similarly, the FBI can demand all the records of banks, colleges, hotels, hospitals, credit-card companies, and many more kinds of companies. And these changes are only the beginning. Just last week, Attorney General Ashcroft issued brand new guidelines permitting FBI agents to run credit checks and background checks and gather other information about anyone who is "of investigatory interest," - meaning anyone the agent thinks is suspicious - without any evidence of criminal behavior.
So, is that fine with everyone?
Listen to the way Israel's highest court dealt with a similar question when, in 1999, it was asked to balance due process rights against dire threats to the security of its people:
"This is the destiny of democracy, as not all means are acceptable to it, and not all practices employed by its enemies are open before it. Although a democracy must often fight with one hand tied behind its back, it nonetheless has the upper hand. Preserving the Rule of Law and recognition of an individual's liberty constitutes an important component in its understanding of security. At the end of the day they (add to) its strength."
I want to challenge the Bush Administration's implicit assumption that we have to give up many of our traditional freedoms in order to be safe from terrorists.
Because it is simply not true.
In fact, in my opinion, it makes no more sense to launch an assault on our civil liberties as the best way to get at terrorists than it did to launch an invasion of Iraq as the best way to get at Osama Bin Laden.
In both cases, the Administration has attacked the wrong target.
In both cases they have recklessly put our country in grave and unnecessary danger, while avoiding and neglecting obvious and much more important challenges that would actually help to protect the country.
In both cases, the administration has fostered false impressions and misled the nation with superficial, emotional and manipulative presentations that are not worthy of American Democracy.
In both cases they have exploited public fears for partisan political gain and postured themselves as bold defenders of our country while actually weakening not strengthening America.
In both cases, they have used unprecedented secrecy and deception in order to avoid accountability to the Congress, the Courts, the press and the people.
Indeed, this Administration has turned the fundamental presumption of our democracy on its head. A government of and for the people is supposed to be generally open to public scrutiny by the people while the private information of the people themselves should be routinely protected from government intrusion.
But instead, this Administration is seeking to conduct its work in secret even as it demands broad unfettered access to personal information about American citizens. Under the rubric of protecting national security, they have obtained new powers to gather information from citizens and to keep it secret. Yet at the same time they themselves refuse to disclose information that is highly relevant to the war against terrorism.
They are even arrogantly refusing to provide information about 9/11 that is in their possession to the 9/11 Commission -- the lawful investigative body charged with examining not only the performance of the Bush Administration, but also the actions of the prior Administration in which I served. The whole point is to learn all we can about preventing future terrorist attacks,
Two days ago, the Commission was forced to issue a subpoena to the Pentagon, which has -- disgracefully -- put Secretary Rumsfeld's desire to avoid embarrassment ahead of the nation's need to learn how we can best avoid future terrorist attacks. The Commission also served notice that it will issue a subpoena to the White House if the President continues to withhold information essential to the investigation.
And the White House is also refusing to respond to repeated bipartisan Congressional requests for information about 9/11 -- even though the Congress is simply exercising its Constitutional oversight authority. In the words of Senator Main, "Excessive administration secrecy on issues related to the September 11 attacks feeds conspiracy theories and reduces the public's confidence in government."
In a revealing move, just three days ago, the White House asked the Republican leadership of the Senate to shut down the Intelligence Committee's investigation of 9/11 based on a trivial political dispute. Apparently the President is anxious to keep the Congress from seeing what are said to have been clear, strong and explicit warnings directly to him a few weeks before 9/11 that terrorists were planning to hijack commercial airliners and use them to attack us.
Astonishingly, the Republican Senate leadership quickly complied with the President's request. Such obedience and complicity in what looks like a cover-up from the majority party in a separate and supposedly co-equal branch of government makes it seem like a very long time ago when a Republican Attorney General and his deputy resigned rather than comply with an order to fire the special prosecutor investigating Richard Nixon.
In an even more brazen move, more than two years after they rounded up over 1,200 individuals of Arab descent, they still refuse to release the names of the individuals they detained, even though virtually every one of those arrested has been "cleared" by the FBI of any connection to terrorism and there is absolutely no national security justification for keeping the names secret. Yet at the same time, White House officials themselves leaked the name of a CIA operative serving the country, in clear violation of the law, in an effort to get at her husband, who had angered them by disclosing that the President had relied on forged evidence in his state of the union address as part of his effort to convince the country that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of building nuclear weapons.
And even as they claim the right to see the private bank records of every American, they are adopting a new policy on the Freedom of Information Act that actively encourages federal agencies to fully consider all potential reasons for non-disclosure regardless of whether the disclosure would be harmful. In other words, the federal government will now actively resist complying with ANY request for information.
Moreover, they have established a new exemption that enables them to refuse the release to the press and the public of important health, safety and environmental information submitted to the government by businesses -- merely by calling it "critical infrastructure."
By closely guarding information about their own behavior, they are dismantling a fundamental element of our system of checks and balances. Because so long as the government's actions are secret, they cannot be held accountable. A government for the people and by the people must be transparent to the people.
The administration is justifying the collection of all this information by saying in effect that it will make us safer to have it. But it is not the kind of information that would have been of much help in preventing 9/11. However, there was in fact a great deal of specific information that WAS available prior to 9/11 that probably could have been used to prevent the tragedy. A recent analysis by the Merkle foundation, (working with data from a software company that received venture capital from a CIA-sponsored firm) demonstrates this point in a startling way:
- In late August 2001, Nawaq Alhamzi and Khalid Al-Midhar bought tickets to fly on American Airlines Flight 77 (which was flown into the Pentagon). They bought the tickets using their real names. Both names were then on a State Department/INS watch list called TIPOFF. Both men were sought by the FBI and CIA as suspected terrorists, in part because they had been observed at a terrorist meeting in Malaysia.
- These two passenger names would have been exact matches when checked against the TIPOFF list. But that would only have been the first step. Further data checks could then have begun.
- Checking for common addresses (address information is widely available, including on the internet), analysts would have discovered that Salem Al-Hazmi (who also bought a seat on American 77) used the same address as Nawaq Alhazmi. More importantly, they could have discovered that Mohamed Atta (American 11, North Tower of the World Trade Center) and Marwan Al-Shehhi (United 175, South Tower of the World Trade Center) used the same address as Khalid Al-Midhar.
- Checking for identical frequent flier numbers, analysts would have discovered that Majed Moqed (American 77) used the same number as Al-Midhar.
- With Mohamed Atta now also identified as a possible associate of the wanted terrorist, Al-Midhar, analysts could have added Atta's phone numbers (also publicly available information) to their checklist. By doing so they would have identified five other hijackers (Fayez Ahmed, Mohand Alshehri, Wail Alsheri, and Abdulaziz Alomari).
- Closer to September 11, a further check of passenger lists against a more innocuous INS watch list (for expired visas) would have identified Ahmed Alghandi. Through him, the same sort of relatively simple correlations could have led to identifying the remaining hijackers, who boarded United 93 (which crashed in Pennsylvania)."
In addition, Al-Midhar and Nawaf Alhamzi, the two who were on the terrorist watch list, rented an apartment in San Diego under their own names and were listed, again under their own names, in the San Diego phone book while the FBI was searching for them.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but what is needed is better and more timely analysis. Simply piling up more raw data that is almost entirely irrelevant is not only not going to help. It may actually hurt the cause. As one FBI agent said privately of Ashcroft: "We're looking for a needle in a haystack here and he (Ashcroft) is just piling on more hay."
In other words, the mass collecting of personal data on hundreds of millions of people actually makes it more difficult to protect the nation against terrorists, so they ought to cut most of it out.
And meanwhile, the real story is that while the administration
manages to convey the impression that it is doing everything possible to protect America, in reality it has seriously neglected most of the measures that it could have taken to really make our country safer.
For example, there is still no serious strategy for domestic security that protects critical infrastructure such as electric power lines, gas pipelines, nuclear facilities, ports, chemical plants and the like.
They're still not checking incoming cargo carriers for radiation. They're still skimping on protection of certain nuclear weapons storage facilities. They're still not hardening critical facilities that must never be soft targets for terrorists. They're still not investing in the translators and analysts we need to counter the growing terror threat.
The administration is still not investing in local government training and infrastructures where they could make the biggest difference. The first responder community is still being shortchanged. In many cases, fire and police still don't have the communications equipment to talk to each other. The CDC and local hospitals are still nowhere close to being ready for a biological weapons attack.
The administration has still failed to address the fundamental disorganization and rivalries of our law enforcement, intelligence and investigative agencies. In particular, the critical FBI-CIA coordination, while finally improved at the top, still remains dysfunctional in the trenches.
The constant violations of civil liberties promote the false impression that these violations are necessary in order to take every precaution against another terrorist attack. But the simple truth is that the vast majority of the violations have not benefited our security at all; to the contrary, they hurt our security.
And the treatment of immigrants was probably the worst example. This mass mistreatment actually hurt our security in a number of important ways.
But first, let's be clear about what happened: this was little more than a cheap and cruel political stunt by John Ashcroft. More than 99% of the mostly Arab-background men who were rounded up had merely overstayed their visas or committed some other minor offense as they tried to pursue the American dream just like most immigrants. But they were used as extras in the Administration's effort to give the impression that they had caught a large number of bad guys. And many of them were treated horribly and abusively.
Consider this example reported in depth by Anthony Lewis:
"Anser Mehmood, a Pakistani who had overstayed his visa, was arrested in New York on October 3, 2001. The next day he was briefly questioned by FBI agents, who said they had no further interest in him. Then he was shackled in handcuffs, leg irons, and a belly chain and taken to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. Guards there put two more sets of handcuffs on him and another set of leg irons. One threw Mehmood against a wall. The guards forced him to run down a long ramp, the irons cutting into his wrists and ankles. The physical abuse was mixed with verbal taunts.
"After two weeks Mehmood was allowed to make a telephone call to his wife. She was not at home and Mehmood was told that he would have to wait six weeks to try again. He first saw her, on a visit, three months after his arrest. All that time he was kept in a windowless cell, in solitary confinement, with two overhead fluorescent lights on all the time. In the end he was charged with using an invalid Social Security card. He was deported in May 2002, nearly eight months after his arrest.
The faith tradition I share with Ashcroft includes this teaching from Jesus: "whatsoever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me."
And make no mistake: the disgraceful treatment suffered by many of these vulnerable immigrants at the hands of the administration has created deep resentments and hurt the cooperation desperately needed from immigrant communities in the U.S.and from the Security Services of other countries.
Second, these gross violations of their rights have seriously damaged U.S. moral authority and goodwill around the world, and delegitimized U.S.efforts to continue promoting Human Rights around the world. As one analyst put it, "We used to set the standard; now we have lowered the bar." And our moral authority is, after all, our greatest source of enduring strength in the world.
And the handling of prisoners at Guantanomo has been particularly harmful to America's image. Even England and Australia have criticized our departure from international law and the Geneva Convention. Sec. Rumsfeld's handling of the captives there has been about as thoughtful as his "postwar" plan for Iraq.
So the mass violations of civil liberties have hurt rather than helped. But there is yet another reason for urgency in stopping what this administration is doing. Where Civil Liberties are concerned, they have taken us much farther down the road toward an intrusive, "Big Brother"-style government toward the dangers prophesized by George Orwell in his book "1984" than anyone ever thought would be possible in the United States of America.
And they have done it primarily by heightening and exploiting public anxieties and apprehensions. Rather than leading with a call to courage, this Administration has chosen to lead us by inciting fear.
Almost eighty years ago, Justice Louis Brandeis wrote "Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. . . . They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty." Those who won our independence, Brandeis asserted, understood that "courage [is] the secret of liberty" and "fear [only] breeds repression."
Rather than defending our freedoms, this Administration has sought to abandon them. Rather than accepting our traditions of openness and accountability, this Administration has opted to rule by secrecy and unquestioned authority. Instead, its assaults on our core democratic principles have only left us less free and less secure.
Throughout American history, what we now call Civil Liberties have often been abused and limited during times of war and perceived threats to security. The best known instances include the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798-1800, the brief suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, the extreme abuses during World War I and the notorious Red Scare and Palmer Raids immediately after the war, the shameful internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and the excesses of the FBI and CIA during the Vietnam War and social turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
But in each of these cases, the nation has recovered its equilibrium when the war ended and absorbed the lessons learned in a recurring cycle of excess and regret.
There are reasons for concern this time around that what we are experiencing may no longer be the first half of a recurring cycle but rather, the beginning of something new. For one thing, this war is predicted by the administration to "last for the rest of our lives." Others have expressed the view that over time it will begin to resemble the "war" against drugs -- that is, that it will become a more or less permanent struggle that occupies a significant part of our law enforcement and security agenda from now on. If that is the case, then when -- if ever does this encroachment on our freedoms die a natural death?
It is important to remember that throughout history, the loss of civil liberties by individuals and the aggregation of too much unchecked power in the executive go hand in hand. They are two sides of the same coin.
A second reason to worry that what we are witnessing is a discontinuity and not another turn of the recurring cycle is that the new technologies of surveillance -- long anticipated by novelists like Orwell and other prophets of the "Police State" are now more widespread than they have ever been.
And they do have the potential for shifting the balance of power between the apparatus of the state and the freedom of the individual in ways both subtle and profound.
Moreover, these technologies are being widely used not only by the government but also by corporations and other private entities. And that is relevant to an assessment of the new requirements in the Patriot Act for so many corporations -- especially in the finance industries -- to prepare millions of reports annually for the government on suspicious activities by their customers. It is also relevant to the new flexibility corporations have been given to share information with one another about their customers.
The third reason for concern is that the threat of more terror strikes is all too real. And the potential use of weapons of mass destruction by terrorist groups does create a new practical imperative for the speedy exercise of discretionary power by the executive branch -- just as the emergence of nuclear weapons and ICBMs created a new practical imperative in the Cold War that altered the balance of war-making responsibility between Congress and the President.
But President Bush has stretched this new practical imperative beyond what is healthy for our democracy. Indeed, one of the ways he has tried to maximize his power within the American system has been by constantly emphasizing his role as Commander-in-Chief, far more than any previous President assuming it as often and as visibly as he can, and bringing it into the domestic arena and conflating it with his other roles: as head of government and head of state -- and especially with his political role as head of the Republican Party.
Indeed, the most worrisome new factor, in my view, is the aggressive ideological approach of the current administration, which seems determined to use fear as a political tool to consolidate its power and to escape any accountability for its use. Just as unilateralism and dominance are the guiding principles of their disastrous approach to international relations, they are also the guiding impulses of the administration's approach to domestic politics. They are impatient with any constraints on the exercise of power overseas whether from our allies, the UN, or international law. And in the same way, they are impatient with any obstacles to their use of power at home -- whether from Congress, the Courts, the press, or the rule of law.
Ashcroft has also authorized FBI agents to attend church meetings, rallies, political meetings and any other citizen activity open to the public simply on the agents' own initiative, reversing a decades old policy that required justification to supervisors that such infiltrations has a provable connection to a legitimate investigation;
They have even taken steps that seem to be clearly aimed at stifling dissent. The Bush Justice Department has recently begun a highly disturbing criminal prosecution of the environmental group Greenpeace because of a non-violent direct action protest against what Greenpeace claimed was the illegal importation of endangered mahogany from the Amazon. Independent legal experts and historians have said that the prosecution under an obscure and bizarre 1872 law against "sailor-mongering" appears to be aimed at inhibiting Greenpeace's First Amendment activities.
And at the same time they are breaking new ground by prosecuting Greenpeace, the Bush Administration announced just a few days ago that it is dropping the investigations of 50 power plants for violating the Clean Air Act -- a move that Sen. Chuck Schumer said, "basically announced to the power industry that it can now pollute with impunity."
The politicization of law enforcement in this administration is part of their larger agenda to roll back the changes in government policy brought about by the New Deal and the Progressive Movement. Toward that end, they are cutting back on Civil Rights enforcement, Women's Rights, progressive taxation, the estate tax, access to the courts, Medicare, and much more. And they approach every issue as a partisan fight to the finish, even in the areas of national security and terror.
Instead of trying to make the "War on Terrorism" a bipartisan cause, the Bush White House has consistently tried to exploit it for partisan advantage. The President goes to war verbally against terrorists in virtually every campaign speech and fundraising dinner for his political party. It is his main political theme. Democratic candidates like Max Cleland in Georgiawere labeled unpatriotic for voting differently from the White House on obscure amendments to the Homeland Security Bill.
When the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, Tom DeLay, was embroiled in an effort to pick up more congressional seats in Texas by forcing a highly unusual redistricting vote in the state senate, he was able to track down Democratic legislators who fled the state to prevent a quorum (and thus prevent the vote) by enlisting the help of President Bush's new Department of Homeland Security, as many as 13 employees of the Federal Aviation Administration who conducted an eight-hour search, and at least one FBI agent (though several other agents who were asked to help refused to do so.)
By locating the Democrats quickly with the technology put in place for tracking terrorists, the Republicans were able to succeed in focusing public pressure on the weakest of the Senators and forced passage of their new political redistricting plan. Now, thanks in part to the efforts of three different federal agencies, Bush and DeLay are celebrating the gain of up to seven new Republican congressional seats in the next Congress.
The White House timing for its big push for a vote in Congress on going to war with Iraqalso happened to coincide exactly with the start of the fall election campaign in September a year ago. The President's chief of staff said the timing was chosen because "from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."
White House political advisor Karl Rove advised Republican candidates that their best political strategy was to "run on the war". And as soon as the troops began to mobilize, the Republican National Committee distributed yard signs throughout Americasaying, "I support President Bush and the troops" as if they were one and the same.
This persistent effort to politicize the war in Iraqand the war against terrorism for partisan advantage is obviously harmful to the prospects for bipartisan support of the nation's security policies. By sharp contrast, consider the different approach that was taken by Prime Minister Winston Churchill during the terrible days of October 1943 when in the midst of World War II, he faced a controversy with the potential to divide his bipartisan coalition. He said, "What holds us together is the prosecution of the war. No&man has been asked to give up his convictions. That would be indecent and improper. We are held together by something outside, which rivets our attention. The principle that we work on is, 'Everything for the war, whether controversial or not, and nothing controversial that is not bona fide for the war.' That is our position. We must also be careful that a pretext is not made of war needs to introduce far-reaching social or political changes by a side wind."
Yet that is exactly what the Bush Administration is attempting to do -- to use the war against terrorism for partisan advantage and to introduce far reaching controversial changes in social policy by a "side wind," in an effort to consolidate its political power.
It is an approach that is deeply antithetical to the American spirit. Respect for our President is important. But so is respect for our people. Our founders knew -- and our history has proven -- that freedom is best guaranteed by a separation of powers into co-equal branches of government within a system of checks and balances to prevent the unhealthy concentration of too much power in the hands of any one person or group.
Our framers were also keenly aware that the history of the world proves that Republics are fragile. The very hour of America's birth in Philadelphia, when Benjamin Franklin was asked, "What have we got? A Republic or a Monarchy?" he cautiously replied, "A Republic, if you can keep it."
And even in the midst of our greatest testing, Lincoln knew that our fate was tied to the larger question of whether ANY nation so conceived could long endure.
This Administration simply does not seem to agree that the challenge of preserving democratic freedom cannot be met by surrendering core American values. Incredibly, this Administration has attempted to compromise the most precious rights that Americahas stood for all over the world for more than 200 years: due process, equal treatment under the law, the dignity of the individual, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, freedom from promiscuous government surveillance. And in the name of security, this Administration has attempted to relegate the Congress and the Courts to the sidelines and replace our democratic system of checks and balances with an unaccountable Executive. And all the while, it has constantly angled for new ways to exploit the sense of crisis for partisan gain and political dominance. How dare they!
Years ago, during World War II, one of our most eloquent Supreme Court Justices, Robert Jackson, wrote that the President should be given the "widest latitude" in wartime, but he warned against the "loose and irresponsible invocation of war as an excuse for discharging the Executive Branch from the rules of law that govern our Republic in times of peace. No penance would ever expiate the sin against free government," Jackson said, "of holding that a President can escape control of executive powers by law through assuming his military role. Our government has ample authority under the Constitution to take those steps which are genuinely necessary for our security. At the same time, our system demands that government act only on the basis of measures that have been the subject of open and thoughtful debate in Congress and among the American people, and that invasions of the liberty or equal dignity of any individual are subject to review by courts which are open to those affected and independent of the government which is curtailing their freedom."
So what should be done? Well, to begin with, our country ought to find a way to immediately stop its policy of indefinitely detaining American citizens without charges and without a judicial determination that their detention is proper.
Such a course of conduct is incompatible with American traditions and values, with sacred principles of due process of law and separation of powers.
It is no accident that our Constitution requires in criminal prosecutions a "speedy and public trial." The principles of liberty and the accountability of government, at the heart of what makes Americaunique, require no less. The Bush Administration's treatment of American citizens it calls "enemy combatants" is nothing short of un-American.
Second, foreign citizens held in Guantanamo should be given hearings to determine their status provided for under Article V of the Geneva Convention, a hearing that the United Stateshas given those captured in every war until this one, including Vietnamand the Gulf War.
If we don't provide this, how can we expect American soldiers captured overseas to be treated with equal respect? We owe this to our sons and daughters who fight to defend freedom in Iraq, in Afghanistanand elsewhere in the world.
Third, the President should seek congressional authorization for the military commissions he says he intends to use instead of civilian courts to try some of those who are charged with violating the laws of war. Military commissions are exceptional in American law and they present unique dangers. The prosecutor and the judge both work for the same man, the President of the United States. Such commissions may be appropriate in time of war, but they must be authorized by Congress, as they were in World War II, and Congress must delineate the scope of their authority. Review of their decisions must be available in a civilian court, at least the Supreme Court, as it was in World War II.
Next, our nation's greatness is measured by how we treat those who are the most vulnerable. Noncitizens who the government seeks to detain should be entitled to some basic rights. The administration must stop abusing the material witness statute. That statute was designed to hold witnesses briefly before they are called to testify before a grand jury. It has been misused by this administration as a pretext for indefinite detention without charge. That is simply not right.
Finally, I have studied the Patriot Act and have found that along with its many excesses, it contains a few needed changes in the law. And it is certainly true that many of the worst abuses of due process and civil liberties that are now occurring are taking place under the color of laws and executive orders other than the Patriot Act.
Nevertheless, I believe the Patriot Act has turned out to be, on balance, a terrible mistake, and that it became a kind of Tonkin Gulf Resolution conferring Congress' blessing for this President's assault on civil liberties. Therefore, I believe strongly that the few good features of this law should be passed again in a new, smaller law -- but that the Patriot Act must be repealed.
As John Adams wrote in 1780, ours is a government of laws and not of men. What is at stake today is that defining principle of our nation, and thus the very nature of America. As the Supreme Court has written, "Our Constitution is a covenant running from the first generation of Americans to us and then to future generations." The Constitution includes no wartime exception, though its Framers knew well the reality of war. And, as Justice Holmes reminded us shortly after World War I, the Constitution's principles only have value if we apply them in the difficult times as well as those where it matters less.
The question before us could be of no greater moment: will we continue to live as a people under the rule of law as embodied in our Constitution? Or will we fail future generations, by leaving them a Constitution far diminished from the charter of liberty we have inherited from our forebears? Our choice is clear.
-------- MILITARY
-------- biological weapons
A Career Ends and a Trial Begins Over Plague Vials
Texas Researcher Accused of Lying About Bacteria Samples
By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 9, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16973-2003Nov8.html
LUBBOCK, Tex. -- It was Thomas C. Butler's unruffled, matter-of-fact calm that struck his bosses at Texas Tech University's medical school as out of place and a little weird.
Here was Butler -- tall and snowy-haired, an eminent doctor and renowned contagious disease researcher -- reporting that 30 specimen vials of the bacteria that cause bubonic plague, the medieval "Black Death" still common in parts of Asia and Africa, were missing from his cramped laboratory. What is more, he said he believed they had been stolen.
Thunderstruck, and spooked by the threat of bioterrorism, Butler's department head and the dean of the medical school said they would have to alert the authorities. But Butler, preternaturally serene, said he really did not see why that was necessary. Couldn't the university handle it as an internal matter?
"I was flabbergasted," Donald Wesson, chairman of the medical school's Department of Internal Medicine, testified in court this week. "All kinds of things went through my head."
So began a drama last Jan. 14 in the cotton-growing Texas Panhandle town of Lubbock, the drab, pancake-flat home of Texas Tech University and its medical school, the Health Sciences Center. Within hours, 60 federal agents arrived in Lubbock. President Bush was briefed at the White House. And Butler -- who eventually admitted to a "misjudgment" in asserting the samples had been stolen and said he had accidentally destroyed them -- was shackled in handcuffs and leg irons on his way to jail, his passport confiscated, his illustrious career destroyed and his reputation in ruins.
Last week Butler went on trial for lying to the FBI, illegally importing and transporting plague bacteria samples, defrauding Texas Tech and filing false tax returns. According to federal prosecutors, Butler, locked in an escalating dispute with the medical school over his research grants and under orders suspending his clinical research, "lashed out" by inventing the story about stolen plague samples.
In all, he faces 69 federal felony counts, carrying a maximum sentence of 469 years in prison and $17.1 million in fines. Even if he is convicted on just two or three counts of the thick indictment, he could spend a decade behind bars.
"An incident that could have sparked widespread panic of a bioterrorism threat in West Texas was stopped clean in its tracks," U.S. Attorney Jane J. Boyle said in a statement in April.
And yet the incongruities of the case -- why someone of Butler's stature would lie in the first place, and why the federal government would so aggressively pursue a case in which no physical harm was meant or alleged -- have unsettled preeminent American scientists and biodefense researchers.
Some, including a quartet of Nobel laureates, insist that whatever Butler's missteps, he does not deserve to be in the dock at federal court. They suspect that Butler is mainly a victim of the post-Sept. 11, 2001, hysteria of a nation traumatized by terrorism and anthrax, and of prosecutors run amok. And they warn that whatever the outcome at Butler's trial, the effect of his prosecution will be to intimidate biowarfare disease researchers and impede their work at a critical moment.
"I mean, what's the motivation -- why are we prosecuting this guy?" said Donald A. Henderson, the 75-year-old founder of the Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies at Johns Hopkins University, and a key figure in the effort to eradicate smallpox in the 1960s and '70s. "I think the idea is to make an example of him [so] scientists will be more likely to follow the guidelines . . . I don't think that is consonant with the way our justice system is supposed to work."
Butler's prosecution has shaken Lubbock, a college town of 200,000 best known for its sandstorms and as rocker Buddy Holly's home town. Perhaps half the town is affiliated one way or another with Texas Tech University -- the judge in Butler's case is a graduate, and one of the prosecutors teaches there -- and many were unnerved by the plague scare last January.
At the center of the storm, Butler -- barred from his lab at the medical school and facing the likelihood of dismissal by the university -- sits in silence these days through hours of courtroom testimony, working his jaw muscles as federal prosecutors present the government's case. His wife, a son and a small coterie of friends sit in the benches behind him. At the prosecution table, agents from the FBI, Department of Commerce, Department of Transportation and Internal Revenue Service flank three assistant U.S. attorneys.
He now says he does not know what happened to the samples of plague bacteria in his laboratory, where he was working on a new antidote to the disease. In an interview with the CBS News program "60 Minutes" that aired last month, Butler insists that FBI interrogators "tricked" him into saying he had "accidentally destroyed" them with the promise that it would set the matter to rest and reassure a panicky public. If he did destroy the samples, which is routine procedure in labs, he does not remember doing so, he says.
A Career Ends and a Trial Begins Over Plague Vials "I feel I was naïve to have trusted [the FBI agents] and the assurances they gave me," Butler told "60 Minutes." "They wanted to conclude the investigation and, they told me, reassure the public that there was no danger."
Butler, as well as the lawyers and agents involved in the trial, is now subject to a gag order imposed this fall by Judge Sam R. Cummings, forbidding them from discussing the case. However, under close monitoring by one of his lawyers, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, Butler did speak to a reporter last week -- with the condition that he would not discuss the case or the allegations against him.
He spoke generally about what drew him to plague research as a young Navy doctor in Vietnam, and the idealism, sense of adventure and altruism that he says kept him at it through years of living and traveling in the Third World and treating desperately poor people.
"Going out to do field research, where you travel with medicines and supplies with you that are less available to Third World countries -- there's a sense of service to people and a hope that your research findings will benefit society in general," he said.
Butler admitted to a certain degree of what he called "egoism" and "stick-to-itiveness" in pursuing his research. And it is those qualities, which some of Butler's own allies interpret as his stubbornness, that may have played a part in his current troubles.
According to the indictment and prosecutors, Butler well understood the regulations for importing and transporting plague bacteria and other potentially deadly pathogens in the United States. And yet he apparently disregarded the rules -- when he returned from a trip to Tanzania in 2002 with samples of the plague bacteria in his luggage; when he brought samples to Fort Detrick, Md., home of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, and to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lab in Fort Collins, Colo.; and when he shipped samples back to Tanzania in a FedEx package that he marked "laboratory materials."
Some of Butler's methods were once common among contagious disease researchers, including carrying potentially hazardous materials on airplanes, a practice known as "VIP," or vials in pocket. But those methods have been forbidden since 1996. And Butler's cavalier attitude toward the rules, say prosecutors, characterized his work and eventually landed him in trouble.
From 1998, the government says, documents show that drug companies for which Butler was conducting clinical trials at Texas Tech were paying both the university as well as Butler -- an arrangement hidden from university officials. Prosecutors have termed these "shadow contracts" a form of fraud that deprived the university of overhead expenses on the money paid directly to Butler.
Butler's lawyers contend that the contracts were consultancies permitted under vaguely written university regulations; his allies note that in any event, arcane disputes between researchers and administrators are routine in the world of academia.
Nonetheless, auditors from an internal review board at Texas Tech were pressing Butler for details of his research work and contracts. When he repeatedly ignored their requests, prosecutors said, the university notified him in November 2002 that his clinical work with patients was suspended. A top university official confirmed the suspension in a letter to Butler on Jan. 9.
Four days later, on Jan. 13, Butler reported that 30 of his 180 vials of plague bacteria were missing. Federal agents were summoned on Jan. 14. After a full night of questioning, Butler, who waived his right to a lawyer, signed a handwritten affidavit at about 3 a.m. on Jan. 15 acknowledging his "misjudgment."
Butler was "in trouble," Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Webster said in his opening argument at the trial. "He knew the wagons were circled . . . and he had a plan to lash out."
Butler's intent, said Webster, was to "throw a monkey wrench in the internal affairs" of the university. But instead of "lighting a fire, he lit a bonfire," the prosecutor said.
The trial, which is expected to last into December, has also ignited a controversy in the world of science, with some scientists dismissing the idea that Butler is being unfairly prosecuted.
"If this occurred, it's simply not defensible," said Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey. "It's not an issue of sloppy practice. It's an issue of criminal offense coupled with practices incompatible with science."
But Butler's supporters include some of the United States' top scientists, and many of them are incensed.
Prosecutors "are acting like they think they're Eliot Ness," said Peter Agre, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry this year. "But I think scientists in this country are convinced they're more like Sen. Joe McCarthy."
-------- britain
Elite forces attack intelligence blunder
By Francis Elliott, Deputy Political Editor
09/11/2003
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/11/09/nirq09.xml&sSheet=/portal/2003/11/09/ixportaltop.html
The leaders of Britain's special forces have criticised the quality of the intelligence they received during the war in Iraq.
At a confidential briefing attended by Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, and members of the House of Commons Defence Committee, special forces commanders said "inaccurate or inadequate" information received during the conflict had almost cost lives.
As evidence, the officers, disclosed details of a mission, launched in the final days before the invasion of Iraq, which had to be aborted after an ambush.
The MPs were told that an operation to insert a unit of special forces into an area north-west of Baghdad was approved after intelligence was received that local tribesmen would welcome it.
The unit, however, was lured into an ambush by well-equipped loyalists of Saddam Hussein and was forced to flee in a fierce fire-fight.
Some soldiers were taken to safety by helicopter, others escaped across the border into Syria. An investigation into the aborted operation found the tribesmen had been bribed to switch their allegiance to Saddam.
The decision to disclose details of an aborted mission is clear evidence of considerable concern about intelligence failures.
One MP said: "On the basis of what they told us you get the feeling that they would gladly sack the intelligence services. How we didn't get blokes wiped out I don't know."
-------- china
Reality-check with China
Sunday, November 09, 2003
Pakistan Daily Times
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_5-11-2003_pg3_1
General Pervez Musharraf's visit to China has put Pak-China relations on an interesting footing. For border-sensitive Beijing at least two agreements will sound like music to the ears, both relating to flow of illegal goods and men across the frontiers. Pakistan was getting concerned about the influx of cheap smuggled Chinese goods and the Chinese were upset over the infiltration of religious fanatics into Chinese border areas in the north. The two sides signed treaties on economic cooperation that included one on preferential trade - 800 goods from Pakistan and 200 from China will get through on low tariffs - and another on extradition of criminals. General Musharraf made the issue clear by saying that Pakistan's soil would not be used for any kind of terrorist activity inside China and that separatist Chinese Muslims would not be allowed to flee into Pakistan. Also, there was an understanding on the building of another nuclear power plant at Chashma in Pakistan.
Cheap Chinese goods have created trade surpluses for China all over the world - $130 billion against the US and $53 billion against the EU. Pakistan will be no exception to this trend. Pakistani markets are already flooded with goods of all kinds from China, from electronic gadgets to cloth, which have driven a number of Pakistani industries almost out of business. That is why many industrialists had started complaining to Islamabad about the 'friendly invasion' from China. Now, with preferential trade, many more Chinese goods will be visible in Pakistani markets and certain domestic industries will dry up. Consumers will be happy but certain industrialists will be out of business.
General Musharraf's comment on Chinese Muslims was a landmark statement because it was the first high-level public expression of Pakistan's resolve not to offer 'unofficial' pinpricks to its great northerly friend. In the past the Chinese have handled the problem - 'mujahideen' going in and Uighurs fleeing out - with great tact. This was in fact the underside of Pakistan's jihad strategy that hurt Pakistan as well while the Taliban war was going on. Pakistan supported the Taliban but the Taliban gave shelter to all kinds of rebels and separatists from Central Asia and the Chinese territories adjacent to High Asia. There was also a lack of clarity in Islamabad about the true implications of its Taliban policy. Pakistan offended Russia by allowing a Chechen 'ambassador' to roam freely in Pakistan. Pakistan-based militias operated in Central Asian states close to the Chinese border, at times instigating the Muslims in Sinkiang to jihad. China reacted by joining a coalition of regional states together with Russia against what it termed 'terrorism and separatism'. The Shanghai Five (now Six) process indirectly targeted the Pakistani militias.
With relations with India going nowhere and contacts declining into dares of war, Pakistan once again looks to China to counterbalance the Indian strategic threat. Unable to creatively address their bilateral problems, India and Pakistan have tilted into an arms race of sorts. With much less on offer from the economy to spend on weapons, Pakistan needs to make its relations with China more realistic. And the statement by General Musharraf on the 'separatists' is a move in the right direction.
However, the Chinese assistance in the building of the next phase of the Chashma nuclear plant will be seen by the world as an important development in view of the fact that Pakistan will obtain enriched plutonium from Chashma while being a non-signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This assistance should be seen in a particular context. Russia is requesting the US, which is the leader of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), to waive sanctions on India so that Russia can supply nuclear technology to it. It had earlier violated an NSG ban by supplying two nuclear reactors to India. But China is not a member of NSG. Therefore its help to Pakistan is both legitimate and crucial in this respect.
Afghan constitution, alas!
Muslims generally find it difficult to live under constitutions and the Afghans will be no exception when the Loya Jirga starts discussing the draft just completed by the Hamid Karzai government. The draft says all the right things Muslims want to hear, that the republic would be 'Islamic' and that the state religion would be 'our scared religion' Islam. Chief justice of Afghanistan Hadi Shinwari - who outlawed cable TV earlier this year, calling it prostitution - has already warned that that the new Constitution better be according to the shariah.
It is obvious that things are not going to go well at the Loya Jirga in December unless the warlords are bribed into saying yes to a democratic constitution. This will be nothing new. The Iranian people are now unhappy with their constitution twenty years down the line. In Pakistan the Pushtuns want a shariah law close to what Mulla Umar had, lashing those with long pubic hair and shaved beards. Judge Shinwari, a Pushtun, couldn't get his verdict on TV enforced in the North; it is difficult to imagine how another Taliban-like constitution will be enforced without another civil war. Tragically, anything short of a draconian charter more focused on punishing the poor long suffering people of Afghanistan than their rights will be rejected. If the Loya Jirga somehow accepts the present draft there will be no dearth of people in Afghanistan - and in Pakistan too - abominating it as an American imposition.
-------- iraq
U.S. Troops Raid Tikrit In Hunt for Guerrillas
November 9, 2003
By ALEX BERENSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/09/international/middleeast/09BAGH.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 8 - American forces used tanks, howitzers, and fighter planes in an overnight raid on a volatile area around Tikrit, the hometown of Saddam Hussein, the Fourth Infantry Division said on Saturday.
The raid began a few hours after a Black Hawk helicopter crashed near Tikrit on Friday, killing six American soldiers, and was intended as a show of force in an area where guerrillas attack American soldiers every day, said Maj. Josslyn Aberle, a spokeswoman for the division, which controls north-central Iraq. The Army has not yet officially determined the cause of the Black Hawk crash.
Meanwhile, two soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division were killed in Falluja on Saturday when a roadside bomb hit their vehicle, the military reported. A third soldier was wounded.
The deaths brought to at least 392 the number of soldiers who have died in Iraq or Kuwait since the United States invaded Iraq on March 19. At least 254 soldiers have died since May 1, when President Bush declared major combat operations over.
The raid in Tikrit began about 10 p.m. on Friday and lasted about five hours, Major Aberle said. She said that it was part of an aggressive new effort to root out guerrillas in and around the city, which is about 100 miles north of Baghdad and has been a center of resistance to the American occupation.
In an effort to be culturally sensitive, the division had scaled back its patrols and raids in late October to accommodate Muslims during Ramadan, the holiest month of the Muslim year, Major Aberle said.
"Our hopes were that we would give the local population the opportunity to police themselves," Major Aberle said.
But guerrilla activity increased, leading to the new crackdown, called Operation Ivy Cyclone, she said. "The intent is to let the individuals who are involved in anti-coalition activities know that it's not going to be tolerated."
At least three houses were destroyed in the raid, Major Aberle said. The houses were empty and had been used by guerrillas for meetings and to store weapons, she said.
Also on Saturday, the International Committee of the Red Cross said it would close its offices in Baghdad and in Basra, the second largest city in Iraq.
The announcement came almost two weeks after a car bomb at its Baghdad office killed 12 people.
In a news conference in Baghdad, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said the United States had been "sobered" by the guerrilla attacks in the Sunni Triangle, the region north and west of Baghdad where resistance to the occ