Archive By Date | Today's Links to Search By
Activists' News | Nuclear | Depleted Uranium | Military | Police
Alternative Energy Etc. | From Subscribers
NUCLEAR
'Lost' Radioactive Matter Poses Risk
Quotes on Missing Radioactive Materials
President Arafat: Israel Used Depleted Uranium
Bratoselce clean-up completed
Tehran to submit pledge on uranium
Iran Says It Suspended Nuclear Enrichment
Iran and the A-bomb
UN Says Iran Produced Small Amount of Plutonium
AP: U.N. Finds No Evidence of Iran Nukes
Plan to Rename Livermore Lab Fizzles
Yucca Mountain Safety Depends on Geological Absorption
MILITARY
U.S. Forces in Airborne Assault on Rebels in 2 Afghan Areas
In $87.5 Billion Bill, $2 Million Bounty for Exiled Liberian
New Military Mega-Companies
Defining the resistance in Iraq
U.S. Gen. to Iraq: Stop Attacks
Pentagon hurries help to explode rebel bombs
Pentagon office to oversee Iraq contracts
U.S. Soldier Dies in Iraq; Bremer Warns of Worse to Come
Fighting a 'Battle of Perceptions'
Iraqi Warns of Delay on Constitution, Vote
Israeli Cabinet Backs Trade of Prisoners
Israel Approves Hezbollah Prisoner Swap
Attacks in Saudi Arabia Aim to Rattle a Dynasty
Saudi Bombing Blamed on Al Qaeda
Pushing Weapons at Home: The Star Wars lobby
WHITE HOUSE LETTER
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Patriot Act Spawns New Laws Across the Globe
Supreme Court Takes First Case on Guantánamo Detainees
Afghan Poppies Sprout Again
Gore Criticizes Expanded Terrorism Law
Gore Criticizes Bush Approach to Security
States to Be Scored On Crisis Readiness
OTHER
Superfund Job, Not Quite Finished, Frustrates Town
At Meetings, U.S. to Seek Support for Broad Ozone Exemptions
ACTIVISTS
Greenpeace protests against new Finnish nuclear power plant
War Vigils Evolve, Continue
Burmese Dissenter Refuses to Be Free
58 years after dropping Hiroshima bomb
Yard fury over Bush visit
The George and Tony show could get wild
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
'Lost' Radioactive Matter Poses Risk
November 10, 2003
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Terrorism-Radioactive.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal investigators have documented 1,300 cases of lost, stolen or abandoned radioactive material inside the United States over the past five years and have concluded there is a significant risk that terrorists could cobble enough together for a dirty bomb.
Studies by the Energy Department's Los Alamos laboratory and the General Accounting Office found significant holes in the nation's security net that could take years to close, even after improvements by regulators since Sept. 11, 2001.
``The world of radiological sources developed prior to recent concerns about terrorism, and many of the sources are either unsecured or provided, at best, with an industrial level of security,'' the Los Alamos lab concluded two months ago in a report that was reviewed by The Associated Press.
The report concludes that the threat of a so-called dirty bomb that could disperse radiological materials across a wide area ``appears to be very significant, and there is no shortage of radioactive materials that could be used.'' Security improvements under way ``are unlikely to significantly alter the global risk picture for a few years,'' it added.
The FBI repeatedly has warned law enforcement over the past year that al-Qaida was interested in obtaining radiological materials and creating a dispersal bomb, most recently after authorities received an uncorroborated report a few weeks ago that al-Qaida might be seeking material from a Canadian source.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokeswoman Beth Hayden said the agency recognizes the potential dangers of such materials and al-Qaida's interest in them -- ``there are millions of sources,'' she said. But she added most of the 1,300 lost radiological sources were subsequently recovered and the public should keep the threat in perspective.
``The ones that have been lost and not recovered, I'm told, if you put them all together, it would not add up to one highly radioactive source,'' Hayden said. ``These are low-level sources.''
The top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee says the studies show security efforts fall short of what is needed.
``Even though for years we have known of the threat that terrorists would use 'dirty bombs' to attack the United States, I am alarmed at the government's inadequate response to this very real threat. The economic and health costs of such an event would be staggering. It appears we don't even know how much material exists that could be used for such weapons or even where it is being kept,'' Rep. Jim Turner, D-Texas, said.
The Los Alamos analysis specifically cited concerns about the transportation of large shipments of radioactive cobalt from industrial sites, as well as lax security at hospitals that use radiological devices to treat and diagnose patients.
The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, detailed how terrorists could abuse the legal method for obtaining radiological sources because the NRC takes as long as a year to inspect facilities after it mails them a license for such materials.
``Because the process assumes that the applicant is acting in good faith and it can take the NRC as along as 12 months before conducting an inspection, it is possible that sealed sources can be obtained for malicious intent,'' the GAO told the Senate recently.
NRC Commissioner Edward McGaffigan Jr. said the GAO concerns were overstated, focusing on materials with extremely low level radioactivity. He said his agency has been taking steps for months to more securely ship and store high-risk sources.
``We honestly think we are doing a very aggressive and excellent job in this area, but we have obviously more to do,'' McGaffigan said in an interview. ``Our view is we don't want to lose any of them, and we are going to have cradle-to-grave controls as soon as we possibly can for high-risk sources.''
He said the government was undertaking a first-ever inventory of who possesses radioactive materials and how much they possess.
The GAO questioned whether the NRC has moved fast enough to secure sealed sources -- devices that contain small amounts of radiological materials used in construction and hospitals.
``The number of sealed sources in the United States is unknown because NRC and states track numbers of licensees instead of sealed sources,'' the GAO told the Senate in a report published in August.
Two universities told the GAO about security problems with nuclear materials, specifically cases in which doors to rooms with the materials had been found unlocked or open.
The congressional investigators found that many of the 114 universities that possess, from earlier experiments, the radiological material plutonium-239 have tried unsuccessfully to return it to the government. The Energy Department doesn't have enough secure storage space, the investigators said.
The congressional investigation for the first time tallied the number of times sealed radiological materials have been lost, misplaced or stolen. They found more than 1,300 instances inside the United States since 1998. While most have been recovered, the report cited a handful of harrowing, unsolved losses.
For instance, in March 1999, an industrial radiography camera containing iridium-192 was stolen from a Florida home. The camera has not been recovered despite an investigation by the FBI. The NRC believes the material should have degraded by now and would no longer be useful for a bomb.
A North Carolina hospital discovered in March 1998 that 19 sealed sources of radiological material, including the highly dispersible cesium-137, were missing from a locked safe. They have not been found.
Security improvements are being made. For instance, the NRC requires tighter security by companies that use soil analysis gauges that contain radiological materials. There are some 20,000 of them used nationwide by more than 5,100 licensees. The devices are lost or stolen at a rate of one a week, officials said.
The GAO and Los Alamos security reviews made several recommendations. They include keeping licensed sources from getting radiological materials until after they are inspected, improving structural security at high-risk locations and working with federal, state and international regulators to toughen controls.
``These efforts are unlikely to significantly alter the global risk picture for a few years, although the risks regarding certain sources and circumstances could change more quickly,'' the Los Alamos study conceded.
On The Net:
Copies of the studies reviewed by AP are available at http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/external/wid.ap.org/index.html
Nuclear Regulatory Commission: http://www.nrc.gov
FBI: http://www.fbi.gov
----
Quotes on Missing Radioactive Materials
November 10, 2003
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Radioactive-Quotes.html
Quotes from General Accounting Office and Los Alamos Laboratory reports on the risks of common radiological materials falling into the hands of terrorists or being used to create a radiological bomb.
``The RDD (radiation dispersal device, or bomb) threat appears to be very significant, and there is no shortage of radioactive materials that could be used. Among the materials most readily available are the radiological sources in widespread usage around the world. Most of these sources are comparatively small, and their usage in an RDD attack would generate fear and economic displacements.'' -- Los Alamos report.
``Since 1998, there have been more than 1,300 reported incidents of lost, stolen or abandoned devices containing sealed sources, an average of about 250 per year. The majority of these devices were subsequently recovered. Both NRC and DOE recognize the importance of determining how many sealed sources are present in the United States, and which sealed sources pose the greatest risk if they were to be used in a dirty bomb'' -- General Accounting Office.
``We found a potential security weakness in NRC's licensing process to obtain sealed sources. The process assumes an applicant is acting in good faith and allows applicants to acquire sealed sources as soon as a new license is issued by mail. It can then take NRC as long as 12 months to conduct its first inspection, leaving the possibility that materials will be obtained and used maliciously in the meantime.'' -- GAO.
``Because there has been long-standing concern about both nuclear weapons and materials that could be used in making nuclear weapons, there is generally good security in the handling of these materials (especially the weapons). In contrast, the world of radiological sources developed prior to recent concerns about terrorism, and many of the sources are either unsecured or provided, at best, with an industrial level of security.'' -- Los Alamos.
``There are significant problems with radioactive sources in the medical industry. When a source for teletherapy or blood irradiation becomes disused, it is not uncommon for the source to remain at the user institution instead of being disposed of properly. Most companies do not make it standard practice to take back sources upon their disuse. ... With rare exceptions, hospitals do not usually feature much security, and there are many hospitals around the world where theft of radioactive materials would be quite feasible.'' -- Los Alamos.
-------- depleted uranium
President Arafat: Israel Used Depleted Uranium
November 10, 2003
(IPC + WAFA)
http://www.ipc.gov.ps/ipc_e/ipc_e-1/e_News/news2003/2003-11/028.html
RAMALLAH--Palestinian President Yasser Arafat asserted that Israel used depleted uranium against the Palestinian people, which was evidently verified by American and European assertions as well as the cancer rate among Palestinians has risen similar to that caused in "Hiroshima".
Arafat's remarks came following his reception of a delegation involving Christian, Jewish and Muslim figures headed by Mitchell Koal on Sunday in his office in Rammallah.
Speaking to the delegation, President Arafat disclosed that the Apartheid Wall had confiscated 58 % of the Palestinian lands in the West Bank, besides the disastrous economic consequences the wall caused; destroying farms, factories and turning the Palestinian cities into isolated cantons.
Arafat, who has been besieged in his battered compound in Ramallah for 19 months by Israel, pointed out that there are Israeli generals who refused to serve in the occupied Palestinian territories or participate in the criminal and wrong-doings committed there.
He added that the Israeli occupying forces perished64 -65% of the olive groves and stole 90 % of the palm trees in Deir al Balah, over 4,762 Palestinian houses were demolished and the toll of killed and wounded people exceeded 71,000.
President Arafat mentioned out that traveling between Ramallah and Bethlehem normally takes three hours but at present, travelers were obliged to wait long hours to cross the distance, not to mention that women in labor were denied access to pass through the checkpoints, and eventually they gave birth at the checkpoints.
"Where do such doings happen in the world?" President Arafat exclaimed.
Up to this moment, the Israeli government has not yet approved the "Road Map" peace process and conditioned about 14 amendments on the plan as well as the Israeli slam of all the agreed upon agreements including the Mitchell report, Tenet Understandings and the UN resolutions, President Arafat briefed the delegation.
"We (Palestinians) want an equitable and everlasting peace that was agreed upon with the late Yitzhak Rabin," Arafat said.
Mr. Koal, on his part, asserted the backing of international and regional peace and dialogue and that the delegation came to solidify with the Palestinian people and to channel the Palestinian ordeal to Europe.
----
Bratoselce clean-up completed
Andjelka Mihajlov,
Nov 10, 2003
Serbia Office of Communication
http://www.serbia.sr.gov.yu/news/2003-11/10/331836.html
Bujanovac - The clean-up of some 5,000 square meters of land in the village of Bratoselce near Bujanovac, contaminated by depleted uranium during the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, was finished on Sunday.
Serbian Minister of Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Andjelka Mihajlov and Serbia-Montenegrin Army Chief of Staff General Branko Krga visited the site upon the completion of the works, expressing satisfaction with the cooperation between the ministry, the army, and the Vinca institute of nuclear sciences during this task.
During the clean-up, the team performing the task discovered around 100 kilograms of depleted uranium in the soil and stored some 2.5 tons of contaminated earth in the Vinca institute's facilities.
Mihajlov said that Bratoselce is the first contaminated site in Serbia that has been cleaned up and added that the efficiency of the work was higher than 95 percent. She expressed that hope that the clean-up of the remaining three sites, Pljackovica, Reljan, and Borovac, will begin next year.
The Serbian government funded the project with 15 million dinars.
-------- iran
Tehran to submit pledge on uranium
November 10, 2003
Agence France-Presse
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20031109-103632-3179r.htm
TEHRAN - Iran will implement its pledge to suspend uranium-enrichment activities in line with demands from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a foreign ministry spokesman said yesterday.
"In the course of the coming days, Iran will implement and announce the suspension of uranium enrichment," Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters, without giving further details.
The IAEA in September asked Iran to do three main things ahead of a Nov. 20 board meeting: fully disclose its nuclear program, agree to tougher inspections, and suspend the enrichment of uranium that could be used to make an atomic bomb.
Iran already has made what it says is a full declaration of its nuclear program, and says it will send a letter next week to the Vienna, Austria,-based watchdog, stating its intention to sign an additional protocol to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that would subject it to a vigorous inspections regime.
Iran agreed to comply with the demands on Oct. 21, when the British, French and German foreign ministers visited Tehran to seek a way out of the dispute over the country's bid to generate nuclear power - seen by the United States as a cover for secret weapons development.
A suspension of enrichment activities is seen as crucial by the IAEA as it tries to fully uncover the Islamic republic's nuclear program.
The problem centers on traces of highly enriched uranium that IAEA inspectors found at two sites in Iran during previous visits.
The Iranians say the particles came from contamination from equipment they bought aboard, but the IAEA wants enrichment inside Iran to be halted while it verifies the equipment, and also pending Iran's submission to the tougher safeguards enshrined by the additional protocol.
Although Iran is expected to declare its readiness to sign the text, the country's top national security official said yesterday that IAEA inspectors will not be granted access to sites in Iran that are not related to its nuclear program.
"Next week, the Islamic Republic of Iran will give a letter on the additional protocol," Hassan Rowhani, who as secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council is charged with the nuclear dossier, told state television.
"In this letter, we will state that the IAEA will not be permitted to enter sites that are not linked to Iran's nuclear activities."
Although Mr. Rowhani appeared to be attaching conditions to the application of the additional protocol, a diplomat close to the discussions emphasized there was no need for immediate alarm that Iran was making some kind of U-turn.
"Iran can express reservations, but the text of the additional protocol is standard," said the diplomat, who asked not to be named.
The source explained that once Iran signed the text, it would be subject only to unlimited inspections of declared facilities related to its nuclear activities.
As for suspect sites, he said, the IAEA would have to respect a specific procedure for securing visits.
Iran raised concerns over visits to military and holy sites, citing national security and sovereignty concerns, when the European ministers visited.
----
Iran Says It Suspended Nuclear Enrichment
By MARA D. BELLABY
Associated Press Writer
Nov 10,
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/R/RUSSIA_IRAN_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
MOSCOW (AP) -- A top Iranian official said Monday that his country had suspended its enrichment of uranium and sent a letter to the U.N. nuclear watchdog accepting additional inspections of its nuclear facilities.
"Before your government, I officially announce that we are giving the International Atomic Energy Agency a letter agreeing with the additional protocol today," Hasan Rowhani, the head of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said before a Kremlin meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"From today, we are temporarily suspending our process of uranium enrichment."
Rowhani's statements were aimed at eliminating suspicions that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. The protocol appended to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty would allow IAEA inspectors to perform snap inspections and otherwise extend their probe of Iranian nuclear activities that had previously been off-limits.
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. Iran had pledged in recent weeks to allow unfettered inspections and suspend enrichment, but the time frame was unclear.
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.
Washington has urged Moscow to freeze its $800 million deal to help build Iran's first nuclear power reactor, saying it could help Iran develop nuclear weapons. The Kremlin has said it shares some of the U.S. concerns and prodded Tehran to accept tighter controls by the IAEA. Moscow has also insisted that all spent fuel be returned to Russia.
Putin indicated that Moscow was satisfied with Rowhani's pledges.
"With regard to the enrichment of uranium, Iran has a right to carry out these kinds of activities but we are pleased to note that Iran has itself resolved to limit itself," Putin said.
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.
Before traveling to Moscow, Rowhani met in Vienna with the head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, who is currently preparing a report to the IAEA board of governors on Tehran's nuclear activities.
The board will consider ElBaradei's report on Nov. 20. 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.
----
Iran and the A-bomb
November 10, 2003
WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20031109-103643-2000r.htm
In discussing what to do about Iran's nuclear weapons programs, a disproportionate amount of attention is being focused on getting Tehran to comply with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and to permit the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to carry out more comprehensive inspections of its nuclear facilities. Late last month, the foreign ministers of France, Germany and Britain announced with great fanfare what they considered a hopeful sign: an Iranian promise to suspend uranium enrichment in exchange for the Europeans' promise to help the regime obtain peaceful nuclear technology. But the reality is that even if Iran were to comply with the promises it made to the Europeans (a big if), it would have only a marginal impact in slowing Tehran's progress toward developing nuclear weapons.
The problem lies in the fact that international community and the IAEA are too focused on Iran's covert nuclear program, and are giving insufficient attention to its potentially much more dangerous overt nuclear program. In an analysis paper, entitled "Iran: Breaking Out Without Quite Breaking the Rules?", the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center (NPEC) reaches this chilling conclusion about the radical Islamic regime's efforts to develop nuclear weapons: "Iran can come within weeks of acquiring a large arsenal of weapons without breaking the rules of the NPT or IAEA and perhaps do so even sooner than when it might get its first covert bomb."
According to the NPEC (one of nation's leading research organizations on nuclear proliferation issues), "if Iran's overt program all stays on schedule, Tehran, in fact, could get a large arsenal of nuclear weapons - 50 to 75 bombs by 2006." It could do this by operating its Russian-built light-water reactor (LWR) at Bushehr for 12-15 months. It could then chemically separate the plutonium from the spent fuel and convert it into metal. "Metal conversion and the chemical separation of the plutonium from the spent fuel might take an additional 12-16...weeks beyond the time Iran extracts the spent fuel from the LWR," the NPEC analysis observes. "Under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, all of this is legal. It is also legal under the NPT for Iran to make as many implosion devices (sans fissile cores) as one might want and have them ready to receive metal plutonium cores. At this point, some time by or before 2006, Iran could break out of the NPT and have a large arsenal of weapons in a matter of weeks or days."
By contrast, Tehran's efforts to use centrifuges to enrich natural uranium to weapons grade (a major focus of the IAEA's current inspections efforts) play a secondary role, functioning as a nuclear insurance policy: they could produce a much smaller number of atomic weapons for Iran- 2-6 a year by the end of 2006, the NPEC concludes. The bottom line is that we may be much closer to an Iranian A-bomb (which could pose a tremendous danger to international peace and stability) than policy-makers and the public realize.
--------
UN Says Iran Produced Small Amount of Plutonium
November 10, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iran-nuclear.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - The U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Monday in a confidential report obtained by Reuters that Iran had acknowledged producing a small amount of plutonium, a material useable in a nuclear bomb.
The United States accuses Iran of having a secret atomic weapons program. Tehran denies this and says it was forced to hide many aspects of its nuclear program from the United Nations because of decades of international sanctions it says were illegal.
``Iran has admitted that it produced small amounts of low enriched uranium using both centrifuges and laser enrichment processes... and that it had failed to report a large number of conversion, fabrication and irradiation activities involving nuclear material, including the separation of a small amount of plutonium,'' the report said.
Enrichment is a process of purifying uranium to make it useable as nuclear fuel or in atomic weapons. It can be done in several ways, including with centrifuges that separate the fissile uranium atoms through high-speed spinning or with lasers.
In contrast to Tehran's previous denials, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said Iran also ``acknowledged that 'a limited number of tests using small amounts of (uranium hexafluoride) had been conducted in 1999 and 2002' at the Kalaye Electric Company.''
The report said these tests involved 4.2 lb of missing uranium hexafluoride, the chemical form of uranium used in the enrichment process, which Iran had previously ``attempted to conceal by attributing the loss due to leaking valves.''
The IAEA also said Iran had admitted to establishing a laser uranium-enrichment plant at Lashkar Ab'ad in 2000 which it had kept secret from the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
The IAEA said it had ``no evidence'' of a secret weapons program, but that ``given Iran's past pattern of concealment, it will take some time for the agency to conclude that Iran's nuclear program is exclusively for peaceful purposes.''
The report was submitted to the 35 member states on the IAEA Board of Governors ahead of a November 20 meeting on Iran.
--------
AP: U.N. Finds No Evidence of Iran Nukes
November 10, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Nuclear-Agency-Iran.html
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- The U.N. nuclear watchdog agency has found ``no evidence'' Iran is trying to make nuclear weapons, but cannot rule out the possibility because Tehran previously hid parts of its program, diplomats told The Associated Press.
The report, drawn up by the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, says Iran has been cooperating with the agency since September, the diplomats said on condition of anonymity.
But disclosures made recently by Iran ``clearly show that in the past, Iran had concealed many aspects of its nuclear activities, which resulted in breaches of its obligations of the safeguard agreement'' it had signed with the agency, the report says, according to the diplomats.
The report comes as Iran, after months of pressure, declared Monday that it has temporarily halted enrichment of uranium and committed to unfettered inspections of its nuclear facilities, two top demands of the IAEA.
The report by IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei will be central when the United States and other member nations on the agency's board of governors meet, starting Nov. 20, to decide what steps to take over Iran's nuclear program.
Washington, which has long accused Iran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons, wants the board to declare Tehran in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. If the board does so, it will likely kick the issue to the U.N. Security Council, which could impose sanctions.
U.S. officials will likely point to the report's comments on Iranian efforts to hide parts of its program to boost their case.
ElBaradei's report said that so far, the agency had no proof that the hidden programs were involved in weapons production.
``To date there is no evidence that the previous undeclared nuclear material and activities ... were related to a nuclear weapons program,'' said the report, as cited by one of the diplomats. ``However, given Iran's past pattern of concealment, it will take some time before the agency is able to conclude that Iran's nuclear program is exclusively for peaceful purposes.''
Iran, which insists its nuclear program aims only to produce energy, gave the IAEA what it called a full accounting of its nuclear activities. It has also been allowing IAEA inspections of some facilities in past months.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- california
Plan to Rename Livermore Lab Fizzles
November 10, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Livermore-Lab-Teller.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is keeping its name despite efforts by the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee to rename it in honor of physicist Edward Teller.
Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., wanted to make the name change a part of the $401 billion defense bill the House passed last Friday. He relented after objections from Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif., whose district includes the lab; Missouri Rep. Ike Skelton, the senior Democrat on the committee; and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.
Teller, a member of the Manhattan Project, which created the first atomic bomb, died in September at 95. Teller also championed the more powerful hydrogen bomb and the space-based ``Star Wars'' missile defense system.
Tauscher and lab officials objected to renaming the facility partly out of fears of slighting the town of Livermore and the memory of Ernest O. Lawrence, who co-founded the lab with Teller.
Susan Houghton, a spokeswoman for the lab, said it was proceeding with plans under consideration since Teller's death to rename a science center or computer facility at the lab after him. The lab is operated by the University of California for the Department of Energy.
Local anti-nuclear activists, who had reacted gleefully to the proposed name change, said they were disappointed.
``Lawrence Livermore is a very innocuous-sounding name, so I think it would've been really good if it had the Teller name attached to it, because everyone understands Teller as the father of the hydrogen bomb,'' said Jacqueline Cabasso, executive director of the Western States Legal Foundation, a nuclear disarmament advocacy group in Oakland, Calif.
-------- nevada
Yucca Mountain Safety Depends on Geological Absorption
BLOOMINGTON, Indiana, (ENS)
November 10, 2003
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/nov2003/2003-11-10-09.asp#anchor6
The proposed Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste repository 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada, must take advantage of the mountain's natural geological properties, says a new study by scientists at Indiana University Bloomington (IUB) and Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The report, published in the November-December issue of "American Mineralogist" and largely funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Office, provides the most detailed three dimensional picture to date of the minerals most likely to impact long term waste storage. "The repository must not place undue reliance on any one portion of the storage system, such as the man-made engineered portion," said David Bish, Haydn Murray Chair in Applied Clay Mineralogy at IUB and the report's lead author. "The long term storage of high-level radioactive waste will depend on geological and engineered systems that are intertwined in a complex way."
The Yucca Mountain site, approved by Congress and the President in 2002 for the long-term storage of 70,000 metric tons of high-level radioactive waste must remain geologically stable for at least 10,000 years according to federal requirements, but doubts remain about the ability of the mountain to keep the public safe from radioactive contamination for that length of time.
Department of Energy (DOE) representatives are expected to approach the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2004 to acquire three federal licenses: one for facility construction, another permitting the storage of high-level radioactive waste and a third for sealing the repository.
"Because the work presented in our paper provides the most comprehensive, three-dimensional mineralogical picture of Yucca Mountain, we believe the paper will probably be used in licensing deliberations," Bish said.
Bish and his colleagues confirmed that Yucca Mountain's rocks are rich in zeolites - soft, clay-like minerals that are known to absorb a number of positively charged ions, such as radioactive cesium, barium and strontium. "These zeolites are still one of the most potent natural means of retarding the movement of radioactive ions through rock," Bish said.
Zeolites also possess some of the properties of sponges, absorbing and releasing large amounts of water. This water can, in turn, absorb much of the heat produced by the radioactive waste.
The DOE maintains that Yucca Mountain was selected because the area is dry, the climate is arid and the water table is deep, so waste packages would be preserved. But Allison Macfarlane, a professor at Georgia Tech's Sam Nunn School of International Affairs who is co-editing a book on the safety of the proposed Yucca Mountain repository, says Yucca Mountain is not really that dry.
In fact, Macfarlane said, wet conditions are better than dry for extending the life of spent fuel, but as a result of its policy, the DOE has neglected to explore significant issues associated with the corrosion of spent fuel. "DOE's understanding of water transport through the rock above the water table remains in its infancy, Macfarlane said.
DOE relies heavily on the performance of Alloy-22, a chromium-nickel-molybdenum alloy, to endow the waste packages with a predicted 10,000 years of resistance to corrosion. This reliance stems from two years' worth of corrosion research in the laboratory. "But there is good reason to be skeptical about these results," said Macfarlane. "No natural analogs were studied, because there are none. No long-term studies were conducted. And the complex conditions that will evolve over time around the waste package are still poorly understood."
Bish also said that understanding the complex geological and mineralogical features of Yucca Mountain is vital to modeling the long-term performance of any storage facility that is built there.
"I'd like to know more about how introduction of a repository into the mountain will change the geology, mineralogy and hydrology, all of which will affect the ability of the mountain to contain the waste," Bish said. "We also need to know more about how water flows through the repository horizon, a zone of rock into which the waste would be placed."
If all goes according to proponents' plans, the Yucca Mountain site could begin receiving radioactive waste as early as 2010. But many obstacles exist, that could delay the transportation of waste. Many of the 43 states through which it will pass object to the transportation of radioactive waste across their borders.
Also, the state of Nevada contests scientists' claim that Yucca Mountain is geologically satisfactory for the purposes of high-level radioactive waste storage. Governor Kenny Guinn, a Republican, has said, "Yucca Mountain is not safe. It is not suitable." The state has mounted several lawsuits against the project, and a majority of Nevada residents are opposed to Yucca Mountain.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
U.S. Forces in Airborne Assault on Rebels in 2 Afghan Areas
November 10, 2003
By CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/10/international/asia/10CND-AFGH.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, Nov. 10 - American forces opened a large-scale airborne assault against suspected Taliban and other antigovernment forces in two mountainous northeastern provinces over the weekend, a United States military spokesman said today.
The assault is the first big sweep by the American military against these fighters in the remote mountains of the Hindu Kush, and it suggests that militants have spread their influence to new areas.
Soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division were dropped by air on Friday into Kunar and Nuristan provinces "to clear the area of anticoalition and antigovernment fighters," an American military spokesman, Col. Rodney Davis, said in a brief press statement.
Local residents and aid workers had been reporting increased air and vehicle activity in the area for several days. Forces loyal to a renegade commander, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who has declared a holy war against American forces in Afghanistan, are thought to be present in the area and may be the target of the operation. United States troops based in Kunar Province have come under repeated rocket attacks in recent months.
Both provinces share a rugged mountainous border with Pakistan, where sympathy for the Taliban and Mr. Hekmatyar remains strong.
But tribal leaders from Nuristan complained at the weekend that American forces were mistaken in attacking the province. Maulavi Ghulam Rabbani, a longtime religious leader and guerrilla commander allied to the government, said United States planes had bombed and fired upon his home two weeks ago, killing six people, including two of his children.
Maulavi Rabbani, 60, said American planes and helicopters opened a three-hour attack on his home village of Arans in Nuristan on the night of Oct. 30.
"Three planes came," he said. "First they bombed the mosque. My 18-year-old son was sleeping in the mosque and he was killed. When they started bombing, the people in the village started fleeing and my 21-year-old daughter was shot down by a plane as she was running in the street."
A 75-year-old woman called Shar Maliki was trying to take three of his young cousins to shelter in a gully away from their house when they were all killed by gunfire from a plane or helicopter, he said. Shireen, 15, Ahmad Shah, 7, and Hamida, 5, were all found dead beside the gully, together with the old woman, he said. Their father, carrying his blind mother on his back, was ahead and escaped the gunfire, he said.
Maulavi Rabbani was not in the village at the time of the attack but said he had received a detailed account from his nephew who traveled to the capital, Kabul, after the attack.
The United States military spokesman, Colonel Davis, said in an e-mail message that he was unable to confirm whether American planes had attacked the village. A United Nations official in Kabul said the United States had bombed the village mistakenly, and had been trying to target the house of one of Mr. Hekmatyar's commanders called Fakirullah.
-------- africa
In $87.5 Billion Bill, $2 Million Bounty for Exiled Liberian
November 10, 2003
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/10/international/africa/10TAYL.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 9 - The United States is offering a $2 million reward for the capture of the former Liberian president, Charles G. Taylor, a Congressional aide said on Sunday.
The reward is part of the bill signed into law by President Bush last Thursday that authorizes $87.5 billion for emergency spending for Iraq and Afghanistan.
A clause in the bill allocates the reward "for an indictee of the Special Court for Sierra Leone," but it does not mention anyone by name. But John Scofield, the majority spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee, said the reference is to Mr. Taylor, who has been charged with war crimes by a United Nations-backed court in Sierra Leone for his role in the country's decade-long civil war.
Mr. Scofield said he did not know when the clause was added to the bill.
Mr. Taylor emerged as a warlord in Liberia in 1989, helping fuel a civil war that killed 150,000 people. He was elected president in 1997 and was later accused of sponsoring brutal rebel groups in Sierra Leone. United Nations officials contend that during his six years in office he impoverished his country by pilfering or diverting tens of millions of dollars from Liberia, using much of it for his personal gain.
Mr. Taylor resigned on Aug. 11 under pressure from Liberian rebels and international leaders, including Mr. Bush. Mr. Taylor has been living in exile in Nigeria, which gave him asylum in exchange for resigning.
In response to the American reward offer, Nigeria has reportedly heightened security around Mr. Taylor's refuge in the southeastern city of Calaba.
-------- business
New Military Mega-Companies: Corporate Interests or National Interests
Foreign Policy In Focus,
November 10, 2003
http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/papers/micr/companies_body.html
Figure 4
What's Good for Lockheed Martin: U.S. Security Policy
- Lockheed Martin is top Pentagon contractor, receiving $18.5 billion in DOD contracts in FY 1997.
- 49% of company $28 billion in annual sales go to the Defense Dept, 24% to business and civil govt, 21% to international purchasers, and 6% to NASA (97).
- Operates facilities in 447 cities an 45 states in the U.S., and in 56 nations and territories around the world (97).
- 32nd largest industrial corporation in the U.S. (97).
Source: Lockheed Martin
In the 1950s, when General Motors was the nation's top automaker and its CEO, Charles Wilson, was tapped to be President Eisenhower's Secretary of Defense, Wilson responded to critics who were concerned that he and his company had too much power by saying "what's good for General Motors is good for America." Today, the nation's top weapons maker is Lockheed Martin, which was created by merging Lockheed with Martin Marietta, Loral Defense, the General Dynamics combat aircraft division, and scores of other military companies to create a $35 billion behemoth that received over $18 billion in Pentagon
contracts (see Figure 4).11 In recent years, Lockheed Martin and its allies in the weapons industry have aggressively pushed for favorable treatment from the federal government in the form of special subsidies, lucrative contracts for big-ticket weapons systems, and wholesale changes in U.S. policies on arms sales and military technology transfers. Given the tremendous growth of these military conglomerates, one way to look at the development of U.S. security policy as we approach the 21st century is to echo the question that critics raised about General Motors in the 1950s: Is what's good for Lockheed Martin good for America?
In gauging the power and influence of our new, "improved" military-industrial complex, it is instructive to look at how the military merger boom came about in the first place. Early in the Clinton administration, Defense Secretary Les Aspin and Undersecretary of Defense William Perry decided to encourage mergers of defense firms. First, at a meeting that Lockheed Martin's Norman Augustine refers to as the "last supper," Perry bluntly told industry executives that the Pentagon would not be ordering enough ships, planes, and tanks to support the number of major military contractors that had been sustained by the Reagan military buildup of the 1980s.12 Perry's judgment reflected two realities. First, weapons procurement budgets, while still high by historical standards, were dropping significantly from the lavish levels they had reached during the Reagan years. This meant that the Pentagon budget could no longer support the same number of major contractors in the style to which they had become accustomed in the years of the Reagan military boom. And second, the Pentagon was in the process of slowing down the production lines for current-generation systems like the F-16 fighter and the M-1 tank to make room for next-generation systems like the F-22 and the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). The official rationale behind the merger movement was that it would cut overhead by reducing the number of underutilized factories in the military industry. But, as will be discussed below, companies and their allies in Congress have fiercely resisted closing weapons production lines, preferring instead to lay off workers even as industry profits hit near-record levels and industry executives earn fat bonuses and inflated salaries.
The strategy that Perry and his Pentagon colleague, John Deutch, who went on to direct the CIA during 1995/96, chose for consolidating the weapons industry was dubbed "payoffs for layoffs" by critics like Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). At the urging of then Martin Marietta CEO Norman Augustine, in the summer of 1993 Perry and Deutch signed off on a new policy under which the Pentagon would partially underwrite defense industry mergers by picking up the costs of moving equipment, dismantling factories, and providing golden parachutes for top executives (see Figure 5). In a classic example of the "revolving door" between the defense industry and the Pentagon, Perry and Deutch had to get a conflict of interest waiver from then Secretary of Defense Les Aspin before they could give the green light to the new merger subsidy policy (both men had worked as paid consultants for their old friend Norman Augustine at Martin Marietta just prior to joining the Clinton administration). Augustine himself received $8.2 million in bonus money as a result of the Lockheed/Martin Marietta merger, which was announced just three months after Perry and Deutch cleared the new merger subsidy policy. Augustine's lobbying for the merger subsidies, which has yielded his company over $855 million in taxpayer money, prompted one former Pentagon official to observe "when it comes to corporate welfare, you'd better look out for St. Norman Augustine."13
The Pentagon claims that using taxpayer money to subsidize military mergers will cut overhead and save money by, as Norman Augustine puts it, allowing companies to run "three full factories instead of six half-full factories." In reality, as research by Harvey Sapolsky of MIT has demonstrated, the Pentagon has not shut down a single major weapons production line since the end of the cold war. And even if Lockheed Martin cuts some overhead costs by closing factories and laying off workers, there is no guarantee that the same company that brought us the $600 toilet seat in the 1980s and pioneered in the arts of bribery and influence peddling in the 1970s is going to pass on its savings on overhead to U.S. taxpayers. So, while it may never provide lower weapons prices for the Pentagon, the 1990s bout of government-backed "merger mania" in the military industry has accomplished one thing: it has resulted in a slightly leaner, considerably meaner, and much more politically powerful corporate military sector. As John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists has noted, a company like Boeing, which since its absorption of McDonnell Douglas has over 250,000 employees, leaves a huge "political footprint" that gives the company immense clout on Capitol Hill. Similarly, after the Lockheed/Martin Marietta merger was consummated, Lockheed Martin put out a slick brochure that bragged openly about its "facilities in all 50 states."14
The geopolitical reach of the new defense megafirms has been reinforced by millions of dollars in campaign cash. In 1997 the top six U.S. military companies spent over $2.4 million in contributions to candidates and political parties, and Lockheed Martin was "leader of the PACs" among weapons contractors (see Figure 6). In fact, from 1991 to 1997, defense companies made more political donations than those other well-known merchants of death, the tobacco lobby, by a margin of $32.3 million to $26.9 million. In addition to these hefty campaign donations, America's six biggest defense contractors spent an astonishing $51 million on lobbying over the past two years . These lobbying funds go for items like maintaining armies of lobbyists and PR people in Washington, producing slick materials to present to Congress, and running ads touting company products in Capitol Hill publications.15
Last but not least, the consolidation of the weapons sectors gives arms companies greater leverage over the Pentagon, because the Department of Defense has so few options left when it comes to purchasing a major weapons system. In the spring of 1998, when the Pentagon awarded a $1.6 billion contract to do the so-called "systems architecture" for a National Missile Defense system (the latter day successor to Ronald Reagan's Star Wars plan), the competition pitted Boeing against a partnership called United Missile Defense, which was a teaming arrangement composed of Lockheed Martin, TRW, and Raytheon. When Boeing won the competition, TRW and Raytheon immediately switched teams and became major subcontractors for Boeing on the project. Given the fact that three of the four major players were going to have a big payday regardless of which company won the competition, how likely is it that TRW and Raytheon officials were racking their brains for innovative approaches to the problem at hand?16
Similarly, in the field of combat aircraft, Boeing is a partner with Lockheed Martin on one major system (the Air Force's F-22 stealth fighter plane) and a competitor on another (the next-generation Joint Strike Fighter). These interlocking business relationships create a climate in which it often makes more sense for the defense megafirms to team up and use their unprecedented political clout to increase the Pentagon budget pie than to compete to produce cost-effective systems for existing programs. And that's just what they've been doing. Buying Weapons That the Pentagon Never Requested
One way that firms like Lockheed Martin and Boeing fatten their bottom lines at the expense of our long-term security is by using their connections on Capitol Hill to force the Pentagon to buy weapons that weren't included in the department's original budget request. This "add-on game" is a bipartisan pursuit (see Figure 7). House Speaker Newt Gingrich kept an eye out for Lockheed Martin, which has a plant near his Marietta, Georgia, district, but House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt has been just as aggressive in seeking funds for the McDonnell Douglas division of Boeing, the largest employer in his St. Louis area district. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was a master at steering military projects to his home state of Mississippi, but Democratic Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii almost matched Lott's lobbying prowess: Inouye inserted 31 projects for his home state-worth over $258 million-into the FY 1999 Pentagon budget.17
Spreading Pentagon contracts around to the districts of powerful legislators has been a routine practice for decades, but defense budget politics have taken a unique twist in the 1990s. Since 1994, when the Republicans took control of both Houses of Congress, Congress has added billions to the Pentagon budget every year beyond what the Department of Defense requested. This is a role reversal from the Reagan years, when liberals in Congress were always trying to shave a few billion off from the President's Pentagon budget request. According to the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Congress added a total of roughly $20 billion to the Pentagon budget during Fiscal Years 1996-1998. And despite cries from the military and Pentagon budget hawks regarding the "readiness crisis" that is afflicting U.S. forces, three-quarters of this $20 billion windfall was earmarked for weapons projects that benefit major arms makers, not for maintenance, training, pay, or other items that would improve the safety and quality of life of our men and women in uniform.18
The add-on game is designed to increase the revenues of major contractors by extending the production runs of weapons systems that the Pentagon had hoped to terminate. The payback for legislators is twofold: not only do they get hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the contractors, but they also get to claim credit for high-profile, job-producing weapons projects in their districts. This self-serving process has serious costs. First, it wastes billions of dollars in taxpayer funds that could be put to more productive uses rebuilding our schools or restoring our environment. Second, it undermines our security by distorting the spending patterns within the Pentagon budget.
Take the C-130 transport plane, which is built by Lockheed Martin just outside of Newt Gingrich's Marietta, Georgia, district. Since 1978, the U.S. Air Force has requested a total of just five C-130s, but Congress has purchased 256 C-130s. This ratio of 50 planes purchased for every one requested by the Pentagon may well be a record in the annals of pork barrel politics. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has remarked that Congress has purchased so many surplus C-130s that "we could use them to house the homeless." The C-130 has been promoted over the years by everyone from former Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn (D-GA) to former National Guard and National Reserve subcommittee Chairman Sonny Montgomery (R-MS) to House Speaker Newt Gingrich to Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. The added planes are generally placed with national guard units based in the states of key members. For example, of the more than two dozen C-130s that Congress has added to the budget in recent years, more than half of them will be based at Kessler Air Force Base in Trent Lott's home state of Mississippi.19
The C-130 add-on is an example of "the waste that keeps on wasting." For one thing, Congress has been buying them at such a rapid clip that since 1991 the Air Force has been forced to retire 13 perfectly usable C-130Es with more than a dozen years of useful life left. Secondly, because Congress doesn't budget funds to operate the added C-130s, the Pentagon will have to come up with over $1 billion to maintain the unrequested C-130s over the next six years, funds that may have to deplete allocations for pay, or training, or other so-called "readiness accounts" of the sort that the Joint Chiefs of Staff have been claiming are underfunded.20
The C-130 is one of dozens of unnecessary items that members of Congress from key committees have been cramming into the Pentagon budget during the Clinton/Gingrich era. Even in 1998, when Congress was allegedly operating under a balanced budget agreement that was supposed to cap the military budget at roughly $270 billion, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott managed to slip in a down payment on a $1.5 billion helicopter carrier for the Marines (to be built in his hometown of Pascagoula, Mississippi) and $94 million for a spaced-based laser program that Lott hopes to have located in Mississippi. The Texas delegation slipped in a few more F-16 fighters (built at Lockheed Martin's Fort Worth, Texas, facility), and Connecticut will benefit from the addition to the Army's budget of no fewer than eight extra Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopters. In June 1998, Senator McCain released a list of $2.5 billion in unrequested projects that members of the Senate had added to the Pentagon's FY 1999 budget; McCain described the add-ons as the "worst pork" that he had witnessed in the Pentagon budget process in years. Finally, to add insult to injury, in the last-minute maneuvering between the White House and Capitol Hill on the FY 1999 federal budget, the congressional leadership added an astounding $9 billion to the Pentagon's funding, including an extra $1 billion for Star Wars research. Then, to add insult to injury, in May of 1999 Congress more than doubled President Clinton's already generous $6 billion supplemental budget request to pay for the war in Kosovo, adding billions in unrequested military funds that had nothing to do with sustaining NATO's bombing campaign and everything to do with opening up room in the budget for more military pork targeted to the states and districts of key members of Congress.21
Shaping Policy, or How to Write Your Own Ticket
The National Intelligence Community nominally consists of thirteen agencies, grouped under the National Foreign Intelligence Program (NFIP) and the Joint Military Intelligence Program (JMIP). NFIP includes those agencies or sub-agency programs that support national policy makers, i.e. the President and other national leaders. JMIP includes those agencies or sub-agency programs which support defense-wide intelligence needs, as opposed to the needs of an individual military service. Nearly all intelligence agencies and programs are within the Defense Department.
In addition, there are hundreds of free standing, relatively small programs that support tactical intelligence needs, i.e., the requirements of individual combat units. These are grouped under the Tactical Intelligence and Related Activities (TIARA). Some TIARA programs are executed by other non-intelligence agencies, which is why the aggregate agency budgets do not equal the entire intelligence budget....
Beyond joining with key legislators to insert specific items into the Pentagon budget, companies like Lockheed Martin are also actively engaged in the business of shaping U.S. foreign and military policies to meet their needs. This more sinister form of lobbying can involve changing the terms under which major contractors are reimbursed, such as the "payoffs for layoffs" subsidies for defense industry mergers that Norman Augustine engineered prior to the Lockheed/Martin Marietta merger; or eliminating royalty fees that foreign arms customers had been paying to reimburse the U.S. Treasury for the cost of weapons systems that were developed at taxpayer expense (a move that is costing the Treasury roughly $500 million per year); or creating billions of dollars of new grants and government-guaranteed loans to support the export of U.S. weaponry; or lifting longstanding arms control curbs like the ban on the sale of advanced combat aircraft to Latin America. In other instances, contractors have weighed in heavily in favor of controversial programs or policies that stand to benefit them. The most immediate examples of this kind of lobbying are the Star Wars missile defense program, which has received on average an extra $1 billion per year as a result of lobbying by Pentagon contractors and conservative research and advocacy groups, and the push for NATO expansion, which benefited from considerable time, effort, and money from companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Textron that see expanding NATO as a golden opportunity to open up a new, government-approved, tax-payer-subsidized market for their wares.
A few examples of specific industry lobbying campaigns will illustrate how the Big Three arms makers have been using their newfound political clout. Peddling Weapons Abroad: Lifting the Latin Arms Ban, Promoting NATO Expansion
As the Reagan weapons buying binge of the 1980s begin to wind down, U.S. weapons manufacturers began to focus more attention on foreign markets as a way to sustain their profit margins. Because foreign sales often involve transfers of more "mature" technologies in which the bugs have been worked out of the production process, and because the research, development, and initial production runs on the system have been paid for by U.S. taxpayers (in the form of Pentagon contracts), weapons exports are often more profitable than sales of weaponry to the Pentagon. This quest for easy profits has driven virtually all major weapons producing companies worldwide to make a concerted effort to boost their exports. U.S. companies have fared the best, cornering 40-50% of the total global arms market in the 1990s. Given this impressive market dominance, companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing have found that the only way to expand their exports beyond current levels is to change U.S. government policy. The changes they want involve either opening up new markets, by eliminating existing restrictions based on the human rights or proliferation record of potential recipient states, or seeking new government subsidies that can be used to create more "cash paying customers" (i.e., foreign clients that use U.S.-taxpayer supplied "cash" to buy U.S. weapons).
The industry's successful campaign to lift a 20-year-old ban on exports of advanced U.S. combat aircraft to Latin America is a prime example of how its lobbying machine operates. First the industry prevailed on Defense Secretary William Perry to advocate for lifting the ban within the counsels of the Clinton administration and to send U.S. Air Force F-16s to do demonstration flights at the March 1996 air show in Santiago, Chile. Prior to the show, the Pentagon had also arranged for some Brazilian generals to do test flights in F-16 planes deployed with the Puerto Rican National Guard. Then aerospace lobbyists generated letters to then Secretary of State Warren Christopher from 38 Senators and 78 members of the House of Representatives urging him to support the lifting of the ban as well. Time magazine reporter Douglas Waller described the lobbying letters as the "more million dollar letters," because the members of the House and Senate who signed onto the appeal to Christopher received a total of more than $1 million in Political Action Committee contributions from major weapons exporting companies. The industry representatives followed up by holding White House meetings with presidential counselor and confidante Mack McLarty and an aide to Vice President Gore.22
According to an account by Merrill Goozner of the Chicago Tribune, a Lockheed Martin brochure touting the Latin arms market as "a $3 to $15 billion opportunity over the next 10 years" was even slipped under the hotel door of former Costa Rican President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Oscar Arias during one of his business trips. Dr. Arias has been working with the Carter Center, the Council for a Livable World, and a coalition of DC-based public interest groups to promote a moratorium on new sales of advanced weaponry to Latin America as a first step toward promoting regional discussions on conflict prevention and force reductions. But so far, the power and money of the arms lobby has sidetracked this common sense proposal, which would do far more for the future security and stability of Latin America than would hawking expensive military hardware.23
On the issue of NATO expansion, the role of U.S. contractors was not to change administration policy but rather to reinforce a questionable policy decision. The Clinton administration decided to expand NATO for a variety of reasons, such as consolidating free market democratic reforms in Eastern and Central Europe and recruiting new allies to help keep the peace in Bosnia and other hot spots. But given the obvious downsides of expanding the alliance-such as alienating Russia, stalling further efforts at U.S.-Russian nuclear arms reductions, and initiating an open-ended, costly commitment to rearm the new member states-the Clinton administration needed allies to help it sell the NATO expansion concept to Congress and the public. By far the most important players in the pro-NATO expansion lobby were organizations of Polish, Hungarian, and Czech-Americans along with major arms manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Textron, who took an aggressive stance in support of this costly new commitment.
Corporate lobbying for NATO expansion took several forms. Most importantly, Lockheed Martin lent out one of its vice presidents, Bruce Jackson, to serve as president of the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO, a lobbying and public education group housed at the offices of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. The committee sponsored ad campaigns, congressional briefings, speeches, articles, and white papers promoting the "widest possible" expansion of NATO. Jackson claims that his role at the Committee to Expand NATO is a "hobby," but the nature of his work suggests otherwise. For example, in the summer of 1997, when the U.S. Committee sponsored a dinner at which twelve U.S. senators were briefed on NATO expansion by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Jackson invited Lockheed Martin board member Bernard Schwartz, who, coincidentally, was the largest individual donor of soft money to the Democratic Party during the 1995/96 election cycle. Schwartz's presence was a clear signal to the senators present at the dinner that supporting NATO expansion would be a good way to garner support for their campaign coffers. To reinforce that message, a few weeks after the NATO dinner Schwartz sent a $50,000 check to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
Other pro-NATO expansion activities pursued by U.S. weapons firms included financial contributions by Lockheed Martin, Textron, and McDonnell Douglas to proexpansion ethnic organizations like the American Friends of the Czech Republic and several Romanian foundations promoting that nation's candidacy for NATO membership; political funding to help pass the public referendum on NATO expansion that was held in Hungary in 1997; and all manner of wheeling and dealing in East and Central Europe in order to convince the top leadership in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania, and other NATO "wannabe" nations that buying U.S. weapons would be the best way to curry favor with the U.S. government and win its support for their NATO candidacies. It is important to note that many people in Eastern and Central Europe, including democratic leaders such as Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic and Lech Walesa of Poland, were supportive of NATO expansion based on longstanding fears of Russia, which made them a receptive audience for the NATO expansion proposal.
When the Senate finally voted on NATO expansion in early 1998, it passed by a vote of 81 to 19. But due to public concerns about the costs of future NATO expansion-by one estimate the total cost of multiple rounds of expansion could reach as much as $500 billion over 12 to 15 years, or at least $2,500 for every American household-the next round of NATO entrants may not be invited to join until 2001, not 1999 as originally planned. This delay offers critics of NATO expansion an important political opening to marshal the forces that will be needed to hold back the arms lobby and the executive branch from going further down the dangerous and costly path of expanding a cold war alliance that has no clear purpose in the post-cold war world.24
By the time that NATO held its 50th anniversary celebrations in Washington in April of 1999, the costs of expanding the alliance had been outpaced by the price tag for the air war against Yugoslavia, which has been costing roughly $1 billion per month. Restocking the U.S. and allied arsenal with Raytheon Tomahawk cruise missiles, Boeing Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM), and Lockheed Martin F-16 and F-22 fighter planes will provide billions in new contracts for the Big Three weapons makers; and if the public doesn't demand that the President and the Congress pursue a preventive strategy in the wake of the Kosovo fiasco, these billions in replacement contracts may be just the down payment on a massive feeding frenzy for the military industrial complex. The weapons manufacturers are mindful of the "benefits" of the Kosovo conflict; in fact, Lockheed Martin Vice President Bruce Jackson, who helped spearhead the NATO Expansion lobby, took to the pages of the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call to urge Congress to amply fund the war effort. Meanwhile, back at the arms bazaar, Boeing, Raytheon, and United Technologies plunked down $250,000 each to serve on the official "Host Committee" for the April 1999 NATO 50th Anniversary meetings in Washington, as a way to get the inside track on meeting the NATO foreign policy bureaucrats and defense ministers who will be making the decisions on whether to stock up on U.S. military hardware in the years to come.25
-------- iraq
Defining the resistance in Iraq - it's not foreign and it's well prepared
UN weapons inspector saw 'blueprints' for Monday's insurgency
By Scott Ritter
November 10, 2003
Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1110/p09s02-coop.html
DELMAR, N.Y. - In the Baghdad suburb of Abu Ghraib is a compound on an abandoned airstrip that once belonged to a state organization known as M-21, or the Special Operations Directorate of the Iraqi Intelligence Service. As a UN weapons inspector, I inspected this facility in June of 1996. We were looking for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). While I found no evidence of WMD, I did find an organization that specialized in the construction and employment of "improvised explosive devices" - the same IEDs that are now killing Americans daily in Iraq.
When we entered the compound, three Iraqis tried to escape over a wall with documents, but they were caught and surrendered the papers. Like reams of other documents stacked inside the buildings, these papers dealt with IEDs. I held in my hands a photocopied primer on how to conduct a roadside ambush using IEDs, and others on how to construct IEDs from conventional high explosives and military munitions. The sophisticated plans - albeit with crude drawings - showed how to take out a convoy by disguising an IED and when and where to detonate it for maximum damage.
Because WMD was what we were charged with looking for, we weren't allowed to take notes on this kind of activity. But, when we returned to our cars, we carefully reconstructed everything we saw.
What I saw - and passed on to US intelligence agencies - were what might be called the blueprints of the postwar insurgency that the US now faces in Iraq. And they implied two important facts that US authorities must understand:
• The tools and tactics killing Americans today in Iraq are those of the former regime, not imported from abroad.
• The anti-US resistance in Iraq today is Iraqi in nature, and more broadly based and deeply rooted than acknowledged.
IEDs are a terrifying phenomenon to the American soldiers patrolling Iraq. The IED has transformed combat into an anonymous ambush, a nerve-racking game of highway roulette that has every American who enters a vehicle in Iraq today (whether it be the venerable, and increasingly vulnerable, Humvee, or an armored behemoth like the M-1 Abrams tank) wondering if this ride will be their last.
Far from representing the tactics of desperate foreign terrorists, IED attacks in Iraq can be traced to the very organizations most loyal to Saddam Hussein. M-21 wasn't the only unit trained in IEDs. During an inspection of the Iraqi Intelligence Service's training academy in Baghdad in April 1997, I saw classrooms for training all Iraqi covert agents in the black art of making and using IEDs. My notes recall tables piled with mockups of mines and grenades disguised in dolls, stuffed animals, and food containers - and classrooms for training in making car bombs and recruiting proxy agents for using explosives.
That same month, I inspected another facility, located near the wealthy Al Mansur district of Baghdad, that housed a combined unit of Hussein's personal security force and the Iraqi Intelligence Service. The mission of this unit was to track the movement and activities of every Iraqi residing in that neighborhood straddling the highway that links the presidential palace with Saddam International Airport.
A chilling realization overcame us when we entered a gymnasium-sized room and saw that the floors were painted in a giant map of the neighborhood. The streets were lined with stacked metallic "in-box" trays - each stack represented a house or apartment building. A three-story building, for example, contained three levels of trays; each tray contained dossiers on each citizen living on that floor. Similar units existed in other neighborhoods, including those deemed "anti-regime."
Hussein's government was - and its remnants are - intimately familiar with every square inch of Baghdad: who was loyal, where they live, and who they associated with. (The same can be said about all of Iraq, for that matter, even the Kurdish and Shiite regions.) This information allows officials from the remnants of Hussein's intelligence and security services to hide undetected among a sympathetic population. Indeed, a standard quotient among counterinsurgency experts is that for every 100 active insurgents fielded, there must be 1,000 to 10,000 active supporters in the local population.
Though the Bush administration consistently characterizes the nature of the enemy in Iraq as "terrorist," and identifies the leading culprits as "foreign fighters," the notion of Al Qaeda or Al Ansar al Islam using Baghdad (or any urban area in Iraq) as an independent base of operations is far-fetched. To the extent that foreigners appear at all in Baghdad, it is likely only under the careful control of the pro-Hussein resistance, and even then, only to be used as an expendable weapon in the same way one would use a rocket-propelled grenade or IED.
The growing number, sophistication, and diversity of attacks on US forces suggests that the resistance is growing and becoming more organized - clear evidence that the US may be losing the struggle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.
To properly assess the nature of the anti-American resistance in Iraq today, one must remember that the majority of pro-regime forces, especially those military units most loyal to Hussein, as well as the entirety of the Iraqi intelligence and security forces, never surrendered. They simply melted away.
Despite upbeat statements from the Bush administration to the contrary, the reality is that the Hussein regime was not defeated in the traditional sense, and today shows signs of reforming to continue the struggle against the US-led occupiers in a way that plays to its own strengths, and exploits US weakness.
For political reasons, the Bush administration and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) haven't honestly confronted this reality for fear of admitting that they totally bungled their prewar assessments about what conditions they would face in postwar occupied Iraq.
The failure to realistically assess the anti-American resistance in Iraq means that "solutions" the US and CPA develop have minimal chance of success because they're derived from an inaccurate identification of the problem.
The firestorm of anti-US resistance in Iraq continues to expand - and risks growing out of control - because of the void of viable solutions. Unless measures are taken that recognize that the tattered Hussein regime remains a viable force, and unless actions are formulated accordingly, the conflict in Iraq risks consuming the US in a struggle in which there may be no prospect of a clear-cut victory and an increasing possibility of defeat.
• Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq (1991-1998), is author of 'Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America.'
----
U.S. Gen. to Iraq: Stop Attacks
Nov 10, 2003
(AP)
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-woiraqupdate1110,0,6821921.story?coll=ny-top-headlines
Fallujah, Iraq -- America's top general in the Middle East has warned community leaders the U.S. military will use stern measures unless they curb attacks against coalition forces, an Iraqi who attended the meeting said Monday.
Gen. John Abizaid, chief of the U.S. Central Command, delivered the warning to tribal sheiks and mayors in the "Sunni Triangle" city of Ramadi west of Baghdad, according to Fallujah Mayor Taha Bedawi.
"We have the capabilities and equipment," Bedawi quoted the general as saying at Saturday's meeting.
The warning was another sign of a "get tough" campaign against insurgents, who have accelerated attacks against U.S. and coalition forces in recent weeks. U.S. forces had eased off on raids during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which began in late October.
Hours after Abizaid's warning, U.S. jets dropped three 500-pound bombs in the Fallujah area after three paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division were wounded in an ambush. There was no report of casualties from the bombing.
"Neither America, nor the father of America, scares us," said one resident, Najih Latif Abbas. "Iraqi men are striking at Americans and they retaliate by terrifying our children."
Fakhri Fayadh, a 60-year-old farmer, said reprisal attacks "will only increase our spite and hatred of them. If they think that they will scare us, they are wrong. Day after day, Americans will be harmed and attacks against them will increase."
The U.S. military said insurgents struck again late Sunday, firing a rocket-propelled grenade at a military police convoy near Iskandariya, 40 miles south of Baghdad, and killing a soldier from the 18th Military Police Brigade.
The soldier was the 37th American service member to die in Iraq this month and the 151st killed in action since President Bush declared an end to major combat May 1.
U.S. officials have blamed supporters of Saddam Hussein and foreign fighters for the violence. However, a U.S. officer in Saddam's hometown, Tikrit, said Monday there were no signs foreign radicals have gained a foothold there.
Lt. Col. Steve Russell, a battalion commander with the 4th Infantry Division, said gunmen killed or captured during recent attacks against coalition forces were Saddam loyalists and "we have yet to kill or capture a foreign fighter in Tikrit."
Tensions between U.S. forces and Iraqis in the Shiite Muslim enclave, Sadr City, rose Monday after the head of the U.S.-appointed municipal council, Muhanad al-Kaadi, was shot and killed by an American soldier guarding municipal headquarters.
The U.S. military said the shooting occurred Sunday when al-Kaadi got into an argument with a soldier guarding the council headquarters. The statement blamed the altercation on "his refusal to follow instructions of the onsite security officer who was enforcing" regulations "in accordance with the rules of engagement."
An American medic administered first aid and rushed him to a military clinic where he was pronounced dead, a U.S. statement said.
Al-Kaadi, who spoke fluent English, had been trying to improve relations between the Americans and residents of the impoverished community.
In Mosul, an oil official was wounded and his son killed when assailants opened fire at their car in the northern city Monday, his family said.
Mohammed Ahmed Zibari, the Northern Oil Company's distribution manager, was headed to work when gunmen riddled his car, his brother Nawzat Zibari said. The brother speculated that Zibari was killed by "terrorists" because they believed he was cooperating with the Americans.
----
Pentagon hurries help to explode rebel bombs
November 10, 2003
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20031110-120734-8788r.htm
The Pentagon has rushed new technologies to ground troops in Iraq to help foil persistent attacks by guerrillas using homemade bombs.
The bombs, officially known as improvised explosive devices (IEDs), have killed dozens of American soldiers since the insurgency began shortly after the fall of Baghdad on April 9.
Saddam Hussein loyalists make the relatively simple explosives in guerrilla hide-outs, then place them on or near roads traveled by U.S. convoys. When the vehicles pass, Iraqis detonate the bombs from a remote location via radio signal.
Defense officials said the Pentagon began a rush program with the "highest priority" to develop technologies that can find and detonate the IEDs from a safe distance. One senior official said the technologies were introduced into Iraq in the last couple of weeks, with more to come.
"This was not a long-developed, mature program," the official said. "This was the top priority of the department. They pushed the technologies into the battlefield. They were not necessarily ready to go. They are still developing technologies."
The sources said the programs, which are being overseen by the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, involve systems that can jam a radio signal or send out signals that explode the devices.
In the case of jamming, soldiers could block radio signals as the convoy traveled from point A to point B. In the case of premature explosions, troops could send pulse bursts of radio waves along roads to detonate any hidden bombs.
"There are a number of different technology applications that are being sent over there," one defense official said.
Israel, which has been fighting an insurgency far longer than the United States, is known to have technologies that, under the right conditions, can blow up explosives on the bearer before he reaches a target.
Army Gen. Raymond Odierno commands the 4th Infantry Division, whose troops patrol some of the most dangerous streets in Iraq: the Sunni Triangle north of Baghdad, around the Saddam stronghold of Tikrit.
He told reporters two weeks ago it is not more soldiers he needs, but a way to thwart IEDs.
"I wish I could have - and we're working, I know everybody's working this - but I'd like a technology that allows me to jam and prematurely explode these improvised explosive devices that we have being used against us, where we can use those on a daily basis," Gen. Odierno said. "I would be able to clear those up, and that would reduce that threat significantly.
"We are working on that, and I know there's several people that are, but if you ask me for one technology, that's the technology that I wish we would have, because it would help us to really protect the populace, as well as our own soldiers."
One 4th Infantry raid last week illustrated what soldiers are up against. A search Nov. 4 of a house near the town of al Hadid found 33 blocks of explosives, 98 feet of detonation cord, 20 blasting caps and "abundant volatile munitions used in improvised explosive devices," the military said.
One problem in finding IEDs is not only that they are hidden, but that Iraqi roads are strewn with debris, giving bombs camouflage. The cluttered landscape makes it difficult to pick out any abnormality, such as an IED hidden under a concrete block.
Saddam loyalists and foreign guerrillas have primarily used IEDs and rocket-propelled grenades to kill Americans. The guerrillas appear to be shifting to hand-held missiles to down aircraft. A Black Hawk and CH-47 Chinook helicopter have been shot from the sky during the past week, killing 22 soldiers. More than 30 Americans have died in Iraq in the first week of November.
During the past two months, guerrillas have averaged eight attacks a day on U.S. forces, according to the military command in Baghdad.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said recently he knows there is some central financing of the guerrilla attacks because captured fighters have been found with money, and the homemade IEDs are beginning to look alike.
"A number of the explosive devices appear to be using if not the same, at least very similar, explosives," he said.
A senior military officer said just because there was no off-the-shelf technology to immediately send to Iraq does not mean there was no ongoing research. "Priorities were different 10 years ago. Antisubmarine warfare had a higher priority than IEDs," the officer said. "But we were not sitting on our hands."
----
Pentagon office to oversee Iraq contracts
November 10, 2003
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20031110-080514-6661r.htm
WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 -- Pentagon officials are working around the clock to form a new office to oversee some of the $87.5 billion slated for reconstruction in Iraq.
The new Pentagon-controlled Iraq Infrastructure Reconstruction Office, sidelines the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which have overseen most of the big reconstruction contracts in Iraq, the Wall Street Journal reported.
However, it has still not been resolved how many of the prime contracts to issue, who should be allowed to compete for them and how much authority the new contracting office should have.
The office is expected to have about 100 specialists, some of whom will be private-sector accountants working under contract, working in Baghdad.
"This will be a humongous undertaking," Steven Schooner, a government-procurement expert at George Washington University, told the Journal. "It is one thing to keep awarding contracts, but the real challenge is going to be managing them afterwards."
The Pentagon plans to hold two one-day conferences -- one Nov. 19 in Washington, the other in London two days later -- to explain the new process. Actual bids will be solicited over the next month, the Journal said.
----
U.S. Soldier Dies in Iraq; Bremer Warns of Worse to Come
November 10, 2003
By TERENCE NEILAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/10/international/middleeast/10CND-IRAQ.html
An American military policeman was killed in a rocket-propelled grenade attack, the military said, and the coalition's chief administrator in Iraq warned that stepped-up attacks by insurgents could be expected in the coming months.
The soldier, from the 18th Military Police Brigade, died at about 7 p.m. on Sunday west of Iskandariya, a town about 40 miles south of Baghdad, United States Central Command said in a statement today. No other information, including the soldier's name, was released.
His death follows a month in which insurgents have dramatically escalated attacks on coalition forces, including the downing eight days ago of a Chinook helicopter, with the loss of 15 American lives. Daily attacks are now numbering from 25 to 30 a day, not all of them fatal, a coalition spokeswoman has said. At least 150 American soldiers have died in Iraq since President Bush declared the end of major hostilities on May 1.
Much of the fighting has centered around the cities of Falluja and Tikrit, part of the so-called Sunni Triangle, home to many of Iraq's minority Sunni Muslims and a center of Baathist power under Saddam Hussein.
United States forces replied with their own attacks in the area over the weekend, bombing targets believed to house insurgents and taking the offensive in general.
"We are going to maintain a very offensive stance and take the enemy out whenever we can," Lt. Col. Steve Russell, commander of an American battalion in Tikrit, said, according to Reuters.
The warning of more attacks came from L. Paul Bremer III, the chief coalition administrator, in an interview with The Times of London that was published this morning.
"There are going to be increased attacks and increased terrorism because the terrorists can see the reconstruction dynamic is moving in our direction," Mr. Bremer was quoted as saying.
"It will be more of a problem in the months ahead unless the intelligence gets better."
"Unless our intelligence gets better, we're going to have a problem," he added, seemingly conceding that coalition forces were at a disadvantage coming to grips with the Iraqi insurgents.
But Mr. Bremer insisted that the United States and its allies would not be driven out of Iraq, echoing similar statements made by the Bush administration recently.
He said such a move could have "fatal" consequences for Iraq and the Middle East. He insisted that before leaving, the region's best democracy would be established in Iraq.
--------
Fighting a 'Battle of Perceptions'
General Says Iraqi Resisters Create False Impression of Strength
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 10, 2003; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20191-2003Nov9.html
TIKRIT, Iraq, Nov. 9 -- The commander of U.S. forces in Iraq expressed confidence that American forces were winning the war against Baathist fighters and religious extremists with a combination of combat operations, civil works and support for new Iraqi police and civil defense forces.
But Army Gen. John Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command, said in an interview Friday that he was concerned about a surge of attacks against U.S. forces that have enabled the enemy fighters to create an impression in the news media worldwide that "they are stronger than they are."
"I am concerned about it from the point of view that there's an increased level of violence," Abizaid said. "I am not concerned about it from the point of view militarily that they can defeat us. However, this is a battle of perceptions. We need to understand that they are adapting their tactics . . . and also developing stronger organizational structures, and we've got to break into these structures and destroy them."
Abizaid said that commanders throughout the country remain convinced that Baathists loyal to former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein are their main enemy, with Izzat Ibrahim, one of Hussein's most trusted aides, playing an important role in coordinating attacks.
Ibrahim, who served as vice chairman of Hussein's Revolutionary Command Council and commanded military forces in northern Iraq, was one of only three people allowed to carry a weapon in Hussein's presence, according to his U.S. military biography.
"I think he's a very important cog in the machine, and I think it's important to get him, absolutely," Abizaid said.
But Abizaid said there was also evidence suggesting that some Baathists were beginning to coordinate attacks with Iraqi religious extremists and foreign fighters, particularly in the Fallujah area.
Meeting with commanders over several days last week, Abizaid challenged them to probe the nature of these linkages and to consider why the success that U.S. forces had in May, June and July in rooting out Baathists and reducing the level of attacks had given way to an upsurge in violence.
"Why is it, after we talked about turning the corner about a month ago, that we haven't turned the corner?" Abizaid said. "We are not as far along as I would have liked to have been by November."
His division commanders assured him, however, that they were winning a difficult fight and were confident that they would continue to prevail, despite the intensifying attacks.
Abizaid urged commanders to remain highly aggressive in killing and capturing the enemy. "You want to take risks to get the mission accomplished," he said in a meeting with Maj. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, and commanders from the division's 3rd Brigade. "Don't count casualties; honor casualties. Don't be deterred by what happens in the way you pursue the enemy. You must defeat the enemy."
Abizaid also asked the commanders to consider promoting a process for reconciliation in the Sunni community, which has not coalesced around the U.S.-led occupation and the U.S.-appointed Governing Council to the extent the Americans deem necessary for the country's success.
"We need to work that, not as Americans, but with Iraqis, to move it forward so that we take some of the mystery out of the future," he said in the interview. "When we do that, I believe we'll get a lot more people -- in particular, the Arab Sunni community -- coming our way."
In the final analysis, said Abizaid, who speaks Arabic, "this is not a military battle, per se. It is going to be won on the political, economic and information playing field, because there is no military contest."
Abizaid referred repeatedly to the "five I's" -- Iraqization, internationalization, infrastructure, intelligence and information -- in lengthy meetings with commanders down to the battalion level, many of whom he knew by first name after repeated trips to Iraq since he took the helm of Central Command in July.
Of the five, he spent the most time emphasizing the importance of Iraqization: the rapid training and equipping of Iraqi police, civil defense forces, border patrols, facilities protection guards and a new Iraqi army.
Abizaid said that at times he has been dismayed by the way the war in Iraq is portrayed in the U.S. news media, which he said focus on attacks and casualties to the exclusion of the positive developments in Iraq, including new local governing structures taking root and steady progress in rehabilitating infrastructure.
Abizaid's urged his commanders, "Keep telling your story."
"Don't be afraid of the press," he said. "What we must do in this war is tell the truth. If you tell the truth, you will be okay with the American people and with your soldiers."
He also challenged the commanders to prepare diligently to turn over their operations to new forces rotating in to replace them early next year. "The mark of your professional competence will be how well you turn this over. . . . We've got to set them up for success," he said.
In the end, Abizaid said, the United States has the staying power to prevail in Iraq. "I don't feel concerned, because my leaders, the president and secretary of defense, have said, 'Stay on target, you're on target.' There's no timeline associated with it. They all know how tough this is. They have a very good understanding of it. We've just got to do a better job, all of us, in communicating to folks how hard it is and how hard it is going to be."
--------
Iraqi Warns of Delay on Constitution, Vote
Security Issues Cited as Appointed Council Presses for Provisional Government Status
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, November 10, 2003; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20192-2003Nov9.html
BAGHDAD, Nov. 9 -- Iraq's interim foreign minister, Hoshyar Zubari, said Sunday that a further deterioration in the security situation in Iraq might prevent the U.S.-appointed Governing Council from meeting timetables it will set for writing a constitution and holding elections, despite American pressure for action toward both goals.
Under a U.N. resolution, the Governing Council has a month to set its schedules. But Zubari told reporters that "those timetables depend on the security situation, and if the security deteriorates, we will not adhere to such commitments."
The comments form part of a delicate joust between the council and the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. administrators of Iraq. U.S. officials here have complained that the Governing Council has been laggard in moving the political process forward, and officials in Washington have said they were considering creating an alternative Iraqi assembly. Council members complain that failure to give them greater authority in running Iraq's affairs, particularly in security, makes it difficult to put down a rebellion in the central part of the country.
The council is pressing the occupation authority to grant it the status of a provisional government. That, they argue, would encourage Iraqis to take the fight to anti-occupation guerrillas. The council has proposed recruitment of militia members under the control of Iraqi parties as a means of building up a force capable of fighting the shadowy, violent resistance in central Iraq. "Iraqis are willing to die for an Iraqi government, not for foreigners," a senior Iraqi cabinet official said.
Such talk raises concern at the occupation authority that the council considers the constitution and elections secondary priorities. At some point, council members may conclude that the United States will create a provisional government out of desperation to pacify Iraq, one official suggested.
"After all, elections put the council out of a job. So, in their view, what's the hurry?" a senior occupation official said. "Anyway, it is unlikely that we will want to make a provisional government out of a council that has been feckless." He dismissed the notion that a council-led provisional government would make Iraqis aggressively pursue the guerrillas. "Who really thinks that Iraqis will want to die for the Governing Council?"
For the moment, there is no letup in attacks on U.S. and allied forces. Two Iraqis died Sunday when their taxi, filled with explosives, blew up near a U.S. base in Tikrit, a town that was once home to deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. In the southern city of Basra, a British soldier was wounded by a land mine. November has been the deadliest month for U.S. forces since President Bush declared an end to major combat operations in May.
Also Sunday, U.S. soldiers arrested 18 people in last month's deadly missile attack at the al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad, officials told the Associated Press. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was staying at the hotel at the time of the attack. No details on the detainees were made public.
U.S. warplanes bombed centers of resistance near Tikrit, north of Baghdad, and Fallujah, to the west, and the military said it was intensifying the battle against attackers, the AP reported.
Zubari said the council would fulfill its tasks. "The ball is now in our court and we must deliver," he said. The council is facing a Dec. 15 deadline for laying out the constitutional and electoral schedules.
He spoke Sunday at a news conference with Spain's foreign minister, Ana Palacio. Palacio appeared to side with the Governing Council in its tug of war with Washington and intervened when a reporter queried Zubari about how he could reconcile the U.S. criticisms of the Governing Council with the council's drive to form a provisional government. "We will stand by the Iraqi institutions, especially the Governing Council," she said.
The conflict over creation of a provisional government predates the war in Iraq. A year ago some delegates at a conference of exiled Iraqi political figures in London pressed for immediate establishment of an exile government. U.S. officials squashed the proposal. During the war, opposition leaders contended that Iraqis were unwilling to revolt against Hussein during the American march on Baghdad because the opposition and their militias had been sidelined.
The council, dominated by Shiite Muslims and Kurds, is proposing expanding its membership beyond 25 to give Sunni Muslims a greater voice. Sunnis formed the bulk of support for Hussein during his three-decade rule. Sunnis largely populate the unruly central region of the country.
The council has been hobbled by infighting, particularly over the role of Islam in a new Iraq, and the means of holding elections. Shiites, the country's majority, want a one-person, one-vote system put in place immediately, while minority Sunnis and Kurds are seeking to forge a system that would protect minority rights.
Occupation authority officials complain that council members are frequently absent from meetings or send delegates to sit in while leaders travel or stay at home. In Washington, U.S. officials voiced complaints last week that council members are overly concerned about their own political and economic interests at the expense of acting decisively. The Bush administration is considering replacing the U.S.-appointed body with a large, representative assembly specifically tasked to move the constitutional and elections process forward.
-------- israel / palestine
Israeli Cabinet Backs Trade of Prisoners
November 10, 2003
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/10/international/middleeast/10MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, Nov. 9 - The Israeli cabinet on Sunday narrowly approved a planned prisoner exchange with Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrillas that would free more than 400 Arabs in return for a kidnapped Israeli businessman and the remains of three soldiers.
However, it was not clear whether Hezbollah would accept Israel's terms, and the deal faces many potential snags. "There are dozens of reasons the negotiations may not come to fruition," an Israeli official said after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's cabinet voted 12 to 11 in favor of the deal.
In a separate development on Sunday, Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, and his prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, resolved their disputes over forming a cabinet, and the new government will be presented to the Palestinian parliament for approval on Wednesday.
But with Mr. Arafat retaining broad powers and control of the security forces, Israel said it doubted that the Palestinian leadership would act against militant Palestinian factions, as Israel has pressed it to do.
In Jerusalem, Israel's cabinet debated for eight hours before approving the outline of a complicated deal that has divided Israelis and has been under negotiation for months, with Germany serving as an intermediary.
Israel said it was prepared to release about 400 Palestinians and several dozen prisoners from Lebanon, Syria, Morocco, Sudan and Libya. Israel is also willing to repatriate the bodies of dozens of Lebanese fighters killed in battles with Israel.
A small number of Lebanese who killed Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon would be released, but no other prisoners with "blood on their hands" would be freed, Israel said.
This proviso would block the release of Samir Qantar, who was sentenced to life in prison for an attack in 1979 that killed an Israeli man and his 4-year-old daughter in their home. The man's wife survived by hiding in a closet, but accidentally smothered her 2-year-old daughter, trying to prevent her from crying out. The Hezbollah leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, was quoted Saturday as saying the prisoner trade would not go through unless Israel freed all 20 jailed Lebanese, including Mr. Qantar. Still, Sheik Nasrallah's own standing would be enhanced by winning the release of so many Arab prisoners, and he might want the deal to go ahead even if some demands are not met.
The proposed prisoner swap has produced anguished debates in Israel, with the government, the public and the families of the missing Israelis expressing conflicted feelings about a deal.
Mr. Sharon, who has often opposed concessions to Israel's enemies during his long career as a soldier and a politician, said he supported the plan largely because it would bring home a captive Israeli businessman, Elhanan Tannenbaum.
Mr. Tannenbaum was kidnapped in October 2000, the same month the three soldiers were seized in a clash along the Israel-Lebanon border. Israel has since declared the soldiers dead. "We must vote in favor of the deal in order to save a living Israeli," Mr. Sharon was quoted as saying by Israeli news organizations. "Leaving him there is leaving him to die."
But some Israeli critics said that Israel was paying too high a price and that they feared the agreement could encourage more kidnappings.
Israelis also expressed disappointment that the deal offers no new information on Ron Arad, an Air Force navigator shot down in 1986 in southern Lebanon. He was captured by Lebanese guerrillas, and according to Israel, later wound up in Iranian custody. Israel has had no word on his fate in over a decade.
If the deal goes through, Israel is expected to release Mustafa Dirani, a Lebanese guerrilla leader who held Mr. Arad for about 18 months after his capture. Israel, which seized Mr. Dirani in 1994, has described him as a bargaining chip.
Mr. Arad's family has spoken forcefully against the release of Mr. Dirani, saying it feels Mr. Arad is being abandoned. "From my point of view, tomorrow is the beginning of Ron's funeral, but unlike funerals here it won't last an hour or two," Mr. Arad's wife, Tami Arad, told Israeli radio. "It will last another 17 years."
But Haim Avraham, father of a missing soldier, said he supported the proposal. "I'm pleased with the government decision and I hope it will begin to bring an end to our suffering," he said.
Israeli forces spent almost two decades in a self-declared "security zone" in southern Lebanon before pulling out in May 2000. But the withdrawal was not accompanied by a peace treaty, and the border has remained tense, with Israel and Hezbollah trading fire periodically.
The Palestinians' action on Sunday, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, indicated that they were ready to establish a permanent government after two months of political limbo that followed the resignation of the previous prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, on Sept. 6.
Mr. Qurei's government is considered likely to win parliamentary confirmation on Wednesday. But in reaching an agreement, he backed down from his demand to have a strong role in running the security forces, leaving Mr. Arafat in charge.
Mr. Arafat will control the National Security Council, which will have overall responsibility for the security forces.
Israel said renewed talks on the Middle East peace plan would depend on Palestinian action against militant groups.
"Israel is ready to engage with a new Palestinian government," said Dore Gold, an adviser to Mr. Sharon. "But it will be the Palestinian performance in counterterrorism that will determine the pace and depth of those contacts."
--------
Israel Approves Hezbollah Prisoner Swap
Associated Press
Monday, November 10, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19842-2003Nov9.html
JERUSALEM, Nov. 9 -- The Israeli cabinet narrowly approved a prisoner swap with Hezbollah after eight hours of anguished debate Sunday, overriding warnings that the deal could signal weakness and encourage more kidnappings of Israelis.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon lobbied hard for the swap, which excludes Israel's most famous missing serviceman, air force navigator Ron Arad, who was shot down over Lebanon 17 years ago.
Under the deal, about 400 Palestinians and several dozen prisoners from Lebanon, Syria, Morocco, Sudan and Libya will be released in exchange for Israeli businessman Elhanan Tannenbaum and the bodies of three Israeli soldiers.
But the deal appeared to be threatened by a dispute over a demand by Hezbollah guerrillas to free Samir Kantar, a Lebanese prisoner who killed an Israeli man and his two children in 1979. Hezbollah, a Shiite Muslim movement, threatened to kidnap more Israelis if the agreement fell apart.
In the cabinet session, the ministers voted without knowing the names of most of those to be released, but were assured that they would not have been involved in killing Israelis, with the exception of several Lebanese prisoners who killed Israeli soldiers in south Lebanon.
Israel holds more than 7,000 Palestinians, most of them rounded up in military raids during the past three years of fighting. The release of prisoners is a top priority for the Palestinian Authority, but the Sharon government has freed only a few hundred, most of whom were nearing completion of their terms.
The leader of Hezbollah, Said Hasan Nasrallah, has said the deal would not go through unless Kantar was among those freed.
But Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom ruled out freedom for Kantar. "The prime minister has stated it clearly: Kantar will not be released," Shalom said.
The deal does not address the fate of Arad, who has become something of an icon -- in contrast to Tannenbaum, who was lured abroad by Hezbollah, reportedly with a promise of a lucrative business deal to help him cover gambling debts.
A member of a government committee that recently investigated Arad's disappearance said Sunday that the panel has seen documents indicating he is still alive and being held in Iran.
-------- mideast
NEWS ANALYSIS
Attacks in Saudi Arabia Aim to Rattle a Dynasty
November 10, 2003
By PATRICK E. TYLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/10/international/middleeast/10DIPL.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Nov. 9 - For years, Osama bin Laden called for the violent overthrow of the Saudi royal family for allowing American bases in the holiest land of Islam.
But with American forces gone, the bombs continue to explode - signaling that the withdrawal did not address the deeper grievances among the hardened Saudi militants who were behind the car bomb attack in Riyadh late on Saturday. Those militants are now seeking to exploit the opposition that is growing within Saudi Arabia to a dynasty long immune to political challenge.
What seems ever more apparent in the attack in Riyadh that left at least 17 people dead and 122 wounded is that it is no longer Americans or even Westerners who are the targets of terrorism in Saudi Arabia, but rather stability itself in the oil-producing kingdom, as well as the writ of the House of Saud.
With targets like government ministries and diplomatic quarters heavily guarded, the bombers may have opted for blowing up a relatively unprotected housing compound associated with Western lifestyles and foreign influence to make their point.
"I think they are after the royal family," said Wyche Fowler Jr., a former senator who was ambassador to Saudi Arabia from October 1997 to February 2001. "There is a determined fight to rattle the government if not bring it down."
A prominent Saudi who advises the royal household agreed. "This is an effort to destabilize the regime," he said. "It's against the monarchy and it is against the government."
As such, the terror campaign is merging with the domestic struggle over political reform in the conservative kingdom, where demonstrations against the royal family in Mecca last month showed a new boldness among opposition forces.
Though Saudi officials were quick to blame Al Qaeda for the bombing, it was difficult even for Saudis to distinguish where domestic political opposition ends and the goals of the current terrorist campaign begin. But the danger for the Saudi royal family, analysts said, was that the growing ranks of domestic opponents to the monarchy would adopt the violent tactics of Al Qaeda, or look to its members for leadership.
"I think that is the ultimate concern of the Saudis," Mr. Fowler said. "I think that is why they are being so thorough to uncover these cells and eliminate them."
The threat to the royal family has mobilized security forces who have used increasingly aggressive tactics and firepower during the summer to break up terrorist plots and to seize large caches of explosives and ammunition. The tactics have shocked the public in their scale and volume.
To counter both domestic political opposition and the terrorist instinct that courses through dissident mosques, Crown Prince Abdullah, the day-to-day ruler of the royal family, has tried to accelerate some political reforms. But he is offering far less than even the most centrist opponents demand.
Last month, the government announced that elections for municipal offices would be organized next year and, more recently, the crown prince opened for television coverage the deliberations of the consultative assembly, whose members he appoints. While the steps he has taken or talked about draw derisive comments - as in: too little, too late - from Saudi dissidents, the crown prince is regarded as the most reform-minded among the sons of King Abdul Aziz bin Saud, who unified the warring tribes of the Arabia Peninsula and created the Saudi state.
The bombing in Riyadh was the second major strike in the new campaign and the largest attack since those of the mid-1990's directed at Western and American military targets. It destroyed homes in a compound inhabited mostly by expatriates from other Muslim countries, though some Westerners were among the wounded.
On May 12, a larger and more coordinated assault force set off a series of car bombs in three Riyadh housing complexes whose residents were mostly Saudi, but included American and other foreign workers. The explosions killed 34 people, including 8 Americans and 9 attackers.
"May 12 was the inevitable wake up call," said Judith Kipper, director of Middle East programs at the Council on Foreign Relations. Since then, as Ms. Kipper pointed out, Saudi security authorities have mobilized a significant campaign under the interior ministry to arrest religious figures who have preached violence and to disrupt the flow of illicit arms to people who would use them for terrorist attacks.
"It's going to take some time to dig them all out," she said.
The role of the United States in this struggle may prove to be crucial, analysts said, but the kingdom has come under assault at a time when the Bush administration's relations with Saudi Arabia have been troubled by two years of recriminations over the prominent role that some Saudis played in the Sept. 11 attacks and the Saudi money that has flowed, wittingly and unwittingly, to organizations and charities connected to terrorist groups.
Last week, President Bush admonished Saudi Arabia and Egypt to take concrete steps toward democracy in a speech widely viewed in the Arab world more as hectoring for domestic effect in the United States than constructive statesmanship abroad.
But it is also true that Mr. Bush was articulating a deeply held view among conservatives in his administration: that American power and influence, recently exercised in Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein, should be used to advance the horizons of democracy, not just to protect American national interest by securing strategic commodities, like the oil resources of the Persian Gulf.
While Crown Prince Abdullah continues to welcome American intelligence in the campaign against terrorism, it is unlikely that the Saudi ruler will want publicly stated advice or assistance on how to conduct political reform from Mr. Bush, whose bluntness lacks the subtleties to which Saudis are accustomed in foreign relations.
In Riyadh on Sunday, Richard L. Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, struck a supportive tone, one that seemed to emphasize American hope than certainty.
"We have the utmost faith," he said, "that the direction chosen for this nation by Crown Prince Abdullah, the political and economic reforms, will not be swayed by these horrible terrorists."
--------
Saudi Bombing Blamed on Al Qaeda
Officials Point to Parallels With May 12 Attacks
By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 10, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A19889-2003Nov9?language=printer
The deadly suicide bombing of a housing complex in the capital of Saudi Arabia appears to be the work of an al Qaeda terrorist cell intent on rattling the Saudi government, U.S. and Saudi authorities said yesterday.
As the death toll from the Saturday night attack rose to 17, including five children, investigators pointed to similarities to three May 12 bombings in Riyadh and to warnings gathered from intelligence sources and al Qaeda Web sites.
"I feel personally quite sure because this attack bears their hallmark," said Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, who arrived in the Saudi capital and met with Crown Prince Abdullah. "My view is these al Qaeda terrorists . . . would prefer to have many such events."
The bombing of the upscale Muhaya compound follows several months of intensified anti-terrorist activity by Saudi security forces, who have arrested more than 600 suspects and seized significant amounts of explosives and weapons. There have been two armed confrontations in the past week alone.
"When you put it all together, the picture is very clear. We are locked in a struggle with the terrorists. We have killed more al Qaeda people than any other country in the world," said a senior Saudi official, who requested anonymity. "They want to take us back to the Dark Ages."
President Bush telephoned Abdullah yesterday to offer condolences and cooperation.
The Riyadh terrorists chose a soft target when they detonated a motor vehicle loaded with explosives in the gated community, home primarily to foreign workers, particularly Arabs. Four Americans were treated at a hospital for minor wounds and released, said Amanda Batt, a State Department spokeswoman.
A U.S. Embassy spokesman in Riyadh said officials have been in contact with U.S. government personnel and citizens who had registered with U.S. authorities. All were reported safe, the official said.
The embassy and two consulates, closed Saturday because of an urgent terrorism alert, will remain shut at least through Tuesday. At that point, the embassy's status will be decided "day by day," the official said.
Meanwhile, U.S. diplomats have been instructed not to leave Riyadh's diplomatic quarter, a well-guarded section of the city. Saudi security forces increased their numbers in the quarter late last week after receiving a warning deemed credible by the Bush administration.
Armitage praised the Saudis for being "absolutely first-rate in providing security." This is a change from the immediate postmortem on the May bombings, when then-U.S. Ambassador Robert W. Jordan charged that the Saudi government failed to address threats to Americans quickly enough despite intelligence suggesting an impending attack.
Eight Americans were among the 35 people killed in the May 12 assaults on three housing complexes. Nine suicide bombers were among the dead. They dressed in Saudi national guard uniforms and opened fire on guards about midnight, then roared through the gates in vehicles packed with explosives.
Saturday's attack was quite similar, beginning shortly after midnight when gunmen opened fire on Saudi army guards protecting the Muhaya compound, located in a ravine not far from the diplomatic quarter. A residence belonging to a member of the Saudi royal family overlooks the neighborhood.
Attackers disguised as police officers soon drove to the community's gates in vehicles painted to resemble police or security vehicles, said a senior Saudi official in Riyadh, who reported that they tried to trick the guards into believing they were reinforcements sent to repel the marauders. Several explosions rocked the compound, he said.
The choice of Muhaya indicates that Islamic extremists opposed to Saudi royal rule were seeking a ready target to send a message of defiance, the Saudi official said. "It would've been much more difficult to case a compound in the middle of the city," the official said. "There are police and counter-terrorism people all over the place."
The selection of such a low-value target demonstrates "pretty poor tradecraft" and suggests a weakening of al Qaeda in the oil-fueled kingdom, said Daniel Benjamin, a terrorism specialist at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies.
"The coordination and the targeting is pretty poor by al Qaeda standards," said Benjamin, who served on President Bill Clinton's National Security Council. "We may be going through a period in which local groups that have not historically had close ties, or any ties, to al Qaeda are adopting the al Qaeda agenda without having the al Qaeda expertise."
Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Britain, blamed an "evil cult" for the attack and said the militants' goal is "the destruction of the kingdom." Prince Nayef, the Saudi interior minister, toured the bomb-damaged neighborhood and pledged to defeat Saudi Arabia's violent opponents "no matter how long the path is."
"No mercy or pity," Nayef said, "should be felt for anyone carrying out such acts."
The Saudi government, long criticized by Washington for a lackluster performance on terrorism, became more aggressive after the May 12 bombings, according to U.S. officials and analysts. The White House, deeply frustrated by the Saudi response after 15 of the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001, were identified as Saudi citizens, has welcomed the moves and dispatched counterterrorism specialists to the kingdom.
"Al Qaeda has gotten their attention," a senior U.S. intelligence official said. "They're trying hard, but it's a hard thing to do."
Osama bin Laden, who escaped U.S. capture in Afghanistan and has vowed to undermine the Saudi monarchy, called for a new wave of attacks against U.S. and Western targets in an audiotape released last month. The Saturday night bombing illustrates that the Saudi government's recent moves have not extinguished the threat.
"It suggests to me that there remains an intense desire to carry out operations now to show that the group has not been destroyed," Benjamin said. "It also demonstrates there is a large reservoir of people who may not be their first team, but who are prepared to carry out attacks."
Staff writer Dana Priest contributed to this report.
-------- space
Pushing Weapons at Home: The Star Wars lobby
Foreign Policy In Focus,
November 10, 2003
http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/papers/micr/pushing.html
One of the most amazing lobbying stories of recent times involves the work done by the Pentagon, contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, and right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Center for Security Policy (founded by former Reagan Pentagon official Frank Gaffney) to keep Ronald Reagan's Star Wars program alive-despite radical changes in the world security environment, which have rendered its original mission obsolete, and a string of uninterrupted technical failures. Fifteen years and $55 billion have gone down the drain since Ronald Reagan first gave his Star Wars speech in March 1983, and the Soviet Union, whose nuclear missiles were supposed to be the main target of Reagan's cherished missile defense system, no longer exists. Undaunted, the Star Warriors have devised a new mission for missile defenses: to protect us against attacks by "rogue states" like Iraq and North Korea, which don't even have missiles that can reach American territory. And every time a major component of Star Wars fails-such as Lockheed Martin's troubled Theater High Altitude Area Defense system (THAAD), which is zero for five in tests conducted during this decade-the Star Wars lobby in Congress shouts for more money.26
The nerve center of the Star Wars lobby is Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy (CSP), a think tank and advocacy organization that puts out roughly 200 press releases per year (under the more authoritative name of "national security decision briefs") touting missile defenses, increases in the military budget, and other stock right-wing themes. Since its inception in 1988, Gaffney's group has received over $2 million in corporate donations, mostly from companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, which are major Star Wars contractors. Gaffney's CSP also has no fewer than five Lockheed Martin executives on its board, not to mention vintage Star Warriors such as weapons physicist Edward Teller and his protégé, George Keyworth, who served as Ronald Reagan's science advisor when the Star Wars scheme was first being hatched. The Center for Security Policy also has close links to other conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and Empower America, both of which have representatives on the CSP board. During the fall of 1998, the Star Wars lobby made a concerted effort to win over one more senator to Sen. Thad Cochran's Defend America Act, which would require deployment of a National Missile Defense system. Toward that end, Empower America ran misleading radio ads in the state of Nevada in an effort to convince residents that the reluctance of their two Democratic senators, Harry Reid and Richard Bryan, to vote for a largely useless and massively expensive missile defense system meant that they were against "defending our families" from nuclear attack. In the short term, these prodigious efforts on the part of the Star Wars lobby were in vain. Due in part to a public backlash against the tactics used by special prosecutor Kenneth Starr and the Republican congressional leadership in the Lewinsky scandal, the Republicans failed to pick up a seat in the Senate in the 1998 elections, and Democratic incumbents like Harry Reid of Nevada and Barbara Boxer of California, who had been specifically criticized for opposing Star Wars, were reelected. Despite these apparent setbacks in the 1998 elections, the Star Wars lobby didn't give up; by the spring of 1999, both the Senate and the House had been persuaded to pass legislation modeled on the Cochran bill which stated that it is the policy of the United States government to deploy a National Missile Defense as soon as it is "technologically feasible." While arms control advocates like Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) tried to soften the blow by sponsoring amendments calling for the United States to continue to pursue nuclear weapons reductions with Russia, the passage of the two Star Wars resolutions were clearly a major propaganda victory for conservative missile defense boosters and their corporate sponsors.27
-------- spies
WHITE HOUSE LETTER
Black and White and Read by Precious Few
November 10, 2003
New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/10/politics/10LETT.html
WASHINGTON - People call it a lot of things: the world's most exclusive newspaper, a supersecret product of the Central Intelligence Agency and a document so sensitive that widespread dissemination would endanger lives.
"This thing can kill people," said Milton A. Bearden, who ran the C.I.A.'s war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
Whatever the definition, the document is the innocuously named President's Daily Brief, a 10- to 12-page report produced overnight by the C.I.A. In recent weeks, it has become the hottest property in Washington.
Two powerful bodies are demanding to see it: the nonpartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is trying to determine how the Bush administration reached its conclusions about unconventional weapons in Iraq. Negotiations and threats of subpoenas continued last week, but so far the White House has claimed that the P.D.B., as it is called, is off limits under executive privilege. No one remembers any White House ever giving it up.
So what, exactly, is in the P.D.B.? Who gets to read it? And why do investigators say it is essential to understanding why the Bush administration invaded Iraq, or to learning what went wrong on Sept. 11, 2001?
Here are some answers, culled from national security officials in the current and past administrations.
On the outside, the briefing is a blue three-ring loose-leaf notebook with "President's Daily Brief" stamped across the top. Inside is what the C.I.A. considers the most important information of the last 24 hours, including potential terrorist threats against the United States and the health of foreign leaders.
"If there's something new and exciting and important, it has a good chance of making the P.D.B.," said R. James Woolsey, who was President Bill Clinton's first director of central intelligence. "It's like making the front page."
The document is handed to President Bush in the Oval Office around 8 a.m. each day by a C.I.A. briefer and the agency's director, George J. Tenet. Usually three other people are present: Vice President Dick Cheney; Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser; and Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff. The three get their own copies of the briefing, as do Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Administration officials say that the publication's readership is nomore than 10 and that the C.I.A. briefers wait while the cabinet members read it. Then copies are taken back to the agency's headquarters in Langley, Va. White House officials will not say what the president does with his copy, but there are no extras floating throughout the government.
The P.D.B. is different from Mr. Bush's daily "threat assessment," a separate compilation of what United States intelligence agencies pick up about potential terrorist activity. Mr. Bush has received the threat assessment only since Sept. 11, while the P.D.B. has been around since at least the Ford administration. President Clinton liked to get the briefing in written form. Mr. Bush likes to read the P.D.B. in the company of Mr. Tenet and the agency briefer.
National security officials say the briefing distinguishes itself from other intelligence reports by better describing the methods used to gather information.
"It will be pretty explicit about sources," Mr. Woolsey said. "And you can make better judgments about intelligence if you know what the source is."
Mr. Woolsey gave a hypothetical example: "The P.D.B. would say, `We have a source in President X's household with medical training who is reasonably confident that President X has cirrhosis of the liver.' Lower level intelligence would say, `We have concerns about the health of President X.' "
But Mr. Woolsey and other past national security officials say the P.D.B. is hardly foolproof. "Intelligence is imperfect," Mr. Woolsey said. "Sometimes it's wrong, sometimes it's right, sometimes it's over, sometimes it's under. But it's the best they can do."
Another former government official who has read the P.D.B. said it was useful only if the president and his aides read other documents.
"Intelligence is primarily secrets, and it's about the secrets we got this week," the official said. "It's not about context and how it fits in with a larger picture."
The White House acknowledged last year that one P.D.B. in August 2001, the month before the terrorist attacks, referred to the possibility that Al Qaeda would hijack passenger planes.
"The real question is how explicit it was, and whether it was actionable," the former government official said. "That's why the commission wants to see it."
Or as Tim Roemer, a commission member and a former Democratic congressman, put it: "What kind of warnings did the president have on Al Qaeda? And second, what kind of information was the intelligence community putting out?" The commission has also asked for P.D.B.'s from the Clinton administration.
"If the commission is going to understand what happened on 9/11," Mr. Roemer said, "these are vitally important documents."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Patriot Act Spawns New Laws Across the Globe
By ELAINE CASSEL,
November 10, 2003
CounterPunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/cassel11102003.html
Great Britain, Canada, Australia, South Africa, to name a few of our international "friends," have enacted versions of our post-September 11 laws that curtail civil liberties in the name of fighting "terror." The USA Patriot Act, the Homeland Security Act, and dozens of Executive Orders entered by President Bush, Attorney General Ashcroft, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and even Secretary of State Colin Powell have stripped citizens and resident aliens alike of legal protections and constitutional guarantees.
The "free" world is watching and their governments, recognizing an opportunity to seize power in the name of survival, have followed suit. Canada was the first country to pass a virtual mirror of our Patriot Act, within weeks of ours. Australia and Great Britain followed shortly, and South Africa is struggling with one now. Unlike the U.S., Australia, Great Britain, and Canada, countries that did not bother to debate the merits of curtailing liberty, there is a strong movement of dissent in South Africa. Blacks, and concerned whites there, see the specter of apartheid returning under the guise of "national" security.
Just as American courts are handing the government victories right and left (on November 7, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that holding someone as a material witness forever is just fine--no charge, no attorney, just lock you up until they want to talk to you--if ever--and if you wont' talk you will be found in contempt of court and serve years in prison), the courts in Britain are upholding that country's usurpation of power.
On October 29, 2003, 10 men accused of being involved in international terrorism lost an appeal against their detention without charge or trial since 2001. The men were arrested solely on the say-so of Home Secretary David Blunkett, who alleges that they were connected to groups linked to Al-Qaeda. Most of them have been held for the past two years in high-security prisons or mental hospitals.
The 10 were interned under the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, which added to the powers contained in the Terrorism Act 2000 and came into force two months after the September 11 bombings. Sixteen foreign nationals have been held under its provisions. Under the ATCSA, non-UK nationals certified as "suspected international terrorists and national security risks" by the home secretary can be detained without charge or trial for an unlimited period. Detention can be based on secret evidence-which the detainee and their counsel cannot see, hear, or challenge.
The appeal was also heard largely in secret by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC), a panel of three judges and no jury. As a result of these Kafkaesque procedures, the names of only two of the detainees are known. One, Jamal Ajouaou, is a Moroccan citizen who has already agreed to return to his home country. The other is Palestinian asylum seeker Mahmoud Abu Rideh, a 32-year-old father of five who has lived in Britain since 1995 and is now held in Broadmoor high-security mental hospital. The remaining eight are known only by a letter of the alphabet.
None have been accused of actual crimes, but only of membership of one of the 39 organizations proscribed under the Terrorism Act. Representatives of the security services presented testimony, and the men were not allowed to know the nature of this evidence against them.
In making its verdict, SIAC operated on the assumption that the government only had to prove it had "reasonable grounds to suspect" the men were linked with terrorism. Admitting that the evidence presented would not stand up in a court of law, the judges' ruling stated that "the standard of proof is below a balance of probabilities."
The men expect to remain in prison for the rest of their lives, in a status similar to the "enemy combatant" category used in the US to intern people it does not want to try.
In another British case, the High Court upheld the practice of police stopping and searching peaceful demonstrators at an arms convention under its Terrorism Act of 2000. The court found that "The exercise and use of the power was proportionate to the gravity of the [terrorism] risk." Police routinely employ these powers in every day situations now, according to a report in the Guardian.
The U.S. plans to make the Mideast "free," according to his latest announcement of a grand imperialistic agenda. Suppression of the free world, "freedom" to the supposed "oppressed" Arabs--what do these governments really have in mind for us all?
Elaine Cassel practices law in Virginia and the District of Columbia, teachers law and psychology, and follows the Bush regime's dismantling of the Constitution at Civil Liberties Watch. She can be reached at: ecassel1@c
-------- courts
Supreme Court Takes First Case on Guantánamo Detainees
November 10, 2003
By DAVID STOUT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/10/politics/10CND-SCOT.html?hp
WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 - The Supreme Court entered a fundamental debate between individual liberty and national security today by agreeing to consider whether prisoners held by the United States since the war in Afghanistan can challenge their imprisonment in American courts.
The justices agreed to hear appeals filed on behalf of two groups of detainees at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The cases have been brought on behalf of 12 Kuwaitis, 2 British citizens and 2 Australians.
The prisoners are among more than 600 being held as suspected Taliban or Al-Qaeda members. They were swept up by American forces in Afghanistan or Pakistan in the campaign to topple the Taliban government in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on the United States.
Lower courts have held that the prisoners cannot use American courts to challenge their incarceration because the United States has no legal jurisdiction over the Navy base, which it has leased from Cuba for more than a century.
In so ruling, the courts have in effect deferred to the Bush administration on actions it has taken in the name of national security since the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, more than died at Pearl Harbor.
"Cuba - not the United States - has sovereignty over Guantánamo Bay," the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled last March, upholding a district court ruling. For that reason, the appeals court concluded, American courts are not open to the detainees. Lawyers for the detainees have asserted that the United States does have sovereignty over Guantánamo, since it controls the 45-square-mile base.
The Supreme Court will decide, probably next year, whether the District of Columbia Circuit was right. But the comments of lawyers on both sides suggest that the justices will be asked to decide something of more transcendent importance.
"In times of war, the president must be able to protect our nation from enemies who seek to harm innocent Americans," Attorney General John Ashcroft said last March in praising the circuit court conclusion.
Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson had urged the Supreme Court not to hear the Guantánamo detainees' appeal. His brief argued that the circuit court had properly interpreted a 53-year-old Supreme Court precedent to hold that "aliens detained by the military abroad" have only those rights that are "determined by the executive and the military, and not the courts." (Mr. Olson's wife, Barbara, was killed in the hijacked airliner that struck the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.)
The Center for Constitutional Rights, in New York, took a contrary position. "For over a year and a half, hundreds of people have been imprisoned in Guantánamo without charges, access to lawyers or to their families," the center's president, Michael Ratner, argued. "This lawless situation must not continue. Every imprisoned person should have the right to test the legality of their detention. It is this basic principle that has been denied to our clients and it is this denial that we want the Supreme Court to review."
The center's assistant legal director, Barbara Olshansky, said: "Never has America taken the public position that it is not bound at all by the rule of law. Such a dangerous and immoral principle should not be established now."
The cases are Rasul v. Bush, 03-334 and Al Odah v. United States, 03-343.
Lawyers on behalf of the detainees whose cases will be reviewed argued that they "are not, and have never been, members of Al Qaeda or any other terrorist group" and never plotted against the United States.
The justices also declined to take another case today, an appeal from an Islamic charity, the Illinois based Global Relief Foundation, whose assets were impounded three months after the 2001 terror attacks. The United States and other governments have frozen the assets of several groups they say assist groups like Al Qaeda.
The outcome of the Guantánamo case may not be known for many months. And it may be years before it becomes clear whether some of the measures imposed after the Sept. 11 attacks were necessary to protect the security of the United States - or if they will be regretted by later generations of Americans, as the World War II detainment of Japanese-Americans has been.
"We hope that the Supreme Court will bring an end to the legal black hole into which the Guantánamo detainees have been thrown and ensure justice for them and their families," Amnesty International said in a statement today.
-------- drug war
Afghan Poppies Sprout Again
Production Nears Record Levels, Worrying Anti-Drug Officials
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, November 10, 2003; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A19950-2003Nov9?language=printer
GHANIKHEL, Afghanistan -- At the entrance to this thriving village in Nangahar province is an old, bent metal sign that reads: "Drug abuse is the greatest evil of society. Let us save ourselves, our children and our society."
But in the surrounding fields, farmers feverishly plowing the rich dark earth for winter planting season have only one crop in mind: opium poppy. Some have already agreed to sell their future crop to smugglers from Pakistan, who are eager to front them seed and fertilizer money in return for a guaranteed low price at harvest time.
"Everyone is growing poppy now, and there's no way to stop it," said Amar Gul, 50, an illiterate farmer, rattling off the frank economic calculus that makes poppy-growing such a temptation for Afghanistan's impoverished rural communities.
Growing wheat on a half-acre of land could bring the equivalent of $70 a season, Gul explained. "That's not even enough to pay for fertilizer," he said. "If I grow poppy, I can earn about $1,230. That's enough to buy fertilizer, feed my children for the year and maybe even buy a refrigerator."
Two years ago, Afghanistan was virtually poppy-free. The country's strict Islamic militia, the Taliban, banned the flourishing crop in mid-2000, and it soon vanished from the fields. But in recent months, with deterrence efforts weak and sporadic under democratic rule, opium poppies have made a spectacular comeback, nearly reaching the record-high production levels of the 1990s.
According to a report released last month by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, Afghan poppies -- whose sap is the basis for three-fourths of the opium and heroin consumed illegally abroad -- are being grown on 197,000 acres across 28 of the country's 32 provinces. This year the country is expected to produce 3,960 tons of opium worth about $2.3 billion, which is equal to half of Afghanistan's gross domestic product.
In Nangahar, one of the nation's top two poppy-producing provinces, cultivation peaked in 1999 at 56,000 acres, plunged to just 537 acres after the ban in 2001, and climbed again to 46,000 this year. Shinwar, the district that includes Ghanikhel, seesawed from 3,692 acres in 1999 to zero in 2001 to 3,938 this year.
"There is a palpable risk that Afghanistan will again turn into a failed state, this time in the hands of drug cartels and narco-terrorists," wrote Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N. anti-drug program. If "energetic interdiction measures" are not undertaken now, he added, the country's drug cancer will "metastasize into corruption, violence and terrorism."
The farmers of Ghanikhel insist that such dire predictions are far from the mark. Poppies have been a principal crop for decades, they said, mostly produced on small family plots and sold to local traders. The big traffickers, with their violent methods and international networks, operate somewhere beyond the borders in Pakistan and elsewhere in Central Asia.
U.N. experts here agreed that despite its rapid growth, the Afghan poppy trade so far has not generated much violence or organized criminal activity. But they noted that local militia bosses and administrators in some provinces demand a substantial share of drug profits and that opium traders increasingly offer advance credit for pledges of future crops.
"There is not a lot of high-level corruption or sophisticated dealing. It's all quite loose and informal," said Adam Bouloukos, a U.N. anti-drug official in Kabul, the Afghan capital. "People load up donkeys and drive them to the border. It's a risk-free environment, and there is no need for a sophisticated network."
But he also said that many small farmers become permanently indebted to opium traders to purchase fertilizer and other agricultural needs, and security officials at road checkpoints often extort cash from truckers carrying opium.
"It's not clear where the money goes after that, but only [militia] commanders have the reach necessary to control such networks," Bouloukos said. "We don't really know who's involved, and we don't have well-established law enforcement agencies to turn to."
According to some reports, resurgent Taliban forces in southern Afghanistan have been financing their activities by growing poppies and forming alliances with local opium traders. Opium poppies were a main source of revenue for the Taliban when it held power from 1996 to 2001, and many officials say the militia's ban on poppy cultivation was largely aimed at driving up prices.
Since taking office in late 2001, the U.N.-backed government of President Hamid Karzai has made several efforts to curb poppy production and trade, but none has been effective. Last year, with financial assistance from Britain, the government promised cash and development projects to farmers in Nangahar who planted alternative crops or allowed their poppies to be destroyed.
As a result, cultivation was halted in five districts, but growers complained that most projects never materialized and some money was siphoned off by local intermediaries. Afghan anti-drug officials in Nangahar said the trouble-plagued program, which was suspended after protests by farmers' groups, only reinforced local resistance to crop eradication and substitution.
"We built one road, but that's not enough to stop opium," said Abdul Ghaus, provincial manager of the national Counter Narcotics Directorate. "We didn't put our promises in action, and the result was that those farmers who didn't grow poppy or destroyed their crop are angry and are now planning to grow it, while those who harvested are happy and planning to do it again."
The Karzai government has tried punishments as well as rewards, but its threats have paled in comparison to the lashings meted out by Taliban authorities. In Ghanikhel, provincial troops raided the local opium market last summer and arrested about 150 people, but today virtually every resident with a quarter-acre of land is planting poppies.
At an impromptu gathering of more than 100 villagers, farmers told a visiting journalist that Ghanikhel was thriving following two years of steady poppy production, with some families able to buy their first car or build houses out of concrete blocks after generations of living in mud-walled huts.
"Before, people were eating spinach, and now they are eating meat," said Safatullah, 28. "We know poppy is harmful and it is against Islam. We are not the enemies of humanity, but we have no factories, or roads, or water for other crops. Everything we have comes from poppy."
"People are very poor here. The smugglers know that and they try to take advantage," said Sardar Wali, 24, a barefoot, sweating farmer who was plowing his newly seeded poppy plot behind a team of oxen. Next to it was a patch of cotton, which Wali calculated would bring in five percent of the income he will earn from his next poppy crop.
The continued spread of poppy has alarmed the Karzai government, which fears it may damage Afghanistan's image with international aid donors, reinforce the power of regional warlords and add to the social problems of addiction and corruption.
This year the government passed a law aimed at curbing drug traffic, money laundering and narcotics abuse, but Nangahar officials said the law is useless without serious enforcement. Some residents suggested the local army commander, who recently built several large houses in Jalalabad, has been profiting from the drug boom.
Gul Karim, the provincial police chief, expressed frustration that his forces do not have license to crack down on opium trading as harshly as Taliban authorities did, and he said the only solution is to bring in foreign troops. But Faridoon Mohmand, the provincial tribal minister, warned that taking drastic action could promote terrorism and allow al Qaeda and Taliban forces to rally the public against the government.
"Growing poppy will not create violence and disorder here," he asserted. "For us it is a traditional crop, and some of our problems cannot be solved without it. The more pressure the government creates to stop it, the higher the price will rise, and the more people will be interested in growing it."
-------- homeland security
Gore Criticizes Expanded Terrorism Law
November 10, 2003
By CATE DOTY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/10/national/10GORE.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 9 - Former Vice President Al Gore called on Sunday for a repeal of the law expanding counterterrorism powers, calling it a "terrible mistake" for its effect on civil liberties.
During a speech in which he condemned President Bush's fight against terror, Mr. Gore said: "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. It is simply not true."
Speaking before a crowd of about 3,000 at Constitution Hall, across the street from the White House, Mr. Gore admonished the Bush administration for what he called "unprecedented secrecy and deception" in dealing with the Congress and the public.
But his sharpest remarks focused on how the administration was dealing with civil liberties for immigrants and foreign citizens. He said the administration needed to stop detaining American citizens indefinitely without charges. He was also critical of the treatment of immigrants, like Anser Mehmood, a Pakistani who had overstayed his visa, who was arrested less than a month after the Sept. 11 attacks and deported eight months after his detainment.
"Such a course of conduct is incompatible with American traditions and values," Mr. Gore said.
Saying the detainees at Guantánamo Bay should be given hearings, Mr. Gore asked, "If we don't provide this, how can we expect American soldiers to be treated with equal respect?" He also said President Bush should seek Congressional approval for military commissions that would replace civilian courts.
In the speech, which was sponsored by the progressive group MoveOn.org and the American Constitution Society, a liberal lawyers organization, Mr. Gore spoke with animation, wagging his finger at the audience and shaking his head when audience members yelled, "Run, Al!" imploring him to seek the presidency again.
He said President Bush had used the fight against terrorism and the war in Iraq as political bargaining tools, saying, "They have exploited public fears for partisan political gain and postured themselves as bold defenders of our country."
Congressional Democrats have repeatedly called for a softening of the antiterrorism law, the USA Patriot Act, or the repeal of parts of it. But Mr. Gore, who referred to himself as a "recovering politician," is one of the few high-profile Democrats to call for a complete elimination of the act.
"I have studied the Patriot Act and have found that along with its many excesses, it contains a few needed changes in the law," he said. "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."
--------
Gore Criticizes Bush Approach to Security
Freedoms Shouldn't Be Compromised To Fight Terror, Ex-Vice President Says
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 10, 2003; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20026-2003Nov9.html
In his second major policy speech in three months, former vice president Al Gore took aim yesterday at what he said was the Bush administration's exploitation of the terrorist attacks of 2001 to justify an undemocratic suspension of domestic freedoms and to create a government built on "secrecy and deception."
Looking energized and fit, Gore told 3,000 cheering supporters in Washington's DAR Constitution Hall -- and innumerable others who watched on C-Span and on a live Internet webcast -- that President Bush was taking the wrong approach to protecting the nation from terrorist threats.
"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," Gore said during the one-hour speech sponsored by MoveOn.org and the American Constitution Society (ACS).
"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. Its assaults on our core democratic principles have only left us less free and less secure," he said.
Gore, who described himself as "a recovering politician," urged Congress to repeal the Patriot Act, with its broad enhancements of government powers that allow federal agents to "sneak and peek" at citizens' private records; enter citizens' homes in secret; and hold citizens indefinitely without access to legal counsel or a hearing before a judge.
"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," he said.
Gore made no reference to the 2000 election in which a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on contested votes in Florida left him losing to Bush even as he won the popular vote. But Lisa Brown, ACS acting executive director, found a way to remind everyone of that decision, introducing Gore as "President, oh, nope, vice president Al Gore."
Gore harked back to eras in which Americans had been denied civil liberties at home through government actions that in retrospect were judged to be of questionable wisdom -- among them the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and the aggressive investigations of citizens by the FBI and CIA during the Vietnam War era.
In all those cases, he said, the nation managed to recover its equilibrium and "absorbed the lessons" of fear-inspired suspensions of freedoms.
But there is reason to worry, Gore said, that the Bush administration's actions may represent not just a new cycle but also the beginning of a new and lasting era of repression. For one thing, he said, "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."
For another, he added, the threat of terrorism is so open-ended that it offers Republicans a grand opportunity "to use fear as a political tool to consolidate its power and to escape any accountability for its use."
In addition to calling for a repeal and rewrite of the Patriot Act, Gore called upon the Bush administration to "immediately stop its policy of indefinitely detaining American citizens without charges," a reference to the administration's use of "enemy combatant" status to justify holding U.S. citizens.
He also demanded that foreign citizens held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, be given hearings as provided for under Article 5 of the Geneva Convention, which the United States has given captured combatants in every war, including Vietnam and the Persian Gulf War, until now.
"If we don't provide this, how can we expect American soldiers captured overseas to be treated with equal respect?" Gore asked. "We owe this to our sons and daughters who fight to defend freedom in Iraq, in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world."
--------
States to Be Scored On Crisis Readiness
CDC to Rate Response to Bioterrorism
By Lauran Neergaard
Associated Press
Monday, November 10, 2003; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19843-2003Nov9.html
The government soon will begin grading how well states are prepared for bioterrorism and other health emergencies, including how many could immediately open mass-vaccination clinics if a single case of smallpox occurred anywhere in the world.
Exactly how to measure public health preparedness is still being worked out. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hopes to test a scoring system in January and to have full-fledged evaluations underway next summer.
Just how prepared a state is may differ dramatically depending on the threat. Ten cases of smallpox in New York would require a different response than 10 cases scattered across the nation or "one case in Outer Mongolia," noted Brian Strom of the University of Pennsylvania, chairman of an Institute of Medicine committee that reviewed the CDC's plans last week. Indeed, some members questioned how many Americans would need smallpox vaccinations based on a single report from a remote locale that might not even be the right diagnosis.
But for more than a year, the CDC has told state health officials to be prepared to vaccinate all residents against smallpox within 10 days if a terrorist attack unleashed the deadly virus. In May, the CDC underscored that by telling states that a single case of smallpox anywhere in the world would trigger the opening of mass-vaccination clinics here.
If smallpox were reported abroad, the CDC would verify the diagnosis -- a process that could take three days -- even as states prepared to open inoculation clinics and took other required steps, said Joseph M. Henderson, who heads the CDC's bioterrorism preparedness effort. But because smallpox was eradicated from the wild decades ago, any new case could be caused only by terrorism -- either an intentional release or a would-be terrorist who accidentally infects himself, he said.
"Once you see it anywhere, you have to start to ramp up," he said. "We're committed to this."
More than 190,000 doses of smallpox vaccine have been distributed to states to immediately inoculate emergency workers before larger shipments from the national stockpile could arrive, he said.
Henderson praised Florida for storing some of its vaccine allotment in every county for even faster local access.
That is an example of the many things the CDC will evaluate to decide how well states are prepared for bioterrorist attacks as well as such naturally occurring health emergencies as the severe acute respiratory syndrome virus.
States are supposed to develop comprehensive programs that include ways to catch early warning signs of disease, track outbreaks, train doctors and communicate with the public.
The CDC will hire an independent group to conduct the evaluations, which in part will account for how states have spent about $3 billion in federal funds for preparedness. Low-scoring states won't lose their money, Henderson stressed. The main goal is to find gaps that need filling.
The CDC's program to encourage voluntary smallpox vaccination for several million medical and emergency personnel who would be in immediate danger in an attack remains stalled.
When President Bush announced his vaccination plan in December, administration officials had intended to immunize 450,000 medical workers and first responders. Just 38,759 people had been vaccinated as of Oct. 31. Many health workers resisted getting the shots out of concern over side effects, and few shots have been given since the war in Iraq officially ended without discovery of biological weapons.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- environment
Superfund Job, Not Quite Finished, Frustrates Town
November 10, 2003
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/10/national/10SUPE.html
KOKOMO, Ind., Nov. 6 - The worst has been removed from this industrial city's largest hazardous waste site. Barrels of chemicals have been carted away. Contaminated front yards have been stripped and covered with fresh sod. The rusty buildings where rats and homeless men took shelter have been demolished and removed.
Three years ago, a chain-link fence with barbed wire was put around the site, the former home of Continental Steel, a Kokomo manufacturer that went bankrupt in 1986. Since then, the city has been waiting for the federal government to finish the cleanup. But the money for the Superfund program, which restores the nation's worst abandoned toxic waste sites, has not kept pace.
Kokomo officials have been told for two years that the full cleanup is not being paid for and they fear that the delay will continue indefinitely. A three-inch-thick redevelopment plan sits on the shelves of the downtown library. And the city, which is trying to revitalize itself by building brick gazebos and renovating condominiums downtown, has a toxic site centrally located along one of its busiest roads.
Kokomo's Continental Steel site is only one in a big backlog of hazardous waste sites that has emerged over the last several years as Superfund dollars have been stretched thin.
Seven sites could not start final cleanup in 2002. Last year, that number rose to 10. The backlog for final cleanups is likely to grow as cleanups already in place consume a greater share of the available money, say officials at the Environmental Protection Agency. Superfund appropriations have hovered around $1.2 billion a year over the last two years, down from $1.6 billion in 1999.
While the immediate and visible hazards are gone, Kokomo residents say they still worry.
The final cleanup plan includes a full dredging of the creek beds, since the sediments of the nearby creeks are still contaminated with PCB's. An advisory says the fish in the creek are not fit to be eaten, but most of the warning signs are long gone - blown away by storms or vandalized. Many young people, who have only vague memories of the strong smells and toxic dust cast by the steel mill, fish in the creek regularly. The rock quarry is still contaminated, and the acid lagoons, once dry, fill up regularly with rainwater.
Neighbors complain about a rusty, moldy smell that they say comes from the site in the summer. Four-story black slag heaps sit between the creek and a main road.
"I feel abandoned," said Carolyn Kauble, who lives in a modest house one block away from the site. Her husband, Phillip, died this year of cancer, having lived 60 years in the neighborhood.
Before his death, Mr. Kauble, who had worked at Continental Steel, helped galvanize local and federal governments to begin cleaning up the site.
"It's been 14 years, and we haven't given up," Ms. Kauble said. "It's not completed. It's not done. It's not safe." She still keeps blue crates, stacked four and five high, with reams of her husband's documents on the Continental Steel site.
Kokomo's cleanup is delayed because federal officials do not consider pollution here severe enough to deserve high priority.
"They feel like they've taken care of the imminent threat," said Jolene Rule, a local environmental leader.
E.P.A. officials say that the lower numbers of cleanups reflect the complexity of Superfund operations. Cleanups have become more difficult, time consuming and expensive, leaving less money for the remaining cleanups to enter the final stage. Eight large sites are taking up 40 percent of the budget devoted to final cleanup.
"We just have fewer dollars to start new projects," said Marianne Horinko, an associate administrator of the E.P.A. who oversees toxic cleanup.
But money for cleanups may be tighter now that the industry-supported portion of Superfund, a trust created to clean up "orphaned" toxic sites, will essentially be depleted this year after hitting a high of almost $4.6 billion in 1996, according to recent projections by the General Accounting Office.
Now cleanup funds must come from general Congressional appropriations, competing with other domestic needs.
Environmental groups and Democratic senators have called for the reinstatement of the original corporate taxes that filled the Superfund coffers, which expired in 1995. But the Bush administration and industry have resisted, saying the taxes burden companies that do not pollute.
To clear the backlog, the administration has asked Congress for $150 million in additional funds - enough to jump-start 10 to 15 new cleanups. However, the Senate and the House have each appropriated only $30 million to $40 million of that request.
In the four generations that the hulking Continental Steel buildings stood out against Kokomo's skyline, people coped with the red soot that snowed down regularly on their houses and cars.
At one point Continental Steel, founded in 1914, employed 2,700 people in a city that currently has 46,000 residents.
But then the company went bankrupt. Instead of economic vitality, Continental Steel now symbolizes eyesores and headaches for city planners and neighbors alike. Neighbors requested that the environmental cleanup leave up one wall on the weed-covered lot, to shield the residents from the view and any blowing debris.
"They carried the ball to the 90-yard line," said John Rawlings, who lives near the site. "They have to carry it 10 more yards that are the toughest part, and they backed off."
--------
At Meetings, U.S. to Seek Support for Broad Ozone Exemptions
November 10, 2003
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/10/politics/10OZON.html?pagewanted=all&position=
The two-decade effort to eliminate chemicals that harm the ozone layer faces its most serious test in recent years this week as the Bush administration seeks international support for broad exemptions to a 2005 ban on a popular pesticide.
Many American farmers say the pesticide, methyl bromide, is vital as they try to compete with farm production in countries where fields are tended by low-paid laborers. Critics of the proposed exemptions, led by the European Union, say that substitute chemicals are already in wide use and that the American request threatens progress toward repairing the ozone layer, which shields the earth from radiation that causes cancers and other problems.
The United States and 180 other countries begin a weeklong meeting today in Nairobi to consider the methyl bromide question and other aspects of the Montreal Protocol, a 1987 treaty eliminating a host of ozone-destroying substances. Methyl bromide was added to the treaty in the first Bush administration.
The issue is widening a rift that separates Europe and the United States on a number of environmental issues, including the stringency of testing for industrial chemicals and the Kyoto Protocol, the treaty controlling emissions linked to global warming, which President Bush has rejected.
Senior American environmental, agricultural and State Department officials have been urging their counterparts around the world to support the exemptions, which, if granted this week, would cause a substantial increase in American use of the chemical after a long decline.
Industry lobbyists have gone a step further in recent weeks, seeking support from governments by contending that methyl bromide poses no significant threat and that the ozone layer is already healing.
That view is strongly disputed by many atmospheric chemists, who say that while human sources of methyl bromide are less significant than was once thought, they remain a significant destroyer of ozone. Experts almost uniformly say the damage to the ozone layer is unlikely to mend for at least 50 years.
American officials and farmers, particularly in Florida and California, say that strawberries, tomatoes and other crops cannot be affordably grown without methyl bromide's soil-sterilizing properties and that alternatives are either untested or too expensive. Other exemptions are being sought for continued use of methyl bromide in the production of products including cut flowers, smoked hams and honey.
But many countries, environmental groups and scientists say the proposed exemptions would reverse steady progress in healing the ozone layer, would discourage farmers from shifting to safer products and would encourage poorer countries to seek new loopholes or delays.
"Many farmers worldwide successfully grow crops without methyl bromide," said Margot Wallstrom, the environment commissioner for the European Union. "Substitutes are available for the majority of its uses. Methyl bromide exemptions should be agreed only where alternatives are not available and not on any other basis."
James L. Connaughton, the top environmental official in the White House, said the administration had carefully scrutinized each request for an exemption.
"We went with the essential amount of this very important substance that the United States needs to ensure safe and affordable agricultural and food products for Americans," Mr. Connaughton said.
A dozen other industrialized countries are seeking exemptions as well, including eight from the European Union. But the American requests, totaling about 10,000 tons a year, far exceed all the others, which combined add up to about 6,000 tons.
Until 1999, when the treaty started requiring industrialized countries to cut methyl bromide use, 72,000 tons was typically used worldwide each year, with about 25,000 tons of that in the United States.
The 2005 ban applies only to industrialized countries, with developing countries getting a 10-year reprieve.
Bush administration officials noted that last month a technical review panel that advises the parties to the Montreal Protocol rejected only a handful of the proposed American exemptions.
But senior European officials pointed out that the panel said it was accepting two-thirds of the American proposals on faith because there was insufficient data to determine whether such applications of the chemical were truly essential.
A bill introduced in the House on Oct. 29 by Representative George P. Radanovich, Republican of California, would authorize the Environmental Protection Agency to grant industries the methyl bromide exemptions even if the parties to the Montreal treaty rejected them. The bill is sponsored by 20 Republicans and one Democrat, most from California and Southern farm states.
David D. Doniger, who works on global atmosphere policy for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a private environmental advocacy group, said that bill would "flout our country's binding obligations under a treaty that the U.S. has ratified and legally bound itself to follow."
Mr. Radanovich replied, "The intent of the legislation is to preserve the use of the only effective and affordable pesticide available for certain crops until an alternative is developed."
Industry has aggressively lobbied Congress and foreign governments to reconsider elimination of the chemical.
One presentation given to various African governments this year by Rene Weber, a lobbyist for the American methyl bromide industry, shows a pair of satellite images of the ozone hole that forms each austral spring over Antarctica. One is from Sept. 22, 2001, and the next from exactly a year later, when the hole was far smaller. The caption reads, "The ozone hole appears to be closing."
But it does not mention that the hole grew to near record size in September and October this year, that it varies greatly from year to year and that many scientists say it shows no trend toward shrinking.
A printed copy of the presentation was provided to The New York Times by an official who attended one briefing and was upset by its conclusions. A similar presentation has been shown around Europe by MeBrom, a Belgian company that sells methyl bromide in 60 countries.
Mr. Weber did not respond to several e-mail and telephone messages.
Cris Thiers, the managing director of MeBrom, said the company saw no logic in the impending ban. Not only had the risk from methyl bromide diminished, he said, but most of the substitutes offered to it pose bigger environmental dangers.
"I want a greener world for myself and my kids and the kids after my kids," Mr. Thiers said. "I have no problem dropping a product if it's dangerous. But I do have a problem replacing it with one that is worse for the environment."
Cecil Martinez, who oversees strawberry fields on 700 acres in Oxnard, Calif., said that for five years he had experimented with alternatives to methyl bromide in small plots, but added, "None of them have really proven their worth."
Marten Barel, a Dutch consultant who develops methyl bromide substitutes in poor countries for the United Nations, said options were safe and affordable.
"For many years I used methyl bromide myself as a fumigator in the Netherlands," Mr. Barel said. "But the government decided to phase it out for safety reasons in the 1980's. We all complained bitterly, predicting it would be the end of the world for farming. But we did manage to adopt alternatives, and after a couple of years no one wanted to go back."
-------- ACTIVISTS
Greenpeace protests against new Finnish nuclear power plant
Mon Nov 10
(AFP)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1539&ncid=1539&e=19&u=/afp/20031110/sc_afp/finland_environment_031110113349
HELSINKI - Environmental activists from Greenpeace staged protests against Finnish energy group Fortum's plans to invest in the construction of a fifth nuclear reactor in Finland.
"We are protesting and advising and warning Fortum that it should not invest in this nuclear reactor," Kaisa Kosonen, a campaigner with Greenpeace Finland, told AFP.
"The people in the Nordic region don't want more nuclear power, they want alternative and renewable energy sources," she said Monday.
Fortum owns 26.6 percent of TVO, a non-profit entity that last year won parliamentary approval to build a fifth nuclear reactor in Finland, supplementing four existing power stations which were built in the 1970s.
The highly controversial plans forced the departure of the Green Party from the previous left-right coalition government in Finland.
On Monday, Fortum's employees were met by anti-nuclear slogans, leaflets and banners when they came to work at the group's headquarters outside Helsinki as well as its other main offices in Copenhagen, Oslo and Stockholm.
Activists from Greenpeace met with representatives of Fortum over the issue last Friday, when the company was warned that protests would be stepped up if the plans for the new reactor were carried out, Kosonen said.
Fortum, controlled by the Finnish state which has a 61-percent stake, is the Nordic region's second largest producer of electricity, supplying some 13 percent of total deliveries.
----
War Vigils Evolve, Continue
by James Ricci
Monday, November 10, 2003
Los Angeles Times
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1110-11.htm
Each Friday as daylight begins to dim over Glendale, a lone woman pushes an odd contraption up the sidewalk of Brand Boulevard toward the intersection of Broadway.
From a distance, it looks like a small, wheeled frigate with numerous sails sticking out at many angles. On closer inspection, it turns out to be a long pushcart laden with folded chairs and a folded table, its "sails" battered picket signs demanding, "U.S. Out of Iraq," "Support Our Troops - Bring Them Home," "Healthcare Not Warfare," and the like.
The pusher of the cart, 56-year-old retired elementary school teacher Nancy Kent, has been coming to Brand and Broadway every Friday evening for 14 months to register her opposition to the U.S. policy on Iraq. She and 74-year-old Julianne Spillman, a retired Ford production worker, first took to the street corner on Sept. 20, 2002.
That was the founding of the Glendale peace vigil, one of an estimated 40 such weekly affairs that have persevered in the Los Angeles region despite having failed to prevent the war or, so far, return the troops or capture the attention of the mass media.
"We can't afford to lose hope," Kent said, as she set the unfolded table with informational fliers.
Active weekly street corner vigils continue in widespread communities such as Santa Barbara, Mar Vista, San Pedro, West Covina and Palm Springs. Like the lighted candles they sometimes employ, the vigils have flared and flickered in the shifting winds of public sentiment.
Hard to Number
As in the rest of the country, the protests were almost exclusively spontaneous and neighborhood-based, making them difficult to quantify. But last summer a loose affiliation of local activists, called the Congress of Vigils, assembled a list of 135 then-active vigils in the region.
The vastness of Southern California, the fragmented nature of social life here and the dependence on automobile travel made the region a natural breeding ground for neighborhood demonstrations.
"It's grass-roots and really appropriate for the character of such a dispersed city," said Chris Venn, coordinator of the weekly Friday vigil at First and Gaffey streets in San Pedro. "If we tried to go to Westwood for a 5 o'clock demonstration, it would take us 21/2 hours to get there. Instead, people drive 10 minutes, and they're at the vigil, and I find that that's true across the city."
Sarah Jacobus, a writing teacher at Culver City High School and an activist in a vigil at Palms Boulevard and McLaughlin Avenue in Mar Vista, said the grass-roots nature of the vigils has given them the flavor of "neighbor-to-neighbor participatory democracy."
The numbers of vigils and participants peaked in the months shortly before and after the war began March 19. As the war unfolded with American military successes, participation fell off. Some vigils ceased altogether and others combined. "There was some sense of dejection and despair," said Lisa Lubow, a member of the Congress of Vigils steering committee. "They felt they had contributed to the deaths of Americans and Iraqi people because they hadn't stopped it."
The vigil at Ventura and Laurel Canyon boulevards in Studio City "hit 100 vigilers every Friday night for a period of months beginning in January," said Steve Fine, a fiction writer who is the coordinator of the vigil there. "We started falling off in April and that continued through the summer, although we never went away. At one time we were down to just a few people."
On a recent Friday evening, the Glendale vigil drew 35 participants at its peak shortly before 7 p.m. Demonstrators stood on the corner, or mixed with other pedestrians and marched with their picket signs across the streets in time with the traffic signals. Increasingly, their picket signs, and those found elsewhere, carry messages about domestic issues - the redirection of public funds from social services to the military, the effect on civil liberties of the Patriot Act, the suitability of President Bush for reelection.
Stretches of silence are relatively few. Much of the time, prolonged bleating of automobile horns in response to the demonstration drowns out conversation at the intersection. The spikes in public response appear to be driven by Iraq-related news developments. Fine said that when the Studio City vigil began in October 2002, about half of the motorists who responded did so supportively. As the war in Iraq drew nearer, support among those who responded was overwhelming. "Then, when the Saddam statue was pulled down, it shifted, and the attitude toward us was, 'Why are you still out here?' "
A member of a Glendale vigil protests the occupation of Iraq. The vigil is one of an estimated 40 such weekly affairs that have persevered in the Los Angeles region despite having failed to prevent the war or, so far, return the troops or capture the attention of the mass media. (Ricardo DeAratanha / LAT)
Then, the week after reports of Saddam Hussein having received nuclear material from Niger were shown to be false, "you could hardly speak to each other because there was so much honking," said Venn of the San Pedro vigil. Similarly, when Bush requested $87 billion from Congress for military operations and reconstruction in Iraq, "that was a watershed," said Alvaro Maldonado, coordinator of a year-old weekly vigil at Main Street and Garfield Avenue in Alhambra. "Then you just saw big shift in the response to the vigil."
At the Studio City vigil, Fine said, "as the president's policy began to unravel, the honks and our support have gone up again."
Interpreting horn honking is an inexact science. Vigil participants are sometimes surprised by who responds, and how. "We had a first last week when two policemen honked at our 'Honk for Peace' sign," said Venn. "We'll have pickups with American flags on their cabs honk for us. But, on the other hand, we've had the Volvo driver with two little kids in the back give us what we call 'the one-finger peace sign.' "
Peace vigil participants still regularly encounter passersby who vehemently oppose them. Venn detects a slight increase in the number of people "who just go berserk when they see us. It's just that we're still there that some people object to."
Support Varies
In West Covina, "somebody threw an egg at us recently and hit one of our people," said Bob Saylor, coordinator of a vigil at Vincent and Lake streets. "Opponents tend to be young and male, so we get a lot of, 'Bush rocks!' and 'Go, Bush!' " But the negative response is about a tenth of the positive response, even though West Covina is kind of a conservative area."
In the weeks before the war's onset, a number of the vigils, including the one in Glendale, found themselves opposed by counter-demonstrators supporting Bush and the war. Shortly after the war began, the counter-demonstrations for the most part disappeared.
A counter-demonstration has endured, however, in Studio City.
On a recent Friday evening, seven counter-demonstrators stood on the corner carrying picket signs with such messages as, "C'mon, America, Stay Strong," and "Bush Leads, Iraq is Freed," vying for horn-honks with the 35 peace demonstrators. Some motorists seemed confused as to whether the Bush supporters were in accord or disagreement with the demonstrators across the street (both groups prominently displayed American flags).
"A lot of people will flip us off, then come back see, and say, 'I'm sorry. I thought you were with them,' " said Lauren Schmitt, coordinator of the counter-demonstration.
Although there have been no untoward incidents at the corner, bad blood clearly runs between the two groups, each of which accuses the other of boorish comments and gestures.
One of the counter-demonstrators, 56-year-old businessman Bill Shriftman, wore a "God Bless America" T-shirt and expressed pronounced disdain for the people across the street. "I'm a moderate - but not when it comes to these people," he said, gesturing toward the vigil. "These people are just '60s leftovers. I think they're ignorant. I don't think they know the issues. It's their right to do it, but Saddam Hussein would have killed them for what they're doing."
Schmitt accused the peace vigil participants of "regurgitating propaganda." They failed to stop the war, she said, so they've turned their attention to stopping the occupation, "and they've failed at that."
Ultimately, the peace vigil participants have to face the question of how a small group of people standing more or less silently on a street corner in, say, Glendale, can affect decisions being made in Washington, D.C., or distant Iraq - especially if the sort of mass demonstrations that preceded the war failed to dissuade American policymakers.
Historical View
"The same could have been asked of the early Christians," said 67-year-old engineer Henry Fliegel as he handed out fliers at the Glendale vigil. "How could a small of bunch of guys at an agora in Greece change the world? The peace movement didn't stop the war in Vietnam, but after a lot of hard knocks, people began to see through American foreign policy."
One of the demonstrators' prime goals is countering television reports about Iraq, which they see as overly influenced by the Bush administration. One of the signs carried at the Glendale vigil read, "Weapons of Mass Deception: Fox News, CNN Network."
Phyllis Jackson, a 62-year-old former army nurse, took a break from patrolling Brand and Broadway with her picket sign ("No WMD? Oops!") and spoke of her powerful memories of treating returning Vietnam War casualties.
"And now it's happening all over again," she said. "Somehow we don't learn there are ways to solve things other than violence, which doesn't solve problems, ever, ever, ever. If we can just make people stop and think and not just follow the rhetoric they hear - if I can affect one person to do that, then I think it's a success."
----
Burmese Dissenter Refuses to Be Free
November 10, 2003
NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/10/international/asia/10BURM.html
JAKARTA, Indonesia, Nov. 9 - Myanmar's military junta has said that the pro-democracy activist Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is no longer under house arrest, but she is declining to take her freedom until about 30 other political prisons are released, a United Nations human rights envoy, Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, said in Yangon, the capital, on Saturday.
Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the National League for Democracy, has been under detention in one form or another for most of the past 14 years. Her most recent detention began on May 30, after she and her political followers were set upon by a paramilitary mob wielding nail-studded clubs. More than 100 were killed and dozens were imprisoned.
"She will not accept to have any privilege or any access to freedom of movement until everyone detained since May 30 has been released," Mr. Pinheiro said in releasing the information at a news conference.
--------
58 years after dropping Hiroshima bomb, Enola Gay ignites new outrage
AFP
Monday November 10, 6:54 AM
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/031109/1/3fqhs.html
Fifty-eight years after turning Hiroshima into a nuclear Hell, the US plane that dropped the first atomic bomb used in combat has detonated a fierce row over its debut at America's top museum.
Controversy is raging over plans to put the restored Enola Gay, which dropped the "Little Boy" bomb, on public display in a new wing of the world-renowned Smithsonian Institution next month.
Activists want the Smithsonian's National Air and Space museum to detail the death toll from the August 6, 1945 blast alongside the shiny, metallic Boeing B-29 Superfortress with its characteristic fishbowl window nose.
A total of 230,000 people are thought to have perished, both in the initial firestorm which consumed the Japanese city and in subsequent years from toxic radiation.
Angry survivors of the Hiroshima blast will steel themselves to come face to face with the plane when they travel to Washington when the Enola Gay goes on public display on December 15.
"They will see in all its glory, the plane that incinerated the city," said Kevin Martin, Executive Director of Peace Action.
Activists are not opposed to the aircraft going on display, but want to see it presented in the context of the raid in the dying days of World War II.
They also hope to stir debate about the tens of thousands of warheads in the current US nuclear stockpile and plans for mobile, battlefield nuclear devices.
"We don't want this just to be an argument about what happened in 1945 ... the first concern was about current US nuclear policy," Martin said.
The National Air and Space Museum says its display will reflect the fact that the Enola Gay was, in its time, the most technologically advanced aircraft in the skies.
A decision to put it on display "does not glorify or vilify the role this aircraft played in history," it said.
But the descriptive label attached to the exhibit will mention the notorious raid only in passing.
The aircraft "dropped the first atomic weapon used in combat on Hiroshima, Japan," says the label, in the only reference to its role in August 1945.
This, the museum says is consistent with the mission entrusted to it by US Congress, which is to display and preserve historic and technologically significant air and space craft.
"In the end, the Enola Gay played a decisive role in World War II," the museum said in a press release prompted by the controversy.
"It helped bring the war to an end in that after the bombing of Nagasaki, shortly after the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, surrendered unconditionally.
"But perhaps more critically, it profoundly affected our concept of major conflict and the importance of maintaining global peace."
One survivor of the blast, speaking in his home city in August, savaged the decision to put the Enola Gay on display.
"For us, the Enola Gay just equals the atomic bomb," said Sunao Tsuboi, 78.
"Displaying the plane is not only an insult to us but also glorifies the bombing," said Tsuboi, scarred by burns to the head and suffering from cancer believed to be caused by radiation exposure.
The activists, under the umbrella of the Committee for a National Discussion of Nuclear History and Current Policy on Wednesday presented the museum with a petition calling for changes in the exhibit.
Signatories include the mayor of Hiroshima Tadatoshi Akiba, author and activist Noam Chomsky and film director Oliver Stone.
Akiba has been harsly critical of President George W. Bush and in August accused Washington of worshipping nuclear weapons as "God."
This is not the first time the Enola Gay has flown into a diplomatic storm.
In 1995, portions of its fuselage, undercarriage and engines went on display in the National Air and Space museum's building on Washington's central mall.
The exhibit closed in 1998 having never shed the controversy.
The Enola Gay, which pilot Paul Tibbets named after his mother, has undergone the most extensive restoration in the museum's history.
It will be on display, in one piece for the first time in 43 years, at the Air and Space Museum's new annex near Dulles international airport in northern Virginia.
Surrounding the famous warbird will be other aircraft from World War II, including a British Hawker Hurricane, a German Focke-Wulf FW 190A-8 and a Japanese Aichi Seiran.
The Hiroshima bombing was followed by the dropping of a second atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, which killed another estimated 74,000 people.
----
Yard fury over Bush visit
By Patrick Sawer,
Evening Standard
10 November 2003
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/7602147?version=1
White House security demands covering President George Bush's controversial state visit to Britain have provoked a serious row with Scotland Yard.
American officials want a virtual three-day shutdown of central London in a bid to foil disruption of the visit by anti-war protestors. They are demanding that police ban all marches and seal off the city centre.
But senior Yard officers say the powers requested by US security chiefs would be unprecedented on British soil. While the Met wants to prevent violence, it is sensitive to accusations of trying to curtail legitimate protest.
Met officers came in for heavy criticism when banners were torn down and demonstrators prevented from coming within sight of Chinese President Jiang Zemin during his visit in 1999.
But with tens of thousands of protestors from around the UK set to join blockades and marches during the Bush trip, US officials are reportedly insisting on an "exclusion zone".
They say terrorists could use the crowds as cover to attack the President.
Secrecy surrounds his itinerary during the trip, which starts on 19 November. He will stay at Buckingham Palace and his staff want The Mall, Whitehall and part of the City closed. Besides provoking a civil liberties backlash, the Met fears such a move would cause traffic chaos and incur huge loss of business across the capital.
White House officials have already vetoed the traditional drive in an open carriage along the Mall. They fear it would make Mr Bush too vulnerable to attack or confrontations over British support for the US in Iraq.
Anti-war groups such as the Stop The War Coalition, and the Muslim Association of Britain, have made no secret of their wish to harass Mr Bush wherever he goes. But they insist they are only planning "non-violent direct action".
Met Commissioner Sir John Stevens said his force was facing "a very tough" time over the visit, which will see the biggest security operation ever mounted in Britain.
He told the Breakfast with Frost show a balance had to be struck between the President's safety and protestors' right to make their voices heard.
"We are on the highest alert that we have ever worked at," he said. "We are working two-and-a-half times harder than we did at the very height of the Irish terror campaign."
The Yard has cancelled all leave for the three-day visit and mobilised 3,800 officers for the £4million security operation.
Civil rights campaigners say they expect draconian anti-terror rules to be deployed, although Sir John has assured them marches will be allowed and they will be able to use Trafalgar Square.
But the Met and the US Secret Service have reportedly agreed "rules of engagement" allowing Bush bodyguards to shoot anyone they believe is clearly threatening the life of the President.
----
The George and Tony show could get wild
By J.F.O. MCALLISTER
Monday, November 10, 2003
http://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/11/10/timep.tea.tm/index.html
Blair is looking forward to Bush's visit to Britain next week. So are the protesters
It seemed like a great idea at the time. Two summers ago, Elizabeth II decided to invite Bush 43 for a formal state visit, the first for an American President since Woodrow Wilson called on her grandfather in 1918.
Prime Minister Tony Blair's government was behind the idea, confident that lots of royal folderol - a white-tie dinner, a ride by the Queen and the President in a horse-drawn carriage - would put a big, emotional exclamation point on the transatlantic bonds Blair has nourished.
But now, a week before Air Force One is scheduled to touch down, Bush's journey is starting to look like a cross between The Perfect Storm and Chevy Chase Goes to London.
All police vacations have been canceled so that some 4,000 officers can contain anti-Bush protests organized by the Stop the War Coalition, which mobilized a record 1 million marchers for a demonstration last February.
The group's website sports an unflattering photo of Bush, complete with instructions on how to photocopy it at 141% magnification to produce the right dimensions for an effigy. Plans call for toppling a mesh statue of Bush, Saddam style, in Trafalgar Square on November 20.
The President will be kept as far away from protesters as the Secret Service can manage - he won't join the Queen for her carriage ride after all - but as a U.S. official says, "There's a lot of fear of surprises."
Because Blair is so articulate and stalwart, Bush has always got a boost from the Prime Minister's visits to the U.S. But Bush's reciprocal gesture can only hurt Blair. The PM's approval ratings have slumped, largely because of his decision to stand with Bush on Iraq.
There aren't any weapons of mass destruction to vindicate Blair's key argument that Saddam Hussein was furiously producing them. Constant strife and death in Iraq are making the British public uneasy about Bush's competence and fearful that Britain's nearly 10,000 troops in Iraq will be killed in increasing numbers. (Twenty-three have died since Bush declared an end to major hostilities on May 1.) In a recent MORI poll of British adults, half the respondents said they wanted Blair to resign right away.
It's no wonder he has been straining to downplay Iraq in favor of domestic issues. The strategy has been helped by the fact that the British media have lately been focusing on upheavals in the Conservative Party, a lurid child murder and, last week, the strange tale of Prince Charles' denial - without disclosing the original allegation because a court injunction prohibits that - of a racy claim about him by a former aide with a history of alcoholism.
Never mind: next week all of Fleet Street will be awash with coverage of the person a U.S. diplomat ruefully dubbed "the toxic Texan," whose handling of international affairs is panned by two-thirds of Brits. White House officials know their boss is making life awkward for his First Friend. "Maybe they'll keep the lights off and pretend they're not home," quips a Bush aide.
On the contrary, Blair's solution to his p.r. problem is to offer a full-throated advocacy of close U.S.-British ties. Far from keeping Bush under wraps for fear of gaffes, Blair is encouraging him to grant interviews with lots of local media.
A trip to Blair's home constituency in the northeast is planned to showcase more of the President. "Anyone who thinks the Prime Minister is going to be apologetic about his relationship with Bush and the U.S. totally misunderstands his view of them - both personal and strategic," says a Blair aide.
But it's going to be a nerve-racking three days. "It's all thin ice," says a Foreign Office official. One element of unpredictability: Bush hates - really hates - the fuss and formality in which state visits are steeped.
The last time he dined with the Queen - in 1992 at his father's White House, wearing cowboy boots emblazoned with GOD SAVE THE QUEEN - he asked if she had any black sheep in her family. "Don't answer that!" his mother Barbara interjected, trying to avoid embarrassment. This time he's the President, the man in charge. Whatever Bush does, Blair will have to live with it.
- With reporting by John F. Dickerson/Washington and Helen Gibson/London
-------
------- OneList (submissions from subscribers)
------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!
-----------
Posted
without profit or payment for research and educational
purposes only,
in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107.