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NUCLEAR
Two strontium powered lighthouses vandalised on the Kola Peninsula
China denies CIA accusations over Pakistan weapons program
Bulgaria wants compensation for closing nuclear plant
Fortum presses ahead with controversial stake in Finnish nuclear plant
Austria protests Czech plans to expand controversial nuclear plant
Germany's Retreat from Nuclear Energy Begins
IRAN - EU official calls Tehran honest
Wider Split Between U.S. and Europe Over Iran
US Slams Iran Draft; Exiles Say Tehran Fooling UN
Japan's U.S. strategy
U.S. talks Korea strategy shift
U.S. commander fears N. Korea would sell nukes
Nukes option by U.S. in Korea
Kelly in Beijing to Work Out N.Korea Nuclear Talks
U.S., Japan Agree on N. Korea Nuke Crisis
Activists Make Nuclear Waste a Russian Election Issue
Study: West Too Slow to Counter WMD Terror Threat
Congress Approves Bush Nuclear Weapons Funds
Energy Department is tearing down Hanford plutonium facility
EPA to propose easing rules for radioactive waste
EPA Proposes New Radioactive Waste Disposal Rule
Radioactive Waste Plan Attacked
Powell Praises Iran on Nuclear Decisions
Bush Insists That U.S. Troops Will Stay in Iraq
MILITARY
Taiwan protests at criticism over submarine deal
BAE System's Dirty Dealings
U.S. Sets Time Frame For 24 Iraq Contracts
BAE Systems' Dirty Dealings
Colombian drug war stalls
U.S. Jets Pound Suspected Guerrilla Positions in Iraq
A U.S. General Speeds the Shift in an Iraqi City
American, Israeli Hawks Worried Over Peace Moves
Israeli Army Engaged in Fight Over Its Soul
Palestinian Kills Two Soldiers; Israel Raids Gaza Strip
NATO on trial as Afghanistan spins out of control
U.S. Intelligence Is Softening Some Judgments on Illicit Arms
CIA Seeks Probe of Iraq-Al Qaeda Memo Leak
Sweden spied on Russian military until 2001: report
U.N. group seeks control of Internet
Powell and European Leaders Discuss U.N. Role in Iraq
U.N. Refugee Agency Pulls Staff From Afghanistan
Military Alters Plans For Possible Conflicts
Low-Tech Grenades A Danger to Helicopters
U.S.'s 'Iron Hammer' Code Name 1st Used by Nazis
Media caught in Iraq's war of perceptions
Plea Deals Being Used to Clear Balkan War Tribunal's Docket
Blair's Wife Faults Bush's Opposition to International Court
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Judges Question Detention of American
Appeals Court Weighs Case of Enemy Combatant
Court to Rule on 'Enemy Combatant' Label
Show Us Your Money
FBI Curbed In Tracking Gun Buyers Brady Law Policy Foils Watch List
Two Yemenis Held Abroad Are to Face Trial in a U.S. Court
ENERGY AND OTHER
DaimlerChrysler to Test 100 'Green' Cars
China Set to Act on Fuel Economy
Conference panel OKs energy bill
Congress Weighs Extended Deadlines on Smog Reduction
EPA Seeks Middle Ground in Toxic-Release Reporting
Flu Vaccine Faces Unexpected Strain
Flu Season May Be Severe, Officials Say
Congress Adds to Global Spending for AIDS Fight
ACTIVISTS
Environmentalists protest route
Miami Girds for Protests at Trade Talks
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Two strontium powered lighthouses vandalised on the Kola Peninsula
November 18, 2003
Bellona Fdn Russia
http://www.bellona.no/en/international/russia/navy/northern_fleet/incidents/31767.html
MURMANSK - Two Radioisotope Thermal Generators, or RTGs, were vandalised on the Kola Peninsula. The Northern Fleet discovered the damage during regular checks in mid November. The administration of the Murmansk region referred to the event as "radiation accident."
Two Strontium containing Radioisotope Thermal Generators, or RTGs, used to power navigation beacons and lighthouses were found literally ripped to pieces by unknown vandals during regular checks by the Russian Navy's Northern Fleet in the area of the Kola Peninsula last week.
The damage was so severe that Murmansk Regional officials designated the incident as a "radioactive accident."
It is assumed by local authorities that the vandals were scavenging for valuable metals, including stainless steel, lead and aluminium, all of which could easily be dumped on the scrap metal market in Murmansk. But the vandals also took with them the depleted uranium casing, which is used to protect the RTG's strontium cores.
The strontium cores were left at the sites of the navigation devices. They are highly radioactive-emitting some 1000 roentgens per hour-and local police officials and officials from the Murmansk Regional Federal Security Service, or FSB, said in interviews with Bellona Web that the suspects could well be dead or seriously ill. They have therefore expanded a search for the suspects to include not only the areas from where the RTG's were stolen, but to Murmansk area hospitals as well. They are also combing local metal scrap yards, a Murmansk FSB official said in a telephone interview.
That the generators, known as RTGs, could so easily be reached and torn down literally to their radioactive cores is disturbing news for both the environmental and nuclear security communities.
Both groups have warned Russian officials about potential disasters that could occur should terrorists get their hands on any of Russia's aged 1000 RTGs-many of which have not been checked in years, and many of whose locations, by admission of Russian Ministry of Defence, are unknown. In Northwest Russia alone, there are some 150 of these strontium generators. All 1000 of these generators have exceeded their engineering life span-and according to a source in the Defence Ministry-decade.
In the wake of the discovery the Murmansk Region Administration today issued a statement indicating that on November 12th, the Hydrographic Department of the Northern Fleet-while conducting a regular inspection of the lighthouses-discovered a completely dismantled Beta-M type No255 RTG, which was used to power the navigation lighthouse No414.1 in Olenya bay in the Kola harbour.
The statement indicated that the RTG had been completely dismantled, down to the depleted uranium protection vessel. One radioisotope heat source was found near shore in water 1.5 to 3 meters depth.
The next day, according to the Murmansk Administration statement release Monday, yet another Beta-M type No256 type RTG, which powered lighthouse No437 on Yuzhny Goryachinksy island in the Kola harbour was found in precisely the same condition-all of it's valuable metals had been stripped, including the depleted uranium, and a radioisotope heat source was found on shore on the northern part of the island.
No overview or control of RTGs
The destroyed RTGs are the responsibility of the Russian Ministry of Defence, which carried out periodic checks on the units-that are still locatable-once or twice a year. Many RTGs in the Arctic north of Siberia and the coast of the rough Russian Far East have, according to sources in Russia's Ministry of Atomic Energy, or Minatom, literally been lost, or "orphaned."
In a similar accident in the Leningrad Region in March 2003, an RTG of Beta-M type was vandalised. The Navy carried out control of this RTG in June 2002-almost a whole year before the accident was discovered. And in 2002, three hunters in the former Soviet republic of Georgia were severely irradiated after stumbling across an RTG that had been in the wood for years. Huddling around the strontium battery as a heat source, all three spent months in the hospital battling radiation sickness.
It is Bellona's position that the Russian Federation must provide stricter controls over its RTGs and carry out an immediate inventory on all currently operating RTGs. In addition to the health risks these radiation sources-found in isolated areas with little to no warning about their presence-pose, RTGs represent an obvious non-proliferation threat. Their strontium components can easily be fashioned by terrorists into a so-called "dirty bomb," which is a conventional bomb stuffed full of radioactive materials. Fear of such radiological dispersal devices has grown the world over after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Bellona's working paper on RTGs
The newly released Bellona's working paper on RTGs discovers the environmental and non-proliferation dangers associated with them, concludes that Russian authorities have no overview over the problem. The working paper is so far available only in Russian.
RTGs
There are approximately 1000 RTGs in Russia. Most of them are used as a power source for lighthouses. RTGs are operated by the Defence Ministry, the Ministry of Transport and Russian Hydro-Meteorological Service. The Ministry of transport runs more than 380 RTGs, whereas the Ministry of Defence operates 535, including more than 100 located on the Kola Peninsula. Most of the RTGs, which fall under the auspices of the Defence Ministry, are located along the Arctic coast, or the so-called Northern Sea Route.
Since 1960, nine different models of RTGs have been developed. The Beta-M type RTG is most commonly use and there are around 700 of them in operation across the Russian Federation.
Beta-M puts out 230 Watts of power. The weight of an RTG is 560 kilograms altogether, and the weight of the radioactive portion is around 5 kilograms. This active portion contains 35,000 to 40,000 Ci of activity. The radioactivity of an RTG at the distance of 0.02 to 0.5 meters is 800 to 1000 roentgens per hour. The radioactive source can heat up to 500 degrees Celsius.
-------- china
China denies CIA accusations over Pakistan weapons program
BEIJING (AFP)
Nov 18, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031118093706.d2x3p0mw.html
China insisted Tuesday its nuclear energy cooperation with Pakistan was for peaceful purposes and adamantly denied that exchanges with Islamabad violated commitments on the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
"Cooperation between China and Pakistan regarding nuclear energy generation is purely for peaceful purposes and does not violate any non-proliferation obligations or China's export controls," foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said.
He was responding to questions about a US Central Intelligence Agencyreport issued last week which alleged that Chinese firms may be aiding Pakistan's nuclear weapons program.
"China is a party state to the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) treaty and is absolutely opposed to the proliferation of weapons of any kind," said Liu.
He further maintained that the nuclear energy cooperation with Pakistan was being carried out under safeguards put in place by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The CIA report said Chinese entities continued to work with Pakistan and Iran on ballistic missile-related projects during the first six months of this year.
Despite a warming of relations in recent years, the United States and China frequently find themselves at odds over the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
Washington has slapped sanctions on a long list of Chinese firms accused of links to nations including Pakistan, North Korea and Iran.
The unclassified report to Congress notes that Beijing promised Washington in May 1996 not to provide assistance to unsafeguarded nuclear facilities.
"We cannot rule out, however, some continued contacts subsequent to the pledge between Chinese entities and entities associated with Pakistan's nuclear weapons program," the report said.
It noted Beijing has taken some steps to educate individuals and firms on new missile-related export control regulations, but "Chinese entities continued to work with Pakistan and Iran on ballistic missile-related projects during the first half of 2003."
-------- europe
Bulgaria wants compensation for closing nuclear plant
SOFIA (AFP)
Nov 18, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031118130545.hxm1hzuq.html
Bulgaria said Tuesday it would honor its pledge to the European Union to close two reactors at the Kozloduy nuclear power plant but wanted to be compensated for the losses.
"Bulgaria has pledged to close units 3 and 4 in 2006 and we do not shrink from this. There will be losses, however, which must be compensated," Energy Minister Milko Kovatchev said in an interview with bTV television.
"Bulgaria should be compensated for economic and social losses," he said.
Public opinion opposes shutting the reactors down in a country which gets nearly half its electricity needs from the country's only nuclear plant.
Eleven EU experts arrived in Bulgaria on Sunday to inspect Kozloduy, 200 kilometres (125 miles) north of Sofia.
Bulgaria closed the two oldest reactors at Kozloduy at the end of 2002 at the urging of the EU, which argued that they posed a security risk.
Two Soviet-era 440-megawatt reactors are due to be shut down in 2006 under an agreement with the EU made during the course of Bulgaria's accession negotiations with the bloc, which it hopes to join in 2007.
Authorities have since modernised those two reactors and installed a cooling system designed to prevent any radioactive leakage in case of an accident, to allay EU concerns.
The United Nations nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has found that the safety mechanisms at the two reactors meet all their requirements.
If the EU team reaches the same conclusion as the IAEA in their report due out early in 2004, Bulgaria will seek a delay on the date set for the closure of the reactors before it concludes its accession negotiations with the EU towards the middle of 2004.
The reactors were installed between 1981 and 1982, with a projected life span of 30 years.
The director of the plant, Yordan Kostadinov, says their capacity depends on the continued use of the two reactors it must shut down.
----
Fortum presses ahead with controversial stake in Finnish nuclear plant
HELSINKI (AFP)
Nov 18, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031118150216.6owkrzas.html
Fortum, Finland's state-controlled energy group, on Tuesday went ahead with a controversial decision to take a 25-percent stake in a new nuclear reactor, set to become operational by the end of the decade.
The Fortum decision has provoked resistance from anti-nuclear groups, and Greenpeace last week called a demonstration in an effort to stop the move.
"It wasn't an easy decision, but the problem is that there is no other single large scale solution to increase the energy production capacity, that we all agree is needed," Carola Teir-Lehtinen, Fortum's spokeswoman, told AFP.
The Finnish national energy group is a member of TVO, a non-profit consortium that won parliamentary approval last year to build a new nuclear reactor, supplementing four aging power stations from the 1970s.
TVO said on Monday that interest in the project's 1,600 Mw power-generating capacity had been strong, with Finnish firms wanting to reserve over 2,000 Mw for their future use, but gave no further details.
Believed to be among them are Finnish forestry and paper giants UPM-Kymmene and Stora-Enso, which both hold indirect stakes in TVO, while the City of Helsinki has already said that it will participate in the construction.
Fortum, controlled by the Finnish state with a 61-percent stake, has a stated ambition to become the Nordic region's largest supplier of electricity. Currently it ranks second, supplying some 13 percent of total deliveries.
Following the decision Greenpeace said it would start a campaign targeting Fortum's customers in Scandinavia, where resistance against nuclear power remains strong and the firm has marketed its energy as a "green alternative".
"We will make Fortum's customers in the Nordic countries aware of this, I'm sure that their customers and potential customers in Denmark, Sweden and Norway would like to know about this," Kaisa Kosonen, a campaigner for Greenpeace, said.
Fortum was, however, not worried by any possible boycott threat, Teri-Lehtinen said.
----
Austria protests Czech plans to expand controversial nuclear plant
VIENNA (AFP)
Nov 18, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031118154939.pce724ks.html
The Austrian government said Tuesday it was to protest plans by the Czech Republic to expand a controversial nuclear plant that lies just 60 kilometres (36 miles) across the border from Austria.
The Temelin plant has soured Prague's relations with nuclear-free neighbour Austria, which has demanded safety and environmental guarantees.
Environment Minister Josef Proell said: "We have asked the Austrian ambassador in Prague to give a letter of protest to the Czech foreign ministry."
The Czech government is hoping to build two new reactors at Temelin, the industry vice minister Martin Pecina said in Prague in an interview published Monday in the Czech magazine Tyden.
Pecina said the project would be finalized next year and construction would begin in 2009 if all went as planned.
Temelin's first reactor went onstream in October 2000 despite repeated technical problems, and the second reactor is at full power, but in a trial phase.
Prague says that Temelin's two Soviet-designed reactors have been upgraded to Western safety standards.
----
Germany's Retreat from Nuclear Energy Begins
Story by Christian Charisius
REUTERS GERMANY:
November 18, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/22869/story.htm
STADE, Germany - Germany switched off the first of its 19 nuclear power stations on Friday, launching what it calls the world's fastest withdrawal from atomic energy but a policy that may still be reversed if the opposition takes power.
Germany's center-left government struck a deal with industry in 2000 to close all nuclear power plants by about 2025, the Greens making a phase-out a condition for forming a coalition with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats in 1998.
However, it is still unclear if Germany can meet the deadline and how it will replace atomic power, which provides a third of its electricity, while also meeting commitments to cap its emissions of greenhouse gases produced by fossil fuels.
With little fanfare inside the control room, the Stade plant, Germany's second oldest, ceased operations on Friday morning with the simple pressing of two buttons.
"All rods are engaged. We are now out," said shift leader Bernd Schroeder as the reactor near Hamburg shut off.
Greens Environment Minister Juergen Trittin said Friday's closure showed nuclear power had no future in Germany.
"No country is pulling out as quickly as Germany. Up until 2020 one nuclear power plant will be closed on average every year in Germany," he said in a speech
The Greens held a party in Berlin to celebrate, but operator E.ON said its 32-year-old reactor would have closed anyway on purely economic grounds without government pressure.
Opposition parties have threatened to reverse the withdrawal. Within government, Trittin is at odds with SPD Economy Minister Wolfgang Clement over how much to promote renewable energy as coal subsidies are phased out as Germany seeks alternatives to make up the nuclear power shortfall.
EUROPEAN LEADER
Like Germany, Belgium and Sweden have also announced nuclear phase-out plans. Sweden closed one reactor but postponed further closures after protests from energy-intensive industry.
France, which relies on nuclear power for 80 percent of its electricity, and Britain are keeping their options open to build new nuclear plants to replace aging ones. Finland, the only country in western Europe expanding its atomic energy production, is soon to start building its fifth nuclear reactor.
"There's little sign of Europe following Germany. If anything it's going more in the opposite direction," said Berthold Hannes, analyst at consultancy A.T. Kearney.
"Germany's conservatives could also reverse the decision if they came to power. I don't think there will be any new nuclear plants, but the present ones could have their lives extended from 32 years to, say 50 years, or even 60 years as in the United States," he added.
Germany's VDEW electricity association urged the government to extend the lives of nuclear power plants, saying it would help the country keep to greenhouse gas limits. It called Stade's shutdown a routine closure, not an ecological triumph.
German Friends of the Earth was also not celebrating, saying some of Stade's output had been shifted to other nuclear plants.
Despite winning the pledge of an end to atomic power, anti-nuclear protesters are still a force to be reckoned with in Germany, with thousands earlier this week disrupting a shipment of nuclear waste returning to a German storage site.
The reprocessed fuel did complete its journey from France with the help of 13,000 police, but protesters secured extensive media coverage and ensured the nuclear industry remains a costly burden - at least for the state which footed the policing bill.
Work on dismantling the 672-megawatt Stade nuclear reactor is due to begin in 2005, once its fuel has been removed.
(Additional reporting by Philip Blenkinsop, Margaret Orgill in London)
-------- iran
IRAN - EU official calls Tehran honest
November 18, 2003
Washington Times
World Scene
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene.htm
BRUSSELS - European Union foreign-policy chief Javier Solana said yesterday Iran had been honest so far about its nuclear program and said he hoped it would not be reported to the U.N. Security Council for any sanctions.
His comments came as France, Britain and Germany circulated a draft resolution at the U.N. nuclear watchdog, which diplomats said was certain to disappoint Washington, because it did not say Iran had violated a global pact against atomic weapons.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, due to meet EU foreign ministers today, disputed Mr. Solana's comments, saying he "wouldn't have gone quite so far" when crediting Tehran for its honesty.
----
Wider Split Between U.S. and Europe Over Iran
November 18, 2003
By THOMAS FULLER,
International Herald Tribune
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/18/international/europe/18EURO.html
BRUSSELS, Nov. 17 - The split between Europe and the United States over Iran's nuclear program widened on Monday with the foreign policy chief of the European Union saying that the Iranian government had been honest about its nuclear work and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell saying that such a conclusion went too far.
The two are to meet here on Tuesday, and on Thursday the International Atomic Energy Agency is to decide if Iran has violated the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, a finding that would send the issue to the United Nations Security Council for possible sanctions.
The Bush administration has said that Iran has a covert nuclear weapons program, while many officials in Europe have been more conciliatory about Iran's efforts to comply with international inspections.
"They have been honest," Javier Solana, the European Union foreign policy chief, said here on the sidelines of a meeting of European Union foreign ministers and defense ministers. "Let's see if they continue all the way to the end."
In Washington, Mr. Powell said he disagreed with Mr. Solana's assessment. "I wouldn't have gone quite as far," he told reporters, according to Agence France-Presse.
Mr. Powell said the United States believed that Iran's nuclear development program "had an intent to produce a nuclear weapon."
But he also said that diplomatic efforts by the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany had been "very, very helpful."
The three foreign ministers visited Tehran last month and obtained a promise that the Iranian government would stop enriching uranium.
Mr. Solana said it was his hope that the International Atomic Energy Agency would not recommend that Iran appear before the Security Council.
The European Union has pursued a policy of engagement with Iran and is negotiating new trade and investment agreements contingent on political factors like Iran's human rights record and its policies toward its neighbors.
--------
US Slams Iran Draft; Exiles Say Tehran Fooling UN
November 18, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-iran.html
LONDON/VIENNA, Austria (Reuters) - The United States said Tuesday a draft resolution on Iran's breach of U.N. nuclear obligations was ``deficient,'' while an Iranian opposition group accused Tehran of hiding an ``atomic weapons program'' from the United Nations.
France, Britain and Germany have circulated a draft resolution criticizing Iran's long history of concealing its atomic program to be discussed by the International Atomic Energy Agency's Board of Governors Thursday.
Secretary of State Colin Powell expressed his disappointment with the work of the European Union's three biggest states.
``The resolution that I was aware (of) being presented by the EU three was not adequate,'' Powell told reporters on a flight from Brussels to London where he was to join President Bush who is on a three-day state visit to Britain.
``It did not have the trigger mechanisms in the case of further Iranian intransigence or difficulty,'' he said.
Powell said the draft was a matter of intense discussion and he said Washington was considering whether to abandon the quest for one entirely, saying, ``If a resolution (is) totally inadequate, then maybe don't have a resolution right now.''
In Brussels earlier, Powell accused Iran of violating the global pact against atomic weapons and indicated that he felt any resolution on Iran must formally acknowledge this.
``The fact of the matter is that Iran has been in noncompliance'' with its obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Powell said after what he called a ``very candid discussion'' with his EU counterparts.
``We'll be in discussion with our EU colleagues and other members of the IAEA as to whether or not the resolution is strong enough to convey to the world the difficulties we've had with Iran over the years,'' he said.
COOPERATION
However, Powell said Iran appeared to be moving in the right direction recently by cooperating with the IAEA.
The United States says Iran has a secret weapons program and wants the 35-nation IAEA board to declare the Islamic republic in ``noncompliance'' and report its NPT breaches to the U.N. Security Council, which has the power to impose sanctions.
The draft resolution, which will undergo revisions over the next few days, merely criticizes Iran for ``failures to meet safeguards obligations,'' diplomats familiar with the text told Reuters. This is too weak for Washington, they said.
Iran denies wanting an atomic bomb and urged the IAEA board not to give in to pressure from Washington.
``America should abandon such useless pressures and stop imposing its ideas on the agency,'' Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told Reuters in Tehran.
Last month, Iran submitted a declaration of its entire nuclear program to the IAEA that Tehran said was accurate and complete in order to comply with an Oct. 31 IAEA deadline to come clean about the full extent of its atomic program.
In this declaration, Iran admitted to reprocessing a small amount of plutonium and concealing a uranium enrichment program for 18 years. But it denies having weapons ambitions.
However, Shahin Gobadi, a spokesman for the National Council of Resistance of Iran, told Reuters his group had specific information about further ``recent violations'' of Iran's obligation to report all its nuclear activities to the IAEA.
Tehran is also hiding its ``secret atomic weapons program,'' Gobadi said, echoing an often-made U.S. accusation. Iran says it wants nuclear power for the peaceful generation of electricity.
Gobadi said officials working within Iran's nuclear industry had informed some workers that Iran's current policy of openness with the IAEA was ``all temporary.''
He said his group, which has accurately informed about undeclared nuclear sites in Iran in the past but is considered by Washington as a terrorist group, would give details Wednesday.
The IAEA said last week it had ``no evidence'' yet that Iran had a clandestine nuclear weapons program but the jury was still out on whether such a program existed.
-------- japan
Japan's U.S. strategy
November 17, 2003
Washington Times
Embassy Row
http://www.washtimes.com/world/embassy.htm
Japan strengthened its alliance with the United States in the face of threats from North Korea, economic difficulties, competition from China and Russia, and growing nationalism, according to a former U.S. ambassador to Japan.
"Under these circumstances, Japan's latitude for pursuing alternative strategic options is limited," Michael H. Armacost wrote in the annual "Strategic Asia" assessment of the National Bureau of Asian Research, a private think tank.
"Past hopes for carving out a unique role as a global civilian power, advancing the cause of human security, while relying essentially on soft power, confronted the harsh realities of real threats, a sluggish economy and a tight budget."
•Call Embassy Row at 202/636-3297, fax 202/832-7278 or e-mail jmorrison@washingtontimes.com.
-------- korea
U.S. talks Korea strategy shift
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
CNN http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/east/11/17/skorea.rumsfeld/index.html
Photo: Protesters hurl eggs at a picture of Rumsfeld during a protest in Seoul.
http://i.cnn.net/cnn/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/east/11/17/skorea.rumsfeld/story.skorea.protest.ap.jpg
SEOUL, South Korea -- The United States is to move its forces back from the highly-fortified Demilitarized Zone dividing South and North Korea, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said.
Although no timetable had been set, the process would begin "as soon as possible," Rumsfeld said after holding high-level joint security talks on realignment of U.S. forces on the Korean peninsula.
The relocation would form part of a sweeping reorganization of U.S. troops across Asia.
"Any changes to U.S. military posture in Northeast Asia will be the product of consultation with our key allies. Most importantly, they will result in an increased U.S. capability in the region," Rumsfeld told a press conference Monday in Seoul.
"(The troop movements) will reflect our new technologies and abilities to deter and defeat any aggressions against allies such as South Korea," he said.
The security talks, described by Rumsfeld as "possibly the most substantive" between the two countries, focused on issues relating to North Korea and Iraq.
"They shared a grave concern that North Korea's self-acknowledged nuclear weapons program threatens regional and global security and violates North Korea's commitments to a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula," Rumsfeld and South Korean Defense Minister Cho Young-kil said in a joint statement.
Rumsfeld also expressed appreciation for South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun's decision to send additional troops to Iraq, as well as US$260 million in reconstruction funds by 2007.
Outside the defense ministry a group of about 30 protesters chanted slogans against Rumsfeld's visit .
The demonstrators claimed Rumsfeld was trying to pressure Seoul into sending more troops to Iraq. They also demanded the withdrawal of the 37,000 U.S. troops in stationed in South Korea since the end of the Korean War. Iraq commitments
Rumsfeld arrived in the South Korean capital Sunday amid protests over plans to send more South Korean troops to Iraq.
Nearly 700 South Korean soldiers, mostly medics and engineers are already in Iraq, and Washington was seeking several thousand more, including combat troops.
Professor Koh Byung-chul, of the Institute of Far Eastern Studies told CNN Monday the U.S. had asked for 5,000 troops, including combat forces, but South Korea wanted to limit the numbers to 3,000 in mainly non-combat roles.
He said polls showed opinion in South Korea to be evenly divided on the troops issue, adding that it would be politically difficult for South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun to agree to the U.S. request. Rumsfeld (right) is greeted upon arrival in Seoul by U.S. Ambassador Thomas C. Hubbard.
Riot police were deployed on the streets of the capital Sunday night when Rumsfeld arrived by helicopter at Yongsan Garrison, the 8th U.S. Army's 320-hectare (800-acre) headquarters in the center of the city, the Associated Press reports.
While some South Koreans oppose sending any troops to Iraq, others believe the nation must be realistic and shoulder some international responsibility.
The issue is complicated by the presence of 37,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea to defend against possible aggression by North Korea.
Also South Korea and the United States are currently involved in a global effort to stop North Korea's nuclear weapons ambitions. (N. Korea: 'Stop threats')
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the U.S.-South Korean security treaty following the end of the Korean War.
On Tuesday, Rumsfeld was scheduled to visit U.S. troops, including soldiers of the 2nd Infantry Division, the main Army unit based in South Korea. Asian strategy shift
South Korea is the third leg of Rumsfeld's six-day Asian trip. He has already visited Guam and Japan.
While in Tokyo, Rumsfeld downplayed Japan's decision to delay sending non-combat troops to Iraq which was prompted by the bomb attack on Italian troops that left 26, including 18 Italians, dead.
Japan has said it would like to send troops "as soon as possible" and dispatched a 10-member fact-finding team to Iraq Saturday to further assess the security situation.
During talks Friday and Saturday, Rumsfeld presented Japanese leaders with plans for altering the U.S. military "footprint" as part of a sweeping realignment of U.S. forces around the world.
"But we don't have any specifics because it will take a great deal of discussion," he said at a press conference on Saturday.
The long-term U.S. presence on Okinawa has sparked strong opposition from a section of the Japanese public.
-- Seoul CNN Bureau Chief Sohn Jie-ae contributed to this report
----
U.S. commander fears N. Korea would sell nukes
November 18, 2003
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20031117-104259-1344r.htm
SEOUL - North Korea poses a regional danger because the communist regime is likely to sell its nuclear arms and expertise to rogue states or terrorists, the commander of U.S. forces in South Korea said yesterday.
"North Korea is a known proliferator of military technology," said Army Gen. Leon LaPorte in an interview with reporters. "We believe that nothing would prevent them from selling weapons-grade nuclear material to other countries, rogue nations or terrorist organizations."
That could lead to terrorist groups obtaining and using nuclear bombs.
"That's the concern that we have relative to North Korea's nuclear program," Gen. LaPorte said.
North Korea's large military has outdated conventional equipment, but is backed by an estimated 800 missiles and nuclear weapons.
The North Korean military ranks No. 1 in the world in terms of submarine forces, special operations commandos and artillery, he said.
While the North Korean navy and air force are not well-armed, the ground forces are very powerful, Gen. LaPorte said.
North Korea's "asymmetric threat" lies in its 120,000 special forces commandos and its chemical weapons.
"Their doctrine is to use chemical weapons as a standard munition," he said.
A key worry is North Korea's weapons of mass destruction and missiles, the four-star general said.
"And our concern is that they have nearly 800 missiles," he said. "The missiles themselves are a very significant asymmetrical threat. But if that was combined with a nuclear capability, now you have a capability that not only threatens the Korean Peninsula, but the entire region."
Gen. LaPorte and other senior U.S. military leaders took part in military committee talks with South Korean military leaders, coinciding with civilian defense talks.
The key issue discussed at the talks was the relocation of the 7,000 U.S. troops at more than 10 facilities in Seoul.
South Korean officials want to keep some of the troops in the city, while Pentagon officials plan to leave a small number and move the rest farther south, a senior defense official said.
"It will be way less than a thousand," said the official referring to the remaining troops.
Gen. LaPorte said the South Koreans would take over security at the truce village of Panmunjom sometime in the fall of 2005, while they would probably assume responsibility for countering North Korean artillery by October 2004.
As for enhancing U.S. capabilities, the Pentagon is spending $11 billion over the next several years on new weapons and equipment, including Apache attack helicopters, Stryker combat vehicles and high-speed ships that can move troops quickly.
South Korea, for its part, is buying U.S. surface-to-surface short-range missiles known as the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS.
South Koreans also are planning to purchase advanced Patriot PAC-3 antimissile systems.
Gen. LaPorte said the decrease in the 37,000 U.S. troops based in South Korea may be "one of the payoffs" of the multiyear program to realign bases and add new forces.
----
Nukes option by U.S. in Korea
November 18, 2003
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20031117-115816-2478r.htm
SEOUL - The United States is committed to defending South Korea from an attack by the North and would use nuclear forces if needed, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told the government here yesterday.
Mr. Rumsfeld, who finishes his first official visit to Asia today, said the U.S. commitment to South Korea includes "the continued provision of a nuclear umbrella" for South Korea, according to a statement issued after joint security talks.
"We understand that weakness can be provocative, that weakness can invite people into doing things that they otherwise might not even consider," Mr. Rumsfeld told a joint news conference with South Korean Defense Minister Cho Young-kil.
The two defense chiefs also discussed transferring some of the 37,000 U.S. troops in South Korea to two areas south of the demilitarized zone.
The tasks carried out by the U.S. forces will be handed over to South Korean troops, including security for the truce area of Panmunjom at the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas and the development of South Korean antiartillery capabilities.
Mr. Rumsfeld met with South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun and told him that the United States would like Seoul to send "self-sufficient" troops to Iraq that do not need the protection of U.S. combat forces or help with supplies, said a senior defense official at the meeting.
South Korea has said it will send additional troops in the coming months but did not say whether they will be combat troops or humanitarian forces. The dispatch of humanitarian forces would require protection from terrorist attacks and Iraqi insurgents by U.S. or allied troops.
At the annual defense talks, the two sides agreed that North Korea poses a "global threat," the joint statement said.
Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cho share the "grave concern that North Korea's self-acknowledged nuclear-weapons program threatens regional and global security and violates North Korea's commitment to a nuclear-free peninsula."
North Korea has not tested a nuclear device, but the CIA stated in a recent report to Congress that Pyongyang has "validated" atomic weapons design to the point of posing a credible nuclear threat.
North Korea is continuing to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and long-range missiles, and poses a danger of exporting the weapons and technologies, the statement said.
The United States pulled out all of its tactical nuclear weapons, including nuclear land mines, in the early 1990s. It was then that Washington promised to use its nuclear forces, primarily missile-equipped submarines, to counter any atomic threats to South Korea.
However, the explicit restatement of that promise was unusual, and appeared intended to pressure North Korea in upcoming nuclear arms talks and to persuade South Korea not to develop its own atomic weapons.
North Korea's deployment of nuclear arms in the late 1990s shifted the strategic balance on the peninsula in Pyongyang's favor.
The United States' willingness to use nuclear arms to defend South Korea is expected to anger the communist North, which has accused the Bush administration of planning a nuclear attack.
Asked later about the nuclear assurances, Army Gen. Leon LaPorte, commander of U.S. forces in South Korea, said he could not comment on operational plans.
"Our concern is to maintain a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula," Gen. LaPorte said in an interview with reporters.
The United States is developing nuclear weapons capable of penetrating deep, rock-hardened bunkers like those housing North Korean weapons, U.S. officials have said.
Both leaders called on North Korea to "completely, verifiably and irreversibly dismantle its nuclear-weapons programs" and halt the testing, development, deployment and export of weapons of mass destruction, missiles and related technologies, the statement said.
North Korea should take the opportunity of the six-party talks to denuclearize, the statement said.
Assistant Secretary of State James A. Kelly is in Tokyo and will visit Seoul later this week. He told reporters that a resumption of six-party talks is expected as early as mid-December.
Mr. Rumsfeld said at the press conference that the 13-year plan to move forces away from the demilitarized zone and consolidate bases over the next several years will strengthen the 50-year-old alliance with South Korea.
The alliance is successful because "we have had the ability to deter and defend and, if necessary, prevail," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "And that has been well understood. I can assure you it will be well understood in the years ahead, and, needless to say, neither of our governments would do anything that would in any way weaken the deterrent and the capability to defend."
Mr. Rumsfeld and South Korean leaders did not discuss cutbacks in the numbers of troops, but a U.S. official quoted Mr. Roh as saying that weapons upgrades and organizational reform make the number of troops less important than in the past.
"It is not numbers of things, it is capability to impose lethal power, where needed, when needed, with the greatest flexibility and with the greatest agility," Mr. Rumsfeld said.
Defense officials have said they do not want U.S. military forces to be used as a vulnerable "tripwire" in any initial attack by North Korea's 1.2-million-troop army.
Thousands of U.S. Army forces are deployed in camps spread close to the demilitarized zone and would be quickly overrun by invading North Korean forces or forced to make a difficult withdrawal through the urbanized Seoul area during a conflict.
The two sides were unable to reach an agreement on the relocation of some 700 to 1,000 U.S. troops from the military's Yongsan garrison in Seoul. South Korea does not want the troops in the Seoul area to be moved. The U.S. wants them pulled back to areas around Osan air base, located south of the capital.
-------
Kelly in Beijing to Work Out N.Korea Nuclear Talks
November 18, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-korea-north-kelly.html
BEIJING (Reuters) - U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly said Tuesday his visit to Tokyo set a ``good basis'' for talks on the North Korean nuclear crisis with China and South Korea before flying to Beijing.
Kelly shed no light on the timing of a next round of six-party discussions with North Korea.
Asked when a second round of six-way talks on ending Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program would be held, Kelly told reporters in Japan: ``I don't know. I still don't know. I am going to go to Beijing and do some more work.''
Kelly, who visited Tokyo for three days, arrived in Beijing Tuesday for talks with Chinese officials on an overnight stopover before flying to Seoul for a three-day stay.
A spokesman for China's foreign ministry declined to comment Tuesday on who Kelly would meet, what specifics would be discussed or when the next round of talks would happen.
South Korean National Security Adviser Ra Jong-yil said on Monday that although nothing had yet been decided, the next round of six-country talks was likely to be held on December 17-18.
The United States, the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia held an inconclusive first round of talks in Beijing in August in an effort to end the crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear program.
Earlier Tuesday, Kelly met Japanese Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi.
Japanese officials said Kelly and Kawaguchi discussed a written security guarantee for North Korea in exchange for a ``verifiable and irreversible'' end to its nuclear weapons program. The officials declined to elaborate.
The officials quoted Kelly as telling Kawaguchi that his talks with Japanese officials laid a ``good basis for talking to China and ROK (South Korea).''
DIALOGUE AND PRESSURE
Ishiba told Kelly that both dialogue and pressure should be used in dealing with North Korea, they said.
``A diplomatic and peaceful solution does not mean accepting everything North Korea says,'' Ishiba told reporters after meeting Kelly. ``If (North Korea) is trying to have its way by blackmail, with nuclear weapons, weapons of mass destruction or missiles, we cannot accept that and such methods should not be tolerated.''
Pyongyang, reiterating recent remarks, said Sunday it was ``ready to abandon in practice its nuclear program which the U.S. is concerned about at the phase where its hostile policy is fundamentally dropped and its threat to us removed in practice.''
A spokesman for North Korea's Foreign Ministry, whose comments were reported by the official KCNA news agency, said North Korea was willing to consider ``written assurances of non-aggression'' rather than a formal non-aggression treaty with the United States. The U.S. has ruled out such a treaty.
China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said China, the North's only friend and biggest benefactor, welcomed the comments and said they would help the process.
``We think this is yet another positive and important piece of news North Korea has issued to the international community and goes ahead in showing North Korea's sincerity,'' he told a news conference.
``It benefits the goal of restoring the process of dialogue and I think this news will be welcomed and taken seriously by the relevant parties and international community.''
The crisis began in October 2002 when U.S. officials said Pyongyang had privately admitted pursuing a clandestine nuclear weapons program that violated its international agreements.
--------
U.S., Japan Agree on N. Korea Nuke Crisis
November 18, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Japan-US-Koreas.html
TOKYO (AP) -- A senior U.S. envoy and Japan's defense chief agreed Tuesday to use ``dialogue and pressure'' to persuade North Korea to abandon its suspected nuclear weapons development.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly met with defense chief Shigeru Ishiba as he wrapped up the Tokyo leg of a three-nation Asia tour to coordinate policy ahead of six-way talks expected next month on the North Korean nuclear dispute.
Kelly told reporters that the date for a new round of multilateral negotiations with North Korea was still not set. Kelly then went to Beijing, where he said he would do ``more work on that problem.''
A six-nation conference including China, the United States, the two Koreas, Japan and Russia in August in Beijing ended with the participants only reiterating their desire to resolve the crisis diplomatically.
South Korean officials have indicated that a second round could take place Dec. 17-18 in Beijing.
Kelly and Ishiba agreed to continue using ``dialogue and pressure'' to resolve the nuclear crisis, Ishiba told reporters afterward.
``Resolving the matter diplomatically and peacefully does not mean accepting everything (North Korea) says,'' Ishiba added. ``If it tries to benefit from nuclear weapons, weapons of mass destruction, missiles or threats ... that is not acceptable.''
Kelly's earlier talks with Japanese officials focused on the question of how to defuse the crisis over North Korea's suspected development of nuclear weapons without compromising Japan's defense.
In Seoul, a senior South Korean official said that he was not ``confident'' that six-nation talks could alone persuade the communist North to give up its nuclear ambitions.
Kim Hee-sang, national defense adviser for President Roh Moo-hyun, said the North would be reluctant to relinquish its nuclear programs because it was the last playing card that the impoverished and isolated state has.
Meanwhile, North Korea criticized South Korea for planning to deploy U.S.-made missiles near the border and slammed the United States for repeatedly raising the North's human rights record.
South Korea has said it would start deploying the Army Tactical Missile System Block 1A missiles next month near the border with the North. The missile has a 186-mile range and can reach most of North Korea.
``This is an provocative act that throws cold water on the six-nation talks' atmosphere,'' the North's state-run Rodong Sinmun newspaper said Tuesday, according to KCNA, the North's official news agency. KCNA was monitored by Yonhap.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said Kelly, who was scheduled to arrive Tuesday evening from Japan, will meet with ``relevant officials'' during his 24-hour visit. He offered no additional details.
-------- russia
Activists Make Nuclear Waste a Russian Election Issue
MOSCOW, Russia, (ENS)
November 18, 2003
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/nov2003/2003-11-18-19.asp#anchor3
Environmental activists across Russia plan to stage protests on November 25 against the import of nuclear waste that are intended to influence public opinion in advance of national elections.
Two weeks ahead of the December 7 elections to the State Duma (Parliament), Russian environmental groups will organize protests and information pickets, actions and performances aimed at informing voters across country on the positions of candidates on nuclear waste issue.
Ecodefense, Russia's national anti-nuclear group since 1998, says actions will take place 20 large cities on November 25, conducted by some 50 environmental groups.
The campaign is aimed at building a strong civil society by forcing parliamentarians to be more responsible.
"The new elections are coming, and we have to remind voters which Duma members voted in favor of the import of nuclear waste," Ecodefense said. "Through effective public pressure we need to force the new parliament to disapprove the nuclear waste legislation as amoral and anti-democratic."
In 2001, the Duma approved legislation allowing the Ministry of Atomic Energy (MinAtom) and the nuclear industry to import high-level radioactive waste such as spent nuclear fuel.
At the same time, nearly 90 percent of citizens demonstrated their opposition to the new legislation, holding hundreds of actions all across the country. The parliament ignored mass public opinion.
The Russian nuclear industry has announced it will import over 20,000 metric tons of nuclear waste from across the world for long term storage. The industry expects to earn nearly $20 billion for new reactor construction and spent nuclear fuel reprocessing.
But Ecodefense says that for the past several years the nuclear industry has been under strong public pressure, and cannot find new customers for its spent fuel services.
At the same time, Russia is having problems dealing with its own spent nuclear fuel. In Murmansk today, Victor Akhunov, head of the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy's Department of Ecology and Nuclear Installation Decommissioning, told a meeting of an International Atomic Energy Agency expert group that Russia has 200 metric tons of spent nuclear naval fuel that it has little chance of reprocessing. He called the backlog Minatom's "most difficult current challenge."
-------- terrorism
Study: West Too Slow to Counter WMD Terror Threat
November 18, 2003
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-security-wmd.html
LONDON (Reuters) - Western governments and Russia are moving far too slowly to stop terrorists acquiring deadly ingredients to build weapons of mass destruction, a major international report concluded Tuesday.
Of a total $20 billion pledged by the Group of Eight last year to secure stockpiles of nuclear, chemical and biological materials, ``only a tiny fraction'' has been spent or even allocated to specific projects, it said.
``The threat is outpacing the response,'' former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn told Reuters in an interview in London. He heads the Nuclear Threat Initiative, an anti-proliferation watchdog which largely funded the study by 21 security think tanks.
Nunn said war in Iraq had distracted the United States and diverted resources away from the need to secure WMD materials in regions such as the former Soviet Union.
``We've spent more now (on the war) than it would take to lock up all the nuclear materials around the globe,'' he said.
According to the study, there are some 100 poorly protected research reactors, spread across 40 countries, containing weapons-usable uranium.
``The global community remains alarmingly vulnerable to catastrophic terrorism. Around the world, and particularly in the former Soviet Union, materials and weapons of mass destruction are insecure, often protected only by a padlock or an unpaid guard,'' it said.
``To construct a nuclear bomb, terrorists would need to steal only a small amount of nuclear material, about enough to fit in a suitcase.''
While praising a European diplomatic initiative to dissuade Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapons program, Nunn said terror groups were less likely to acquire WMD from a state than to source the materials from ill-secured research sites.
``The most likely source of terrorist weapons probably does not come from a state that has spent 10, 15, 20 years trying to get their own weapons -- they're not likely to turn around and give it to al Qaeda,'' he said.
``Theft or sale of nuclear material from these stockpiles is the more likely source of supply.''
Apart from money, the report said, ``Russian bureaucratic foot-dragging'' and the reluctance of Russian security forces to grant access to some sensitive sites were also hampering progress.
Nunn said the rate of success in securing such sites was too slow. ``At the pace we're going, you're talking about 20 years. I don't think we've got that long.''
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Congress Approves Bush Nuclear Weapons Funds
November 18, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-congress-spending.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Congress on Tuesday granted President Bush much of the money he had sought to study new types of nuclear weapons as Republican leaders worked toward a deal that would let them wrap up the rest of Congress' unfinished budget work this week.
The House of Representatives voted 387-36 to pass the funds as part of a $27.3 billion spending bill for energy and water programs in 2004. The Senate later unanimously followed suit, sending the bill to Bush to be signed into law.
Meanwhile, Republicans were negotiating with the White House to try to craft a catch-all measure grouping most of the remaining spending bills -- which could then be cleared all at once before Congress is set to adjourn at the end of the week.
The energy spending bill would give Bush half of the $15 million he had sought to develop an earth-penetrating nuclear warhead for use against deeply buried bunkers.
It also has the full $6 million he wanted to research small, low-yield nuclear weapons -- although $4 million of that would be contingent on a report to Congress detailing the administration's future plans for the U.S. nuclear stockpile.
Critics argue small nuclear weapons are dangerous because policy-makers may see them as a usable adjunct to conventional arms, heightening risks of nuclear escalation. And they say U.S. moves to develop them may force others to follow suit.
Congress is supposed to pass 13 spending bills to fund the federal government each fiscal year. So far only six have been sent to Bush and at least five more may now have to be wrapped up into a huge end-of-session ``omnibus'' package.
But the process is being dogged by disagreements over the controversial provisions that the must-pass spending measures always attract. This year, lawmakers defied veto threats to bar a relaxation of curbs on media ownership and block an administration effort to change overtime pay rules.
While no final decision has been made, Republican lawmakers and aides have said they expect the White House to eventually accept Congress' effort to force the Federal Communications Commission to reinstate a stricter limit on how many local stations U.S. television networks can own.
``The White House is just sticking up for their agency. They don't really care about it,'' said one aide.
But the overtime issue, which pits business groups against organized labor in a fight with heavy political implications, remains ``a showstopper,'' said House Appropriations Committee Chairman Bill Young, a Florida Republican.
The energy and water spending bill also contains $580 million for the controversial Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal project, $11 million less than Bush requested but far above a limit previously backed by the Senate.
The plan aims to site the first permanent U.S. nuclear waste repository in the desert northwest of Las Vegas and is bitterly opposed by the state of Nevada, whose senators have generally succeeded in capping its funding in past years.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- washington
Energy Department is tearing down Hanford plutonium facility
November 18, 2003
Associated Press
http://www.katu.com/outdoor/story.asp?ID=62563
http://www.kxly.com/common/getStory.asp?id=32637
RICHLAND - For four decades, the Hanford nuclear reservation made plutonium for weapons, including the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
Now, more than half a century later, workers are tearing down a plutonium facility for the first time at the south-central Washington site.
Hanford is demolishing hundreds of industrial buildings as part of the effort to clean up the nation's most contaminated nuclear site.
Among those buildings is the Plutonium Concentration Facility.
The three-story building played a critical role in the production of plutonium at Hanford during the first decades of the Cold War.
The building's foot-thick concrete walls will be sheared or sawed away in sections in the coming weeks.
Most of the debris will be transported to an on-site landfill. The work should be completed in March.
-------- us nuc waste
EPA to propose easing rules for radioactive waste
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
By Nancy Zuckerbrod,
Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2003-11-18/s_10499.asp
President George W. Bush's administration is considering allowing low-level radioactive waste to be dumped at toxic waste sites and other facilities that currently aren't permitted to receive it.
The Environmental Protection Agency was expected to issue a notice Tuesday seeking public comments on the proposal. The notice asks the public to weigh in on whether certain levels of radioactive waste can be stored in landfills or hazardous material disposal sites.
Nuclear power companies can dispose of low-level radioactive waste at a handful of sites around the country, and about 20 sites can dispose of hazardous material.
The EPA notice says a rule change could simplify the process for getting rid of hazardous and radioactive waste for nuclear power companies and others that generate it. "The need to comply with two separate regulatory systems, each of which is targeted to a different component of the waste, creates a certain regulatory and economic burden on mixed waste generators," the EPA states in its notice.
Companies have stored a lot of waste instead of disposing of it because of the burden of getting rid of it properly, the notice says.
Environmentalists criticized the new proposal.
"They can save a lot of money if their waste doesn't have to go to a facility designed to safely contain it," said Daniel Hirsch, president of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, a Los Angeles-based nuclear watchdog group.
Environmentalists urged new EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt, the former governor of Utah, not to make the changes.
----
EPA Proposes New Radioactive Waste Disposal Rule
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
November 18, 2003
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/nov2003/2003-11-18-09.asp#anchor3
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today proposed to allow the storage of low level radioactive waste in landfills designed and permitted only for chemical wastes, industrial wastes, and possibly municipal garbage. Current regulations require such waste to be sent to facilities specifically licensed for radioactive materials and regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the EPA.
The proposal would facilitate this by allowing mixed radioactive and hazardous wastes to be considered only hazardous.
EPA officials say today's proposal is only the first step towards revising the rule and that the decision is far from final. The public can comment on the Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking through March 17, 2004.
In the proposal published in the Federal Register, the agency said that it is focused on finding a "simpler but protective approach to the present dual regulatory system applicable to low-activity mixed waste."
The EPA says it is seeking comment on approaches to "reduce the burden of the dual regulatory framework" for the waste.
But a coalition of environmental groups is already convinced the proposal should be scrapped.
"The EPA's proposal is to deregulate radioactive waste pure and simple," said Diane D'Arrigo, Nuclear Waste Project director at the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS).
The coalition, which includes NIRS, the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, Sierra Club, and Public Citizen sent a letter Monday to EPA Administrator Michael Leavitt voicing their opposition to the proposal.
The groups wrote in the letter that the proposed new rule "could significantly harm the environment and public health if you do not act promptly to block it."
"The nuclear industry knows that in order to prolong its existence it must deal with nuclear waste and it must do so at minimal cost," said David Ritter, policy analyst with Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy & Environment Program. "The EPA is now helping to prop up the industry, at the expense of public health, by paving the way for tons of nuclear waste to be dumped in facilities that were not designed for, nor capable of containing, these dangerous radionuclides."
"That they are attempting to paint this effort as a benign shift in management style is just shameful, and contradictory to the stated mission of the EPA," Ritter added.
----
Radioactive Waste Plan Attacked
EPA Suggests Storing Low-Level Material in Landfills
By Eric Pianin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 18, 2003; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54507-2003Nov17.html
The Environmental Protection Agency is considering an important rule change that for the first time would allow the nuclear industry to store low-level radioactive material in ordinary landfills and hazardous waste sites.
The agency today will formally invite public comment on its plan to "promote a more consistent framework" for the disposal of the waste, including such low-yielding radioactive materials as cesium, strontium, cobalt and plutonium. Currently, those materials must be stored in nuclear waste sites closely regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the EPA and state governments.
EPA officials stressed that the waste under review contains only small amounts of radioactive material and that any loosening of rules would not affect the carefully monitored handling of lethal spent nuclear fuel, high-level radioactive waste, or tailings from the processing of uranium or thorium ore.
"The important principle is that any facility that might accept 'low-activity' [nuclear] waste must provide protection of public health and the environment that is comparable to the protection provided by EPA and NRC standards for other radioactive wastes," according to an EPA statement.
After a meeting late yesterday between EPA officials and environmentalists, EPA spokeswoman Cynthia Bergman said, "No decisions have been made, and at the end of this [review], we may decide no change is necessary."
Despite those assurances, a coalition of environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, Public Citizen, and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, is strongly opposing the potential rule change. In a letter to EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt, the coalition warned that the proposed rule "could significantly harm the environment and public health . . . if you do not act promptly to block it."
Environmentalists said the EPA proposal would permit radioactive waste -- including refuse and soil from decommissioned nuclear power plants and weapons manufacturing plants -- to be disposed of in landfills designed and permitted only for chemical waste, industrial waste and municipal garbage. Some say the Bush administration is considering the change as a means of reducing the industry's storage and disposal costs.
"The EPA's proposal is to deregulate radioactive waste, pure and simple," said Diane D'Arrigo of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a watchdog organization.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said recently that a rule change "would allow radioactive wastes to be sent to landfills that were neither designed nor licensed to handle such waste."
The EPA's efforts to devise a new "safe" category of nuclear waste that could be disposed of at unlicensed dumps or incinerators coincides with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's consideration of several options for nuclear waste deregulation.
The NRC has provided technical support and comments to the EPA over the past 18 months, and the two agencies have coordinated their regulatory review activities, according to NRC spokesman David McIntyre.
-------- us politics
Powell Praises Iran on Nuclear Decisions
Tuesday November 18, 2003
By PAUL GEITNER
Associated Press Writer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-3402369,00.html
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) - Secretary of State Colin Powell said Tuesday that Iran ``seems to be moving in the right direction'' in disclosing details of its nuclear program but he was still not satisfied Tehran had abandoned all efforts to produce a weapon.
Powell made the comments after talks with EU foreign ministers over whether to declare Iran in violation of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty - a step that could lead to U.N. sanctions against Tehran.
European leaders favor a less drastic step when the member nations of the board of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency meet this month in Vienna, Austria.
Powell said he and the EU ministers had ``a very candid discussion'' about a draft IAEA resolution that stops short of declaring Iran in noncompliance.
``We had some reservations ... about whether the resolution is strong enough to convey to the world the difficulties that we have had with Iran over the years,'' Powell said.
``The fact of the matter is Iran has been in noncompliance. It's a position the United States has taken for some time and finally the facts became clear to all.''
Powell said it ``remains to be seen'' if a resolution can be adopted unanimously. ``That will be the subject of intense discussions in Vienna over the next couple of days.''
In an attempt to avoid U.N. Security Council sanctions, Iran has agreed to unfettered IAEA inspections of its nuclear facilities and suspended enrichment of uranium, two key steps demanded by the nuclear watchdog.
``I am pleased that Iran seems to be moving in the right direction now,'' Powell said. ``But we can't be satisfied until Iran has demonstrated that all of the programs it had been pursuing have now been made known ... and they are now being brought to a halt.''
In a report last week, the IAEA said Iran produced small amounts of plutonium as part of covert nuclear activities. While finding ``no evidence'' Iran tried to make atomic arms, the report said such efforts cannot be ruled out.
The report did not link it to weapons activity but it criticized Iran for not reporting its processing activities, listing it among dozens of cases where Tehran had covert programs in place.
The report credited Iran for a change of heart since September, when the agency demanded it explain contradictions and ambiguities in its nuclear activities.
--------
THE WHITE HOUSE
Bush Insists That U.S. Troops Will Stay in Iraq
November 18, 2003
By ELISABETH BUMILLER and DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/18/politics/18PREX.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 - President Bush said emphatically on Monday that the United States would not leave Iraq even though the White House had decided to speed the transfer of American civilian authority to a new government in Baghdad.
"I assured these five women that America wasn't leaving," Mr. Bush told reporters at the end of a meeting with a group of leading Iraqi women in the Oval Office. "When they hear me say, `We're staying,' that means we're staying."
Mr. Bush's comments were his most explicit commitment to date to keep American troops in Iraq, but he did not say how long they would stay, or how many would remain. For now, the Pentagon has plans to reduce total American forces in Iraq to about 105,000 troops next year from the 130,000 that are there now. The White House has decided to try to hold elections in Iraq in the first half of next year, which would lead to a provisional Iraqi government.
"The political process is moving on," Mr. Bush said. "The Iraqi people are plenty capable of governing themselves." Even so, he said, "we will continue to work with the Iraqi people to secure" the country. "We fully recognize that Iraq has become a new front on the war on terror, and that there are disgruntled Baathists, as well as fedayeen fighters and mujahedeen types and Al Qaeda types that want to test the will of the civilized world there," he added.
Mr. Bush made his comments on the same day that the C.I.A. said it had been unable to determine the authenticity of a new audiotape purporting to carry a message from Saddam Hussein.
"The quality of the recording was poor, and after an extensive technical analysis it is inconclusive as to whether or not it is the voice of Saddam Hussein," a C.I.A. spokesman said of the tape, which was broadcast on the Arabic-language television network Al Arabiya.
In the 14-minute tape, the speaker said the United States military forces now occupying Iraq would "only reap disappointment with more and more American lives lost." Iraqis who heard the message said the voice sounded like Mr. Hussein's and used a similar oratorical style.
An earlier tape, broadcast in September, was determined by the C.I.A. to "probably" contain the voice of Mr. Hussein. But government officials familiar with the latest review said the poor quality of the latest recording had made it impossible for intelligence analysts to reach any kind of solid verdict.
President Bush has said he regards the latest recording as "propaganda" whether or not it is authentic. In a television interview broadcast in the United States on Monday, L. Paul Bremer III, the top American official in Iraq, dismissed Mr. Hussein as nothing more than a "voice in the wilderness."
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms
Taiwan protests at criticism over submarine deal
TAIPEI (AFP)
Nov 18, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031118090612.43v7te32.html
Taiwan said Tuesday it had lodged a protest against the top US envoy to Taipei for allegedly calling the island's decision to buy eight conventional submarines "silly".
Defense minister Tang Yao-ming said military officers had met with American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) officials Monday over the alleged comments made in Maryland by its managing director, Therese Shaheen.
"The cabinet had demanded the defense ministry and foreign ministry to protest to the US government ... and we have also met AIT officials," Tang told parliament.
Defense ministry spokesman Huang Suey-sheng declined to disclose details of the meeting, but said the ministry's position had been "clearly explained" to AIT, Washington's quasi-embassy in Taipei.
"The AIT officials said they would pass our message to Washington," Huang told AFP.
According to Taiwan's China Times, Shaheen commented on the submarine deal to reporters after giving a speech at an annual Thanksgiving dinner hosted by the Taiwanese Association of America in Maryland Saturday.
Shaheen reportedly said it was "silly" for Taiwan to still be disputing who was to build the submarines.
The US had reportedly quoted Taiwan 11 billion US dollars for the eight conventional submarines and 20 percent more if the island insisted on building some of the submarines on its own.
Despite concerns that the submarines could be overpriced, Tang last week reiterated the need for Taiwan to acquire the weaponry as a "deterrent" against China's military threat. He said Taiwan would not pay "exorbitant prices".
US President George W. Bush approved the submarine sale in April 2001 as part of the most comprehensive arms sales to the island since 1992.
The deal, however, has progressed slowly as the US has not built conventional submarines for more than 40 years.
The US remains the leading arms supplier to Taiwan despite its shift of diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979.
Beijing has repeatedly protested against Washington's arms sales to Taiwan, which it considers part of the Chinese territory to be reunified by force if necessary.
-------- business
BAE System's Dirty Dealings
Sasha Lilley,
November 18, 2003
Guerilla News / Corpwatch.org
http://www.guerrillanews.com/corporate_crime/doc3419.html
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, 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 U.S."
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 U.S., 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 intimidate 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 U.S. is on the outs with the Saudis and pulling U.S. 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 U.S. 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.
This article is reprinted with permission from Corpwatch.org.
----
U.S. Sets Time Frame For 24 Iraq Contracts
Pentagon Plans Open Process for Awards
By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 18, 2003; Page E03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54384-2003Nov17.html
The U.S. government plans to award 24 new Iraq reconstruction contracts by Feb. 1 using full and open competition, a process rejected in the first round of awards because it would take too long.
Retired Rear Adm. David J. Nash, who is heading up the new Pentagon-led Project Management Office in Baghdad to oversee reconstruction spending, said in an interview yesterday that contracts for $18.7 billion in recently appropriated rebuilding funds would be awarded using an "accelerated" process to meet a deadline he acknowledged was aggressive.
The government has been criticized for limiting competition in awarding the initial contracts. Such restrictions are allowed under federal procurement laws for emergencies, an exemption that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) relied on in picking companies to bid on some of the 11 contracts it awarded. Full competition can take six months, federal procurement experts said.
"It's very fast for our system, but we're going to do it all appropriately and make sure we comply with all the regulations and law," Nash said of the 10-week time frame. "To me, it's not impossible. It does make people wonder. But I think we're okay."
Representatives of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-led interim government in Baghdad; USAID; the Defense Department; and other agencies have been meeting in recent days to set priorities for how to spend the new reconstruction money.
Nash said USAID, which took the lead in awarding $2 billion in contracts earlier this year, would share the workload this time with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the State and Treasury departments, and the Department of Health and Human Services.
Of the 24 new contracts, 17 will be for construction projects, including five worth about $5 billion for continued work repairing the country's electrical grid, five more worth about $4 billion for public works and water projects, and two worth about $1 billion to build police stations and prisons. One contract worth about $1 billion will target construction of health facilities, two others worth about $1 billion total will go to transportation and communications systems, and two more worth about $1 billion are for fuel distribution and repairs to the oil industry infrastructure.
Six separate contracts will be awarded for project management, and one will be awarded to support the office Nash will head to oversee how the congressional funds are spent.
Nash, who spent 33 years in the Navy before retiring in 1998, is on leave from his job as president of PB Buildings Inc., a subsidiary of the New York-based construction firm Parsons Brinckerhoff Inc. In the Navy, Nash was the "King Bee," the nickname for the commander of the Navy's Seabee construction battalion. He also served as commander and chief of the Navy's civil engineers.
The Defense Contract Audit Agency will monitor the work his office does, Nash said, and the office will employ 130 U.S. government employees from various agencies. "We will mainly do what I call contract management in Iraq because we have to do the day-to-day task to make this thing move forward," he said.
--------
BAE Systems' Dirty Dealings
Sasha Lilley,
November 18, 2003
http://www.khilafah.com/home/category.php?DocumentID=8769&TagID=2
It sounds like the stuff of pulp fiction: The UK's largest armaments producer running a £ 20million ($33. 4million) slush fund to finance prostitutes, gambling trips, yachts, sports cars, and more for its most important clients the Saudi royal family and their intermediaries, greasing the wheels of the largest business deal in UK history. These are the accusations made last month by a former employee of weapons giant BAE Systems. And evidence has surfaced that members of the British government were aware of the bribe arrangement, but looked the other way.
BAE Systems, formerly known as British Aerospace, is one of the world's top arms producers. It manufactures warplanes, avionics, submarines, surface ships, radar, electronics, and guided weapons systems, generating annual sales of £ 12billion ($ 20billion) in 130 countries. The arms giant was formed as a nationalized British defense corporation in1977 , which was subsequently privatized in the early1980 s, and changed its name to BAE when British Aerospace merged with Marconi Electronic Systems in1999 .
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 U.S."
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 late1980's, 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 100Hawk jets and other training aircraft totaling at least £ 20billion ($33. 4billion), with BAE taking in an estimated £1. 5billion 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 in1986 , 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 U.S., while the UK saw the petrodollar-rich Saudis as a long term bonanza. A second deal between the two governments was signed in1988 . Some analysts believe that Al-Yamamah kept BAE afloat through the1990 s 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 £ 12million 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. In2002 , 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 intimidate 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 £ 28million ($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 £ 5billion 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 £ 1billion 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, 000a year to infiltrate and spy on CAAT over a four year period in the1990 s. The head of the firm told BAE that she had a database containing more than148 , 000names 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 U.S. is on the outs with the Saudis and pulling U.S. 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 U.S. 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.
-------- colombia
Colombian drug war stalls
November 18, 2003
By Steve Salisbury
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20031117-092206-3888r.htm
BOGOTA, Colombia - The ouster of a Colombian army general - sacked in June partly because of secretly recorded conversations obtained by American agents - has apparently caused distrust between U.S. and Colombian officials and hindered cooperation in the war on drugs.
It has also prompted an investigation by the Defense Department Inspector General's Office in Washington. The Pentagon has a major role in a joint $2.3 billion effort over the past three years to halt the production and export of cocaine and other drugs from Colombia to the United States.
The story centers on ousted Brig. Gen. Gabriel Diaz Ortiz, who was forced out by then-Defense Minister Marta Lucia Ramirez. Miss Ramirez resigned from the government last week.
Gen. Diaz's ouster came days before the publication of an account in Cambio magazine here linking him to the disappearance of cocaine intercepted by authorities in the northern city of Barranquilla last year.
Subsequent news accounts and a report by the Colombian attorney general's office accused the police - not Gen. Diaz - of having seized at least one truck carrying 2 tons of cocaine. The accounts said it appeared Colombian police accepted a payment of $769,000 from the drug traffickers and returned the cocaine shipment to them.
That was in August 2002. Gen. Diaz, at the time commander of the Colombian army's 2nd Brigade, based in Barranquilla, says he had introduced three informants to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration days before the cocaine was intercepted by police.
"That meeting with the DEA was the last time I had anything to do with the case," he said in a recent interview.
According to Gen. Diaz, the three informants - two of whom were slain separately the following month - had information that would have enabled the DEA and police to intercept the cocaine shipment.
In Colombia, the DEA and police often work together.
"I collaborated [with the DEA] totally, providing them very important antinarcotics information, and look what happened," Gen. Diaz said. "The fact is that of the three informants I handed over to the DEA, two are dead. And the cocaine passed through."
Suspicious pattern
U.S. officials tell a different story. Speaking to reporters on the condition of anonymity, they say the U.S. suspicions of Gen. Diaz are based not only on the case of the missing cocaine, but also on three different cases. They involve:
•Human rights reports since 2000 about Gen. Diaz's purported links to outlawed paramilitaries.
•A cocaine seizure by Gen. Diaz's soldiers in June 2002.
• Operation Conquista - an October 2002 joint DEA-Colombian police sweep along Colombia's northern coast, in Medellin, and on San Andres Island that led to the extradition in June of at least a dozen Colombians to the United States to face charges of money laundering.
Colombia's largest magazine, Semana, says DEA evidence against Gen. Diaz includes tapes of 12 conversations between the general and a suspect in Operation Conquista, businessman Omar Ghassan Fakih.
Gen. Diaz and Mr. Ghassan say their conversations were innocent.
Regardless of which version of events one believes, some view Gen. Diaz's ouster as evidence of confusion in the government of President Alvaro Uribe.
This month, Mr. Uribe's government had a spate of high-level resignations or dismissals, including that of Justice Minister Fernando Londono on Nov. 6, Defense Minister Ramirez on Nov. 9, National Police commander Gen. Teodoro Campo on Nov. 11, armed forces commander Gen. Jorge Enrique Mora last Wednesday, and other senior officials.
The Associated Press ascribed some of the departures to an Oct. 25 referendum in which Colombians rejected cuts in government spending that were sought to free money for fighting Marxist rebels and strengthening Mr. Uribe's battle against corruption.
Even before the resignations, the Pentagon's inspector general had opened a probe into complaints of tension between U.S. and Colombian military and law enforcement personnel.
The United States has a cap of 400 military and 400 civilian contractors in Colombia to provide logistical, communications and technical intelligence support. They also train thousands of Colombian soldiers and police in counternarcotics, counterterrorism, antikidnapping and oil-pipeline protection.
The DEA's mission is to assist Colombian law enforcement in counternarcotics efforts.
The Pentagon began its investigation in June at the urging of retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Gordon Sumner, who had just completed a weeklong fact-finding trip to Colombia.
Gen. Sumner, who was President Reagan's ambassador-at-large to Latin America, said he has shared his observations with high-ranking officials in Washington.
Gen. Sumner noted that the Colombian military has recently scored high-profile battlefield successes in a 39-year-old war against Marxist guerrillas. But he added: "There seem to be some frictions on the ground between Colombians and U.S. Embassy personnel, and they appear to be hindering the ability to fight terrorism and drug trafficking in Colombia."
The ouster of Gen. Diaz is one event cited by Gen. Sumner.
'Scapegoat'
Supporters of Gen. Diaz are particularly upset at Col. William Graves, the defense attache at the U.S. Embassy, over Gen. Diaz's ouster.
"Graves allowed me to be lynched," Gen. Diaz said.
Mrs. Ramirez, the former defense minister, reportedly acknowledged that U.S. concerns and the U.S. surveillance tapes were factors in her dismissal of Gen. Diaz.
The U.S. State Department's director for Andean affairs, Phil Chicola, has also told Colombian TV that Gen. Diaz was ousted over suspicions he had ties to outlawed paramilitaries and drug traffickers.
"This is outrageous. I am an innocent scapegoat," said Gen. Diaz.
About three years ago, human rights activists began charging that Gen. Diaz had ties to paramilitary militias and that the general had turned a blind eye to abuses by these groups.
Like Marxist guerrilla forces, some paramilitary groups are funded by drug growers and traffickers who operate in regions they control.
U.S. officials reportedly say the surveillance tapes were part of Operation Conquista, an investigation of merchants and businessmen suspected of laundering drug money in Barranquilla and Maicao, a town near the Venezuelan border.
One of those extradited to the United States was Mr. Ghassan, described as a porcelain and appliance merchant of Lebanese descent, in his late 30s.
In one videotape, Gen. Diaz is reportedly seen entering and leaving Mr. Ghassan's popular Sanyo Center store in Barranquilla.
According to Semana magazine, an anonymous agent who participated in Operation Conquista said:
"There are [recordings of] more than 12 conversations between the general and [Mr. Ghassan], in which they talk about personal favors, the purchase of firearms and permits to carry them, of permits to tint the windows of their friends' cars, and of invitations to meetings and parties."
Mr. Ghassan responded, according to the magazine: "The recordings that the DEA may have of my conversations with the general don't have any relation with illicit business, for I have never had them with him, nor with anyone. The conversations make reference to a china set that the general bought in my store."
Gen. Diaz said he never knew of any links to drug trafficking that involved Mr. Ghassan.
Gen. Diaz has taken his case to the press and the Colombian congress. He says anonymous news leaks against him were aimed at shifting attention away from corrupt police who used the Barranquilla bust to extort money.
On June 16, the Colombian attorney general's antinarcotics and maritime interdiction unit (UNAIM) opened an investigation into the events.
UNAIM reviewed a statement from the surviving informant, secret police-counterintelligence reports, and testimony from police and a former paramilitary member.
They said that the cocaine had been seized by members of the police's Judicial Investigation Section (SIJIN) and a separate antikidnapping unit and later returned to the drug traffickers for $769,000.
UNAIM identified the drug traffickers as belonging to the Northern Valle drug cartel, which is believed to work closely with paramilitaries.
Last September, prosecutors issued arrest warrants for some 16 policemen and 10 civilians in the Barranquilla area on drug-related charges.
UNAIM said in a statement that Gen. Diaz has not been, nor is he now under criminal investigation for drug trafficking, although a separate UNAIM report criticized him for not informing prosecutors promptly about the failed Barranquilla drug bust and of the informant's account when they first came to him.
'Falsely accused'
Gen. Diaz says he informed his army superiors and the provincial police chief, Col. Luis Enrique Estupinan, who was eventually transferred and ousted after the scandal broke.
At least seven police officers have since been arrested and jailed - two on charges related to killing the informants.
Gen. Diaz sees the UNAIM findings as vindication of his innocence. "But what about my reputation and the job I lost? Who is going to repair the damage I suffered after I was falsely accused?" he asked.
Gen. Diaz said he feels betrayed by the DEA and Col. Graves, the defense attache at the U.S. Embassy. He said he, Col. Graves and DEA agents met several times between March 2002 and April 2003.
But U.S. officials discount the value of that cooperation.
Colombian prosecutors say two of the three informants - brothers Angel Guillermo Leon Sanchez and Luis Alfonso Sanchez, the surviving informant - were "big fish" drug dealers a decade ago who had served jail time. The prosecutors say the informants had proven their credibility by supplying information leading to earlier cocaine seizures.
A Colombian judicial official in Barranquilla, who requested anonymity, said police who have admitted taking bribes to let the cocaine go have also accused DEA personnel of taking bribes. A policeman at the Atlantico province police headquarters in Barranquilla said separately, "Yes, some of the DEA received money."
A U.S. Embassy spokesman denied the accusations, attributing it to unfounded rumors from dubious sources.
But a spokesman for the Colombian attorney general's office said the investigation into the Barranquilla police scandal and into any DEA actions or omissions continues.
"Every officer I have talked to supports Gen. Diaz," said Miguel Posada, director of the Center for Sociopolitical Analysis. "They see him as being scapegoated, and they are worried they could be next."
-------- iraq
U.S. Jets Pound Suspected Guerrilla Positions in Iraq
November 18, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq.html?hp
TIKRIT, Iraq (AP) -- U.S. fighter jets pounded suspected insurgent positions Tuesday in the largest bombardment of guerrillas in central Iraq since President Bush declared the end of major combat in May, the U.S. military said.
In Baghdad, dozens of loud explosions were heard after sundown Tuesday in what appeared to be a U.S. operation against Iraqi insurgents. A U.S. military spokesman had no comment on the blasts.
In northern Iraq, guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb, wounding two soldiers, the military said. On Monday, a U.S. civilian contractor was killed in an insurgent attack near Baghdad, the military said without elaborating.
The U.S. military has reacted forcefully to an upsurge in guerrilla activity in central and northern Iraq. On Monday, six insurgents were killed in gunbattles and 99 suspects were reportedly detained in a series of sweeps.
Near Baqouba, 30 miles northeast of Baghdad, U.S. jets and Apache helicopter gunships Tuesday blasted abandoned buildings, walls and trees along a road where attacks have been so common that troops nicknamed it ``RPG Alley'' after the rocket-propelled grenades used by insurgents. Fighter-bombers dropped 500-pound bombs and tanks fired their 120mm guns at suspected ambush sites, the military said.
F-16 fighter aircraft dropped two bombs Tuesday on insurgent targets near the town of Samara, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, the military said.
On Monday, 4th Infantry Division soldiers also killed six alleged insurgents in the Tikrit area as they pressed their search for a former Saddam deputy, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, who is believed to be orchestrating attacks.
The attacks went on sporadically through the night, with sporadic explosions reverberating across Tikrit.
In fighting in central Iraq, U.S. soldiers destroyed 12 safe houses, 14 mortar firing positions and four ambush sites, said Lt. Col. William MacDonald, a military spokesman. No casualties were reported.
Elsewhere, an Iraqi militant group called Muhammad's Army claimed responsibility Monday for the Nov. 2 downing of a U.S. helicopter that killed 16 soldiers near Fallujah, west of Baghdad. The group warned that U.S. forces would face more attacks if they did not leave Iraq in 15 days. There was no way to independently verify the claims.
In a videotape broadcast by the Lebanese Al Hayat-LBC satellite station, Muhammad's Army also claimed responsibility for the September assassination of Aquila al-Hashimi, a member of the U.S.-backed Iraq Governing Council, who was gunned down near her Baghdad home.
The group is seeking to return Saddam to power and consists of several hundred former Iraqi intelligence and security services. A group with this name is one of several that claimed responsibility for the Aug. 19 bombing of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad.
Despite the administration's efforts to repair infrastructure, Iraqis frequently complain about the slow pace of reconstruction seven months after the war that deposed Saddam's regime.
Coalition authorities have frequently pointed to the gradual restoration of electrical power as a benchmark of their success in rebuilding Iraq.
But those efforts suffered a major setback when the grid supplying the capital from power plants in the north collapsed Saturday.
As a result, much of Baghdad has been left with only brief, 10-15 minute periods of electricity in the last three days.
U.S. administrators said the outages were a result of maintenance work on the national grid. But Iraqi government officials said they were caused by the collapse of steel pylons carrying high-tension lines after heavy rains and high winds.
Kareem Waheed, an undersecretary in the Electricity Ministry, said he was hopeful that power could be resupplied to Baghdad on Wednesday.
``We cannot cook, there is no water, and it is very cold without heating at night,'' said Leyla Najim, a librarian in central Baghdad. ``The children cannot do their homework in the dark.''
On Monday, the Italian Foreign Ministry confirmed the resignation of an Italian official of the U.S.-led coalition, who accused the occupation authorities of incompetence
``The provisional authority simply doesn't work,'' the Italian daily Corriere della Sera quoted Marco Calamai, a special counselor of the Coalition Provisional Authority, as saying. ``Reconstruction projects that were promised and financed have had practically no results.''
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, asked about the resignation, said the coalition authority has made ``excellent progress'' in several areas, including ``the physical reconstruction of Iraq, the restoration of services to Iraqi people, the beginnings of political authority among the Iraqi ministers and now an accelerated path to political authority.''
In Baghdad, shots were fired outside the Japanese Embassy about 3 a.m. Tuesday but no staffers were injured, the Japanese Foreign Ministry said in Tokyo.
More than one gunman was apparently involved, and they fled in a car after an Iraqi security guard at the embassy fired back, it said.
Japan was among the first countries to support the U.S.-led war against Iraq and is considering sending troops to help with reconstruction.
Meanwhile, a United Nations official was quoted Tuesday as saying the world body will continue to operate in Iraq through its local staff and