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NUCLEAR
Jack C. Grigg, a Shaper of Nuclear Navy's Systems, Is Dead at 83
Nuclear power station shut down in Russia after breakdown
Radioactive Materials Missing in U.S.
Using Baby Teeth as a Geiger Counter
BAE System's Dirty Dealings
IRAQ: Worse Could Follow, Says New Study
Iraqi Death Toll, Health Perils Assessed by Medical Group
DU shipping and transport
U.N. Atomic Agency Draws Fire Over Iran
UN agency raps Iran but says no evidence of nuclear bomb
Iran produced both uranium and plutonium - IAEA
Iran plays down its breaches of nuclear agreements as minor
Iran guilty but cooperating: UN
EU says Iran needs to follow words with action on nukes
What happens next with IAEA report on Iran
Iran Dismisses Criticism of Nuclear Program by U.N. Agency
Russia Ready to Help Iran With Nuclear Plant
U.N. Agency Reports Iran Made Small Amount of Plutonium
Iran Had Secret Nuclear Program,
CIA fears North Korea nuke
North Korea Nuclear Talks May Restart Dec 10, Report Says
Russian Jury to Hear Treason Case Against Arms Control Researcher
Feds Concerned About Dirty Bombs
French terror suspect had photos of nuclear reactor
Lawrence Livermore Lab Retains Its Name
Yucca Mountain Site Must Make Use Of Geological Safety Net
Rumsfeld Takes More Friendly Fire
Disparity in Iraq, Afghanistan War Costs Scrutinized
MILITARY
Bomb Damages U.N. Office in Afghanistan
6 Afghans Die in U.S. Raid, Reports Say
U.S., Afghan Forces Stage Offensive in Eastern Area
Asia's 14-billion-dollar naval defence market a magnet for global firms
Military warns of withdrawal
NATO peacekeepers destroy weapons in Bosnia
Iraqis want private-sector Japanese, not SDF
War killed 55,000 Iraqi civilians
Iraqi Tribes, Asked to Help G.I.'s, Say They Can't
GI Kills Head of Council in Baghdad Slum
New Office to Coordinate Iraq Contracts
Saudi Forces Detain Riyadh Bombing Suspects
Death of student on military training causes storm in Russia
Defense bill elevates debate on tech security issues
Desert Storm-era vet: Disservice done to syndrome victims
Troops Awaiting Deployment Hear of Mounting Casualties
Enola Gay Exhibit Won't Be Changed
Critics say blunt-spoken weapons expert has exaggerated
Cheney Theme of Qaeda Ties to Iraq Bombings Are Questioned by Some
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
High court to hear Guantanamo detainees' case
Justices to Hear Case of Detainees at Guantánamo
Justices to Rule on Detainees' Rights
Homeland Security chief seeks school children's help
U.S. Examining Anti - Missile Systems for Airliners
Post-9/11 Visa Rules Keep Thousands From Coming to U.S.
FBI Challenges in Probe of Iraq Bombings
ENERGY AND OTHER
Clean Energy Brings Windfall to Indian Village
Federal Lab Hosts Experimental Thin-Film Solar Cells
ACTIVISTS
Protests as nuclear waste shipment heads to German dump
German and French protesters slow shipment of nuclear waste
It doesn't always pay to plead
Thousands to Speak Out Against Terror Training at SOA
-------- NUCLEAR
Jack C. Grigg, a Shaper of Nuclear Navy's Systems, Is Dead at 83
November 11, 2003
New York Times
By WOLFGANG SAXON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/national/11GRIG.html
Jack Clifton Grigg, an electrical engineer who helped guide the Navy into the age of nuclear propulsion and the country into the realm of commercial nuclear power, died on Nov. 1 at his home in Silver Spring, Md. He was 83.
The cause was Parkinson's disease, his family said.
Mr. Grigg worked directly for Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, who was the public face of the nuclear Navy and was often called its father. But it was lesser-known experts like Mr. Grigg who safely executed the concept.
Mr. Grigg was in charge of drafting and installing instrumentation and control systems to make nuclear propulsion operational. His engineering team designed the profusion of levers and switches, panels and gauges, piping and wiring for the generators that powered the Nautilus and Seawolf submarines, the behemoths of the Nimitz carrier class, as well as electric plants on shore.
He spent 36 years with the Navy and its Bureau of Ships, now the Naval Sea Systems Command, and retired in 1978 as chief of nuclear instrumentation and control.
He accompanied Rickover to shipyards for a final inspection of electrical gear before commissioning the vessels. And he went back with him to the home ports of the rapidly growing nuclear fleet for periodic examinations of their power plants to forestall leaks or control failures at sea.
Mr. Grigg was responsible for the electrical equipment of the Shippingport Atomic Power Station near Midland, Pa. The first commercial atomic reactor, it went into operation on May 23, 1958, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower tripped the circuit from 300 miles away in the Oval Office. The plant was operated by the Duquesne Light Company for the Department of Energy until October 1982, after which it was decommissioned and decontaminated.
Jack Grigg was born and raised on a farm outside Tulia, Tex., and received a degree in electrical engineering from Texas Tech University in 1941. Initially employed by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, he joined the Navy's Bureau of Ships in 1942, working with Rickover in makeshift quarters on the grounds of the Washington Monument.
He worked in various positions designing control systems for naval vessels. In 1952 he transferred to the bureau's newly formed Nuclear Propulsion Division, in charge of design, procurement, installation and testing of all control systems for the Nautilus and the Seawolf.
Supervising large staffs of engineers and scientists, Mr. Grigg also oversaw the assembly of such systems for land-based prototype reactor plants.
After retiring from government service, he worked as a consultant for utilities, architectural and engineering firms and the Navy.
Mr. Grigg is survived by his wife of 57 years, Magdalene Mayfield Grigg; two daughters, Jeanine Lee of Potomac, Md., and Eileen Grigg of Manhattan; and one grandson.
-------- accidents and safety
Nuclear power station shut down in Russia after breakdown
MOSCOW (AFP)
Nov 11, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031111101408.ldi4o68a.html
A nuclear power station in the southern Russian town of Volgodonsk was shut down last week after an unspecified fault, the ITAR-TASS news agency reported Tuesday.
The shutdown occurred on Friday, the report said, but was not reported until Tuesday.
The station which has only one functioning nuclear reactor is located in the town of Volgodonsk in the southern Rostov region.
Nuclear energy officials were not immediately able to determine what caused the problem, with ITAR-TASS reporting that an investigation was being conducted at the scene.
There was no immediate information about any possible radiation leaks during the accident, but the report said the power supplies were not affected in the region.
----
Radioactive Materials Missing in U.S.
JOHN SOLOMON
Associated Press
Tue, Nov. 11, 2003
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/nation/7230134.htm
WASHINGTON - Despite tightened security, terrorists still have a "very significant" chance of obtaining enough radioactive ingredients to create a dirty bomb, federal investigators conclude.
This finding arises from studies that document more than 1,300 disappearances of radioactive materials in the United States over the past five years. Most have been recovered, but some losses remain unsolved.
"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," a report written by the Energy Department's Los Alamos lab concluded.
That study and three others by the General Accounting Office, reviewed by The Associated Press, cited significant holes in the nation's security net that could take years to close, even after improvements by regulators since Sept. 11, 2001.
The Los Alamos report concludes that the threat of a so-called dirty bomb that could disperse radioactive debris 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 materials 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 the need.
"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, Congress' investigative arm, 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. "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 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."
The government is undertaking its first-ever inventory of who possesses radioactive materials and how much they possess, he said.
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 August.
Two universities told the GAO about cases in which doors to rooms with nuclear materials had been found unlocked or open.
The congressional investigators found that many of the 114 universities that possess radioactive 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.
In March 1999, an industrial radiography camera containing iridium-192 was stolen from a Florida home. The camera has not been recovered despite an FBI investigation. The NRC believes the material should have degraded by now and 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 toughening federal, state and international regulatory 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
--------
Using Baby Teeth as a Geiger Counter
November 11, 2003
By ANDY NEWMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/nyregion/11TEET.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Joseph J. Mangano does not even notice the smell anymore. It hits you the moment you walk into his tiny, tidy apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, something musty and a little acrid, though not entirely unpleasant.
It is the smell of 3,000 human baby teeth and the crumbling 50-year-old envelopes that hold them, each one scribbled with a few bits of information: cuspid or molar, intact or rootless, milk-fed or breast. The teeth - some split or brown-streaked, some improbably pearly - sit in boxes inside boxes atop his bookshelf, waiting for the next phase of research to see if they contain life-threatening amounts of nuclear fallout.
Mr. Mangano runs the Radiation and Public Health Project Inc., a shoestring organization with offices mostly on his kitchen table, that has spent the last 18 years questioning the safety of nuclear power.
In 2001, the group acquired custody of thousands of baby teeth collected from America's young mostly during the 1950's and 60's for a study of the effects of atom bomb tests.
The original survey, known as the Tooth Fairy study, found many teeth with elevated levels of strontium 90, a radioactive and carcinogenic yellowish metal isotope that bonds to tooth and bone. Mr. Mangano's group is looking to track down donors and find out if levels of strontium 90 correlate with cancer in later life.
But that is only half of the Radiation and Public Health Project's mission - the less provocative half. They are also measuring strontium 90 in the teeth of modern-day children, sick and healthy, to determine the relative levels in children born or reared near nuclear power plants.
Mr. Mangano's group thinks the dual effort might show something that few people want to hear: that the nation's 100-plus nuclear power reactors, when operated under normal conditions, are giving people cancer. They say they have already found signs: disproportionate drops in infant mortality after reactors close; parallel trends in childhood cancer rates and strontium 90 levels.
"We're not trying to scare anyone," Mr. Mangano said last Friday. "We're trying to inform people."
The group's work is, to say the very least, controversial. Though members of the group have published a handful of articles in peer-reviewed journals, including Archives of Environmental Health, their credibility with the scientific establishment hovers near zero. Detractors say they obsess over amounts of radiation that are insignificant compared with the dose humans receive each day from cosmic rays, soil and other natural sources.
And their few government contracts have left a short trail of dissatisfied local officials sharply critical of their methods, their scientific objectivity and their results.
"What they do is what's popularly referred to as junk science," said Dr. Joshua Lipsman, the health commissioner in Westchester County, home of the embattled Indian Point nuclear power plant and, according to the Radiation and Public Health Project, children with the highest strontium 90 readings in the region. "We found a number of scientific errors both in measurement and process in their proposals."
Mr. Mangano, 47, who has a master's degree in public health, defends the group's work. He is not surprised to meet resistance from the military-industrial-energy-pharmaceutical-governmental complex.
"It's something that government does not do, measure radiation levels in the bodies of people living near reactors," he said. A 1991 National Cancer Institute study of disease patterns found no general increased risk of death from cancer for people living near 62 reactors. But Mr. Mangano said the study, while comprehensive, focused on disease patterns, which can have causes other than radiation, and that in any case the most recent data used in it is now 20 years old and needs to be updated.
Zdenek Hrubec, a biostatistician who worked on the 1991 study, said that while the study had its limits, it was difficult to imagine a case where reactors caused an increase in cancer that was hidden in the statistics. "You'd have to postulate that there was a deficit of smokers or industrial pollutants in the same places where there were nuclear reactors," he said.
The Radiation and Public Health Project keeps trying, and with the help of its friends, including left-leaning celebrities like Alec Baldwin and Susan Sarandon, it is surviving. Tomorrow at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, the group will announce the receipt of a $25,000 state grant to collect and analyze 50 teeth from children with cancer and compare them with the teeth of healthy children.
Gov. James E. McGreevey is scheduled to speak. Almost more encouraging, Mr. Mangano said, is that a state finance official told him on Friday that the first check was in the mail. "By Tuesday I'll know if he's telling the truth," Mr. Mangano said.
The original Tooth Fairy study goes back to the height of the Red Menace, when scientists began to complain that the government was regularly exploding atomic bombs over domestic soil - more than 100 nuclear tests were eventually done - without knowing their effects on people.
In 1959, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, including Barry Commoner, one of the founders of environmentalism, started a campaign to collect baby teeth. Each donor received a button saying "I gave my tooth to science."
Strontium 90 was chosen as a proxy for the dozens of slow-decaying radioactive compounds in nuclear fallout because it was relatively easy to test for.
The researchers determined that from 1945 to 1965, strontium 90 levels in baby teeth had risen 50-fold, a finding used in the successful push for a nuclear test ban. But no one followed up on the health of the donors, and the program was discontinued in 1970.
The Radiation and Public Health Project was founded in 1985 by Jay M. Gould, a retired statistician. The group's first tooth study, done in Suffolk County in 1999, found that strontium 90 levels had dropped steadily in the first 20 years after the nuclear test ban but had been creeping up since the mid-1980's, a finding that Mr. Mangano said has been repeated in every study they've done since then, across several states.
In 2001, a cache of 85,000 old teeth turned up in an old munitions bunker in, believe it or not, Eureka, Mo. Dr. Commoner recommended that they be given to Mr. Mangano's group for analysis. Mr. Mangano said it would cost about $50,000 to track down and study the health of 400 of the old donors. (The 82,000 teeth not in Mr. Mangano's living room are being stored upstate.)
The Radiation and Public Health Project has its teeth tested at a radiochemistry laboratory in Ontario. There they are washed, dried, ground, dissolved in nitric acid and treated with chemicals that help locate the strontium.
But John Matuszek, a retired director of the New York State Health Department's radiological sciences laboratory who was hired by Suffolk County to evaluate the Radiation and Public Health Project's research proposal there, said he found that the proposal had a host of basic scientific flaws.
Dr. Matuszek said that the proposed sample sizes - a single tooth, as opposed to the 90-tooth batches used in the St. Louis study - were too small to yield detectable amounts of strontium 90. And that the detectors they used were incapable of differentiating between strontium 90 and some naturally occurring radioactive compounds, and that the error margins they claimed were implausible.
The conclusions the group drew, Dr. Matuszek said, "have nothing to do with cancer cases."
Hari Sharma, the radiochemist the group uses, said the precautions he had taken were more than adequate to screen out false positives and other errors.
Mr. Mangano said Dr. Matuszek had been enlisted by health officials in Suffolk County who "were determined that we not receive those funds and test those teeth."
The group has its defenders. Samuel Epstein, chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition and a professor of environmental and occupational medicine at the University of Illinois, has reviewed some of Mr. Mangano's papers for journals. He called the group's research "good, careful work."
"While they were somewhat overexuberant in their initial stuff," Dr. Epstein said, "they've calmed down and I think they are producing solid scientific work that stands critical peer review."
In the eyes of Mr. Mangano's group, it is the government that has the proven credibility problem. For decades, he said, officials lied or withheld the truth about the extent of civilian exposure to nuclear tests and its health consequences. In 1997, for example, the government belatedly acknowledged that radioactive iodine from nuclear fallout caused thyroid cancer in 10,000 to 75,000 Americans.
"National security considerations are sometimes placed before health concerns," Mr. Mangano said. "These are very inflammatory comments but that's the way it is."
Matt Ahearn, the Green Party assemblyman from Bergen County who shepherded the group's $25,000 appropriation through the budget process, said the debate over their work did not bother him.
"There's corporate junk science and the people's junk science," he said. "Take your pick."
-------- britain
BAE System's Dirty Dealings
By Sasha Lilley
CorpWatch
November 11, 2003
http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=9008
It sounds like the stuff of pulp fiction: The UK's largest armaments producer running a £20 million ($33.4 million) slush fund to finance prostitutes, gambling trips, yachts, sports cars, and more for its most important clients the Saudi royal family and their intermediaries, greasing the wheels of the largest business deal in UK history. These are the accusations made last month by a former employee of weapons giant BAE Systems. And evidence has surfaced that members of the British government were aware of the bribe arrangement, but looked the other way.
BAE Systems, formerly known as British Aerospace or BAe, is one of the world's top arms producers. It manufactures warplanes, avionics, submarines, surface ships, radar, electronics, and guided weapons systems, generating annual sales of £12 billion ($20 billion) in 130 countries. The arms giant was formed as a nationalized British defense corporation in 1977, which was subsequently privatized in the early 1980s, and changed its name to BAE when British Aerospace merged with Marconi Electronic Systems in 1999.
BAE Systems' North American branch has an unusual special relationship with the Pentagon where it is treated as a domestic arms company. According to Ian Prichard of the British Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), "BAES North America appears to be virtually a separate company - even top UK executives are not privy to the more sensitive work carried out by 'their' company in the US."
For years the company has been accused of selling arms to impoverished and dictatorial regimes, polluting the environment, and has been dogged for years by allegations of corrupt dealings.
Now those allegations have exploded into the open. Revelations point to BAE's provision of enticements to the Saudis over a fifteen year period, starting in the late 1980s, using a front company Robert Lee International (RLI), to divert funds to the arms clients and their middlemen. Among other allegations, RLI procured prostitutes for visiting Saudi officials and bought houses for mistresses, while an internal BAE statement reportedly refers to "sex and bondage with Saudi princes". According to documents published by The Guardian, the British government's Serious Fraud Office (SFO) alerted the Ministry of Defense of the possible involvement of BAE's chairman Sir Richard Evans in the bribe scheme, but the Ministry of Defense did nothing.
BAE Systems' chief executive Mike Turner didn't deny the slush fund charges. At a press conference following the revelations, he stated, "They are old allegations and they are old hat. They are history." Turner added, "Everything we do is legal and that is all I am prepared to say. Whatever the law is, we are legal."
Al-Yamamah
The slush fund allegations are tied to the biggest export agreement in British history - the Al-Yamamah (The Dove) arms deals that the British government signed with the Saudi royal family. BAE, then known as British Aerospace, was to sell the Saudis 72 Tornado and 30 Hawk advanced fighter-bombers along with other tranches of military hardware.
In an unusual barter arrangement between the two governments, the Saudis were to purchase the armaments in payments of oil, over an unspecified period of time. Over the last two and a half decades, the deals have amounted to the sale of 96 Tornado Fighters and more than 100 Hawk jets and other training aircraft totaling at least £20 billion ($33.4 billion), with BAE taking in an estimated £1.5 billion a year. BAE is currently in negotiations with the Saudis for a further extension of the Al-Yamamah deal.
The first Al-Yamamah deal was signed in 1986, when the Saudis' main armaments supplier, the United States, was blocked from selling arms to their longtime ally by an historic Congressional vote. The House of Saud turned to British weapons manufacturers instead. The Saudis were happy to reduce their dependence on the US, while the UK saw the petrodollar-rich Saudis as a long term bonanza. A second deal between the two governments was signed in 1988. Some analysts believe that Al-Yamamah kept BAE afloat through the 1990s when the company was facing financial difficulties. Rotten from the Beginning
While armaments transactions are known to be fraught with bribery, British journalist and arms trade opponent Gideon Burrows states that Al-Yamamah "may be the world's most corrupt deal". And while the scandal around allegations of the BAE slush fund are particularly lurid, accusations of corruption date back to the creation of Al-Yamamah I and II, as they've come to be known.
According to former CIA operative Robert Baer much of the money that BAE registered as earnings from Al-Yamamah was earmarked from its inception for kickbacks to members of the Saudi royal family and other intermediaries. "[Al-Yamamah] was a huge commission-generating machine. British Aerospace overcharged for its hardware and spare parts, with the difference going to commissions."
The Saudis are not the only ones who may have profited from Al-Yamamah kickbacks. In 1994 MP Tam Dalyell accused the son of then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of receiving a £12 million commission from the Al-Yamamah deal, but the government declined to investigate the charges against Mark Thatcher. Less fortunate was British Defense Procurement Minister Jonathan Aiken who played a key role in setting up Al-Yamamah II. He was imprisoned in 1993 for letting the Saudis pick up his tab at the Paris Ritz.
The British government and BAE have been criticized from the start by arms watchdog groups for selling weapons to a despotic, theocratic regime. Amnesty International characterizes Saudi Arabia, the world's top arms buyer, as a major violator of human rights: "Summary, unfair and secret trials are the norm in Saudi Arabia and torture is a common practice to extract confessions from suspects. Defendants facing capital charge are invariably convicted after trials which lack the most basic standards of fairness." A 1995 Channel 4 "Dispatches" documentary revealed that BAE tried to sell electric shock batons to Saudi Arabia two years earlier, which could be used for the torture of prisoners.
Hawk Jets
If the current allegations of the Saudi slush fund weren't bad enough, BAE is in the center of another storm of controversy. This summer, BAE finally clinched a highly contentious deal to sell 66 Hawk jets to India - for which the poverty-stricken nation paid £1billion ($1.7 billion).
The agreement, which threatened to fall through a number of times, was helped along by the intervention of the British government. In 2002, in the midst of heightened tensions between India and Pakistan over Kashmir that threatened to turn into a nuclear war, British Prime Minister Tony Blair visited the two countries ostensibly on a peace-making mission. However, as the Indian media revealed, he used the visit as an opportunity to promote the sale of BAE Systems Hawk jets, as did his Foreign Secretary Geoff Hoon later in the year.
"The same time that the prime minister and the foreign secretary have been over in India trying to play a role as a peace broker in the Kashmir crisis, we've also in effect been acting as an arms broker," says Andy McLean of the London-based think tank Saferworld. "And the government has been directly pushing the sale of jets which we will know could be used both directly in Kashmir and also will be used to train Indian pilots to fly much more deadly fighter jets which could also be used in Kashmir and potentially which could be used to carry nuclear weapons."
McLean says that BAE Systems' dealings in India are not an anomaly. "The Hawk jet [has] almost become synonymous in the UK with scandal in the arms trade," he says. "It was Hawk jets that were licensed for export to Indonesia and were then found after years of protestation from human rights groups to have been used to intimate the civilian population in East Timor. This was denied by the government for years but was then actually admitted by the Indonesian armed forces."
The British government also allowed export licenses for the sale of BAE's Hawk jets to Zimbabwe, which is was later forced to revoke Zimbabwe became involved in the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. BAE has targeted other poor African countries for arms sales. "It was also British Aerospace which manufactured the military radar system that has cost the Tanzania people £28 million ($46.8 million) that could have been used on providing fresh water and vaccinations for the population there," says McLean.
Government Role
Business between BAE and the governments of impoverished countries like Indonesia, Zaire and Tanzania would not be possible without the sanctioning of the British state, which must issue export licenses for such sales to go through. Fortunately for BAE, the UK government - the world's second largest arms exporter - is a most faithful ally, promoting BAE's interests through the Ministry of Defense's Defense Export Sales Organisation (DESO), whose role is to encourage the sale of British weapons abroad.
BAE and other arms companies get further assistance from the British government's Export Credit Guarantee Department (ECGD) which underwrites the transactions between the weapons companies and potentially unreliable buyers, loaning out UK tax payers' money for the foreign purchase of British-made arms. BAE has received more Export Credit Guarantees than any other UK company in recent times.
The Blair Labour government has proved itself as steadfast a supporter of the arms industry in general, and BAE in particular, like the governments of its Conservative predecessors Margaret Thatcher and John Major - The Observer refers to BAE chairman Sir Richard Evans as "one of the few businessmen who can see Blair on request". Before its ascendancy to power, the Labour government promised to publish the conclusions of a 1992 investigation into charges of corruption by BAE in the Al-Yamamah deals by the National Audit Office (NAO). However, the audit has never been published.
The Blair government has defended its backing of the arms industry by claiming that companies like BAE Systems play a central role in the economy. Arms critic Richard Bingley and former member of CAAT disagrees. "On the face of it, the arms export business is reckoned to be quite lucrative, its worth about £5 billion to the UK Exchequer every year. However, when you take away overheads and then also look at the fact that the arms trade is subsidized by about £1 billion per year by the UK Exchequer, actually you begin to see there's no profit line by exporting arms. So literally, it is at best an industry that pays for itself." Under Fire
Despite the British government's ongoing support for BAE, pressure is mounting on the armaments giant. Adding to the embarrassment of the slush fund scandal, activist groups like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA), Oxfam, Amnesty International, and Friends of the Earth UK are putting the spotlight on BAE's role in perpetuating armed conflicts around the world.
Earlier this year, Friends of the Earth UK launched a campaign against BAE's production of depleted uranium shells which have been used by British soldiers in Iraq. Hannah Griffiths, corporate campaigner at Friends of the Earth UK, said: "We want the directors of companies like BAe to take their duties to communities and the environment as seriously as they do their duties to the company's bottom line".
The Campaign Against Arms Trade has also been targeting BAE with protests at 40 sites all across England, Wales and Scotland that belong to BAE or its subsidiaries, accusing BAE of fanning the flames of war.
Meanwhile BAE has also targeted CAAT. The Sunday Times (London) revealed in September that BAE paid a private intelligence firm £120,000 a year to infiltrate and spy on CAAT over a four year period in the 1990s. The head of the firm told BAE that she had a database containing more than 148,000 names and addresses of arms trade and peace activists, environmentalists and union members. CAAT issued a statement denouncing BAE's actions. "The alleged theft of the supporter database, by copying it, is illegal and entirely unacceptable. CAAT is considering how to pursue the allegation," it said. A New Al-Yamamah
In spite of the recent bribery revelations, BAE is intent on pressing ahead with a new Al-Yamamah deal with the Saudis, according to a statement by the Swiss investment bank UBS.
In the last decade and a half the Saudis have had difficulties holding up their end of the arms-for-oil bargain, as the price of petroleum has fluctuated and the Saudi domestic debt has continued to mushroom, while arms purchases gobble up a third of the national budget. However, recently Saudi Arabia's fortunes have been buoyed by higher oil prices, while their relationship with their other main weapons supplier has gotten chillier. "Now that the US is on the outs with the Saudis and pulling US troops out of Saudi Arabia, the Saudis are looking more to Europe for their defense needs," says analyst Frida Berrigan of the Arms Trade Resource Center in New York.
The new agreement would be to upgrade 85 Tornado fighter planes that were purchased in an earlier Al-Yamamah deal. If it goes through it would be a boost to the beleaguered weapons giant, which has been having difficulties arranging a merger with a US defense company. But it would be anything but a boon for British taxpayers, who would continue to subsidize BAE, or the Saudi populace, who would see none of the kickbacks flowing to the House of Saud -- just the further perpetuation of the royal family's corrupt rule.
Sasha Lilley is Research Coordinator/ Editor at CorpWatch and a Producer for Pacifica Radio's KPFA.
CorpWatch
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#702 Oakland, CA 94612 USA
Tel: 510-271-8080
URL: http://www.corpwatch.org Email: corpwatch@corpwatch.org
-------- depleted uranium
IRAQ: Worse Could Follow, Says New Study
Sanjay Suri,
Nov 11, 2003
(IPS)
http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=21031
LONDON - The consequences of the war on people's health may be felt for generations, says a report by the medical charity Medact.
The number of deaths and injuries during the conflict and in its aftermath have been high, but "the full effects of war on health are felt through many other less direct but potentially equally or more deadly pathways," says the report released in London Tuesday.
"The full impact of the war on health will not be known for years," the report adds.
Medact, which includes doctors and other health professionals, points to a death and injury toll that is far higher than many people imagined.
The group estimates a total of between 13,500 to 45,000 Iraqi military deaths from March 20 to May 1, with about three times as many injured. The number of Iraqi civilian deaths during this period is between 5,708 and 7,356, the report says. In the post-conflict phase, there have been between 2,049 and 2,209 deaths, the report says.
The U.S. and British toll was 172 killed during the conflict and 222 in the post-conflict period from May 2 to Oct. 20, the report says. In addition, the number of U.S. troops wounded is officially 1,927, half of them post-war, the report says, adding that the unofficial number is higher.
Besides, more than 6,000 U.S. soldiers have been evacuated due to physical or mental illness, the report says.
But unlike to coalition troops, "very few Iraqi combatants have access to adequate health or social care or long-term rehabilitation services," Medact says.
The legacy of the war continues to kill, injure and damage people in all sorts of ways, the report points out.
One direct consequence of the war is the masses of unexploded ordnance lying around. Cluster weapons, landmines and depleted uranium weapons "remain a potential health hazard for local populations years after the conflict," the report says. "Deaths and injuries from unexploded ordnance are likely to be under-reported."
The condition of a country's environment and physical infrastructure also has a significant and direct impact on its people's health, the report says. It points to the dangers from destruction of water and sanitation systems.
"Smoke from oil well fires and burning trenches caused air pollution and soil contamination," the report says. "Heavy bombing and troop movements degraded natural and agricultural ecosystems."
The study finds that "malnutrition, which results from low food intake or an unbalanced diet or both is a major determinant of poor health in Iraq."
Mental and physical health is being damaged further. "People suffering from the immediate impact of war are more susceptible to further health hazards and less able to mobilise their own resources for survival and reconstruction," the report says.
The study finds that shortages of clean water, adequate food and power lead to an increase in certain diseases that is likely to result in more deaths than caused directly by the conflict.
The short and long-term physical health effects feared include disability, infectious diseases, stillbirths, underweight newborns, diseases of malnutrition, and possibly more cancers.
The mental consequences include post-traumatic stress reaction, psychiatric illness, behavioural disturbance and developmental delays in children. "With unemployment above 60 percent, the vicious circle of ill health and poverty is reinforced," the report adds.
"Security remains the country's main health issue, both as an underlying reason for seeking medical care and in limiting access to services," Medact says in its report. "Since the war robbery, burglary, kidnapping and violence have been widespread. The U.S. has too few soldiers and only 150 of the 400 law courts are believed to be in operation."
There are a reported 15 to 20 daily attacks on coalition forces and 15 to 25 civilians shot dead in Baghdad every day, the report points out. "Since the end of the war the Baghdad morgue reports 500 excess deaths per month."
The study warns of the "less visible aspects such as disruption of individual and societal development."
The bombing tactics of "shock and awe" generated acute anxiety among Iraqi civilians and combatants "that will trigger a significant increase in common mental disorders of anxiety and mood disturbance," the report says.
"Long-term morbidity will include more suicides, greater disability, increased drug and alcohol abuse and more social and domestic violence - major obstacles to the restoration of a stable society."
The incidence of behavioural and emotional disorders is likely to be high among children and adolescents, "interacting with broader issues of moral breakdown, violence and educational failures."
Medact calls on authorities to establish a health sector based on the principle that health and health care are basic social rights. It is asking for health information systems to monitor disease patterns, and an assessment of chemical risks and contamination.
Medact says the authorities in Iraq must give social and political reconstruction the same prominence as economic reconstruction.
----
Iraqi Death Toll, Health Perils Assessed by Medical Group
by Jim Lobe
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
by OneWorld.net
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1111-10.htm
WASHINGTON -- Between 21,000 and 55,000 people have died as a result of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, according to a new report that also warned of rapidly deteriorating health conditions for those who survived.
London-based Medact, the British affiliate of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), concluded that the war's continuing impact--particularly the failure of occupation authorities to ensure security-- has resulted in a further deterioration of the Iraqi population's health status. IPPNW's U.S. affiliate, Physicians for Social Responsibility, joined in the report's release Tuesday. The report's funding was provided by Oxfam and the Polden-Puckham Charitable Foundation.
"The health of the Iraqi people is generally worse than before the war," according to an executive summary of the 12-report, which noted that the state of health in Iraq was already poor by international standards. It said women and children were particularly at risk due to the breakdown in law and order and damage to infrastructure and that women were also being affected by the emergence of religious conservatism after the war.
The report, entitled "Continuing Collateral Damage: The Health and Environmental Costs of War on Iraq 2003," is the follow-up to a pre-war study released last November that predicted at the time that between 49,000 and 261,000 people could be killed in an invasion of Iraq over three months.
The much lower estimated death toll in the seven months that followed the March 20 invasion is due primarily to the quick collapse of Iraqi military resistance and the fact that no weapons of mass destruction were used.
The report says that 172 U.S. and British combatants were killed during the war period (March 20 to May 1) and another 222 died between May 2 and October 20. It estimates the number of civilians killed during the war at between 5,708 and 7,356. From May 2 to October 20, the report estimates civilian deaths resulting from hostilities at between 2,049 and 2,209.
The major unknown, according to the report, is the number of Iraqi military deaths during the war. As few as 13,500--or as many as 45,000--soldiers and paramilitary fighters are believed to have been killed, based on extrapolations from death rates of between three and ten percent found in the units around Baghdad, as well as U.S. military estimates that 2,320 Iraqi soldiers were killed in and around Baghdad alone. In the absence of official body counts, "the final toll will probably never be known" the report concluded, noting that the Iraqi Red Crescent is currently exhuming mass graves to identify Iraqi war dead around Baghdad and elsewhere.
In addition, thousands of combatants on both sides, as well as civilians, suffered serious injuries, including amputations and mental trauma, according to the report. It noted that one source, Iraq Body Count, estimated at least 20,000 civilian injuries by July, of which 8,000 were in Baghdad alone. Deaths and injuries from unexploded ordnance have continued, and are likely to be under-reported, according to the independent Mines Advisory Group (MAG).
The report estimated the number of Iraqi military wounded at roughly three times the death toll.
The full health impact of the war, however, continues to be felt in a variety of ways that defy precise monitoring due to the lack of accurate data, the failure of occupation authorities to collect and record data, and the inability of the Iraqi health system to cope with the number of people who need treatment.
"Limited access to clean water and sanitation, poverty, malnutrition, and disruption of public services including health services continue to have a negative impact on the health of the Iraqi people," according to Dr. Sabya Farooq, the report's main author.
Environmental damage, including extensive pollution of land, sea, rivers, and the atmosphere--some of which may have spilled over to neighboring countries--is also a major concern covered by the report. Oil well fires created oil spills and toxic smoke, while military convoys disrupted the desert economy. Land mines and other ordinance have maimed people and animals and continue to pose a hazard in various parts of the country.
Particularly worrisome are the remains of some of the military debris, particularly depleted uranium used in weapons and armor, and material looted from nuclear power plant sites, much of which remains to be accounted for.
"The health and environmental consequences of the war will be felt for many years to come," said Medact president, Dr. June Crown.
The report expressed particular concern about the health of young children. While Iraq had built one of the most advanced health systems in the developing world before the first Gulf War in 1991, that war and the sanctions that followed had a disastrous impact on its performance. One in eight children under five died before their fifth birthday; one in four was chronically malnourished; a quarter of all newborns were underweight; while maternal mortality stood at 294 for every 100,000 births, roughly the same level as Peru and Bangladesh.
In the immediate aftermath of the most recent war, small-scale studies found a dramatic increase in waterborne diseases, including typhoid and cholera and a doubling of acute malnutrition or wasting--problems to which young children are particularly vulnerable.
The report makes a series of recommendations to the occupation authorities, noting that, with the influx of new resources and the end of sanctions, health services could be significantly upgraded once security is assured. But it expresses concerns about the heavy participation of for-profit companies, mostly from the U.S., that have been awarded contracts to provide services and technical aid in the health sector.
The successful post-World War II reconstruction of Europe and Japan, it notes, included substantial investment in public health systems. "On the basis of international evidence," it urges, "commercialization of health care should be avoided."
Reconstruction of the Iraqi health sector, the report recommends, should be based "on the principle that health and health care are fundamental social rights... and an important aspect of nation-building..."
----
DU shipping and transport
Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2003
From: "Tara Thornton" <Tara@miltoxproj.org>
Depleted Uranium Munitions Action Plan
The United States military does not want civilian populations to know how and when depleted uranium (DU) munitions are being shipped through their communities for fear of "unnecessary public concern about the radiation risks associated with DU munitions." Normally this type of shipment would be labeled with both Department of Transportation (DOT) "Radioactive" and "Explosive" placards. Branches of the U.S. military, however, have a special Department of Transportation exemption, DOT-E 9649, which allows them to ship DU munitions without the "Radioactive" placard. The exemption must be renewed every few years by the DOT and the Military Traffic Management Command.
The current DU munitions shipping exemption expires on June 30, 2004. Public pressure could force the DOT to not renew the next application for exemption by the Military Traffic Management Command.
Why should we care about DU shipments while devastation continues in foreign countries from the actual use of this radioactive weapon? By understanding the danger of shipping DU through our neighborhoods, we will better understand the damage done by firing DU in neighborhoods in other countries in our name.
By identifying shipments of DU munitions en route to military bases inside the United States for deployment overseas, we open the opportunity to expose and eventually stop the shipments.
What to do...
Contact the Department of Transportation Exemptions division and ask that the DOT immediately terminate and not renew DOT-E 9649. Depleted uranium munitions should have a "Radioactive" placard and an "Explosives" placard on shipments. Depleted uranium is an extremely toxic material and much more dangerous when shipped with an explosive propellant as in the case of DU munitions. In case of a fire, first responders (local police and fire fighters) would have no idea the shipment contained radioactive material.
Send correspondence regarding DOT-E 9649 to:
Mr. Delmer Billings DHM-31
Director, Office of Hazardous Materials Exemptions and Approvals
Department of Transportation
400 7th St. SW
Washington, D.C. 20590
Fax: (202) 366-3308
E-mail: delmer.billings@rspa.dot.gov
Please also (if you want) send a copy to info@gzcenter.org
Please share this information with others and local officials.
DU Shipping information
Depleted uranium (DU) munitions are deployed by the United States military in a number of weapons systems in various locations in the United States and other nations. DU munitions, in our time of endless war, are shipped on a daily basis on our nation's highways, railways, waterways, and through foreign nations.
DU munitions are a uniquely hazardous material, consisting of a radioactive penetrator which breaks down into small particles when burned, and an explosive charge or combustible propellant in the shell of the cartridge. In an accident scenario, DU munitions on our highways or railways can burn and spread radioactive material. The DU shipments are, in essence, the "dirty bomb" that our government warns us about.
In the case of an accident involving a fire, it is very likely the driver would be incapacitated. The driver would not be able to communicate to others that radioactive material is involved in the fire, making it impossible for first responders to correctly control the fire and protect the public from radioactive material.
Three U.S. government documents best describe the purposes and dangers behind DU shipments and DOT-E 9649.
U.S. Military Reasons for DOT-E 9649
The original application to the DOT in 1986 from the Military Traffic Management Command stated three reasons for the special exemption for DU munitions. The application for exemption also showed the U.S. military knew in 1986 that DU munitions shipments were a potentially controversial issue.
A letter from the U.S. Army Military Traffic Management Command dated August 11, 1986 stated, "There are three reasons for transporting DOD DU munitions without drawing public attention by placarding trucks or marking munitions containers as radioactive. First, marking the outside of the DU munitions containers as radioactive may create friction with foreign governments when foreign nations handle DU munitions during shipping, loading or unloading. Secondly, we do not want to generate unnecessary public concern about the radiation risks associated with DU munitions. Thirdly, we do not want to raise public concerns by placarding trucks with the words "Radioactive" and "Explosive" since the combination of these two hazard class placards may be construed to mean that nuclear weapons are being shipped when this simply is not the case."
The Danger
A May 14, 1984 Material Safety Data Sheet on depleted uranium stated the hazards of a fire involving DU.
8. Should DU be handled in powdered form or should a DU penetrator oxidize resulting from a penetrator's involvement in an accident such as a fire, then the intake of DU aerosol or ash via inhalation, ingestion or absorption presents an internal hazard.
9. Depending upon the solubility of the particular DU compound in body fluids, it may also be toxic, particularly to the kidney.
10. Should an accident occur or DU corrosion be discovered, clean up and decontamination should be performed only by authorized personnel.
11. Anyone who may have inadvertently come in contact with material that is potentially contaminated with DU should be surveyed for contamination by authorized personnel as soon as possible, remove any clothing which may be contaminated, wash hands, arms, face and any other exposed parts of the body with soap and water. Do not eat, drink, smoke or apply cosmetics before being satisfactorily decontaminated.
The August 2002 Navy Radioactive Materials Permit contains a supplement showing the hazardous potential of a fire involving the shipment of DU. The Navy permit application dated August 21, 2002 contained a lengthy but informative section, applicable to any situation involving the combustion of DU.
Transportation Accident/Incident w/Fire
When involved in a fire, depleted uranium (DU) may oxidize, generating a downwind hazard in the form of a DU oxide dust plume. The significant health hazards associated with the dust plume are; 1) heavy metal poisoning from inhalation of the dust, and 2) the radiological hazards associated with inhalation of the dust. First responder personnel should adhere to the following information when approaching the scene of a DU fire.
a. First responders should approach the scene from upwind and assure all non-emergency personnel are evacuated from all downwind areas. First responder personnel should wear self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) respirators to protect against inhalation of any DU oxide dust or remain upwind of the fire. Evacuate the immediate vicinity of the accident and notify the emergency number identified on the DD form 836. In the event that the DD form 836 is not available the on-scene commander should notify the traffic manager at the nearest military base.
b. Because, the complete round of DU ammunition contains explosive propellant an explosive hazard exists when fire is present. In this case, remain upwind and assure that essential and non-essential personnel are moved to a safe distance as listed on the DD form 836, Fire Fighting Instructions. Use any available method to stay upwind of the smoke plume.
c. Each hazardous material shipment made by the Department of Defense requires the vehicle driver to have in their possession a DD form 836, Fire Fighting Instructions. The DD form 836 contains the necessary withdrawal distance for on-scene emergency personnel and public. The on-scene commander will assure these distances are strictly adhered to. The on-scene commander should establish a cordon of the accident area and assure all personnel are evacuated from the downwind side. The cordon can be increased to limit the effects of wind changes or adverse weather conditions. Establish an entry control point and monitor all personnel entering and exiting the hazard zone. Evaluate the fire scene and determine what actions or non-actions to initiate. In most cases, fire and ammunition don't mix and fire fighting personnel are relegated to observer status to assure the fire doesn't spread or become more serious.
d. Contact the nearest Explosives Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit to inspect the load and determine the extent of damage. Navy EOD personnel are trained in make-safe operations involving depleted uranium ammunition. Navy EOD personnel will also make all contacts to coordinate clean-up and disposal actions required by U.S. Army Technical Assistance Team.
e. The establishment of a radiation contamination control line (RCCL) should be established near the cordon entry control point and outside of the contaminated area. The number of emergency personnel who are to pass over the RCCL should be kept to a minimum. All personnel evacuated from the established cordon should report to the RCCL radiation contamination for screening. The names, addresses, telephone number and monitoring results of all personnel passing through the RCCL shall be recorded, whether contaminated or not.
f. Personnel injured in the accident will be evacuated through medical channels. Injured personnel evacuated from the accident scene should be wrapped in a white sheet and tagged to identify possible exposure to DU contamination. Medial treatment for serious injuries takes priority over contamination surveys and decontamination efforts.
g. All materials including soil, clothing, packaging, pallets, vehicles and dismembered parts, etc. shall be surveyed and declared radioactive free. Contaminated materials should be disposed of per OPNAVNOTE 5100, Low Level Radioactive Waste (LLWR) Disposal Program. All materials found to be radioactive free may be disposed of through normal methods.
h. Once the fire has been extinguished, a smaller controlled area around the accident site must be maintained, until it has been surveyed by EOD and radiological personnel and declared contamination free or the area decontaminated per local, state and federal laws and regulations.
i. All emergency response personnel may be contaminated with DU. Some of the personnel may sustain injuries while working at the scene, they should be decontaminated prior to receiving medical treatment, provided medical personnel concur. All equipment used at the fire scene shall be surveyed for radioactive contamination and decontaminated at the RCCL.
j. After EOD has declared the area safe from an explosive standpoint, radiation surveys will be performed to determine the extent of radioactive contamination. Areas noted to be contaminated shall be marked and decontaminated as soon as possible.
k. The chain-of-command/local military community will assure that waste receptacles are available, and located at the RCCL for disposal of contaminated clothing and equipment. Metal containers with lids should be available with 4 mil plastic linings for solid waste. Radioactive waste should be held at the nearest Department of Defense installation, and disposition instructions requested per OPNAV NOTICE 5100.
l. Damaged ammunition that is contamination free shall be repackaged and reported to the applicable Program Manager, listed in appendix 1 to Supplement 7, for disposition.
m. Specific guidance on packaging damaged DU ammunition may be obtained by contacting the points of contact identified in Supplement 7, paragraph D.3 and D.4.
Not mentioned in the documents is how first responders would have any idea that a burning truck with an "Explosives" placard might contain depleted uranium. This is because the U.S. government does not want anyone to know.
Tara Thornton
Executive Director
Military Toxics Project
P.O. Box 558
Lewiston, ME 04243
(207)783-5091 phone
(207783-5096 fax
Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, Poulsbo, Washington Website: www.gzcenter.org E-mail: info@gzcenter.org
Traprock Peace Center, Deerfield, Massachusetts Website: www.traprockpeace.org E-mail: traprock@crocker.com
Military Toxics Project, Lewiston, Maine Website: www.miltoxproj.org Email: mtp@miltoxproj.org
Nukewatch, Luck, Wisconsin Website: www.nukewatch.com E-mail: nukewatch@lakeland.ws
-------- iran
U.N. Atomic Agency Draws Fire Over Iran
By GEORGE JAHN
Associated Press Writer
http://www.rockymounttelegram.com/news/content/news/ap_story.html/Intl/AP.V4557.AP-Iran-Nuclear.html;COXnetJSessionID=10x5RLV7pyZTurrT2zFvJKN1fDGfBU2I2MYh5UEDnBKJXhCbNVB5!-206000842?urac=n&urvf=10687736894680.5658557475577913
VIENNA, Austria (AP)--The U.N. atomic agency is coming under fire for saying it has no evidence that Tehran tried to make nuclear weapons.
In a report detailing two decades of covert Iranian nuclear activity, the agency said Iran was guilty of numerous secret experiments, including uranium enrichment and the production of small amounts of plutonium that effectively put the nation in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
But the document, presented this week to the International Atomic Energy Agency's board of governors, also praised Tehran for cooperation and openness. It said the agency had found ``no evidence'' of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. That stance contradicts the American view that Tehran is not only trying to make such arms but could be just years away from putting nuclear warheads on missiles capable of reaching Israel.
In Washington, Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton said Wednesday the IAEA finding was ``simply impossible to believe.'' But in Iran officials say it should dispel suspicions their country had a nuclear weapons agenda.
``This proves our claim and removes the possibility for some powers to misuse the situation against us,'' Iranian President Mohammad Khatami said.
The board will be looking closely at the report, written by IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, when it meets on Nov. 20. Any finding that Iran violated the nuclear treaty brings with it Security Council involvement.
The Council can impose sanctions as its ultimate weapon. At the least, it could be asked to note concerns about Iran's nuclear program but take no action while the agency continues to probe the country's activities.
The Bush administration wants the IAEA board to take a strong and unified stance, but there is concern now that it may not even refer the matter to the Security Council. One official in Washington, who declined to be identified, said Iran had succeeded in confusing the U.N. agency with its partial disclosures.
Some Vienna-based diplomats from other countries said they understood U.S. concerns.
``Factually, there is no evidence, no smoking gun,'' said one senior diplomat who follows the Iran issue and who declined to be identified. ``But there's a lot of circumstantial evidence, including 18 years spent in the pursuit of fissile material.''
The report outlines nearly two decades of illicit activity disclosed by Iran only recently and under international pressure.
In the last few weeks, Iran has swung from belligerent denial of wrongdoing to acknowledging it made ``mistakes'' by failing to keep the agency abreast of its nuclear programs.
While still maintaining it only wants to generate nuclear power, it has delivered what it says is complete information about past suspect activities, suspended uranium enrichment--a key board demand--and agreed to open its nuclear programs to closer international scrutiny, including unannounced inspections.
The strategy appears to be working. Another diplomat suggested some Western board members normally supportive of Washington did not share America's rejection of the ``no evidence'' clause.
He described ElBaradei's view that there is no direct proof Iran tried to make nuclear weapons as ``an interpretation that has a lot going for it.''
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was expected to discuss the issue with Secretary of State Colin Powell during a meeting Thursday in Washington. On Wednesday, Straw pointed to Iran's recent cooperation with the IAEA, saying ``we should be reacting calmly'' to the report.
In Stockholm, former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix said the United States has a history of jumping to conclusions, noting the war in Iraq was based on U.S. claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
``Experience has shown that that was not so. So one has to be cautious,'' said Blix, ElBaradei's predecessor as IAEA head.
Asked for comment, agency spokesman Mark Gwozdecky said the IAEA was ``standing by the report.'' He refused to elaborate on the leaked but formally still confidential document ahead of the board meeting next week.
One diplomat familiar with the agency said there was some debate by ElBaradei's team on whether to include the ``no evidence'' finding and the decision was made on the basis of ``we're going to be asked anyway.''
On the Net:
IAEA, www.iaea.org
----
UN agency raps Iran but says no evidence of nuclear bomb
VIENNA (AFP)
Nov 11, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031111130839.dbj07wn5.html
Iran has breached international nuclear accords by secretly making plutonium and enriched uranium but there is no evidence it is trying to build an atomic bomb, the UN's nuclear watchdog reported.
The confidential International Atomic Agency (IAEA) report was released Monday ahead of a November 20 meeting of the body's board of governors, which is set rule on Iran's nuclear activities after a months-long standoff.
The IAEA said Iran had concealed aspects of its nuclear activities and breached a number of international monitoring agreements, including developing enriched uranium and plutonium -- material which can be used to make nuclear bombs.
But the report, made available to AFP, credited Iran for having since October "adopted a policy of full disclosure and decided to provide the agency with a full picture of all its nuclear activities."
At its meeting next week, the 35-nation IAEA board could declare Iran in non-compliance with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), a move which could lead to UN sanctions against the Islamic republic.
The United States accuses Iran, which is building a nuclear power plant at Bushehr with Russian help, of secretly trying to develop nuclear arms and wants the matter taken to the UN Security Council.
But a diplomat said that a number of IAEA board member states did not want to pursue such action.
Diplomats said Iran, which denies making atomic weapons and says its nuclear program is strictly peaceful, may escape a non-compliance ruling because it has yielded to key IAEA demands over the past month.
"The report is severe about the problems of the past but appreciative of Iran's cooperation since October 21," said one diplomat.
In September, the IAEA demanded that Iran fully disclose its nuclear program, agree to tougher inspections of suspect sites and suspend the enrichment of uranium.
Iran submitted on October 23 what it said was a full report on its nuclear program, only eight days before an October 31 deadline set by the IAEA for full disclosure.
And on Monday, Tehran's ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Akbar Salehi, handed over a letter to agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei pledging to sign an additional protocol to the NPT to allow wider inspections and told him that Iran was as of Tuesday suspending the enrichment program.
The IAEA report said Iran had "concealed many aspects of its nuclear activities with resulting breaches of its obligation to comply with the provision of the safeguards agreement" of the NPT.
But it said: "There is no evidence that the previously undeclared nuclear material and activities... were related to a nuclear weapons program."
However, the IAEA is still investigating the possibility that Iran is hiding an atomic weapons program, said the report.
"Iran has now acknowledged that it has been developing, for 18 years, a uranium centrifuge enrichment program and for 12 years, a laser enrichment program," the report said, referring to technologies that produce nuclear fuel for reactors but also material for making atomic weapons.
It said Iran made "limited quantities of nuclear material" that "dealt with the most sensitive aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle, including enrichment and reprocessing."
A diplomat said the report clearly implies that Iran is in non-compliance but said that the board could issue a condemnation without making a formal declaration that would throw the issue to the Security Council.
"There will surely be a severe judgement of Iran's lack of cooperation until October" but the accent after that will be on Iran's cooperation, especially since no sign of nuclear weapons have been found, the diplomat said.
Another diplomat said the IAEA's aim had been to get Iran to cooperate and since that was now happening "let's not potentially poison the well by going to the Council."
----
Iran produced both uranium and plutonium - IAEA
VIENNA (AFP)
Nov 11, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031111123748.jzkjaomr.html
Iran secretly produced plutonium in a nuclear program being investigated by the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has said in a report.
It said Iran had in a letter to the IAEA on October 21 acknowledged the irradiation of uranium at the Tehran Nuclear Research Center "and subsequent plutonium separation experiments" between 1988 and 1992.
"Neither the activities nor the separated plutonium had been reported previously to the agency," said the report, which was released Monday, and a copy of which was made available to AFP.
----
Iran plays down its breaches of nuclear agreements as minor
TEHRAN (AFP)
Nov 11, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031111135342.xilthkcc.html
A top Iranian official acknowledged Tuesday the Islamic republic's nuclear programme had breached International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) rules, but asserted the failures were only minor and a thing of the past.
"The failures that Iran has been reproached for are minor, and are only in the order of the gramme or milligramme, while in the past some countries had problems with larger quantities of plutonium," Iran's representative to the IAEA, Ali Akbar Salehi, was quoted as saying by state television.
"Failures are a normal thing, and the report of last year (by the IAEA) stated failures by 50 states," he added.
The UN nuclear watchdog said in a report Monday that it had so far found no evidence Iran was trying to develop nuclear weapons, but the agency was also not ready to certify that Tehran's atomic programme was exclusively peaceful.
The IAEA reported a series of breaches by Iran of international nuclear monitoring agreements, including the secret production of plutonium at the Tehran Nuclear Research Center "and subsequent plutonium separation experiments" between 1988 and 1992.
Also listed as infringements were Iran's enrichment of uranium and the import of certain nuclear materials.
Salehi said these failures only corresponded to "experiments in laboratories which we should have declared to the agency".
"Given that these failures correspond to the past, corrective measures have been taken and therefore this matter is closed," he asserted.
"And taking into account all the information now in the hands of the agency (given to the IAEA by Iran), it is clear that Iran had failed on several occasions and for a long period to meet its safeguard commitments" set out in the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), he added.
The IAEA report, which is to be submitted to a meeting next week of the agency's 35-nation board of governors, said the IAEA was still investigating the possibility that Iran is hiding an atomic weapons programme.
The IAEA's executive board of governors could declare Iran in non-compliance with the NPT, which could lead to UN sanctions. But some diplomats said the country may escape a non-compliance ruling as it has over the past month yielded to key IAEA demands.
Crucially, the IAEA report said that until October, Iran's cooperation had been "limited and reactive" but "since that time Iran has shown active cooperation and openness."
The IAEA in September had asked Iran to do three main things ahead of the November 20 meeting: fully disclose its nuclear programme, agree to tougher inspections and suspend the enrichment of uranium that could be used to make an atomic bomb.
Iran told foreign ministers from Britain, France and Germany it would cooperate when the three diplomats visited Tehran on October 21 to break the deadlock.
Tehran then promptly handed the IAEA a full declaration of its nuclear activities, and on Monday handed the IAEA a letter agreeing to tougher inspections of its nuclear program.
It also informed the agency it was suspending the enrichment of uranium.
----
Iran guilty but cooperating: UN
From correspondents in Vienna
11nov03
http://www.theadvertiser.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,7833573%255E1702,00.html
IRAN is guilty of some breaches of international nuclear safeguards but has shown increased cooperation with United Nations inspectors, the UN nuclear watchdog said in a report, according to diplomats.
"Based on all information currently available to the agency, it is clear that Iran has failed in a number of instances over an extended period of time to meet its obligations under its safeguards agreements" from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), said the report.
The report was written by IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei ahead of an IAEA meeting next week that will decide whether Iran should be cited for hiding an alleged nuclear weapons program.
A ruling of Iranian non-compliance with nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) safeguards agreements could lead to UN sanctions against Iran.
In September, the IAEA had imposed an October 31 deadline on Iran to answer all its questions about its nuclear program.
The report said Iran had since October 16 "adopted a policy of full disclosure and decided to provide the agency with a full picture of all its nuclear activities".
"Since that time Iran has shown active cooperation and openness. This is a welcome development," the report said.
In a clear move to avoid sanctions, Iran had on October 23 provided, only eight days before the deadline fell, what it said was a full report on its nuclear program to the IAEA.
Previous to that Iran had "concealed many aspects of its nuclear activities with resulting breaches of its obligation to comply with the provision of the safeguards agreement".
It said that until October, Iran's cooperation had been "limited and reactive".
The safeguards failures included testing uranium enrichment with centrifuges, something the IAEA caught Iran doing when it did environmental sampling in the past few months at a suspect site.
The IAEA discovered "the use of imported natural uranium hexafluoride for the testing of centrifuges at the Kalaye Electric Company (near Tehran) in 1999 and 2002, and the consequent production of enriched and depleted uranium", the report said.
Enriched uranium can be a fuel for nuclear reactors but can also be used to make atomic weapons.
The report said Iran had also failed to report "the import of natural uranium in 1994".
The end result is that Iran has secretly developed a nuclear program with "a practically complete front-end of a nuclear fuel cycle, including uranium mining and milling, conversion, enrichment, fuel fabrication, heavy water production, a light water reactor, a heavy water research reactor and associated research and development facilities," the report said.
----
EU says Iran needs to follow words with action on nukes
Tuesday, November 11 , 2003
(AFP)
http://www.iranmania.com/News/ArticleView/Default.asp?NewsCode=19622&NewsKind=Current%20Affairs
BRUSSELS, Nov 11 - The European Commission Tuesday called on Iran to follow its pledges on its nuclear program with action, fulfilling promises to allow unnnounced UN inspections of its nuclear facilities and suspend uranium and plutonium enrichment.
"Of course the more clearly Iran states its intention to sign the additional protocol, the happier we are," the spokeswoman for EU External Affairs Commissioner Chris Patten said.
"We believe it is in Iran's own interest as well as in the interests of the international community. We would like to see the deeds as well as the words with this issue as well as the suspension of Iranian enrichment," Emma Udwin told reporters.
"What we would most like to see is implementation of the very welcome announcement that Iran has made."
Tehran's representative to the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), on Monday handed in a letter pledging Iran would sign an additional protocol to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to allow wider and suprise inspections.
Ali Akbar Salehi also told IAEA head Mohammed ElBaradei that Iran was suspending its enrichment program.
The United States has repeatedly accused Iran of secretly trying to make atomic weapons, charges Tehran strongly denies.
----
What happens next with IAEA report on Iran
11 Nov 2003
(Reuters)
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L11266749.htm
VIENNA, Nov 11 - The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has circulated a new report on nuclear inspections in Iran ahead of its November 20 Board of Governors meeting.
The report says the U.N. nuclear watchdog has found no evidence of a secret atomic weapons programme but it does not rule out that one exists.
WHAT'S IN THE REPORT
The IAEA report said Tehran had dabbled in activity often associated with arms, like plutonium production.
"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."
Enrichment is a process of purifying uranium to make it useable as nuclear fuel or in weapons.
In contrast to Tehran's previous denials, the IAEA said Iran also acknowledged some "tests using small amounts of (uranium hexafluoride) had been conducted in 1999 and 2002". The report added that, for decades, Iran received help from sources in four countries with sensitive technology that could be used to develop weapons.
The countries were not identified.
"Iran acknowledged that, starting in the 1970s, it had had contracts related to laser (uranium) enrichment with foreign sources from four countries," the report said.
Diplomats have said Pakistan, a nuclear weapons state that has opted out of signing the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), was almost certainly one of the four countries.
NOVEMBER 20 IAEA BOARD MEETING
The 35-nation Board of Governors will meet to discuss the Iran report. The U.S. is pushing the board to declare that Iran has been in non-compliance with obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which Tehran signed in 1970.
Diplomats said the board is divided as France, Britain and Germany have a tacit agreement not to back a non-compliance vote as part of a deal last month under which Iran agreed to stop enriching uranium and accept tougher U.N. nuclear inspections.
Other European and some Asian members of the board are said to stand between the U.S. and the "Big Three" EU states.
WHAT NON-COMPLIANCE MEANS
A country is in non-compliance with its IAEA Safeguards Agreement, a key part of the NPT, when the IAEA is unable to confirm that the country is not diverting nuclear resources to a weapons programme, or when it confirms that a country diverted resources.
Such a finding would require notifying the U.N. Security Council.
The Security Council can issue a statement condemning the country in non-compliance, issue an ultimatum or impose economic or diplomatic sanctions. It can also choose to ignore the issue.
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Iran Dismisses Criticism of Nuclear Program by U.N. Agency
November 11, 2003
By NAZILA FATHI
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/international/middleeast/11CND-IRAN.html?hp
TEHRAN, Iran, Nov. 11 - The Iranian ambassador to the United Nations nuclear agency today dismissed accusations that Iran had tried to make nuclear weapons. He also said that a failure to inform the agency about how advanced it nuclear program actually was, as cited in the agency's report, was insignificant.
"The failures that Iran has been reproached for are minor, and are only at the level of gram or milligram, while in the past some countries had problems with larger quantities of plutonium," the ambassador, Ali Akbar Salehi, was quoted as saying by state television.
"Failures are a normal thing and the report of last year by the agency stated failures by 50 countries," he added. In Iran's case he was referring to enrichment of uranium, importation of equipment, including centrifuges, and the building of new nuclear sites.
The report by the International Atomic Energy Agency said on Monday that it had found no evidence that Iran was producing nuclear weapons but that documents turned over by Iran showed a clear pattern of years of experimentation in producing small amounts of material, including plutonium, that could be made into weapons.
The report concluded that because of Iran's past pattern of concealment it would take some time before it could decide whether Iran's nuclear program was exclusively for peaceful purposes.
Iran announced in mid-October in a meeting with foreign secretaries of Britain, Germany and France that it would cooperate with the agency by allowing unexpected inspections of its sites and suspending its enrichment program. It submitted an official letter stating all its new obligations on Monday to the United Nations in New York.
Mr. Salehi acknowledged that Iran had failed on several occasions and for a long time to meet its safeguard commitments. But he added that the failures belonged to the past and corrective measures were taken.
"Therefore the matter is closed," he was quoted as saying.
A spokesman for Iran's Foreign Ministry also denounced comments by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell who said on Monday that Iranian people wanted their freedom and wanted to be "free of those who have dragged the sacred garments of Islam into the political gutter."
The spokesman, Hamid Reza Assefi, said the comments were a sign of United States' anger of the spread of political Islam in the world.
"American officials' interpretation of Islam and Muslims show that, like other issues such as Iraq, the Middle East and democracy, they do not know anything about Islam and Muslims," he said in a statement, the Iranian Student News Agency reported.
The findings by the United Nations' nuclear agency fell short of backing up the Bush administration's claims that Iran is using its civilian nuclear program as a cover for its nuclear weapons program. But the agency concluded in the report that "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."
At American insistence, the agency gave Iran until Oct. 31 to reveal all the details of its nuclear program. It is not clear, experts say, whether the voluminous materials turned over to the agency represent all of the evidence that the Iranian government has in its possession or, in the words of one American diplomat, "all that they think we know about."
The report says that Iran admitted to producing "small amounts of low-enriched uranium using both centrifuges and laser enrichment processes," which it had never reported to the agency, a violation of its commitments under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. However, low-enriched uranium would require further processing and enrichment to be used in the production of a bomb.
Iran also said it had separated "a small amount" of plutonium, the report said. By comparison, North Korea claims to have separated enough plutonium to make many nuclear weapons, a boast American intelligence agencies say probably overstates the country's abilities. The amounts reported by Iran, if accurate, would not be enough to produce a nuclear weapon.
One American official, who had not read the report, said Monday night that it appeared to be "harshly worded" for the I.A.E.A., which has traditionally resisted criticizing member countries. For example, the report refers to "breaches" that Iran committed by hiding its activities from the agency's inspectors for many years, and falsifying past claims.
David E. Sanger in Washington contributed to this report.
--------
Russia Ready to Help Iran With Nuclear Plant
November 11, 2003
By SETH MYDANS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/international/europe/11RUSS.html
MOSCOW, Nov. 10 - Russia and Iran appeared to draw closer on Monday to an agreement that would clear the way for the completion of a nuclear power plant that Russians are building in Iran.
On a visit here, Hassan Rowhani, leader of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said Iran had halted its uranium-enrichment program and was ready to sign a protocol that would be a safeguard against having Iran develop nuclear weapons.
"I can see no obstacles to nuclear cooperation with Iran in this situation," President Vladimir V. Putin said after meeting Mr. Rowhani, although he did not say specifically that construction would proceed.
Mr. Rowhani also said Iran was prepared to agree to more intrusive inspections of its nuclear plants on short notice by the International Atomic Energy Agency. These assurances were similar to those given last month to the foreign ministers of France, Britain and Germany.
The United States has opposed Russia's program to build nuclear reactors at Bushehr, on the Persian Gulf, arguing that Iran, a major oil producer, does not need nuclear energy and that the reactors could indirectly help a nuclear weapons program.
In an interview last month with The New York Times, Mr. Putin said that the American concerns were justified and that Russia was seeking a stipulation that spent fuel must be returned to Russia.
But he said, "This doesn't imply that without agreeing upon the principles of our cooperation in this sphere, we're going to suspend all of our programs."
--------
U.N. Agency Reports Iran Made Small Amount of Plutonium
November 11, 2003
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/international/middleeast/11IRAN.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 - The International Atomic Energy Agency said on Monday that it found no evidence that Iran was producing nuclear weapons, but that inspections and documents turned over by the country found a clear pattern of years of experimentation in producing small amounts of materials that could be fabricated into weapons, including plutonium.
The findings by the United Nations' nuclear agency falls short of backing up the Bush administration's claims that Iran is using its civilian nuclear program as a cover for its nuclear weapons program. But the I.A.E.A. concluded in the report that "given Iran's past pattern of concealment, it will take some time before the agency is able to conclude that Iran's nuclear programme is exclusively for peaceful purposes."
At American insistence, the agency gave Iran until Oct. 31 to reveal all the details of its nuclear program. It is not clear, experts say, whether the voluminous materials turned over to the agency represent all of the evidence that the Iranian government has in its possession or, in the words of one American diplomat, "all that they think we know about."
The report says that Iran admitted to producing "small amounts of low-enriched uranium using both centrifuges and laser enrichmentprocesses," which it had never reported to the agency, a violation of its commitments under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. However, low-enriched uranium would require further processing and enrichment to be used in the production of a bomb.
The country also said that it had separated "a small amount" of plutonium, the report said. By comparison, North Korea claims to have separated enough plutonium to make many nuclear weapons, a boast American intelligence agencies say probably overstates the country's abilities. The amounts reported by Iran, if accurate, would not be enough to produce a nuclear weapon.
One American official, who had not read the report, said tonight that it appeared to be "harshly worded" for the I.A.E.A., which has traditionally resisted criticizing member countries. For example, the report refers to "breaches" that Iran committed by hiding its activities from the agency's inspectors for many years, and falsifying past claims.
--------
Iran Had Secret Nuclear Program,
U.N. Agency Says 'No Evidence' of Arms Plans; Probe Continues
By Joby Warrick and Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, November 11, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23686-2003Nov10?language=printer
Iran manufactured small amounts of enriched uranium and plutonium as part of a nuclear program that operated in secret for 18 years, according to a confidential report by a U.N. agency. The report harshly criticizes Iran for deliberately hiding evidence of its nuclear program from international inspectors and for numerous "breaches" in its nuclear treaty obligations.
The 29-page report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says there is "no evidence" so far that Iran had sought to build a nuclear bomb, as asserted by the Bush administration, but the U.N. watchdog said it would keep investigating this claim. 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," the report says.
The report's catalogue of Iran's nuclear activities shows that the Islamic republic had made significant strides in a program that until last year was barely understood by the outside world. The report, obtained by The Washington Post, documents numerous occasions when Iranian officials altered or reversed their explanations after being challenged by investigators or with conflicting evidence.
"Iran has now acknowledged that it has been developing, for 18 years, a uranium centrifuge program, and, for 12 years, a laser enrichment program," the report says, referring to two of the leading technologies for making fissile material for nuclear power plants or weapons. "In that context Iran has admitted that it produced small amounts of LEU [low-enriched uranium], using both centrifuge and laser enrichment processes . . . and a small amount of plutonium."
Iran maintains that its nuclear program is strictly for peaceful purposes.
The report says that Iran made the plutonium between 1988 and 1992 at the Tehran Nuclear Research Center, a laboratory in the capital. Iran said the plutonium was produced during experiments intended to "gain experience in reprocessing chemistry," the IAEA report says. The equipment used in the experiment was dismantled in 1992.
While the amount of plutonium produced was likely minuscule -- far less than needed for a nuclear weapon -- Iran had previously denied conducting any such experiments. Plutonium production is generally associated only with nuclear weapons programs.
The IAEA report was delivered to the 35 member nations of the agency's Board of Governors, which will meet Nov. 20 to decide whether Iran should be declared in violation of its nuclear treaty obligations. At that meeting, the report will be weighed against new signs that Iran has decided to come clean about its past and cooperate with nuclear inspectors.
As the report was being finalized, Iran formally announced several measures intended to ease international concerns about its nuclear intentions. In a letter hand-delivered to IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, Iran agreed to snap inspections and unfettered access to its nuclear facilities under an enhanced safeguards agreement called the "Additional Protocol."
The letter also states Iran's commitment to suspend uranium enrichment for an unspecified period. Iran agreed in principle to the tougher inspections and suspension last month as part of a diplomatic initiative led by Germany, Britain and France. Yesterday, ElBaradei praised the Iranian move as "a welcome and positive development."
After meeting with ElBaradei on Saturday, Hassan Rouhani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said in a statement that Iran was "determined to make sure that the international community is assured of the peaceful nature of its program."
The IAEA report, in assessing Iran's past practices, says the country had repeatedly breached its nuclear safeguard agreements under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which it is a signatory. "Based on all the information currently available to the [IAEA], it is clear that Iran has failed in a number of instances over an extended period of time to meet its obligations," the report says.
"Iran's policy of concealment continued until last month, with cooperation being limited and reactive and information being slow in coming, changing and contradictory," the report says. "While most of the breaches identified to date have involved limited quantities of nuclear material, they have dealt with the most sensitive aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle, including enrichment and reprocessing."
The report notes that although the material would require further processing before being suitable for weapons purposes, "the number of failures by Iran to report in a timely manner . . . has given rise to serous concerns."
Because of that previous concealment, the report says, it is critical that Iran agree to a "particularly robust" verification program of surprise inspections and frequent, intrusive monitoring.
In documents turned over to the IAEA last month, Iran presented a picture of its nuclear history that contrasts sharply with earlier pronouncements. After repeatedly denying having enriched uranium, Iran acknowledged in the documents that it enriched a small amount in 1999 and 2000 at Kalaye, a pilot plant Iran once described as a watch factory. Highly enriched uranium can be used in weapons.
Iran also acknowledged for the first time that it had built a pilot plant to enrich uranium using lasers, something the IAEA had suspected for months. The plant had been dismantled, and soil from the site trucked away, by the time IAEA inspectors visited it last summer.
Weapons experts described the report as deeply troubling, mostly because of the disclosures about how Iran hid its activities from nuclear inspectors.
"It's quite clear now that Iran was engaged in willful and systematic deception over more than a decade," said Michael Levi, a science fellow at the Brookings Institution. "It's a damning report, and the IAEA should be given full credit for its persistence in exposing" the dishonesty.
While encouraged by Iran's recent candor, former IAEA inspector David Albright said he remained suspicious that Iran's leaders still had not told the full truth, especially about possible weapons research.
"Iran has admitted to activities that the IAEA had suspected had occurred, back in the spring of 2003. It may be guessing what it thinks the IAEA already knows," said Albright, president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. "Overall, Iran's cooperation is a good sign, because it shows that a combination of pressure and incentives is leading to real results. But by no means can you have confidence that the whole picture is known."
Key questions about Iran's past nuclear activity remained unresolved. For example, IAEA inspectors still were not convinced by Iran's explanations for why traces of highly enriched uranium were found at two Iranian facilities during IAEA tests last summer. Iran has acknowledged making only low-enriched uranium, which cannot be used in weapons without further refinement. Iranian officials say the particles of highly enriched uranium came with used nuclear equipment that Iran imported from another, still-unnamed country. Iran has acknowledged purchasing sensitive parts from numerous countries, often using front companies or black-market dealers.
-------- korea
CIA fears North Korea nuke
Story by Jim Wolf
REUTERS USA:
November 11, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/22809/story.htm
WASHINGTON - North Korea appears to have built one or two nuclear weapons it could be confident would work even without a test nuclear blast, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has told Congress.
"We assess that North Korea has produced one or two simple fission-type nuclear weapons and has validated the designs without conducting yield-producing nuclear tests," the CIA said in written replies to questions from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
The CIA's August 18 statement was made public recently by the Federation of American Scientists on its Web site (www.fas.org/irp/congress/2003_hr/021103qfr-cia.pdf).
Some experts said on Friday they had expected Pyongyang to carry out a test blast just as India and Pakistan did in 1998 to show the world they were members of the nuclear club, but the CIA's statement suggests this is not necessary.
"Testing would confirm (the existence of a nuclear capability) but it's not changing what they already believe," said Daniel Pinkston, a North Korea expert at the Centre for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California.
North Korea is widely reported to have been carrying out nuclear weapon-related tests, short of blasts, since the 1980s to develop what it now says is a nuclear deterrent that is ready to use.
"Pyongyang at this point appears to view ambiguity regarding its nuclear capabilities as providing a tactical advantage," the spy agency said. A test nuclear explosion could spark an international backlash that would isolate the reclusive Communist state further, the agency added.
Robert Norris, who has tracked North Korea's nuclear program at the Natural Resources Defence Council, said it was not surprising Pyongyang had reached this point.
"They've been working on this for several decades," he said.
David Albright, a physicist who is president of the Institute for Science and International Security, said the CIA statement suggested a belief the North had already "weaponised" a nuclear device that could be dropped from a plane or delivered by missile.
North Korea's envoy in Britain told Reuters in an interview Thursday the North possessed a "nuclear deterrent capability ... powerful enough to deter any U.S. attack."
The latest crisis in U.S.-North Korean relations began in October 2002, when U.S. officials said the North had been pursuing a clandestine nuclear-weapons program that violated its international commitments.
The State Department said on Friday it was optimistic about chances for a fresh round of six-way talks on North Korea's suspected nuclear arms program after Secretary of State Colin Powell met a key Chinese diplomat.
The Chinese official, Vice Foreign Minister Wang Yi, told reporters after his talks with Powell that Beijing was working to set up a new round of discussions among officials from the United States, the two Koreas, Japan, Russia and China.
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North Korea Nuclear Talks May Restart Dec 10, Report Says
November 11, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north-usa-talks.html
TOKYO (Reuters) - The United States and North Korea have agreed to hold a second round of nuclear talks from December 10 to 13 in Beijing, the Asahi Shimbun daily said Wednesday.
Quoting South Korean government sources, the Japanese newspaper said Chinese diplomats were trying to agree the dates with the other countries involved in the six-way talks.
Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo arrives in Japan for a four-day visit Wednesday.
A separate report from Japan's Kyodo news agency said North Korea had indicated it was prepared to accept talks in mid-December if certain conditions were met.
The report did not specify what the conditions were, but Pyongyang has been pushing for a security guarantee from the United States in exchange for abandoning nuclear arms.
A first round of talks took place in Beijing in August in an attempt to resolve a nuclear crisis that has been simmering since U.S. officials said in October 2002 that Pyongyang had admitted to a secret nuclear weapons program that violated international agreements.
China's foreign ministry said Tuesday it hoped the talks could be resumed by the end of the year.
The six-country talks involve South Korea, China, Russia and Japan, as well as the United States and North Korea.
-------- russia
Russian Jury to Hear Treason Case Against Arms Control Researcher
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23946-2003Nov10.html
MOSCOW, Nov. 10 -- He does not have billions of dollars and his arrest did not shake the foundations of the Russian stock market. But in a spare and cramped courtroom in Moscow, Igor Sutyagin stands trial these days in a case that human rights groups consider as important as that of the imprisoned oil tycoon, Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Sutyagin, a Russian arms control researcher accused of high treason for allegedly passing secrets to the United States, has already spent four years behind bars. Finally, after many twists and turns, he has his chance to plead his case in what apparently is the first espionage trial to go to a jury in Russia.
A panel of 12 Russians was selected last week to decide the case in Moscow City Court and attorneys will begin presenting evidence behind closed doors on Tuesday. Even before the first witness was called, the trial drew public recriminations last week as Sutyagin's attorneys unsuccessfully sought the removal of the judge on grounds he improperly allowed previously dropped charges to be reintroduced.
While not as internationally renowned as last month's arrest of Khodorkovsky, Sutyagin's case has sparked the same sort of debate about Russia's commitment to the rule of law and the resurgence of the secret services.
Since former KGB agent Vladimir Putin's ascension as prime minister four years ago and then as president, Russia has shown a renewed fervor for espionage prosecutions, many of which international human rights activists consider to be trumped-up political cases. Among those accused, Sutyagin has been jailed the longest without being convicted.
Critics say the Federal Security Service, the domestic successor agency to the KGB known by its Russian initials FSB, has violated standards of fairness in prosecuting Sutyagin and other academics and researchers who have been labeled spies. The FSB has relied on secret decrees that the defendants were not allowed to see, has publicly branded the defendants guilty and put forth only vaguely defined charges, according to human rights groups.
"In this case as well as the Khodorkovsky case, there are a lot of questions about the real reasons for their prosecutions," said Diederik Lohman, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. In Sutyagin's case, at least, "the feeling we have is the FSB is trying to reassert itself in Russian society."
Authorities declined to discuss the case, citing its secret nature.
Sutyagin, 38, of the Institute for the Study of the United States and Canada in Moscow, was arrested in October 1999 for allegedly passing military secrets to the West. Based on the few documents that have become public, the FSB alleged that his work as a consultant for a British firm, Alternative Futures, amounted to espionage, because the firm was purportedly tied to U.S. intelligence.
Sutyagin denied the allegations, saying he did nothing more than collect information from public documents, newspapers and other open sources. His defenders point out that in his job as a researcher, Sutyagin was never privy to secret information.
"There's no evidence he ever had access to any classified documents . . . and it's pretty revealing that four years failed to turn up any evidence," said Victoria Baxter, a program associate at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which has taken up Sutyagin's cause.
According to Sutyagin's supporters, the authorities seemed to want to settle the case earlier this year when they tried to persuade him to cut a deal rather than proceed to trial before a jury. Pavel Podvig, a fellow arms control researcher, said authorities offered to free Sutyagin on time served if he pleaded guilty.
Sutyagin refused. "He feels strongly that there is no case and he is not guilty," Podvig said.
The main Russian court to hear the case so far has found the evidence inadequate. After a closed trial, a court in Kaluga, about 100 miles south of Moscow, refused in December 2001 to convict Sutyagin on the grounds that the charges were vaguely formulated and sent it back to the FSB for further investigation. However, it also refused to free Sutyagin in the meantime.
Russian courts have expressed reluctance to sanction FSB charges in several of the spy cases brought in recent years, but in this country judges remain overwhelmingly loyal to the state and rarely rule completely against it.
In February, the Moscow City Court convicted Anatoly Babkin, a university professor, of treason for providing torpedo technology to an American company, but it gave him a suspended eight-year sentence. In August, a court in the Far East city of Vladivostok found Vladimir Shchurov, head of a research institute, guilty of disclosing state secrets for sending an acoustic device measuring ocean noises to China, but he was given a suspended two-year sentence and then freed him under amnesty.
Given the reality of Russia's judicial system, Sutyagin's attorneys decided to gamble on a jury rather than a judge for his retrial. Jury trials, banned for seven decades under the Communists, have begun reappearing in recent years. The first one held in Moscow City Court since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution was conducted last summer by the judge now overseeing Sutyagin's trial, Pyotr Shtunder.
"For us, it means more hope for a positive result," said Anna Stavitskaya, one of Sutyagin's attorneys. "Having just a judge, I don't think we can have a fair trial."
Still, Stavitskaya and her colleagues asked for Shtunder to be removed after he seemed to switch gears overnight last week and allowed prosecutors far more leeway in introducing charges previously dropped. "It seems to us that his bosses said to stick to the prosecutor's point of view," she said.
-------- terrorism
Feds Concerned About Dirty Bombs
By John Solomon
Associated Press Writer
November 11, 2003
http://www.cbn.com/CBNNews/Wire/031111h.asp
CBN.com - WASHINGTON (AP) -- Despite tightened security, terrorists still have a "very significant" chance of obtaining enough radioactive ingredients to create a dirty bomb, federal investigators conclude.
This finding arises from studies that document more than 1,300 disappearances of radioactive materials in the United States over the past five years. Most have been recovered, but some losses remain unsolved.
"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," a report written by the Energy Department's Los Alamos lab concluded.
That study and three others by the General Accounting Office, reviewed by The Associated Press, cited significant holes in the nation's security net that could take years to close, even after improvements by regulators since Sept. 11, 2001.
The Los Alamos report concludes that the threat of a so-called dirty bomb that could disperse radioactive debris 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 materials 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 the need.
"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, Congress' investigative arm, 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. "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 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."
The government is undertaking its first-ever inventory of who possesses radioactive materials and how much they possess, he said.
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 August.
Two universities told the GAO about cases in which doors to rooms with nuclear materials had been found unlocked or open.
The congressional investigators found that many of the 114 universities that possess radioactive 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.
In March 1999, an industrial radiography camera containing iridium-192 was stolen from a Florida home. The camera has not been recovered despite an FBI investigation. The NRC believes the material should have degraded by now and 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 toughening federal, state and international regulatory 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
----
French terror suspect had photos of nuclear reactor in Sydney flat: report
PARIS (AFP)
Nov 11, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031111103933.nsi5lnmu.html
Australian police have uncovered pictures of a nuclear reactor and a list of bomb-making components in the apartment of a French man suspected of planning terror attacks in Sydney, French radio reported Tuesday.
Europe 1 radio reported the find in the flat of Willie Virgile Brigitte, who was deported last month, as Australian police said they had sent a team of agents to France to interrogate the suspected Islamic militant.
The radio station did not identify the nuclear reactor shown in the photographs, but said the list of bomb-making materials uncovered in Brigitte's apartment were for explosives typically used by the al-Qaeda network.
Brigitte, 35, has been held by French counter-terrorism authorities in a prison outside Paris since he was deported on October 17, after France warned he could have been in Australia for "terror-related reasons".
Media reports have speculated Brigitte was setting up an al-Qaeda sleeper cell, passing on bomb-making skills and considering the possibility of attacking the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor, on Sydney's southern outskirts.
"We have deployed some of our members to France as part of ongoing inquiries into the Brigitte matter," an Australian Federal Police spokeswoman said Tuesday.
She refused to comment on a report in the Australian press that the federal police's director of counter-terrorism Tim Morris would join France's top anti-terrorism judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere in questioning Brigitte.
Australian authorities are unsure exactly what Brigitte may have been planning during his five-month stay in Sydney, but the head of the country's top spy agency ASIO said last week he was "almost certainly involved in activities with the intention of doing harm in Australia".
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- california
Lawrence Livermore Lab Retains Its Name
Associated Press
Tuesday, November 11, 2003; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23921-2003Nov10.html
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 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 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 U.S. 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 Site Must Make Use Of Geological Safety Net
No matter what ones thinks of nuclear power the waste problem must be solved
Space Daily
Nov 11, 2003
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/nuclear-civil-03c.html
Bloomington - A proposed federal repository near Yucca Mountain, Nev., for the long-term storage of 70,000 metric tons of high-level radioactive waste must take advantage of the mountain's natural geological properties, according to a new study by scientists at Indiana University Bloomington 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. Conclusions from the paper will likely be used during licensing discussions before the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission next year.
"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."
Bish and his Los Alamos National Laboratory colleagues also confirmed that Yucca Mountain's rocks are rich in zeolites -- soft, clay-like minerals with powerful absorption properties.
The mountain's zeolite deposits, which include extensive layers of clinoptilolite and mordenite, have long been considered a major asset that supports any proposed storage facility. This is because zeolites are known to readily absorb a number of positively charged ions, such as radioactive cesium, barium and strontium.
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 emplaced radioactive materials, providing an outlet for that energy.
Clinoptilolite and mordenite do not, however, effectively absorb several radioactive ions that are negatively charged or are very large. Bish said that this doesn't necessarily make Yucca Mountain a less desirable waste storage site.
"These zeolites are still one of the most potent natural means of retarding the movement of radioactive ions through rock," Bish said.
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's built there.
And although the sponge-like properties of Yucca Mountain minerals are desirable for a radioactive waste repository, Bish said a facility that successfully prevents waste migration will require a combination of man-made safeguards and the mountain's natural features.
The researchers took more than 2,000 samples from 17 cored holes across Yucca Mountain, at depths ranging from 20 to 1,800 meters below the surface. They performed X-ray diffraction studies of each sample.
Bish and his colleagues found zeolites are widespread at many depths, but perhaps most importantly, are abundant at a depth considered highly ideal for waste storage -- 300 meters below the mountain surface and 150 meters above the water table. A waste containment area would be built above this zeolitic safety net.
"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."
Yucca Mountain is located about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, near the DOE's Nevada Test Site. It was initially suggested as a possible high-level radioactive waste repository in the late 1970s. Congress approved the site for waste storage in July 2002.
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.
If all goes according to proponents' plans, the Yucca Mountain site could begin receiving radioactive waste as early as 2010. Many obstacles exist, however, that will likely delay the transportation of waste. Many states 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.
-------- us politics
Rumsfeld Takes More Friendly Fire
by Jim Lobe
November 11, 2003
(Inter Press Service)
http://www.antiwar.com/ips/lobe111103.html
The right-wing coalition that powered the United States into Iraq earlier this year appears in ever greater disarray amid increasingly heated complaints by friends, as well as foes, that the US occupation is not going well at all.
The main target is Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, who appears increasingly at a loss to explain US strategy beyond his now-famous admission in a "leaked" memo to his top aides last month that the situation in Iraq - not to mention the wider war against al-Qaeda terrorists - will be a "long, hard slog."
That was before Iraqi insurgents shot down a Chinook transport helicopter, killing 15 US servicemen at a single blow 10 days ago, and then destroyed a Blackhawk helicopter late last week and killed 6 more.
Meanwhile, the daily US death count, as well as the number of attacks against US forces, has roughly doubled since midsummer, while public confidence in President George W. Bush's Iraq policy continues to erode.
A whopping 87 percent of respondents in one ABC-Washington Post poll taken before the Chinook disaster said they feared that the United States is getting bogged down, while public and media discourse is increasingly studded with the dreaded "V" word, for Vietnam.
While military commanders continue to insist that the attacks on US forces do not amount to anything like a strategic threat, their latest reactions suggest a sharp rise in concern, at the very least.
In the past week, for example, the administration announced a dramatic acceleration of plans to recall thousands of Iraqi army troops, police and even intelligence officers to active duty, a strategy that will necessarily mean far less training than originally contemplated and a much stronger likelihood that former Baathists or other anti-US elements will be back in uniform.
Moreover, US military raids against suspected guerrilla strongholds in the so-called "Sunni Triangle" in central Iraq are now being carried out with much more firepower.
After the Blackhawk was shot down, US warplanes dropped 500-pound bombs on suspected enemy sites near Tikrit and Fallujah for the first time since Bush declared that major combat operations in Iraq had ended May 1.
Other reports said that tanks and howitzers were also involved in an assault, in what commanders in the field called "a show of force."
As more than one commentator has pointed out, such tactics risk undermining the battle for "hearts and minds" in the most troublesome Sunni areas, which Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) chief Paul Bremer says must become a focus of US efforts.
"These growing attacks against American forces have two clear goals: inflict casualties and force a reaction that alienates the local population," wrote Milt Bearden, a retired Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer who oversaw US covert actions against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, in the New York Times Sunday.
"Both are being achieved, as the quick-response raids by coalition troops to seize those behind the attacks fuel Iraqi alienation."
But that is not the only risk of more aggressive tactics. Larger shows of force also demonstrate to the public both here and in Iraq that the insurgency must be taken seriously.
In the face of this development, the administration in general and Rumsfeld in particular, are getting no end of increasingly biting advice, from friendly as well as less friendly sectors.
Neo-conservatives, the most insistent war boosters outside the administration before last March's invasion, are plainly upset with what they see as Rumsfeld's desperation to reduce US troop numbers in favor of activating the Iraqis.
In a two-page lead editorial Monday, the Weekly Standard newspaper accused the defense chief, its former hero, for essentially subverting the express wishes of the commander-in-chief.
"The president wants to win, and the Pentagon wants to get out," wrote Executive Editor William Kristol and Contributing Editor Robert Kagan in their piece called Exit Strategy or Victory Strategy?
The accelerated "Iraqification" strategy, according to the two founders of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) - the platform on which the "Attack Iraq" coalition behind Bush's post-Sept. 11 policies was forged - posed a potential disaster given the likelihood that the force will be inadequately trained and almost certainly penetrated by Baathists.
"It takes only a couple of mistakes in background checks to have a disaster," they warned.
Their answer is to sharply increase US troop numbers in Iraq, particularly in Sunni areas, and to increase the size of the US army from 10 to 12 divisions, even at the risk of fueling public worries that the country is becoming a quagmire, both militarily and fiscally.
Their advice echoed that given by Republican Senator John McCain, who, in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations last week, charged that the administration's actions, in contrast to its rhetoric, was creating the impressions that "our ultimate goal in Iraq is leaving as soon as possible, not meeting our strategic objective of building a free and democratic country in the heart of the Arab world."
McCain stressed that he believed Washington could still achieve its strategic objective with a greater military commitment, "but not if we lose popular support in the United States."
But that appears to be what is happening, judging by the latest polls, as well as the increasing frequency with which the current situation is being compared to the Vietnam War.
For their part, Democrats are behaving cautiously, seeing in the administration's obvious flailing about an opportunity to score political points and attack Bush's unilateralism.
Their leading presidential candidates also agree with the administration, the neo-conservatives and McCain that "cutting and running" is unacceptable because Washington would lose all "credibility" - another oft-heard echo of Vietnam - in the Middle East and beyond, and leave Iraq to the Baathists and even Islamist terrorists.
Their general solution is to internationalize the occupation, both by enlisting NATO forces under US command to keep the peace and by handing control of the civil and economic administration to the UN Security Council or some other multilateral mechanism.
But both options were rejected by Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney in September, and the deterioration in the security situation since then makes it much less likely that either the United Nations or most NATO members will want to get deeply involved.
--------
Disparity in Iraq, Afghanistan War Costs Scrutinized
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 11, 2003; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23970-2003Nov10.html
The United States has about 141/2 times as many troops in Iraq as in Afghanistan -- 132,000 compared with 9,000.
Yet the average monthly cost of U.S. military operations in Iraq has been running at about four times the cost of operations in Afghanistan -- $4.4 billion compared with $1 billion.
This disparity has caused some head-scratching among appropriators on Capitol Hill and raised some eyebrows -- and accounting eyeshades -- in the Pentagon.
Based on costs in Afghanistan, has the U.S. taxpayer been getting a bargain in Iraq? Or has Iraq been more the measure of what costs should be, making Afghanistan appear excessively expensive?
The answer seems to lie somewhere in between, according to Dov Zakheim, the Pentagon's comptroller and overseer of the military's financial books.
"People have held up these two sets of costs and said, 'This doesn't make sense to us,' " Zakheim said in a recent interview. "But when you start to peel away a little, you see a lot of the difference has to do with geography."
Take transportation, for instance. Getting around Afghanistan costs more than getting around Iraq.
That is because Afghanistan is bigger (in square miles, roughly 250,000 vs. 170,000), includes more mountains and has fewer roads. So using helicopters to supply troops and move them and their equipment is more necessary in Afghanistan than in Iraq. And helicopters are more expensive than travel by land or sea.
Compounding matters, much of the airlift in Afghanistan has been contracted to commercial firms, whose rates are higher than the military's Transportation Command, Zakheim said. By contrast, transportation needs in Iraq are being met almost exclusively by U.S. military assets. Many things can also be shipped into and out of Iraq by sea.
"It's just much harder to get into Afghanistan than it is to get into Iraq," he said.
Afghanistan's rugged terrain and larger size also raise the price of surveillance and other intelligence efforts to track down al Qaeda terrorists and their Taliban supporters. The Pentagon is having to pay more in Afghanistan than in Iraq for the same amount of tactical intelligence, Zakheim said.
Additionally, although both Afghanistan and Iraq are poor, Afghanistan is significantly poorer. As much as Iraq's power plants, water facilities and other public works have deteriorated, at least some infrastructure exists. The same cannot be said of Afghanistan.
"In Iraq, it's a matter of improving things," Zakheim said. "In Afghanistan, it's a matter of building them."
One other advantage in Iraq is that the bigger U.S. force there provides certain economies of scale. A substantial amount of logistical, communications, medical and other support goes into maintaining thousands of U.S. troops dispatched abroad. But these support costs often rise at a slower rate than the number of troops being supported.
The 9,000-member U.S. force in Afghanistan takes about 35,000 support troops outside the country, according to Pentagon figures. The 132,000 troops in Iraq require about 87,000 serving outside support roles.
This computes into total force figures of 44,000 for Afghanistan and 220,000 for Iraq. Dividing each by the average monthly operational costs yields $23,000 per service member in Afghanistan and $20,000 in Iraq -- numbers that suggest a narrower cost gap between the two military operations.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Bomb Damages U.N. Office in Afghanistan
November 11, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Afghan-Explosion-UN.html
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) -- In another attack on a foreign aid group in southern Afghanistan, a car bomb exploded outside a United Nations office here Tuesday, wounding at least one person, a U.N. official said.
The explosion, in Kandahar's upscale residential area of Shehr-e-Nau, occurred in a car parked in front of a home being used as a workplace by the U.N. Office Project Support, said Siddiqullah, an Afghan who is in charge of humanitarian operations for the United Nations in southern Afghanistan.
The blast, which occurred minutes after U.N. employees had left the building at the end of their work day, smashed a front gate, cracked walls in the building and broke its windows, said Siddiqullah, who like many Afghans only uses one name.
A man driving by on a motorcycle was wounded by the blast, said Siddiqullah.
It was unclear who had parked the car in front of the building, and there was no immediate claim of responsibility.
Kandahar is a former stronghold of the Taliban militia which ruled most of Afghanistan before it was driven out of power by a U.S.-led invasion and replaced by an Afghan government supported by the coalition.
The Taliban have been blamed for other attacks in Kandahar since losing power, and its supporters often fight there with Afghan security forces and coalition troops.
However, the U.N. Office Project Support has continued to work in the area, building roads and drains.
Afghan government officials have blamed suspected Taliban or al-Qaida fighters for a spate of attacks against government security forces and aid groups in southern Afghanistan.
Two weeks ago, Taliban insurgents kidnapped a Turkish road engineer, Hasan Onal, on the highway in Zabul, which borders Kandahar. They released his Afghan driver with a ransom note saying that Onal would be executed within 48 hours unless authorities freed several Taliban prisoners. But the insurgents have not carried out their threat and instead began talks with the government.
Last month, attackers riding a motorcycle tossed a grenade into the office of an Italian aid group, Intersos, in Helmand, anther southern province.
In September, four aid workers -- Afghans who worked for the Danish Committee for Aid to Afghan Refugees -- were killed in Mokur district of the southern Ghazni province. Suspected Taliban rebels on motorcycles stopped the victims' car and tied them up before killing them execution-style by the side of the road.
Last March, a worker for the International Committee of the Red Cross, Ricardo Munguia of El Salvador, was shot and killed in southern Afghanistan after his captors apparently received instructions from a former Taliban commander, Mullah Dadullah, who is wanted by the Afghan government.
--------
6 Afghans Die in U.S. Raid, Reports Say
November 11, 2003
By CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/international/asia/11AFGH.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, Nov. 10 - American forces began 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 Monday.
The operation is the first big sweep by the American military against fighters in the remote mountains of the Hindu Kush, and suggests that militants have spread their influence to new areas.
But some tribal leaders who support the government objected to the operation. One said an attack by American forces on Oct. 30 had killed several of his family members.
Soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division were dropped by air into Kunar and Nuristan Provinces on Friday "to clear the area of anticoalition and antigovernment fighters," the military spokesman, Col. Rodney Davis, said in a brief statement.
Forces loyal to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a renegade commander who has declared a holy war against American forces in Afghanistan, are thought to be in the area.
Maulavi Ghulam Rabbani, 60, a religious leader and commander allied with the government, said American planes bombed and fired on his home on the night of Oct. 30, killing six people, including two of his children. He said he was not there at the time but was given a detailed report from his nephew.
"Three planes came," Mr. Rabbani 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 was trying to take three of Mr. Rabbani's young cousins - ages 15, 7 and 5 - to shelter when they were all killed by gunfire from a plane or helicopter, he said. The children's father, carrying his blind mother on his back, escaped, he said.
Colonel Davis, the spokesman, said by e-mail that he was unable to confirm whether Americans had attacked the village. A United Nations official in Kabul said the Americans had bombed the village by mistake, trying to hit the house of one of Mr. Hekmatyar's commanders.
-------
U.S., Afghan Forces Stage Offensive in Eastern Area
Associated Press
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24882-2003Nov11.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, Nov. 10 -- U.S. and Afghan militias began a new operation in eastern Afghanistan, the U.S. military said Monday, in the latest effort to destroy a network of insurgents that includes members of al Qaeda, the Taliban and forces loyal to a renegade warlord.
Separately, government loyalists in the south appealed for help fighting the Taliban -- two years after the militia's rulers were driven from power by a U.S.-led invasion.
Operation Mountain Resolve began Friday in Nurestan and Konar provinces with an airdrop by the 10th Mountain Division, U.S. military spokesman Col. Rodney Davis said. The provinces are northeast of the capital, Kabul.
"The main objective is against terrorism," Davis said. "It is focused on destroying anti-coalition elements, disrupting their ability to operate in the eastern region of Afghanistan. We want the anti-coalition forces to understand that there is no sanctuary for them anywhere in Afghanistan."
Davis did not say how long the operation was expected to last and did not provide details about manpower or equipment.
The combined operation by U.S. troops and Afghan militiamen is likely to target members of al Qaeda, Taliban and the Hizb-i-Islami, a group loyal to renegade warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
Hekmatyar, a former prime minister, has called for a jihad, or holy war, against foreign troops in Afghanistan, but so far has eluded U.S. efforts to arrest or kill him.
Hekmatyar issued a statement Monday saying attacks by his supporters would not stop until the U.S.-led coalition and its "puppet government" withdrew from Afghanistan.
"America knows that it has just one choice, that it has to leave Afghanistan and Iraq," the statement said. "America will only increase casualties in its forces if it increases its troops in Afghanistan or Iraq."
The two-page, Pashto-language statement was faxed to the Associated Press in Peshawar, Pakistan, from an unknown location. Its authenticity was verified by Salahuddin Salah, a Hizb-i-Islami official.
President Hamid Karzai's spokesman, Jawid Luddin, said the three groups "probably are part of the same network."
Afghanistan's national army is not participating in the new operation, but the U.S. military coordinated the offensive with Kabul, Karzai said.
Karzai's central government, installed after the Taliban's ouster, wields limited influence outside Kabul. Luddin said it remained deeply concerned about poor security in the provinces.
Parts of the north are controlled by rival warlords, who back the government only nominally.
In the south, Taliban insurgents have increased attacks in recent months against coalition and government troops and Kabul loyalists.
On Monday, an official from Zabol province, about 60 miles from the Taliban's former power base in Kandahar, urged the central government to send more troops because of mounting attacks in the remote mountainous region bordering Pakistan, where many Taliban fighters are believed to have fled after their ouster.
Zabol has experienced a recent string of bomb blasts, direct attacks and kidnappings by militants.
-------- arms
Asia's 14-billion-dollar naval defence market a magnet for global firms
SINGAPORE (AFP)
Nov 11, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031111094945.m5uqyfw0.html
The world's top defence companies are moving to make a big splash in the Asia-Pacific's naval arms market which is seen doubling to 14 billion US dollars in the next six years, industry experts said Tuesday.
Frigates with stealth capabilities, patrol vessels, submarines, seaborne surveillance systems as well as command and control facilities are in demand as governments upgrade capabilities to deal with a growing terrorist threat, piracy and environmental concerns.
Top defence firms from Europe and the United States participating at the International Maritime Defence Exhibition and Conference which opened here Tuesday agreed the Asia Pacific would become the world's biggest market by
Singapore Defence Minister Teo Chee Hean told the conference the threat of maritime terrorism "is not theoretical but real".
He warned of "horrific" consequences such as a disruption of the global economy if terrorists turned oil supertankers and chemical carriers into floating bombs in such choke points at the Straits of Malacca or the Suez Canal.
Mark Ritson, director for marketing and public affairs at British defence firm BAE Systems, said that after Asian governments complete modernising their air forces, they are likely to shift to equipping their navies.
"Primarily, if you look at the Pacific Rim, the requirement is to protect borders and to deal with piracy, illegal immigration, coastal pollution and patrolling coastlines," he told AFP on the sidelines of the conference.
"Thus, there is a demand for patrol boats like frigates and offshore patrol vessels and to a point submarines.
"It seems that countries are moving away from the key combat aircraft competition more and more towards naval requirements."
BAE Systems senior vice president for Singapore Tony Harrison said "the essence of Asia is that it's a trading area, and so vast amounts of the world's shipping goes through this area."
"And the rising terrorist threat has meant that any ship, any cargo has to be looked at with a degree of suspicion."
BAE Systems can provide surveillance capabilities onshore as well as on board frigates to detect suspicious cargo. The company can also offer command and control systems for the region's navies.
Compared with 10 years ago when naval doctrines were shaped by the Cold War, the dynamics have changed to focus more on the emerging terrorist threat to shipping, Harrison said.
BAE Systems has supplied frigates to Malaysia and patrol vessels to Brunei and hopes to secure a deal to sell frigates to Thailand.
Armaris, a joint venture between French naval shipbuilder DCN and Thales, is another company that has already established a beach-head in the region.
In July last year, Armaris signed a contract to build two Scorpene Class submarines for the Malaysian navy to be delivered in 2008.
This year, the firm signed another contract to train more than 150 Malaysian sailors to man the submarines.
An old French submarine will be put into service in the next few months to train the Malaysian sailors, said Armaris communications director Jean-Marie Daviron.
He said the company also expects to participate in the construction of a naval facility for the submarines.
"It's an entire package," Daviron said.
DCN itself has a contract with Singapore to build six stealth frigates for the city-state's navy, and Daviron said he hopes Singapore would express an interest in its submarines.
Armaris is also negotiating with India to help build six Scorpene Class submarines for the Indian navy.
While the Middle East remained Armaris' biggest market, Asia is seen a major growth area.
China's growing military influence is another reason why some Asian countries are modernising their navies, a defence expert who who asked not to be named said.
-------- asia
Military warns of withdrawal
By Sharon Behn
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20031110-102549-6176r.htm
JAKARTA, Indonesia - The head of Indonesia's military said yesterday he has proposed to withdraw military forces protecting vital oil and mining projects around the country, potentially exposing foreign investors to separatist violence.
The move would affect several American companies just as the United States is moving to cut military aid to the Indonesian military and shift support to the country's police.
Most heavily dependent on military protection is PT Freeport Indonesia, a subsidiary of the U.S. gold and copper mining company Freeport-McMoRan, which is guarded by some 2,500 soldiers and police under military command.
Freeport had been renegotiating its security arrangements with the military as recently as two weeks ago.
"I haven't heard anything about this," said Freeport Senior Vice President Daniel Bowman just hours after Gen. Endriartono Sutarto made the announcement at a military complex outside the capital.
Gen. Sutarto said the military had proposed at a Cabinet-level meeting last week "to hand over the security task from the military to the internal security [apparatus] of each company." It was not clear when the Cabinet would decide on the matter.
"Basically, the task and responsibility of the security of vital national projects should be undertaken by their managements. They should secure their projects and, if necessary, will be backed by the police," Gen. Sutarto said.
Despite the timing, the general denied the decision was linked to a U.S. Senate vote at the end of October cutting $400,000 in training assistance to the Indonesian military.
The vote, taken over President Bush's objections, reflected dissatisfaction with the results of a joint FBI-Indonesian investigation into the ambush killing last year of two American teachers working at a company-sponsored school. There has been speculation in the United States that the military was involved in the shooting.
Indonesia's military guards a number of important exploration sites around the country, and reportedly receives large sums of money in return. In addition to Freeport, which is located in West Papua, it secures companies such as Exxon Mobil, which has interests in the unstable province of Aceh - which is under martial law.
According to Maj. Gen. Sjafrie Sjamsuddin, the military has one battalion protecting Freeport, another protecting Exxon Mobil and the equivalent of a third battalion divided among 10 other vital projects.
A Western analyst based in Jakarta said the impact would be felt most severely by Freeport. He noted that Exxon Mobil was reducing its operations in the area and considering shutting down altogether because of the security situation.
Freeport pays the military more than $7 million a year for the army's protection. Until now, the payment had been made on an informal basis, but the company had been pushing to formalize the arrangement.
"We are not mercenaries. We never sign any contracts," Gen. Sutarto said.
The Western analyst agreed that the move was probably not linked to the U.S. Senate decision involving military-to-military training.
"What [the Indonesian military] want is foreign military sales," he said. "They know now that they can't get American hardware anytime soon ... so they ... have stopped trying to please the United States."
He also said the military may be trying to negotiate a better deal with the companies it protects.
"I think it is part of a gamble on Mr. Sutarto's side, because financially, they can't afford to leave these very lucrative [deals]," he said. "So there will be some compromise, I'm sure."
-------- balkans
NATO peacekeepers destroy weapons in Bosnia
SARAJEVO (AFP)
Nov 11, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031111130523.hjj2l6ep.html
NATO-led peacekeepers in Bosnia said Tuesday they had begun an operation to destroy massive quantities of unsafe munitions left over from the country's 1992-95 war.
Stabilisation Force (SFOR) spokesman Jeremy Tod said the weapons belonged mainly to the Bosnian Serb army.
"Something in the order of 1,000 metric tonnes need to be destroyed as soon as possible," he said.
"The destruction of these munitions is already taking place."
SFOR expects to identify "far more" ammunition which would need to be destroyed in the future, he added.
In a separate operation SFOR started Monday to destroy surface-to-air missiles owned by the Bosnian Serb army and the army of the country's Muslim-Croat part.
-------- iraq
Iraqis want private-sector Japanese, not SDF
Eiichiro Ishiyama
(Kyodo News)
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&cat=1&id=278495
SAMAWAH, Iraq - Samawah is a small conservative city in southern Iraq where personnel from Japan's Self-Defense Forces (SDF) may be deployed to engage in the reconstruction of the country under the U.S.-led coalition, but its residents say they would prefer to see Japanese civilians rather than troops.
With a population of about 400,000, the city, about 250 kilometers south of Baghdad, is dominated overwhelmingly by Shiite Muslims.
Like other parts of southern Iraq, Samawah is far more peaceful than Baghdad and looks less like a war zone.
No parts of the city are encircled by barbed wire fences or concrete walls. Relentless security arrangements are nowhere in sight.
Stores are doing business as usual in the heart of Samawah. Dutch military forces in charge of keeping the peace there have not suffered any fatalities nor been attacked since their deployment more than two months ago.
However, when asked about the troops from the Netherlands, some residents said they do not want to see foreign soldiers with guns any more and it is about time for foreign troops to leave the town.
Others said many residents know each other and that the city has always maintained law and order by itself.
The bulk of residents feel Iraqis themselves can maintain the peace as about 2,000 personnel of a newly formed police force are posted in the city and its vicinity.
Many Iraqis are friendly toward Japan, but the people of Samawah are particularly pro-Japanese.
They know Japanese history very well, including the fact that Japan fought the United States in World War II and was reduced to ashes.
They talk about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and express a sense of disappointment with the Japanese for supporting what they call the "one-sided war" that the United States initiated against Iraq.
Asked whether they support Japan's plan to send SDF troops to help rebuild Iraq, many residents said they would "welcome Japanese." But when asked whether Samawah needs more "armed foreign troops," an overwhelming number of residents replied "No."
Asked whether they want armed Japanese or private citizens, almost all those questioned said they hoped for civilians.
Japan may be viewed as a country that betrayed Iraq, but it remains the envy of Iraqis who know Japan was ahead of all other nations except for Europe and the U.S. in becoming an industrially developed country and produced quality products.
Forces in Iraq who have been attacking U.S. military personnel have declared that all those who cooperate with the United States in its occupation policy are the targets of their assaults.
Besides U.S. troops, United Nations and Red Cross personnel in Iraq have been subjected to attacks, so even private-sector Japanese people face risks if sent there.
Forces opposed to the United States may aim at international organizations in Baghdad and other places in the future to give the impression to the rest of the world that Iraq is in chaos.
But even in such a case, it is hard to believe, judging by local people's feelings in Samawah, that Japanese civilians would become targets of assaults as long as they work hard for the restoration of medical and educational facilities.
The more "grass roots" the assistance is, the less the risk of attack.
There has been an increase in births of physically impaired children and cases of infantile cancer in small cities, including Samawah.
They were reportedly caused by the massive use of depleted uranium bombs and ammunition by the U.S. military during the 1991 Gulf War.
A physician at a Samawah pediatric, obstetrics and gynecology hospital said that what he would like to get most is "a specialist doctor well-versed in diseases caused by radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
My visit to Samawah in late October reinforced my doubts on why Japan is sending military personnel instead of private-sector people, such as those from nongovernmental organizations, to help Iraqis.
----
War killed 55,000 Iraqi civilians
By Shaista Aziz
Tuesday 11 November 2003
Aljazeera
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/3FF27CFC-764F-441B-A0D6-FB5B3BAF0704.htm
The invasion, war and occupation of Iraq has cost up to 55,000 civilian lives, according to a shocking new report published by a UK-based charity.
Now the medical charity is lobbying the American and British governments to focus urgently on the healthcare needs of the Iraqi population, following the invasion of the country.
Medact's report, highlighting the devastating impact of war on the Iraqi population, reveals that between 22,000 and 55,000 Iraqi civilians died during the bombing of the country.
The report titled, Continuing Collateral Damage: the Health and Environmental costs of War on Iraq, says the American and British occupiers are obliged under international law to ensure the healthcare needs of the population are met.
Findings
One of the co-authors of the report, Dr Sabya Faruq, told Aljazeera.net that the situation across Iraq was desperate.
''There has been a reported increase in maternal mortality rates, acute malnutrition has almost doubled from 4% to 8% in the last year and there has been an increase in water-borne disease and vaccine-preventable diseases.''
Iraq has a population of 25 million people, half of whom are under the age of 18. Children are particularly vulnerable in post-war Iraq, with one in four not receiving immunisation against measles since Saddam Hussein was removed from power.
The charity says that mines and unexploded bombs are continuing to kill and maim. The effects of chemicals, such as depleted uranium used by invading forces, on civilians could take decades to manifest.
Pre-Conflict
Dr Faruq has told Aljazeera.net that before the recent invasion of Iraq, the country had a poor record on healthcare, but the situation now is at breaking point.
'Iraq was never a third world country, it had a fairly developed healthcare system that was able to deliver to the population'
Dr Sabya Faruq, Medact In 1990, the UN development index, which ranks countries in terms of provisions of healthcare, education and life expectancy rates, placed Iraq 50th out of 130 countries. By 2003 and before the recent invasion of the country, Iraq had dropped to 126th out of 174 countries.
''Iraq was never a third world country, it had a fairly developed infrastructure and healthcare system that was able to deliver to the population. Now, the escalating violence in post-war Iraq is creating huge problems.
''The effects of the war will impact on the healthcare of future generations and, with the way things stand, the situation will get worse.''
Support
Medact is also calling for better support for Iraqi doctors and healthcare workers who are working under increasingly difficult conditions ''This report hasn't even touched on the trauma that doctors in Iraq have been and are suffering. They are working on the frontline and are subjected to violence themselves on an almost daily basis.''
Dr Faruq says that it is important for doctors and development workers to speak up about what is really happening in Iraq.
''Healthcare workers have a duty to speak out and let the outside world know about what's happening in Iraq. We have to speak up to make sure that civilians aren't suffering any more than they already are.''
The charity is calling on the UN to send peacekeepers to Iraq so that humanitarian and reconstruction work can begin.
----
LAW AND ORDER
Iraqi Tribes, Asked to Help G.I.'s, Say They Can't
November 11, 2003
By SUSAN SACHS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/international/middleeast/11FALL.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
FALLUJA, Iraq, Nov. 8 - As a tribal chieftain in Iraq's most rebellious city, Sheik Khamis el-Essawi has met more American commanders in the last seven months than he can remember.
They all make the same polite yet firm demand. He must, they say, exert his legendary tribal authority to stop guerrilla attacks on their troops.
Sheik Khamis, a dapper man whose Buessa tribe still controls a fine swath of fertile land along the Euphrates, says he keeps responding that, alas, his influence is just not what it used to be.
"Every time a new general comes, they call us to a meeting and say the same things," he said after conferring Saturday with the latest high-ranking visitor, Gen. John P. Abizaid, commander of American forces in the Middle East. "But they don't understand that the sheiks have no control over those people doing the attacks. Believe me, those people are not going to listen to me."
In Iraq's Shiite-dominated south, a cohesive group of Shiite Muslim clergymen, quickly established themselves as the new authority figures when official hostilities ended and they urged their followers to tolerate the occupation.
There has also been virtually no violence in the north, where the majority Kurds had long built up their own institutions.
But in restive Falluja, and places like it across the Sunni Muslim heartland of central Iraq, Saddam Hussein had so decimated the natural social hierarchy, Iraqis say, that no group could fill the political vacuum left by his ouster.
"We miss the support that the government used to give," said Sheik Khamis, lighting up a Pleasure brand cigarette and recalling the days when no one in power expected him to actually lead his tribesmen. "Now it's the state that's coming to us for support."
In their day, imperial powers like the Ottoman Turks and the British used to manage this unruly region by co-opting the tribes, keeping them occupied with internal rivalries or buying their loyalty with land.
Iraq's newest foreign occupiers are trying the same formula, but the ingredients are different, producing inconclusive results. Under Mr. Hussein, tribal leaders became an extension of the all-powerful Baath Party, rendering them irrelevant in the eyes of many of their followers.
In the 1990's, Mr. Hussein further undercut tribal authority with his "faith campaign," which placed a new class of militant Sunni clerics above the tribes in the social and political mix, residents here say.
Since Baghdad fell in April, five different American commanders have tried to tame Falluja, a rough and tumble city of 450,000 people that lived almost exclusively off the patronage of Mr. Hussein's government.
Nearly every day, bombs explode near American convoys, rocket-propelled grenades are fired at American patrols or soldiers raid the houses of suspected insurgents. On Nov. 2, a rocket fired from the outskirts of Falluja brought down a Chinook helicopter, killing 16 soldiers on board.
To judge by the look of Falluja, the violent opposition still has the upper hand.
The main streets display neatly written banners urging people to kill "traitors" and Americans. The police station, where officers are paid and supervised by American soldiers, is reinforced against attack with sandbags and barbed wire. City Hall, where the American-appointed mayor sits, has been hit repeatedly with rocket-propelled grenades.
Yet the newest American commander is confident he has found the right combination of military force, persuasion and promise of a brighter future to pacify Falluja.
"What we offer is this," said Lt. Col. Brian M. Drinkwine, of the 82nd Airborne Division, who took charge two months ago. "If Falluja and the surrounding area are safe, then the coalition and the international community would invest here."
The colonel and his men operate from trailers on the southern outskirts of the city, among the bleak remnants of an old holiday camp. They frequently invite clerics and tribal leaders over for chats about the disadvantages of allowing attacks to continue. Sometimes they also make the point more forcefully.
After American convoys encountered homemade explosives on roads running through Sheik Khamis's land, soldiers turned up on his doorstep and demanded to search his home for weapons.
The sheik was delighted.
"When they came to my house, honestly I was happy," he recalled. "It's kind of a cover for me because some people were calling me a traitor for supporting the Americans. It actually helped me."
Colonel Drinkwine has also dangled financial incentives, spending thousands of dollars to fix some schools and a hospital. Not everyone was impressed.
"He was telling us one day how he spent $3,000 on this and $5,000 on that," said Sheik Ibrahim el-Buessa, a cousin of Sheik Khamis. "So what? When Sheik Khamis's father died two years ago, we paid $35,000 just for the funeral."
The American commander's adviser on tribal and religious affairs is a young Arab-American medic in his unit, Pfc. Khaled Dudin, a Californian who spent part of his childhood among the Bedouin tribes of Saudi Arabia.
Private Dudin has taken to warning local Sunni clerics that they will have "blood responsibility" under Islamic law if they incite their followers to attack American forces.
"I am a paratrooper and an American Muslim," the soldier declared, "and I can quote Koran as well as anybody."
But there is nothing simple about Falluja and its murky stew of tribal leaders, Saddam-era pretenders to tribal power, clerics of varying militancy and a population primed for hostility to the United States.
The city and occupiers got off to a bad start. A pro-Saddam Hussein demonstration in late April led to a shootout with soldiers that left at least 15 Iraqis dead. Other lethal confrontations followed, fueled in part by mosque preachers who spread stories about American soldiers spying on women from their posts in residential neighborhoods.
The rumor, denied by the military, was poison in a conservative city where women rarely leave their homes and then only when they are completely covered. Iraqis said it also enhanced the standing of young Sunni clerics who preached that the United States was waging war on Islam, a theme that had been encouraged by Saddam Hussein.
"This used to make a lot of young men eager to go fight the infidels and become a martyr," said Abdelhamid al-Jumaili, one of the more moderate of Falluja's clerics. "So now it's practically impossible for clerics to preach moderation and patience."
Sheik Jumaili, whose title is religious rather than tribal, would prefer to see Falluja at peace.
Most of the city's clerics share these views, he said, but are too divided and frightened to exert influence.
"What can a majority do against 100 people with guns who can go into the street and terrorize us?" he said. "These people don't listen to clerics or anyone else who disagrees with them. They only listen to the hardliners, those who will march with them."
The same questions were asked one night last week in Saadi Muhammad's home in Falluja. The men sat cross-legged on the floor for the sunset meal to break the daylong Ramadan fast. The women stayed in the kitchen, away from visitors, letting the children deliver the flat bread they had baked in an outdoor oven.
The talk around the dishes of soups and rice was of rising prices for gasoline, meat and vegetables, and the many neighbors who lost their jobs in the disbanded military and security services. Mr. Muhammad, a schoolteacher, could not work up much indignation. Under the Americans, his monthly salary has skyrocketed from about $30 to $300.
"We used to sit and dream about people with satellite television," he said. "Now I have it so the kids can watch sports. Before I had a wreck of a car. Now I bought a nice used one. We fixed up the house, too. I guess I'm rich."
Mr. Muhammad was reluctant to criticize openly those who attack American forces here, insisting that no one was fighting for Saddam Hussein - "all he brought us was wars" - but noting, "It's a kind of religious belief that they should not accept occupation."
After several hours of conversation over tea and plates of fruit, he let his own frustration show, just for an instant.
"We were just discussing this at school, that with no security, companies will not come to help us rebuild and the Americans will stay longer because all Iraq will be in chaos," he said. "But I can't stand up and say anything."
--------
GI Kills Head of Council in Baghdad Slum
Army and Iraqis Disagree on Circumstances
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, November 11, 2003; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23947-2003Nov10.html
BAGHDAD, Nov. 10 -- The U.S. military and residents of Baghdad's largest neighborhood differ on the circumstances of Muhannad Kaabi's death. Did he reach for a gun? Did he try to wrestle a U.S. soldier to the ground? Was he killed in cold blood?
They do, however, agree on the aftermath, another potential setback in U.S. efforts to court support among the crucial constituency of Sadr City. After a shouting match and fight that lasted a few minutes Sunday, a soldier shot Kaabi, the man leading the U.S.-supervised council that runs the slum, which is home to as many as 2 million people. His death left supporters of U.S. efforts grasping for explanations and handed detractors new evidence that tranquility under the occupation is impossible.
"Why would they use force against him?" asked Thamer Hamad, 30, a neighbor who joined the funeral procession Monday that escorted Kaabi's flag-draped coffin from his home. "He was the representative of this city and people trusted him."
The fight erupted around noon at the council headquarters as Kaabi, a 28-year-old mechanical engineer who had led the council for more than three months, arrived in his car at council headquarters.
The U.S. military, without referring to Kaabi by name, said in a statement that soldiers blocked the vehicle from entering the gate, which is protected by concrete barriers and barbed wire. Kaabi got out and argued with the soldiers, it said. He then got back in the car and attempted to drive through the barricade. The statement said a soldier fired a warning shot, and Kaabi got out again, and fought with the soldier and grabbed at his weapon. At that point, the statement said, another soldier fired two more warning shots.
"The driver continued to fight and wrestled the soldier to the ground while attempting to pull the weapon away from the soldier," the statement said. "The other soldier shot the driver in the upper leg."
Iraqi guards who patrol the entrance with U.S. forces denied that Kaabi reached for the soldier's gun or tackled him. Several guards who said they witnessed the incident said Kaabi -- known even to them for his temper -- yelled in English at the soldiers as they tried to search his car. One of the soldiers bumped him with his chest, then pushed him and a shoving match ensued.
The fight lasted a couple of minutes, the guards said, and another soldier fired a warning shot into the air. Seconds later, they said, the same soldier fired another shot that struck the slightly built Kaabi, who died a few hours later at a military hospital.
"They fired the second bullet deliberately, 100 percent," said Jassem Kadhim Abboud, 40, a city hall employee, who said he witnessed the incident. "It was killing for the sake of killing. It was not self-defense."
Since the Oct. 27 bombings of the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross and three police stations in Baghdad, U.S. soldiers and their Iraqi colleagues have heightened precautions at city council buildings, government offices and other potential targets across the uneasy capital. Since then, U.S. forces have suffered their highest casualties of the seven-month occupation: 35 killed in the first 10 days of November. Another U.S. soldier was killed in a rocket-propelled grenade attack on a convoy Sunday night in Iskandariyah, a town about 40 miles south of Baghdad, the military said.
[Early Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that an explosion in the southern city of Basra destroyed two cars on a road used by British troops. Iraqi police officers said at least three civilians were killed.]
For U.S. troops, Sadr City has proved to be a particularly difficult neighborhood to navigate. Home to about a third of Baghdad's residents, Sadr City is overwhelmingly populated by Shiite Muslims. The vast majority welcomed the fall of Saddam Hussein's government, whose repression of their community was relentless. But the neighborhood also serves as the stronghold of Muqtada Sadr, a junior cleric who until recently has tried to rally opposition to the U.S. occupation among the legions of poor and disenchanted.
In August, the U.S. military acknowledged that soldiers in a helicopter in Sadr City had intentionally knocked down a banner inscribed with the name of one of Shiite Islam's most revered figures. The incident ignited a protest of about 3,000 people.
Last month, two U.S. soldiers and two Iraqis were killed in a firefight that erupted near Sadr's headquarters. Since then, some residents have complained about the greater U.S. military presence in the streets, a share of them calling it provocative. While U.S. officials insisted the shooting of Kaabi remained under investigation, they clearly worried Monday about the fallout.
"We're concerned about how the good people of Iraq view this. We're concerned about how people might turn this in ways that should not be done," said Col. William Bishop, a civil affairs officer who works with the 41-member council in Sadr City and eight others in Baghdad. "It's a sad event and a good man died, and I'm still not sure exactly what happened."
Despite his position, Kaabi was not a well-known figure in Sadr City, although many said Monday that they had heard of the shooting. The council is caught in a tug-of-war that breaks along the fault lines that define the occupation in much of Iraq. On one side are residents who support the body in the hope that it can bring relief to a neighborhood whose streets are strewn with trash and sewage. On the other are supporters of Sadr and others who view the council as a puppet of U.S. officials and question its motives.
About 200 people poured into the street outside Kaabi's house, within walking distance of the U.S. military base in the area. Women beat their chests in traditional mourning. Men carried the coffin, draped in an Iraqi flag, and shouted, "There is no god but God." Along the procession, residents held up banners denouncing "the criminal act which the infidel Americans committed."
Other banners declared Kaabi a martyr and labeled his killing an assassination.
"It's so strange. Why would they do something like this?" asked Salim Jabbar, a relative of Kaabi's. "This is the policy of occupation. They don't respect people. They respect only those who serve their interests."
Outside Kaabi's house, some relatives traded conspiracy theories, wild speculation that is familiar in Baghdad. He was honest and incorruptible, they said. Perhaps he was not heeding the wishes of the U.S. administration, so he was killed. "This is what we think," said Sawali Kaabi, another relative. "It was deliberate."
--------
New Office to Coordinate Iraq Contracts
Pentagon Facility in Baghdad to Set Reconstruction Spending Priorities
By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 11, 2003; Page E01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23986-2003Nov10.html
A new Pentagon office in Baghdad will coordinate and set priorities for Iraq reconstruction projects, including how to spend international donations and proceeds from the sale of Iraqi oil exports, as well as the $18.7 billion Congress recently approved, a Pentagon spokesman said yesterday.
Maj. Joseph M. Yoswa, a spokesman on U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority matters, said the office will provide a central place for managing contracts and reconstruction work and should help address concerns about the oversight of the contracting process. John A. Shaw, a deputy undersecretary of defense, announced plans for the creation of the new office last month at a contractors' conference in London.
In disclosing new details yesterday, Yoswa said the office is expected to have about 100 people on staff, including government and private-sector contract specialists. Retired Rear Adm. David J. Nash will run it.
The new Iraq Infrastructure Reconstruction office, which will report to L. Paul Bremer, the civilian administrator for the U.S.-led occupation government, will not actually award any contracts to private companies, Yoswa said. Instead, the office will direct existing government agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Army Corps of Engineers to award about 20 prime reconstruction contracts from the second round of U.S. funds for Iraq, he said.
"Hopefully Congress and the public will get more information out of this office in Baghdad than we've gotten from government agencies in Washington," said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). "This needs to be a real step toward accountability and toward much wiser spending of American taxpayers' money."
USAID and the Corps of Engineers, which has a prime role overseeing repairs to Iraq's oil fields and refineries, have both been criticized for their handling of the initial reconstruction contracts, which were awarded through limited competition or sole-source procedures.
Yoswa said officials have not yet decided whether to allow limited bidding in the second round of funding to speed reconstruction. He said officials are also considering whether U.S. laws would allow foreign companies to bid on the contracts.
USAID was the lead agency in the first round of Iraq reconstruction funding, awarding 11 contracts and five grants worth more than $2 billion. It already has a key role in doling out a portion of the $18.7 billion in additional reconstruction funds.
The agency is competitively bidding out $1.5 billion to continue repairing Iraq's infrastructure as a follow-on to a limited-bid contract, worth more than $1 billion, awarded to San Francisco-based Bechtel National Inc. in April. Bids for the new contract were due last Thursday.
Ellen Yount, a spokeswoman for USAID, said the agency does not have a timetable for when the follow-on contract will be awarded.
The Corps of Engineers awarded $1.5 billion worth of work to KBR, a subsidiary of Houston-based Halliburton Co., to get Iraq's oil operations up and running. The Corps is now reviewing bids for two new competitively bid contracts worth $1.2 billion.
As part of the creation of the reconstruction office, the Pentagon has established a Web site, www.rebuilding-iraq.net, and plans to host a contracting conference next week in Arlington.
-------- mideast
Saudi Forces Detain Riyadh Bombing Suspects
November 11, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-security-saudi.html
RIYADH (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia has detained suspects in the devastating suicide bomb attack on a housing complex in Riyadh after vowing to strike back with an ``iron fist.''
``A group of suspects in the bombing was detained. The campaign to chase the culprits started immediately after the bombing. Some were also detained and released after interrogation,'' a diplomat close to the investigation told Reuters on Tuesday.
The diplomat said the arrests took place in Riyadh and the outskirts but did not disclose when they occurred. ``The campaign to hunt down those responsible is continuing,'' the source said.
Saudi-born Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network is suspected of staging Sunday's suicide attack that killed at least 18, including five children, and wounded 120 in the capital Riyadh. In May a triple suicide bombing on a housing complex in Riyadh killed 35 people.
Saudi officials and Washington blame al Qaeda for the weekend attack in which bombers posing as police blew up an explosives-rigged car in the Muhaya compound.
Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Washington Prince Bandar bin Sultan said the kingdom was ``in a state of war against those terrorists.''
The attack had been ``executed by a group of criminals and deviants whose aim is to spread fear, violence and hatred,'' he said in a statement carried by the Saudi daily Okaz newspaper.
King Fahd said on Monday his country would strike with an ``iron fist against militants trying to violate security and stability.''
The vow followed an earlier warning from U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage that al Qaeda was trying to topple the Saudi royal family and the pro-Western government.
``(King Fahd) emphasized the will to confront terrorism and deal forcefully with such criminal and wicked acts and to get at criminals who commit such acts and whoever is behind them,'' a Saudi cabinet statement said.
ALLEGED AL QAEDA CLAIM
The London-based Arab magazine al-Majallah said al Qaeda had claimed responsibility for the deadly bombing and warned of more attacks in the Gulf Arab region.
It said it received the claim in an email sent by a hitherto unknown al Qaeda member, Abu Mohammed al-Ablaj. The magazine identified Ablaj as the head of training in al Qaeda.
``On the injury of children in the bombing... hewarned against working with Americans or residing among them because then there would be no differentiating between them and they would be considered as shielding them,'' it said.
It was not possible to verify the authenticity of the letter, which was paraphrased by the magazine.
Washington has been pressing Saudi Arabia to combat al Qaeda, which it holds responsible for the attacks on U.S. cities on September 11, 2001. Fifteen of the 19 attackers were Saudis.
-------- russia / chechnya
Death of student on military training causes storm in Russia
MOSCOW (AFP)
Nov 11, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031111143034.ks0oq8t0.html
The death of a young student who suffocated during a military training exercise raised protests among Russian media and politicians Tuesday as the country prepares to return to obligatory military exercises in schools.
Alexander Bochanov, 16, died on September 5 when an instructor refused to allow him to take off a gas mask even after a 10-kilometre (six-mile) run in Siberia's Khanty-Mansiisk region, and local authorities attempted to cover up the affair, a leading Russian politician charged.
Reformist Union of Right Forces (SPS) leader Irina Khakamada, quoted in the daily Kommersant, noted that the local prosecutor's office had initially refused to open an inquiry into Bochanov's death, only to reverse the decision later.
The incident was reported by the local press but covered by national media only after the SPS, a pro-business party which favours a sharp reduction in military service, took up the issue, notably through Khakamada, a deputy speaker in the State Duma (lower house of parliament).
A lawyer for the Bochanov family, Konstantin Lopushansky, said several laws and regulations were breached during the school military exercise, media reported.
Among these were the facts that the students on the exercise had not undergone a prior medical examination, no doctor had been present, and the march had been staged soon after the students had eaten lunch, the lawyer said.
Bochanov died after he was taken ill after completing the last two kilometres of the run during which the gas mask had to be worn. He asked his instructor for permission to take off the gas mask but was refused.
He fainted, and then died of suffocation.
Khakamada said that military training in schools, which was discontinued after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 but is to be reintroduced for the last two years of schooling, was "a manipulation designed to turn young people into zombies."
This "suits that part of the political elite that is trying to turn Russia into a milder form of a Pinochet-style state," she said, referring to the military dictatorship set up in Chile in September 1973 after a coup headed by General Augusto Pinochet.
For the moment, military training in schools remains optional.
-------- us
Defense bill elevates debate on tech security issues
By William New,
National Journal's Technology Daily
November 11, 2003
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1103/111103tdpm1.htm
The House-Senate compromise bill for authorizing Defense Department programs in fiscal 2004 contains provisions that have raised questions about software security requirements, as well as abuse of the right to keep intelligence information secret.
One provision calls for the department to ensure that its recent emphasis on using commercial, off-the-shelf software will not make sensitive command, control, communications and intelligence for Defense more vulnerable. The measure says the department "must be more proactive" in protecting its information systems and urges implementation of an "architecture or blueprint" for all of its information technology systems.
The provision would specify that the blueprint protect against unauthorized modifications or insertions of malicious code into critical software and against "reverse engineering" of intellectual property within that software. Reverse engineering involves taking a product apart to see how it works in order to duplicate or improve its functions.
The provision also would direct the department to assess the usefulness of tamper-resistant security software and other security tools. It says tamper-resistant software inserts "security-related functionality directly into the binary level of software code."
Ronald Lee, a partner at the law firm of Arnold and Porter, said that while the concept of increasing Defense security is not new, what is new is that "the authorizers are sufficiently concerned and unified about it to come up with a provision like this."
"They clearly put down their marker here," Lee said. "I think it's a way of opening dialogue and elevating" the issue. He added that the language could benefit vendors working on high-end assurance products and affect procurement and research and development of defense products.
Lee said the language could lead appropriators to back the idea of an assessment and technology blueprint and possibly attach conditions on future funding related to security. And because Defense is seen as a bellwether for the federal government on some issues, it also could extend to other agencies.
Another provision would give the National Security Agency (NSA) an exemption it requested from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for so-called "operational files." Those files are intended to involve the technical collection of intelligence, according to Steve Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.
But the exemption could be abused if extended to other types of intelligence, he said. The provision would relieve NSA from having to search or review documents for FOIA requests if they are considered operational.
Aftergood said such documents probably would not have been released anyway, so the provision "makes some administrative sense." However, "openness" advocates worry because they say a similar clause has been abused by other agencies such as the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which builds spy satellites, and the CIA.
The NRO rejected a request for budget documents, calling them operational, but Aftergood is challenging that rejection.
The compromise version of the provision is narrowed to two NSA directorates: signals intelligence, which intercepts electronic signals, and research associations.
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Desert Storm-era vet: Disservice done to syndrome victims
By John Hoff U.S. Army veteran
Tue, Nov. 11, 2003,
Grand Forks Herald
http://www.grandforks.com/mld/grandforks/news/7232011.htm
Right after the invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, I ran out and enlisted in the Army. I literally ran. I spent about three weeks jogging to assure myself I was in decent shape and then jogged right into the recruiter's office in Harrisonburg, Va. I managed to get enlisted by September 1990.
I remember reading in Time or Newsweek that a "worse-case scenario" would be 50,000 American casualties in the first 48 hours of a ground war against the fourth-largest army in the world. I trained at Fort Jackson, S.C., and Fort Sam Houston, Texas, to be an Army medic with a psych specialty. The drill sergeants trained us knowing many of us would soon see the real deal. Army basic training made my first year of law school in 2001 seem like a cake walk.
The first Gulf War was over by the time I was sent to my duty station in El Paso, Texas. We mostly took care of the Armored Cavalry and the Air Defense Artillery (Patriot missiles) when they had problems such as post traumatic stress disorder, drug problems, even the onset of schizophrenia. We started getting a bunch of admissions complaining about weird symptoms nobody could pin down, so the Army docs wanted to rule out psychosomatic illness. These were soldiers who had been right in the thick of it, mixing it up with the Republican Guard.
I remember how it was a very experienced nurse named Mrs. Russell who started to make comparisons between the sick Gulf troops and Vietnam vets who had been exposed to Agent Orange.
We started getting a series of short-term, highly qualified doctors from Walter Reed. They were supposed to be temporary docs just filling in, but they kept looking very deeply into the issue of the sick soldiers. They told us medics to write down everything in detail, because we weren't sure what we were seeing and we weren't even quite sure what to look for. Was it viral? Nuclear, biological or chemical?
Did it come from the "depleted uranium" in some of the tank rounds, or some kind of nasty chemical weapon? We just didn't know and, from what I've read, we still aren't exactly sure, but I see from a brochure I picked up at the Grand Forks Veterans Service Office that studies are being conducted, and they want soldiers to get in the system and give their information.
Putting those sick guys on the psych ward back then and giving them psych histories to carry for life was a terribly unfair thing. Many were infuriated by it and expressed it rather forcefully to anybody who would listen. I listened and wrote everything the heck down, as ordered. They said stuff like, "Look, I'm sick because of something I was exposed to doing my job as a soldier." And "Look here, you give me Styrofoam slippers with happy faces to wear, like I'm a nut."
Those sick vets divided themselves from the other psych patients every way they could and formed a tight group. They would pick up their trays in the hospital chow hall and move a few feet away rather than sit near what they called "real" psych patients. Their esprit de corps and solidarity could not be broken. If they found any friendship or comradeship with a "real" psych patient, they would say, well, he needs help, so they were helping him.
I left the military in the spring of 1994 with my left leg permanently and seriously injured restraining a violent patient who was probably loaded up on PCP. So I ran to enlist in the Army, but I limped out.
I first heard the term "Desert Storm Syndrome" from the lips of Maj. Waterman from Walter Reed in a break room on Ward 11E, William Beaumont Army Medical Center. He looked around and said it in a low voice, like he was afraid to make it real by saying it aloud.
It was a year or two before I heard the term outside the Army hospital, out in the world.
To any vet who suffered because of psychiatric hospitalization due to these Gulf War symptoms, you should get help and you should know how well you were regarded by hospital staff who always saw you as sane, and as good soldiers placed in a tough position because of a medical mystery.
Hoff lives in Gilby, N.D.
----
Troops Awaiting Deployment Hear of Mounting Casualties
By Dionne Searcey
Newsday Staff Correspondent
November 10, 2003
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-ushood1110,0,4368169.story?coll=ny-worldnews-headlines
Fort Hood, Texas -- Every Friday, Capt. Timothy Tyson lines his soldiers on the pavement in the Army motor pool and tells them straight up what to expect when they eventually deploy to Iraq. His most effective method: reading aloud the details surrounding new deaths of U.S. troops.
During a recent briefing, as Tyson gave an account of three military police officers who died on the job in Karbala, his cell phone rang. The caller told him one of the dead officers was his close friend and mentor.
"I just broke down and cried right there," Tyson said.
His soldiers stood in formation and quietly watched. At that very instant, war became reality for 20-year-old Spc. Ruben Romero, among the silent ones that day.
"I felt like my heart skipped a beat," said Romero, who joined the Army two years ago.
The incident is weighing heavily on Romero as he and thousands of other soldiers in the First Cavalry and Third Corps stationed here ponder the official notification they received Friday that they will be leaving for Iraq as soon as January.
"No one wants to go," said Suree Valenzuela, a 31-year-old headquarters company staff sergeant.
Through the months, these soldiers have become keenly aware of the mounting casualties halfway across the globe. Many of the troops who have died were their neighbors.
Of the total number of Army dead, Fort Hood's 4th Infantry Division, which was dispatched to the particularly violent former Saddam Hussein stronghold of Tikrit, had the second-highest casualty rate even though it arrived in Iraq after the major battles were finished. Only the 3rd Infantry Division, which led the charge into Baghdad, had higher casualties.
Last week's downing of a Chinook helicopter near Fallujah that killed 16 soldiers on their way to rest-and-relaxation leave was a cruel reminder of proximity to war for those who were left behind. Three of the dead were from Fort Hood. And they are sickened to think that it may have happened again on Friday with the deaths of six soldiers in a Blackhawk near Tikrit.
Staff Sgt. Larry Alford shook his head as he read a story about the incident in the Fort Hood Sentinel on Friday. The headline hollered, "Helicopter shot down." Alford mumbled, "It's just sad. It's just sad."
He moved onto another story in the thin paper: "Two soldiers in tank killed."
"I can't get away from it," Alford said, and put down the paper.
In March, this Army post was a much different place. Eager soldiers psyched themselves up for war, desperate to test their combat skills. They were sorely disappointed when they were passed over initially and had to watch battles with the Iraqi army on television news. Spirits lifted at least for some when the 4th Infantry Division, stationed at the east end of Battalion Avenue in Fort Hood, left for Iraq in early April.
Everyone else posted here, 17,000 in all, waited, simmered and then softened. Now, some are simply scared.
Yet many -- Alford, Valenzuela, Romero and others -- said they would dutifully serve in Iraq. They've tailored their training to prepare for ambushes and bombs placed under rock piles and inside animal carcasses. They are learning to control boisterous crowds without killing civilians and to greet Iraqis in Arabic.
But the bravado found last spring has given way to a more sobering tone as was displayed at a ceremony Friday marking the deployment announcement.
"Soldiers, we are at war, and it is our turn to march into harm's way," Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, told hundreds of camouflaged troops.
"On occasion we will lose one of our fellow soldiers. The enemy will kill one of our soldiers. When the enemy does take one of our soldiers we will grieve. But our determination to defeat terror in our world will become more hardened."
For now at least, the hardening of Paul Granahan's determination is on hold. He is mourning the loss of his 20-year-old stepson, Pfc. Anthony D'Agostino, of Waterbury, Conn., who died in the Chinook crash. And he's incredulous that a helicopter appears to have been shot down again. "The boys over there are targets. They're not secure. They're not protected," said Granahan, at the lack of safety for D'Agostino, who was planning to surprise his parents for his 21st birthday last Thursday. "It disturbs me every time Mr. Rumsfeld opens his mouth. They're looking to save money somehow. Let's work on saving lives."
Granahan, in a phone interview from his Connecticut home, sent a message to deploying troops: "We'll fight for everything we can to make you safe."
Pfc. Angel Diaz, 19, of Yonkers, would welcome such peace of mind. He fought the major battles in Iraq, served at checkpoints and patrolled Baghdad and came home in August. He just received new orders to return to Iraq in January for a year-long deployment.
"I came back alive before," Diaz said. "I don't know about this time."
-------- propaganda wars
Enola Gay Exhibit Won't Be Changed
Museum Head Rejects Call To Discuss Nuclear Warfare
By Jacqueline Trescott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 11, 2003; Page C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A24239-2003Nov10?language=printer
The director of the National Air and Space Museum yesterday rejected suggestions that the new display of the Enola Gay, the airplane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, be altered to include information on the number of victims of the attack and a discussion of the politics of nuclear weapons.
Gen. John R. "Jack" Dailey, the director of the museum, said he wasn't changing his mind that the spare placard, which provides vital statistics of the plane and a brief description of its historic role, was correct.
"To be accurate, fair and balanced, inclusion of casualty figures would require an overview of all casualties associated with the conflict, which would not be practical in this exhibit," Dailey said. Referring to an earlier exhibit of part of the plane, he said, "We are confident this approach, similar to one seen by nearly 4 million people, is the right one and, therefore, we have no plans to change the exhibit."
The organizers of a petition asking Dailey to expand the information about the historic plane said the museum was squandering an opportunity.
"I was disappointed by the Smithsonian response," said Peter J. Kuznick, a history professor at American University, who organized the Committee for a National Discussion of Nuclear History and Current Policy. "I see this as a missed opportunity to educate the American people. Nuclear policy is a very important issue in our past and a critical issue now."
The museum has placed the huge B-29 Superfortress, totally restored for the first time in 43 years, in its companion museum, the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles International Airport. That facility, which will eventually house 200 aircraft, 135 spacecraft and related artifacts, is scheduled to open Dec. 15.
The museum's description of the Enola Gay centers on its technical statistics and explains the advancements it represented in military aircraft. It treats its most notorious mission this way: "On August 6, 1945, this Martin-built B-29-45-MO dropped the first atomic weapon used in combat on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later Bockscar (on display at the U.S. Air Force Museum near Dayton, Ohio) dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan. Enola Gay flew as the advance weather reconnaissance aircraft that day."
The latest debate involving the museum and the famed airplane began two weeks ago when the committee objected to the new text and to a statement of Dailey's that the Enola Gay was a "magnificent technological achievement."
A statement posted on the museum's Web site read: "This type of label is precisely the same kind used for the other airplanes and spacecraft in the museum. Its intent is to tell visitors what the object is and the basic facts concerning its history. Over the 27 years of its existence, the museum has carefully followed an approach which offers accurate descriptive data, allowing visitors to evaluate what they encounter in the context of their own points of view."
In 1995 the museum had to scrap plans for an exhibition of the Enola Gay that was more interpretive and had set off a storm of criticism among veterans groups and politicians. The museum then mounted part of the plane at the Mall museum for 21/2 years with a spare text. It was viewed by 4 million people, museum officials said, with few objections.
Reigniting the debate last week, Kuznick sent the museum a petition with 150 signatures from prominent scholars and writers asking for revisions of the text, a meeting with museum officials and a series of conferences on atomic bombings "and the place of nuclear weapons in the modern world." Dailey has also rejected any meeting with the group.
In a statement, the museum said its decision was in keeping with the congressional mandate adopted in 1976, the year the building on the Mall was opened. Part of that mission includes providing "educational material for the historical study of aviation and space flight."
Kuznick, who is also head of American University's Nuclear Studies Institute, said the treatment of the Enola Gay is evidence the museum is not fulfilling that part of the mandate. "We know in 1995 they tried to put on a more expanded exhibition. For them now to decline to do so because they say it is not part of their mandate is disingenuous at best, and cowardly, at least."
----
Critics say blunt-spoken weapons expert has exaggerated
By Sonni Efron,
Los Angeles Times,
11/10/2003
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2003/11/10/critics_say_blunt_spoken_weapons_expert_has_exaggerated/
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration's point man on nonproliferation has exaggerated the threat posed by Syria, Libya, and Cuba in an effort to build the case that strong action is needed to prevent them from developing weapons of mass destruction, former intelligence officials and independent specialists say. ADVERTISEMENT
Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton has long been one of the most controversial figures in the Bush administration -- a pugnacious neoconservative with a reputation for blunt talk and tough action. The allegations that he is inflating the evidence against regimes that are at odds with Washington have been made as the administration is defending itself against criticism that it misused intelligence to make the case for invading Iraq. "Very often, the points he makes have some truth to them, but he simply goes beyond where the facts tell intelligent people they should go," said Carl W. Ford Jr., who retired in October as head of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
In several conversations, Bolton denied trying to shape intelligence for political purposes. He said all of his statements about the weapons capabilities of various states were cleared in advance by all the major political and intelligence agencies, and he brandished interagency approval checklists to prove it.
"I have always used intelligence properly," Bolton said. "Of course, I sometimes go beyond previous statements, but in every case I do, it's been previously cleared. You bet I do -- we do it all the time."
Bolton then shot back at the intelligence community, saying that some intelligence analysts' political biases affect their judgments. "People can and should agree that policy makers should not politicize intelligence," said Bolton, who arrives at work at 6:30 each morning and devours a thick briefing book of cables and analysis that many other officials do not bother to read. "But I think we can also say that intelligence analysts should not politicize intelligence."
Bolton has provoked such controversy that several of his critics, flouting Washington convention, agreed to be quoted by name.
"Undersecretary Bolton repeatedly goes beyond the current public intelligence estimates in his description of the proliferation threats," said Joseph Cirincione, a nonproliferation specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "He offers definitive judgments where there is, at best, only informed speculation about capabilities. In some cases, notably his claim that Cuba has biological weapons, he goes way beyond known capabilities.
"In others, like the claim that Iran has bioweapons or that Syria is developing nuclear weapons, he `connects the dots' to form a judgment that is not supported by solid evidence, but then presents it as established fact," Cirincione said. The result, he said, is an undermining of US credibility and of the ability of policy makers to craft balanced approaches to serious threats.
Bolton replied, "People tend to resort to ad hominem attacks when they feel their substantive arguments are weak."
Bolton, who has close ties to Vice President Cheney, is the reigning "bete noire" of Washington's foreign policy liberals and a hero to neoconservatives. He has been called "highly principled" and "human scum," a "delightful colleague" and "the most hated man in the State Department," an effective public servant and a loose cannon who has "sabotaged" US foreign policy.
Bolton, who turns 55 this month, looks more like a tweedy academic than a top diplomat. He wears his mustache long and speaks his mind with an undiplomatic directness. And he suffers fools, rogues, and reporters badly.
Years ago colleagues in the Reagan administration, in which Bolton was an assistant attorney general, presented him with a bronzed grenade fondly inscribed to "the truest Reaganaut." At the State Department, Bolton's mandate is to prevent the development of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, particularly by states that might transfer them to terrorists. The mandate took on new urgency after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.He has made it his mission not only to warn Congress and the public of what he sees as threats to US security, but also to confront suspected offenders with evidence of their misdeeds. He has traveled the globe to rally other nations to support tougher action.
Some State Department officials say Bolton's abrasive style is disastrous for a diplomat. But the man himself seems not the least bit fazed by the fury of his critics.
"Should I be?" Bolton demanded of an interviewer. He waited an uncomfortably long minute as though expecting a student to supply the correct answer. Then he shrugged. "I say what I believe, and I sleep well at night."
Bolton is not afraid to smash the diplomatic china when it suits his purposes.
Last summer in Seoul, he attacked North Korean leader Kim Jong Il by name 17 times in a speech delivered as Washington was trying to draw Pyongyang regime into talks about abandoning its nuclear program.
In Washington and Seoul, critics fumed that Bolton was trying to provoke Pyongyang into walking away from the negotiations.
North Korea responded with the "human scum" epithet but went to the six-party talks anyway.
Asked whether he regretted the speech, Bolton did not answer directly, saying only that it was cleared in advance and that his boss, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, had defended it as reflecting administration policy.
"Speaking the truth has its virtues," Bolton said.
--------
THE VICE PRESIDENT
Cheney Theme of Qaeda Ties to Iraq Bombings Are Questioned by Some
November 11, 2003
By ERIC SCHMITT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/politics/11CHEN.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 - Vice President Dick Cheney has in recent speeches mentioned the major bombings in Iraq this past summer in the same breath as the deadly strikes in Bali, Casablanca and Riyadh, which authorities say were carried out by Al Qaeda or groups affiliated with it.
The clear implication is that militants linked to Al Qaeda were responsible for the Iraq bombings, too. The attacks in Baghdad last month would appear to lend credence to that claim except for this: senior military, intelligence and law enforcement officials say there is no conclusive evidence pointing to a particular group - Al Qaeda or not - as the mastermind behind any of the major attacks in Iraq. "At this point it isn't clear who's responsible for those bombings," a senior American official said.
Indicating who is behind the bombings - militants linked to Al Qaeda or homegrown loyalists to Saddam Hussein - is important politically for Mr. Cheney and his boss, President Bush, terrorism experts say.
Mr. Cheney has repeatedly sought to cast the Iraq war and its aftermath as part of the broader campaign against terrorism. Administration officials say that linking the bombings in Iraq to Al Qaeda and the broader war on terrorism puts the attacks in a better political light than if they are viewed as guerrilla strikes by Baathist die-hards.
But critics have accused Mr. Cheney of far exceeding what other administration figures have asserted about Qaeda links to Iraq. Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have defined the American antiterror efforts very broadly.
Just last Friday, Mr. Cheney said at fund-raisers in Houston and Austin, Tex., that Mr. Hussein had "an established relationship with Al Qaeda," an assertion some intelligence say is overstated. "Freedom still has enemies in Iraq," Mr. Cheney added. "These terrorists are targeting the very success and the freedom that we're providing to the Iraqi people."
Some critics say the American presence in Iraq has become a magnet for terrorists, but other officials say the precise role of foreign militants in Iraq is murky.
Ansar al-Islam, a small group accused of having links to Al Qaeda, has about 150 fighters now inside Iraq, intelligence officials say. But Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the American ground commander in Iraq, said recently, "We do not have any confirmed Al Qaeda operatives actually in custody at this point."
Administration critics say that by combining the array of hostile actors in Iraq, Mr. Cheney is blurring the focus of what should be a fight against the greatest threat to the United States: Al Qaeda.
"To paint all these groups with such broad brush strokes does a great disservice," said Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat on the Armed Services Committee and a former officer in the 82nd Airborne Division. "We'll lose our focal point on what's the greatest threat."
Over the past several months, Mr. Cheney has aggressively sought to tie foreign terrorists, specifically Al Qaeda, to Iraq. In September, a few days after Mr. Cheney said the government did not know whether Mr. Hussein had some connection to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Mr. Bush all but contradicted him.
Asked by reporters about Mr. Cheney's statement, the president replied, "No, we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th."
Mr. Cheney began mentioning the big Iraq bombings with major Qaeda-related attacks in some of his speeches about two months ago.
His address to the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy in Houston on Oct. 17 was typical: "Since Sept. 11th, the terrorists have continued their attacks in Riyadh, Casablanca, Mombasa, Bali, Jakarta, Najaf and Baghdad. Against that kind of determined, organized, ruthless enemy, America requires a new strategy - not merely to prosecute a series of crimes, but to conduct a global campaign against the terror network."
Catherine J. Martin, a spokeswoman for Mr. Cheney, conceded it was unclear which group was culpable for the Iraq bombings, but said they were still "acts of terrorism."
But experts said Mr. Cheney is seeking to strengthen perceived ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq.
Judith S. Yaphe, a former C.I.A. analyst who is a senior research fellow at the National Defense University, said, "He wants to create a link in people's minds that if they are there now, they were there before the war."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
High court to hear Guantanamo detainees' case
November 11, 2003
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20031110-112129-5764r.htm
The Supreme Court yesterday agreed to consider whether 16 detainees at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have access to U.S. courts to challenge their imprisonment without formal charges.
The two British citizens, two Australians and 12 Kuwaitis are among 600 suspected Taliban and al Qaeda members from 40 nations being held in the wake of the Afghanistan war. They have not been given access to attorneys or to their families.
A federal judge dismissed lawsuits in the case, saying the detainees could not pursue the matter in U.S. courts because the military base was outside the nation's sovereign territory. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia agreed in March, saying Cuba and not the United States had sovereignty over Guantanamo Bay.
It will be the first Supreme Court test of President Bush's war on terrorism.
Oral arguments will be heard this spring. A final ruling, which could set precedent for the judiciary's role in reviewing government actions during the war, is expected by July. The Supreme Court combined the lawsuits into a single appeal for the spring hearing.
The Bush administration issued no immediate comment.
The American Center for Law and Justice said it will file a friend of the court, or amicus, brief supporting the government, saying the "United States is permitted to take action to protect the safety and security of all Americans."
In its written order, the Supreme Court said it would decide whether U.S. courts "lack jurisdiction to consider challenges to the legality of the detention of foreign nationals captured abroad in connection with hostilities and incarcerated at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba."
The detainees, seized after the September 11 attacks, are considered enemy combatants, not prisoners of war who would be entitled to protection under international law.
Attorneys for the detainees, who filed lawsuits on behalf of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), said international law and the U.S. Constitution do not allow indefinite detention without providing those detained with basic protections. They also said their clients "are not, and have never been, members of Al Qaeda or any other terrorist group."
The CCR attorneys asked the justices Sept. 1 to review the appeals court decision in cases involving British citizens Shafig Rasul and Asif Iqbal and Australian David Hicks, detained since January 2002. They said the men had not been permitted to talk with counsel and were unaware of the lawsuits.
Several retired military officers who also asked the court to review the cases said they were pleased by the ruling.
"The United States is presented with a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate to both our allies and our enemies what the rule of law really means," retired Rear Adm. John D. Hutson said. "We dare not fail. This is too important."
In their brief, the officers said the United States was violating its own military regulations and the Geneva Convention by not holding hearings to determine the prisoners' status. They said that decision put U.S. military prisoners at greater risk in future conflicts.
The decision was hailed by several civil rights organizations, including Amnesty International, which described treatment of the Guantanamo detainees as "a human rights scandal."
Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, whose wife, Barbara, was killed in the September 11 attacks, had urged the high court not to hear the case. He said the appeals court properly determined that "aliens detained by the military abroad" have only those rights "determined by the executive and the military, and not the courts."
In other action, the high court declined without comment to hear an appeal from the Illinois-based Global Relief Foundation, an Islamic charity whose assets were frozen after September 11. The charity, the second-largest Islamic relief group in the United States, has been linked to al Qaeda.
--------
Justices to Hear Case of Detainees at Guantánamo
November 11, 2003
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/politics/11SCOT.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 - Setting the stage for a historic clash between presidential and judicial authority in a time of military conflict, the Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide whether prisoners at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are entitled to access to civilian courts to challenge their open-ended detention.
The court said it would resolve only the jurisdictional question of whether the federal courts can hear such a challenge and not, at this stage, whether these detentions are in fact unconstitutional. Even so, the action was an unmistakable rebuff of the Bush administration's insistence that the detainees' status was a question "constitutionally committed to the executive branch" and not the business of the federal courts, as Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson argued in opposition to Supreme Court review.
In accepting the cases, the court moved from the sidelines to the center of the debate over whether the administration's response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, reflects an appropriate balance between national security and individual liberty.
While the court does not indicate why it grants review in a particular case, the justices might well have been persuaded that no matter what the ultimate answer to the question of whether judicial review is even available, they are the ones who have to provide it.
"It is for the courts and not the executive to determine whether executive action is subject to judicial review," the appeal filed on behalf of 12 Kuwaitis told the court.
The two appeals the court accepted were filed on behalf of 16 detainees, the Kuwaitis in one group and two Britons and two Australians in the other, all seized in Afghanistan and Pakistan during United States-led operations against the Taliban in late 2001 and early 2002. They have all been held for more than 18 months without formal charges or access to any forum in which they can contest the validity of their detention.
The men assert that they were not fighters either for the Taliban or for Al Qaeda; most say they were humanitarian volunteers who were captured by bounty hunters.
The two separate lawsuits, seeking a federal court hearing on the validity of the open-ended detention, were combined by the Federal District Court here. That court then ruled, in a decision affirmed in March by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, that on the basis of a World War II-era Supreme Court precedent, the federal courts lack jurisdiction over the military detention of foreigners outside United States territory.
The applicability of that 1950 decision, Johnson v. Eisentrager, is at the heart of the dispute before the Supreme Court. The justices also combined the two cases, Rasul v. Bush, No. 03-334 (the Britons' and Australians' case), and Al Odah v. United States, No. 03-343 (the Kuwaitis' case), and will hear them in late March, with a decision expected by early summer.
One central issue is the status of the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, which while indisputably a part of Cuban territory has been administered by the United States under a 1903 lease that grants it many of the attributes of sovereignty and uses the phrase "complete jurisdiction and control." By contrast, the Eisentrager decision denied judicial review to German intelligence agents who were captured in wartime China and were being held in Germany after conviction as war criminals by military tribunals.
How to characterize Guantánamo Bay is of such importance because it is clear that noncitizens do have certain constitutional rights if they are within United States territory. On the other hand, the court has frequently invoked the Eisentrager precedent, even out of its wartime military context, to stand for the proposition that outside the territorial reach of the United States, aliens have no such rights.
The brief filed for the Britons and Australians by the Center for Constitutional Rights, a liberal public interest law firm in New York, told the court that "we alone exercise power at Guantánamo Bay" and that the base should therefore be treated for jurisdictional purposes as part of the United States. In the administration's view, not only is that conclusion incorrect but it is not one that the court is free to make. The determination of sovereignty over a particular territory is "not a question on which a court may second-guess the political branches," Solicitor General Olson said in his brief.
It was evident on Monday that this, too, was a question on which the justices want to have the final word. That conclusion emerged from a comparison of how the administration phrased the question presented by the two cases with how the justices phrased it in their order granting review. Solicitor General Olson said the question was whether the federal courts had jurisdiction to decide the legality of detaining "aliens captured abroad in connection with ongoing hostilities and held outside the sovereign territory of the United States at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba."
The Supreme Court, by contrast, said it intended to decide the jurisdiction of the courts to hear challenges to "the legality of the detention of foreign nationals captured abroad in connection with hostilities and incarcerated at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba." The court's question incorporated no assumption about whether the base was or was not "outside the sovereign territory of the United States."
Pamela S. Falk, a professor of international law at the City University of New York, recalled on Monday that when she first visited the Guantánamo base 10 years ago, she did not have to clear United States customs on her return flight to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., an indication that she was not considered to have left the United States at any time during her journey.
But when she visited again in July and returned by way of Puerto Rico, she had to clear customs there, reflecting a policy change that she said should not deprive the Supreme Court of the opportunity to decide "the fundamental question of the rights of anyone being held in U.S. custody."
If the justices decide that the federal courts do have jurisdiction, the cases will go back to district court in the first instance for a decision on the merits of the detainees' claims. Lawyers for the Kuwaiti group, from the law firm of Shearman & Sterling, describe what the detainees are asking for as modest relief: to be informed of any charges against them, to be allowed to meet with lawyers and family members and to obtain "access to an impartial tribunal to review whether any basis exists for their continued detentions."
Without those rights, their brief says, their detention violates the Constitution as well as domestic and international law.
Lawyers for the Britons and Australians make similar arguments. Both cases were originally filed as petitions for a writ of habeas corpus, the procedure deeply rooted in English law for challenging confinement.
Several of the detainees in these cases have been placed by the government in the first group of the 660 Guantánamo detainees to go before military commissions, when those operations begin in the coming months. But even if some do get a hearing before a commission, their Supreme Court cases would not become moot because the issue of access to a civilian federal court would remain.
--------
Justices to Rule on Detainees' Rights
Court Access for 660 Prisoners at Issue
By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 11, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A21625-2003Nov10?language=printer
The Supreme Court has intervened directly for the first time in the Bush administration's prosecution of the war on terrorism, announcing yesterday that it will consider the legal rights of the 660 prisoners now held at a U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Until now, lower federal courts have said that the Guantanamo detainees, all of whom are foreign nationals, have no right to demand their freedom in U.S. courts. But in a brief order, the court said it will review that conclusion.
Most of the prisoners were captured by the United States and its allies during fighting or intelligence operations against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and they have been held without trial and interrogated at Guantanamo under conditions of near-total secrecy. In the 22 months since the prison was established, it has been a symbol of the administration's hard line against terrorism and a target of condemnation by international human rights organizations.
The court's announcement sets the stage for a potentially historic ruling in which the justices must balance the president's assertion of his constitutional powers as commander in chief against human rights claims based in part on international law.
The Bush administration had urged the court not to review the case, arguing in its brief that the "detention serves the vital objectives of preventing combatants from continuing to aid our enemies and gathering intelligence to further the overall war effort."
Briefs submitted on behalf of the detainees offered an equally dramatic view of the stakes, suggesting that the United States risks its reputation as a beacon of liberty and drawing parallels between the Guantanamo detentions and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
In a separate terrorism-related case, the court announced it would not hear an appeal by the Global Relief Foundation, an Illinois-based Islamic charity accused of having al Qaeda links. The foundation's assets were frozen by the Bush administration in December 2001.
Though the Guantanamo prison was set up to house detainees from Afghanistan and Pakistan, military officials have transported to the jail suspected terrorists captured in other countries, such as Bosnia.
Sixty-four inmates, mostly Afghans and Pakistanis, have been sent from the prison back to their home countries to be released, and four more have been flown to Saudi Arabia, where they are still jailed and may face trial. U.S. officials are privately negotiating the return of scores more Guantanamo detainees to their home nations.
Six hundred sixty prisoners are still held at the prison, as newly arrived detainees replace those who are repatriated. The prison would be the site for any future military tribunals -- cases in which accused terrorists are tried before military judges. Any executions would take place there, too.
The Bush administration asserts that the Guantanamo detainees have no access to U.S. courts because they are unlawful enemy combatants captured on foreign battlefields and because Guantanamo is not American but Cuban territory.
Therefore, the administration argues, the prisoners may be kept at Guantanamo for as long as President Bush considers it necessary to the war against al Qaeda and its allies.
The administration has also said the detainees are not entitled to prisoner-of-war status under international law, though it has said that it will treat them in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and has allowed access to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The policy has attracted intense criticism both at home and abroad, with even the Kuwaiti and British governments -- two of the closest U.S. allies in the wars against terrorism and in Iraq -- expressing unease at some aspects of the detention of their citizens. There have been 32 suicide attempts at the jail.
International human rights groups and other critics say there is no basis in either U.S. or international law for holding people indefinitely without a hearing. They say some Guantanamo detainees were not involved in either al Qaeda or the Taliban, but were simply swept up in the chaos that enveloped Afghanistan as the United States moved in and the Taliban government fell.
Yesterday's Supreme Court order consolidated two challenges to the Bush administration's policy. The first case, Rasul v. Bush, No. 03-334, was initiated last year by the parents of two British citizens, Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal, and two Australians, Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks. The second case, al Odah v. U.S., No. 03-343, was brought by the relatives of 12 Kuwaiti nationals.
Both cases were dismissed by U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, and earlier this year a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld that ruling without dissent.
The lower courts said the issue had been settled by a 1950 Supreme Court ruling in which the court denied a writ of habeas corpus to German espionage agents who had been captured by U.S. forces in China in 1945 and later jailed in occupied Germany.
Constitutional guarantees of due process do not necessarily extend to every place where people may be held by U.S. authorities, the lower courts said.
The Bush administration agreed, urging the Supreme Court to avoid "judicial interference with military affairs."
But lawyers for the families of the Guantanamo detainees say the 1950 case was different because the Germans had been convicted by a military commission, while today's alleged terrorists have faced no legal process.
Also, they argue that Guantanamo, though technically still Cuban territory, is so thoroughly controlled by the United States that it should be compared with Guam and other overseas territories where U.S. courts have jurisdiction, rather than with wartime China.
"The United States has created a prison on Guantanamo Bay that operates entirely outside the law," lawyers from the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights argued in their appeal petition in Rasul v. Bush. "Within the walls of that prison, foreign nationals may be held indefinitely, without charges or evidence of wrongdoing, without access to family, friends or legal counsel, and with no opportunity to establish their innocence."
The court exercised its prerogative to recast the questions presented in the case, framing a single issue of whether the federal courts "lack jurisdiction to consider challenges to the legality of the detention" of the Guantanamo prisoners. This was a narrower issue than the prisoners' attorneys had posed, and seems to mean that, even if the prisoners win at the Supreme Court, their ultimate fate would still have to be determined by lower courts case by case.
Still, the high court's decision to review the Guantanamo cases, which required the assent of at least four justices, was a mild surprise given that there was no conflict among the lower courts that had considered the issue -- and that the court previously declined to hear two other terrorism-related cases.
With more such cases pending at the court or working their way through the lower courts, the justices may have felt that they could no longer remain on the sidelines.
"Either a majority of the court feels that the law is so clear that it wants to tell the world in no uncertain terms that President Bush is acting within the law, or four members of the court really do question the outcome in the lower courts and want to give it a good, hard look," said Michael J. Glennon, who teaches national security law at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
The cases are set to be argued at the court early next year and decided by July.
In the Global Relief Foundation case, the charity had sought a court order unfreezing its assets. It argued that the government had improperly used its foreign intelligence surveillance authority against a U.S.-chartered corporation, and that the government should not be allowed to use classified information in making the case against it.
But both a federal district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit rejected those claims. The case is Global Relief Foundation v. Snow, No. 03-46.
Staff writer John Mintz contributed to this report.
-------- homeland security
Homeland Security chief seeks school children's help
November 11, 2003
By Derrill Holly
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20031110-112121-2314r.htm
Tom Ridge shed his jacket, dropped to his knees and talked about homeland security issues yesterday with Americans who have known the pressures of living in the nation's capital all their lives.
The Bush administration's homeland security secretary spent more than an hour with elementary students attending classes in a school from which they could see the Capitol on the skyline.
"We hope to convince thousands and thousands of kids to help us," Mr. Ridge told a student who asked how many students he wants involved in community safety efforts. The secretary has designated this a "national week of caring" for the 180,000 men and women employed by federal agencies under his jurisdiction.
In an effort to encourage Department of Homeland Security staffers to get involved in their communities, Mr. Ridge visited Burrville Elementary in Northeast. He told students they could not only prepare themselves for emergencies, but that they could also help their families and neighbors in a time of disaster.
"Whether it's a terrorist attack or a natural disaster, people can get hurt," said Mr. Ridge, who urged the school's 330 students to talk to their families about safety and security issues. He also urged them to follow recommendations contained in materials provided by the American Red Cross.
"These highly motivated, very dedicated kids will go home and talk to their parents about having an emergency kit in their own homes and getting a little training," said Mr. Ridge, a former Republican governor of Pennsylvania. He told the children that Homeland Security Department staffers are committed to backing up millions of firefighters and local police officers involved daily in homeland security efforts nationwide.
The Ridge event was designed to promote volunteerism and financial support of the Combined Federal Campaign, an annual fund-raising effort on behalf of charities and other nonprofit groups supported by federal employees.
Later this week, some of the 10,000 Homeland Security Department staffers working in the metropolitan area will volunteer in local food bank projects. Others will help construct a home in the District for the nonprofit group Habitat for Humanity.
----
U.S. Examining Anti - Missile Systems for Airliners
November 11, 2003
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-airlines-missiles.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration is reviewing proposals to defend commercial airliners against attacks from shoulder-held missiles, although officials say it could be years before any system is implemented.
The Department of Homeland Security said Tuesday it plans to award preliminary contracts to one or more companies in December for a six-month program to adapt existing anti-missile military technologies for use on commercial airliners.
Among the companies vying for these contracts are Northrop Grumman Corp. ; Raytheon Co., together with Elta Systems Ltd., a unit of state-controlled Israel Aircraft Industries; Alliant Techsystems Inc. ; and the U.S. unit of Britain's BAE Systems Plc .
This initial award would be followed by an 18-month period to develop prototypes, said department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse, noting that the department had earmarked $100 million for the two-year process because of concerns about other threats to commercial airliners after the Sept. 11, 2001 hijack attacks.
A future decision to equip commercial airliners could generate huge contracts for a successful bidder.
Some lawmakers -- including Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California and Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat -- are pressing to put anti-missile systems on 6,000 commercial airliners. Skeptics say the costs would be staggering.
Concerns about shoulder-fired missiles -- prevalent during the Muslim guerrilla war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s -- rose after a November 2002 attempt to shoot down an Israeli airliner as it took off from Kenya.
But U.S. officials cite many technical problems in adapting military anti-missile technology.
One official noted that current missile warning systems on military transport planes include equipment that needs to be replaced every 100 flight hours.
Adding mechanics and other maintenance costs would reach $15 billion a year by one estimate, he said -- a huge amount for a financially struggling industry.
Other thorny issues include the effectiveness of putting defenses designed for war planes flying over war zones into commercial airliners, which are vulnerable during slower flight segments such as takeoff and landing.
``This is a very, very complicated issue,'' Roehrkasse said. ``We need the facts to determine whether or not there's a viable technology to equip commercial airliners.''
Robert DelBoca, vice president of infrared countermeasure systems for Los Angeles-based Northrop, said his company's system was installed on 200 military aircraft, including helicopters, transport planes, fast jets and wide-body planes.
The company has cut the system's weight, making it easier to install on commercial jets. DelBoca estimated it would cost $2 million per plane to equip 300 airliners that are part of the civil reserve air fleet used to transport soldiers in times of war.
The price would drop to around $1 million per plane if 1,000 jets were equipped with the system, which uses a laser to detect, track and divert an enemy missile from a plane.
DelBoca estimated it would take Northrop 28 months to equip 300 planes with the anti-missile system. He said the work could be done within a year, but the extra speed would cost 35 to 40 percent more.
Elta's system is already used on 150 military aircraft and Israel recently chose it to outfit its commercial airliners.
-------- immigration / refugees / visas
Post-9/11 Visa Rules Keep Thousands From Coming to U.S.
By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 11, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A24116-2003Nov10?language=printer
AUSTIN -- More than two years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a thicket of new rules governing the granting of visas to foreigners is dissuading thousands of people from coming to the United States and generating protests from research universities, medical institutions, multinational corporations and the travel industry.
Because of the new regulations, American universities have lost students and scholars; corporations have suffered production delays, friction with customers and personnel problems; and foreign tourists and conventioneers have decided by the thousands to take their business elsewhere.
Increasingly, U.S. leaders in education, business and science are warning that the procedural obstacles thrown up to screen security threats have fostered a bureaucratic "culture of no" that discounts the benefits that foreigners bring to the United States.
Bush administration officials defend the new rules, saying they are keeping terrorists from entering the country. "In the post-9/11 environment, we do not believe that the issues at stake allow us the luxury of erring on the side of expeditious processing," Janice L. Jacobs, deputy assistant secretary of state for visa services, told a congressional committee earlier this year.
But many critics caution that by requiring foreigners to wait weeks or months for visas, Washington is damaging its efforts at public diplomacy. They say the United States is sending a hostile message to the world at a time that the Iraq war and other U.S. policies have blackened perceptions of the United States.
"Our commercial, research and academic institutions have always benefited from the open exchange of people, knowledge and ideas," said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.). "We need to protect ourselves. But we don't want to go too far and lose the rewards of an open society."
All 19 of the Sept. 11 hijackers entered the United States on valid visas, most of them without being interviewed by an American consular officer. Mindful of that, the Bush administration adopted extensive new policies governing visas, the latest of which took effect on Aug. 1.
The most significant include a requirement for face-to-face interviews for hundreds of thousands of visa-seekers who previously were excused from such interviews, and the withholding of visas for certain categories of people until the FBI runs name checks to determine that they do not appear to be a threat. That process can take months.
The administration also granted the Department of Homeland Security control of most visa rule-making decisions, as well as vetoes over visas issued overseas, previously the exclusive province of the State Department.
Starting Jan. 5, the government intends to fingerprint all visa-bearing travelers who arrive at airports and seaports. Next October, visitors who do not require visas -- mostly people from Western Europe and Canada -- will have to have machine-readable passports. In addition, people issued non-immigrant visas abroad will be fingerprinted when obtaining the visa.
The new regulations have created special hindrances and holdups for people from Islamic countries that are the subject of concerns about terrorism. Visitors from South Korea and Brazil, which rank among the top 10 countries sending people to the United States, have also faced weeks-long delays in applying for visas. Chinese and Russians, particularly in scientific and technological fields, have also met extensive difficulties in securing visas.
Even British citizens working for American companies overseas are facing waits of a month or two to obtain longer-term work visas for transfers to the United States, a process that once took less than two weeks.
Some recent examples:
• The Amway Corp., one of the world's largest direct-sale firms, ruled out Los Angeles and Hawaii as possible convention sites for about 8,000 South Korean distributors next year, in the face of a requirement that they all complete face-to-face interviews with U.S. consular officials. The convention is to be held in Japan. Amway estimates that the distributors would have spent an average of $1,250 per person on U.S. airlines, hotels and shops, meaning a loss of more than $10 million for the would-be host city.
• The UCLA Medical Center, one of California's elite teaching hospitals, scrambled to fill a staffing gap when one of its three pediatric heart surgeons, a Pakistani, was waylaid in Karachi for seven months awaiting a new visa. The doctor, Faiz Bhora, had just completed 10 years of medical training in the United States.
• Ingersoll-Rand Co., a multinational corporation with $9.6 billion in annual sales and 50,000 employees worldwide, has been waiting for nearly two months to ship a $2.5 million compressor to an energy concern in Sichuan province in China. The hang-up: getting visas for five Chinese engineers and an interpreter for a one-week inspection visit.
"They think they can put in all these security processes and still keep business flowing, but it's not happening," said Elizabeth Dickson, who handles immigration and visa matters for Ingersoll-Rand. "I see a culture of no because no consular officer wants to be the next one to issue a visa to a terrorist. But that means they're treating everyone as a terrorist."
The Government's Role
State Department officials and the FBI, which handles background checks for visa applicants, acknowledge it has been a struggle to implement new programs, procedures and technologies put in place after the attacks of 2001. Months-long delays and backlogs for visa applicants nearly paralyzed the system in 2002, many government officials have said.
But officials insist that most of the worst kinks have been worked out this year, and for the most part they are unapologetic about the new rules and procedures. In the effort to safeguard borders as well as open doors, the Bush administration has struck the right balance, they say. Much of the falloff in the number of foreign visitors is due to the global economic downturn, they say.
The government has broadened the fields that trigger FBI name checks for applicants -- a list of 200 scientific and technical specialties that now includes not only expertise in arms and munitions and nuclear technology, but also landscape architecture, geography, community development, housing and urban design.
Critics say the list is overbroad, and may actually make it more difficult to spot the terrorist needle in an ever-expanding haystack.
Because of the broader criteria, the bureau is now processing about 1,000 name checks per business day, twice the number it handled two years ago, despite a sharp dip in the number of travelers.
Jacobs, the deputy assistant secretary of state, and other officials argue that FBI name checks are not a significant drag on travel to the United States.
To help expedite these checks, the FBI has created a special team of 40 agents. And in any case, the bureau reports that only a small percentage of the millions of visa applicants are subjected to the checks -- scarcely over 2 percent -- and that most of those are completed in days.
Of 8,503 requests for the most common security checks for non-immigrant visa applicants received by the FBI in August, for instance, all but 373 had been resolved by Oct. 1, according to the bureau. Most were resolved in a few days, it said. Officials also report that the portion of applicants who are refused a visa, about 25 percent, has remained virtually stable over the past three years.
FBI officials say the intensified screenings, which also include name checks for most male applicants from a list of 26 predominantly Muslim nations, have turned up an unspecified number of "persons of interest."
"It's not a foolproof system, but at the same time it does identify people," said David M. Hardy, chief of the FBI's Record-Information Dissemination Section.
Officials do acknowledge, however, that the requirement for in-person interviews has created long delays for hundreds of thousands of visa-seekers. In some countries where securing a visa once took a few days, people now routinely wait weeks for an interview.
The State Department is adding 79 consular officers to the 843 positions it already has, but the delays persist.
"The problem is that the administration has made all these new requirements for face-to-face interviews and adding background checks but has not provided adequate resources to fund them," said Waxman.
Students and Scholars
Educators have expressed anxiety that the new visa rules are discouraging international students from studying in the United States, depriving American universities of a vital source of diversity, intellectual energy and tuition. The universities are being put at a competitive disadvantage against institutions in Canada, Britain and Australia in the contest for top-flight international students and scholars, they say.
In recent decades, the influx of foreign students has been crucial to the strength of U.S. universities and technology companies. Nearly 40 percent of engineering faculty members in the United States are foreign-born, as are a third of American Nobel Prize winners.
In addition, "Foreign students are important because many go home and bring back an understanding and appreciation of the United States and often become leaders and help establish business relationships," said Peter Spear, provost of the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Spear said that at his school, where more than 10 percent of the 41,000 undergraduate and 8,800 graduate students are foreigners, undergraduate applications from overseas dropped by 14 percent this year, partly because of new visa rules. "There's some evidence that people who are worried about the climate here or getting their visas on time are starting to avoid the U.S.," he said.
In interviews with more than a half-dozen officials from major research universities, none said they knew of any case in which drawn-out security checks of foreign students and scholars yielded information tying them to terrorism. And the officials expressed frustration that in the minority of cases that get stuck for months, they are unable to learn the status of the security check or do anything to hasten it.
In a case this year, Dennis Eremin, a 28-year-old Russian physicist, had to wait 10 months to reenter the United States to complete his work for a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin. He had already spent five years in Texas before leaving in 2001 to get married.
"I had two theories," said Eremin. "The first was the reluctance of [U.S.] consular representatives to attend to my case, or the sheer ineffectiveness of their work. The second one was paranoia."
University officials acknowledge that visas are granted relatively quickly for most of the 1 million foreign students and scholars in the United States. Nonetheless, they say cases like Eremin's are too common. "If you're stopped by a policeman, they check the database in their laptop in the car in maybe 30 seconds," said Larry Bell, director of international education at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "These are maybe larger and more sophisticated [FBI] databases, but it's a large leap from a 30-second check to a six-month check."
Business and Medicine
The Bush administration's new visa policies have also exasperated one of its traditional constituencies: big business.
In blunt language, corporate leaders have stressed that the smooth conduct of business is threatened by visa delays, and they chafe at what they regard as the government's reluctance to deploy adequate manpower to handle the additional requirements.
Some top business associations have publicly questioned the State Department's insistence that the large majority of travelers are not badly inconvenienced by the new policies. "State controls the numbers, so who knows?" said Randel K. Johnson, vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "But companies that aren't ordinarily critical of the government are having lots of problems, and they're willing to say so publicly. I don't think things are getting any better."
The institutions affected range from huge industrial concerns to some of the nation's most renowned hospitals.
The nonprofit Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., has been plagued by delays in visas for foreign doctors and researchers, which has made a mess of day-to-day appointment schedules, according to Bruce Larson, director of the clinic's International Personnel Office. Foreign physicians and scientists at the clinic have also been prevented from traveling abroad for professional conferences.
In the past two years, visa problems have contributed to the Mayo Clinic's loss of hundreds of foreign patients, particularly from the Middle East, many of whom have chosen to seek treatment in Britain instead, officials said.
"We've had cases where children were granted visas for medical treatment, but their parents were denied," said Misty Hathaway of the clinic's Office of International Relations. "Previously patients were able to get visas for medical treatment in a matter of days. Now it's weeks and sometimes months, and some of the patients are quite ill."
Major corporations and the tourism industry have cited South Korea, the United States' sixth-largest export market and the fifth-largest source of foreign visitors, as especially hard hit; South Korean travelers spent $21 billion in this country last year.
With the introduction of the new policy Aug. 1 requiring consular interviews for most visa applicants, people have waited up to two months for those meetings in the South Korean capital, Seoul; even in the current autumn lull, it is taking about a month. Calling the new regulations ill-coordinated and poorly communicated, American business leaders said they are certain to do damage to U.S. interests there.
Researcher Karin Brulliard contributed to this report.
-------- police
FBI Challenges in Probe of Iraq Bombings
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
November 11, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-FBI-Iraq-Bombings.html?ei=1&en=390f8e1012e1b521&ex=1069651184&pagewanted=print&position=
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The FBI is facing one of the most dangerous, difficult challenges in its history as agents and analysts try to solve a string of deadly bombings in Iraq.
In a telling sign of the peril, FBI agents must be accompanied by American troops whenever they leave their secure compound at the Baghdad airport. Further complicating their job is the lack of a cooperating foreign government to help them and the paucity of high-quality intelligence from either informants or technological surveillance.
``We don't have the intelligence as of yet to keep events from occurring and, postblast, the intelligence to prove who's behind them,'' FBI counterterrorism chief John Pistole told The Associated Press in a recent interview. ``We are making progress, both forensically and in developing sources. It's just a much greater challenge than any place we've been.''
The FBI is involved in about a dozen bombing investigations in Iraq, focusing on those that involve civilian or government targets rather than attacks directly on U.S. or coalition military forces.
About three dozen FBI personnel are stationed in Baghdad, working primarily to identify and trace explosives used in the bombings. The agents are working with American soldiers, the CIA and Iraqi police in trying to track down the perpetrators, Pistole said.
The FBI team also is involved in analyzing and translating documents from deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's government, interviewing detainees and tracking known fugitives. Agents are fingerprinting 3,400 members of the Mujahedeen Khalq, Iranian fighters who want to overthrow Iran's theocracy. The Mujahedeen Khalq, considered a terrorist organization by the State Department, were backed by Saddam, but its members capitulated to and were disarmed by invading U.S. forces and allowed to stay in Iraq on the promise not to make trouble.
The fingerprints and interviews, Pistole said, ``will provide a database for future reference'' that could help the FBI solve -- or prevent -- terrorist attacks. The types of weapons used in Iraq, from rocket-propelled grenades to plastic explosives, are being catalogued and traced by the FBI and other U.S. agencies to identify the sources of terrorist arms.
The FBI would not allow interviews of personnel currently or recently stationed in Iraq.
The team in Iraq is among about 300 FBI agents and analysts who have been deployed around the world to investigate terror attacks since the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole at port in Yemen. Seventeen U.S. sailors were killed in that strike, which was blamed on the al-Qaida network.
In some cases, the agents are helping foreign governments in building criminal cases against terrorism suspects. In other places, getting a criminal conviction is secondary to monitoring the suspects for intelligence purposes, such as uncovering their contacts and weapons suppliers.
Ten agents and analysts worked with the Indonesian government in helping solve the 2002 Bali attack that killed more than 200 people. Indonesian courts have convicted 29 people so far in that case, with two of those sentenced to death.
Five FBI personnel have been helping the Moroccans in the May suicide bombings that killed 45 people, including 12 bombers. Several militants have also been convicted in the case, with a total of 900 arrested in a government crackdown.
Gone are the days when the FBI got involved overseas mainly to haul suspects into U.S. courts for a trial, FBI Director Robert Mueller said in a recent speech about bombing investigations in Saudi Arabia.
``At the end of the day, as we look at this changed world, it does not matter whether we prosecute a case in U.S. courts or help the Saudis prosecute their own case in their own country,'' Mueller said. ``What matters is that justice is served, and we are one step closer to defeating terrorism.''
Mueller and Pistole last week met with senior government officials to discuss the war on terrorism in Saudi Arabia and Yemen and in Baghdad with L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. civil administrator in Iraq. The pair also discussed anti-terrorism efforts for the 2004 Olympics during a stop in Athens.
At any given time, about 100 FBI personnel are working on counterterrorism cases on foreign soil, officials say.
The FBI deployments in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere are much lower-keyed than in the past. After the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Aden, a port in Yemen, 150 FBI personnel sent to that Arabian peninsula country drew heavy criticism as being heavy-handed and overbearing.
``They are trying not to overstaff this thing in Iraq,'' said Tom Baker, a former FBI legal attache in Paris. ``There is a degree of not dominating things, a degree of caution.''
About 80 agents and analysts worked with the Saudis on the May 12 bombing of compounds that housed Westerners. About 20 still were in Riyadh when suspected al-Qaida attackers carried out another suicide bomb attack last weekend. The FBI is helping in that case as well but taking a less direct role because no Americans were killed, a spokesman said.
On the Net:
FBI: http://www.fbi.gov
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Clean Energy Brings Windfall to Indian Village
Story by Himangshu Watts
REUTERS INDIA:
November 11, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/22808/story.htm
MUPPANDAL - On the southern tip of India, the once-impoverished people of Muppandal village are thanking Varuna, the Hindu god of the wind, for blowing unexpected good fortune their way.
In the decade since the first giant power-producing windmill, towering above the palm trees with its whirring 80-foot blades, their lives have changed dramatically.
Incomes have risen and thousands of new jobs have been created as dozens of wind energy producers swarmed the village, the showcase of a $2 billion clean energy program in India, the world's fifth-largest producer of wind energy.
"In 10 years, my daily income has gone up to 450 rupees ($10) from 45 rupees," says Koilpillai Gopal, a barber who has been able to convert his modest roadside kiosk into a glittering shop.
"It is all because of the windmills."
In Muppandal, a hilly region where the wind races in from the Arabian Sea through gaps between the mountains, the price of land for a windmill has soared to 300,000 rupees ($6,620) from 40,000 in the early 1990s.
Electricity produced from wind is costlier than gas, thermal or hydro-based units, but subsidies offered by the government through tax breaks, lower import duties on equipment and cheap loans keep prices competitive.
With the subsidies, analysts say, the generation cost varies from 2.25 to 2.75 rupees per unit, or kilowatt-hour, which is slightly more than thermal electricity. Power produced by old hydro-based units costs below one rupee.
The subsidies and a power-starved market have attracted foreign firms such as Danish NEG Micon, the world's third-biggest turbine maker, Germany's Nordex and privately owned Enercon and General Electric's wind unit.
India produces a total of 100,000 megawatts of power, about 12 percent less than total demand.
RAPID EXPANSION
Nineteen-year-old Raju Palavoor, a watchman at a wind farm, pays his college fees with his salary and flaunts a flashy watch - a luxury in many Indian villages. "Thanks to the windmills, I can become a graduate. One day I can even get a government job," he says.
Wind farms have sprung up all along the 19-mile road from Muppandal to Kanyakumari, a town wedged between the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean.
Muppandal and other areas in the southern state of Tamil Nadu generate about half of India's 2,000 megawatts of wind energy, itself about 2 percent of India's total power output.
The government expects the sector to expand rapidly and pass its target of adding 5,000 megawatts of wind energy by 2012.
"The outlook is optimistic. India has the potential to generate 45,000 megawatts from wind energy," Ajay Vikram Singh, secretary in the Ministry of Non-Conventional Energy Sources, told Reuters.
Clean energy such as wind, biogas and solar energy offer an attractive option for India, which imports 70 percent of its crude oil needs at a cost of more than $17 billion a year.
The Ministry of Non-Conventional Energy Sources estimates a 200-kilowatt wind turbine replacing a thermal power plant will save 120 to 200 tons of coal.
And burning that much coal would add to the atmosphere two to three tons of sulfur dioxide, 1.2 to 2.4 tons of nitrogen oxide and 300-500 tons of carbon dioxide.
"There is enormous scope for more wind energy projects," said M.P. Ramesh, head of the Center for Wind Energy Technology in Madras.
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Federal Lab Hosts Experimental Thin-Film Solar Cells
AUSTIN, Texas, (ENS)
November 11, 2003
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/nov2003/2003-11-11-09.asp#anchor5
An Austin, Texas company is moving toward commercial production of advanced solar cells by using the unique facilities and capabilities of the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).
HelioVolt Corp. is attempting to prove the viability of patented technology it has developed for making thin-film copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS) solar cells.
The HelioVolt process involves depositing two thin chemical reactant layers and rapidly heating them to bond CIGS films to sheets of glass or other surfaces. It is one of several innovative thin-film technologies that hold the promise of lowering the cost of solar cells for the commercial market.
"This is an excellent example of beneficial collaboration between a private company and a national laboratory," said John Benner, a research manager at NREL's National Center for Photovoltaics.
"By removing the obstacles to mass production of thin film cells, we can fast-forward to the day when solar is cost-competitive with conventional energy sources in a wider range of applications," he said.
"There are a lot of smart people here at NREL who have dedicated their lives to this work, and the array of lab facilities is unparalleled," said HelioVolt President and CEO Billy Stanbery. "There really was no other place to do this work."
HelioVolt will present its CIGS solar cells at the 16th NREL Industry Growth Forum, November 17-19 in Austin.
NREL and HelioVolt are working under a $100,000 Cooperative Research and Development Agreement. The company provides a majority of resources, totaling $75,000 in this phase of the project. NREL is providing facilities and staff valued at $25,000.
The goal of the six month effort is to produce a prototype of a HelioVolt CIGS photovoltaic cell, with commercial production to follow.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Protests as nuclear waste shipment heads to German dump
DANNENBERG, Germany (AFP)
Nov 11, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031111120037.kkt2l48f.html
A convoy of highly radioactive nuclear waste started the last and trickiest stage of its journey by rail to a German dump Tuesday, as thousands of protesters plotted to disrupt the transport.
Anti-nuclear campaigners dragged police into running confrontations as the train rumbled slowly from Lueneburg to Dannenberg in northern Germany.
The activists, up to 150 strong, repeatedly sat down on the tracks, forcing police to haul them off only to repeat their action further on.
Further protests were planned at Dannenberg, where the train was scheduled to arrive later Tuesday.
There, the 12 containers of nuclear waste were due to be transferred on to a low-loader for the short journey by road -- probably early Wednesday -- to the storage facility at Gorleben.
The 50-kilometre (32-mile) line from Lueneburg to Dannenberg is considered by police to be the trickiest phase of the transport as activists have in the past centred their protests there, often blocking the trains for hours.
Such actions have become a staple since the convoys began in 1995, forcing authorities this year to deploy around 13,000 police in what has become one of Germany's largest security operations of its kind.
However, the number of demonstrators has significantly dropped over recent years, notably after the German government agreed to phase out atomic energy, and the latest protests were a far cry from their chaotic heyday.
Two people were detained late Monday after chaining themselves to the track, and another 17 after scuffles with police when they tried to occupy a freight station.
Scuffles also broke out in Lueneburg itself.
The train, trundling along at an average speed of just under 15 kilometres per hour, is currently running some five hours behind schedule because of the cumulative effects of the protests since it left the northwestern French town of La Hague on Monday.
Police said the situation at Gorleben itself was "calm."
Anti-nuclear and environmental campaigners say the shipments are dangerous and that the waste will contaminate the water table at Gorleben.
The nuclear waste had been treated at a reprocessing centre at La Hague where Germany, which has no treatment facilities of its own, sends its spent fuel rods.
This is the seventh such convoy from La Hague since 1995.
So far 32 containers have been stored at Gorleben, which has a capacity of 420. According to the company which organises the freight, another 166 are due to be transported to the dump, 127 of them from La Hague and the remaining 39 from the British reprocessing facility at Sellafield.
At present, 12 containers are transported annually from La Hague. Six more are to be shipped every year from Sellafield from 2005.
With so many police on duty, the regional interior ministry calculates the cost of the security operation at 30 million euros (34 million dollars).
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German and French protesters slow shipment of nuclear waste bound for disputed dump
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
By Guido Rijkhoek,
Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2003-11-11/s_10290.asp
WOERTH, Germany - German and French antinuclear demonstrators slowed a trainload of radioactive waste on Monday on its way from a French reprocessing plant to a disputed dump in northern Germany, chaining themselves to the track on both sides of the border.
The train, carrying 12 containers of waste, halted for two hours Monday evening near Heilbronn in southwestern Germany while police cut free two activists chained together through a metal pipe set under the rails, said Harald Trautmann, a spokesman for German border police.
Protesters also spread antinuclear banners across the rails, and 10 people were taken into custody, Trautmann said. Police helicopters searched the area for further protesters before the train resumed its journey at about 11 p.m.
The train crossed from France near the German border town of Woerth some three hours behind schedule on Monday afternoon. It had been forced to halt near Sarrebourg, in eastern France, as police removed the activists' chains and detained about half a dozen people, both French and German.
The shipment left a reprocessing plant at La Hague in northwestern France on Sunday and was expected to reach a specially equipped terminal in the town of Dannenberg on Tuesday. There, cranes will swing the containers onto trucks for the last few kilometers to the Gorleben storage site.
Previous shipments to Gorleben - a traditional focus of protests by the country's antinuclear lobby - have regularly led to clashes between thousands of demonstrators and police.
More than 3,000 people staged a peaceful protest near the dump on Saturday. The next day, a group of antinuclear activists scaled a tower at the site and unfurled banners, including one that read "Gorleben - no atomic toilet."
On Monday, farmers used their tractors to temporarily block one of two roads that could be used by trucks bringing the containers on the final leg of their journey to the dump.
Protests continue to greet every shipment of waste into Germany, despite government plans to phase out the country's nuclear power plants and restart the search for a secure storage site for the radioactive waste.
The phase-out, agreed to in 2001 after hard bargaining with the power industry, is to begin Friday, when a 32-year-old plant operated by energy giant E.On near Hamburg will be switched off.
But activists complain that the timetable is too slow; the last of the 19 nuclear plants is expected to close in about two decades. They also suspect that a disused salt mine at Gorleben will eventually be selected for the permanent dump, raising fears of groundwater contamination. A nearby warehouse is being used for temporary storage.
Nuclear power currently provides nearly one-third of Germany's electricity, and spent fuel from Germany's nuclear plants is sent to France and Britain for reprocessing under contracts that force Germany to take back the waste.
The government says alternative energy sources, including wind and solar power, will be promoted to make up the shortfall.
----
WAR PROTESTERS
It doesn't always pay to plead
BY ALEX IRVINE
November 7 - 13, 2003
http://www.portlandphoenix.com/features/this_just_in/documents/03300035.asp
On March 20, a dozen people occupied Senator Susan Collins's office in the Margaret Chase Smith Federal Building in Bangor and were arrested. Ten of them pled no contest and were sentenced in May to 48 hours in jail (suspended) and either 30 hours of community service or a $200 donation to charity.
The other two, Nancy Galland and Richard Stander, demanded a jury trial. They got it, and were found guilty of criminal trespass on October 16. Then Judge E. Allen Hunter continued sentencing until October 31.
What did he need two weeks to think about? It turns out he put the intervening time to good use, weighing issues of civil disobedience that maybe our Justice Department would do well to consider.
At the sentencing, Greg Campbell Penobscot County Assistant District Attorney argued for a substantial fine, citing the state's time put into what he called a "frivolous issue."
Judge Hunter, though, didn't see things that way. He pronounced himself convinced that the two had violated the law "in pursuit of a principle," and he invoked the Boston Tea Party, Martin Luther King, and Rosa Parks before sentencing Galland and Stander to 20 hours of community service, a much lighter sentence than their 10 compatriots got. The two District Judge-approved protesters then retired to Mamma Baldacci's for a meal on the house.
Asked whether he thinks this result will have an effect on other protesters, Richard Stander says that he and Galland "certainly are buoyed up by the judge's speech and his sentencing. It's a validation of civil disobedience, a recognition by the court that the refusal to obey a police order that we believe to be illegal is justified. We're grateful to the judge for helping to reestablish the force of civil disobedience, and we're thrilled and appreciative that our action was vindicated by this thoughtful and scholarly judge."
Does he plan to get arrested again? "This certainly did not discourage us," Stander chuckles, and his "wife and partner in crime" Galland offers that they were a "pebble in the pond" that will reverberate.
"We told the judge," Stander concludes, "that we expect others to fill our public spaces and follow us in speaking truth to power."
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Thousands to Speak Out Against Terror Training at SOA
Convergence and Mass Civil Disobedience
Action at Fort Benning, Georgia,
November 22-23, 2003
November 11, 2003
Common Dreams
http://www.commondreams.org/news2003/1111-06.htm
COLUMBUS, GA - - Thousands are planning to take nonviolent direct action to close what they call a terrorist training camp on U.S. soil - the School of the Americas, renamed Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (SOA/WHISC), a combat-training school for Latin American soldiers. On November 22-23 thousands will gather at the gates of Ft. Benning, Georgia, site of the school, to expose a double standard. SOA grads continue to be implicated in egregious acts designed to terrorize and coerce civilian populations throughout Latin America.
The gathering will culminate on Sunday, November 23 with a solemn "funeral" procession to the gates of Ft. Benning. Many will negotiate a barbed-wire fence to enter the military base in an act of nonviolent civil disobedience. Since protests against SOA-WHISC began over ten years ago, over 170 people served or are now serving federal prison sentences for civil disobedience.
The weekend's program will feature music and speakers from Latin and North America, including Pete Seeger; Llajtasuyo; Francisco Herrera; Jon Fromer; Amy Goodman from Democracy Now!; Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking; Kathy Kelly of Voices in the Wilderness; Bob King, VP of the United Auto Workers International; and many others.
SOA graduates return to their countries to utilize their training domestically and are consistently cited for atrocities against their own people. Critics say President Bush used this same argument against Saddam Hussein to leverage an invasion of Iraq, while ignoring U.S. culpability in gross human rights violations throughout Latin America. Among those targeted by SOA graduates are educators, union organizers, religious workers, student leaders, and others working for human rights and economic justice. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been tortured, raped, assassinated, "disappeared", massacred, and forced into refuge by SOA graduates.
There has never been an impact-assessment of the training offered at the school. SOA-trained soldiers have returned to their countries to commit atrocities, both as soldiers and as renegades, forming paramilitaries, death squads and drug trafficking operations. A few weeks ago the Mexican Secretary of Defense revealed that SOA-trained ex-soldiers, once part of an elite Mexican army division, are now working as highly trained hired assassins for the Gulf Cartel.
Organizers of the convergence in Georgia are working in solidarity and coordinating with organizers of the protests to oppose the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) in Miami (Nov. 19-21). Critics of the SOA/WHISC argue that the school's underlying purpose is to clear the way for U.S. corporate interests.
"The SOA is part of a corporate-hijacked foreign policy that's making us a lot of enemies," said Fr. Roy Bourgeois, founder of SOA Watch. "If we want lasting peace and security we need a foreign policy that reflects our values of justice and democracy."
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