Archive By Date | Today's Links to Search By
Activists' News | Nuclear | Depleted Uranium | Military | Police
Alternative Energy Etc. | From Subscribers
NUCLEAR
HOW IT WAS - HOW IT WILL BE
World Bank pledges to reduce danger of radioactive waste
Soldier's death was linked to Gulf War, coroner rules
Constellation Energy to Buy Nuclear Plant
Sorrows of Empire
International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan
U.S. Acquiesces to Allies on New Iran Nuclear Resolution
U.S., Allies Agree on Iran Move
Iran May Have More Nuclear Skeletons, Experts Say
Theft of Cobalt in Iraq Prompts Security Inquiry
Report: Japan Aims to Make Missile Shield
U.S. Plan on N.Korea Involves 5 Nuke States - Kyodo
Constellation to Buy NY Nuclear Plant
Constellation Energy to Buy Nuclear Plant
Nuclear Fuel Produces Poorly Understood Minerals
Spending Discipline Proves Unfashionable This Year
MILITARY
Death of five soldiers in helicopter crash
GE Austrian unit Steyr acquires 29 pct of Slovenian arms factory
Boeing Dismisses 2 in Hiring of Official Who Left Pentagon
Boeing Fires 2 Top Officials In Hiring Probe
Boeing Continues on Downward Path
Rumsfeld Orders Review of Boeing Deal
Pentagon denies mutilation reports
'Antiterrorfront' to take over some security tasks
Some Members Propose Keeping Iraqi Council After Transition
Iraqi Security Forces Torn Between Loyalties
Video Shows Iraqi Firing at Cargo Plane
U.S. Presses Israel to Stop Work on New Settlements and Barrier
Turkish Court Charges 9 in Bombings Inquiry
Iraqis Ask U.N. for Resolution
Iraqi Council Asks U.N. To Back Transition Plan
Video shows U.S. chopper
Technological Dub Erases a Bush Flub for a Republican Ad
Iraqi Council Halts Arab TV Network's News Broadcasts
Rumsfeld: Arab TV Worked With Insurgents
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Lawyer Asks Bush to Free Chaplain
ENERGY AND OTHER
North Korea exporting excess electricity to China
Plan Gives Farmers a Role in Fighting Global Warming
Hill Negotiators Agree to Bar Patents for Human Organisms
World AIDS Deaths, Infections at New Highs
Hunger Rising Again in Developing Nations
ACTIVISTS
Protesters 'invaded airbase on bikes'
-------- NUCLEAR
HOW IT WAS - HOW IT WILL BE
THREAT OF NUCLEAR WAR BLOWS IN THE WIND AS RUMSFELD CALLS FOR MINI-NUKES
by Gordon Thomas,
November 25, 2003
GLOBE-INTEL <feedback@globe-intel.net>
There is no description like it:
"In the first milli-second, a pinprick of purplish-red light expanded to a growing fireball hundreds of feet wide. The temperature at its core was 50,000,000 degrees centigrade. The flash heat started fires a mile away and burned skin two miles distant. Stone columns were rammed straight down into the ground. People were vaporised. Sixty-two thousand other buildings, out of a total of 90,000, were destroyed. All utilities and transportation services were wrecked. One hundred and eighty of the city's 200 doctors and 1,564 of its 1,780 nurses were dead or dying. Eighty thousand other people were killed instantly.
"Almost all this happened in the time it took me to blink behind the goggles. Below, on the ground, granite was melting and the shockwave had created fireballs and screaming hailstorms. A seething mass of red and purple began to rise into the sky. The column was sucking into its base super-heated air which set fire to everything combustible. Beside me, my co-pilot, Bob Lewis, was saying 'my God what have we done'."
The words are those of Colonel Pat Tibbets, the pilot of the aircraft Enola Gay which dropped the first atomic bomb on August 6, 1945.
This week, they are a stark warning as Donald Rumsfeld pushed for mini-nukes to be added to America's arsenal of nuclear weapons to fight terrorists and "rogue states" like North Korea and Iran.
But Pentagon strategists say it might only take a faulty computer chip to register a missile launch by North Korea and the consequences would be all-out nuclear war.
"The country has still some way to go to perfect its nuclear capability," said Donald Rumsfeld in Japan this week.
The one mechanism that, until now, prevented a nuclear holocaust was the "hot-line" set up in 1963 between the White House and the Kremlin. It is now in cold storage.
A risk not initially anticipated by the US and Soviet commanders had been that of a false alarm - an early warning system detecting a missile launch that has not occurred.
When it happened several times, and before it was established to be untrue, each side had nervously watched the other's nuclear readiness and mobilised their forces.
In the early days of the nuclear arms race, a quickly accelerating situation often led Washington or Moscow to considering a pre-emptive strike as the only way to deal with the threat it believed it faced.
In 1961, a mechanical breakdown at a relay station in Colorado that handled communications between NORAD, the American Air Defence Command and SAC HQ, Strategic Air Command, generated panic. Military analysts suddenly found themselves cut off from important US early warning systems. Their judgment was the communications breakdown had been the result of an enemy attack.
All SAC bases and B52 crews with nuclear bombs on board were put on combat standby. Missiles and planes were readied for take-off when a B52 on normal airborne alert duty reported that no Soviet attack had taken place. The following year, 1962, a nuclear exchange between the superpowers became a real possibility when two operators at an early warning site in the US mistook a satellite in orbit for two Soviet missiles over Georgia. Only when no explosions occurred had the threat been downgraded to the status of "low credence".
A widespread power failure led to a further false alarm in 1965 when devices at nuclear command sites went red, indicating that there had been nuclear blasts.
A full alert was issued by the Office of Emergency Planning HQ. Luckily, the US military did not follow suit. On that occasion, a crisis occurred because of technical malfunction.
In 1968, the crash of a B52 bomber with a nuclear payload later led experts to conclude that had its weapon exploded, the blast would have convinced SAC HQ that the Soviets had launched a pre-emptive strike.
Fortunately, the B52 crashed on an ice flow off the American coastline and only its fuel tanks exploded.
During peacetime, the US nuclear arsenal is in a mode known as defence readiness condition - DEFCON 5. When a threat is perceived, its seriousness determines the level of alert which can quickly move to the ultimate posture of DEFCON 1 - maximum war readiness.
On November 9, 1978, a full-scale nuclear missile attack on the US was detected by operators watching display monitors at four major defence sites, including the Pentagon Command Centre.
It was 8.50 am and the state of readiness quickly moved from DEFCON 5 to DEFCON 1.
Planes carrying nuclear weapons were launched as well as the President's jumbo jet housing his nuclear command centre. No one had used the "hot-line" between Washington and Moscow - and the President was not aboard his plane. Rumours later circulated from within the Pentagon were not only had the President been kept out of the loop, but could not be located. During a period lasting no longer than six minutes, the world was only the push of a button away from a global disaster. It was averted when NORAD contacted an early warning station PAVE PAWS and learned that there had been no missiles launched by the Soviets.
When the alert began, no one had noticed that a nuclear exercise tape - designed to prepare analysts and radar operators for a real attack - had almost led to Armageddon.
On a normal day in SAC, NORAD and other command centres, computer screens display "000 detected" - no enemy intercontinental and surface launched missiles on their way to the US.
But at 2.25 am on June 3, 1980, the zeros lined against ICBMs and SLBMs suddenly registered "0002", then "0003".
Preparations were immediately made for retaliatory strike against pre-selected targets in the Soviet Union.
While the US nuclear missile arsenal was made ready - Minutemen missiles primed in their silos and the US Pacific Command with nuclear crews in their planes - no one seemed to understand that a real Soviet attack would not be in the form of two or three missiles.
When someone finally recognised the absurdity of the situation, a technician found that a faulty computer chip had inserted the numbers 2 and 3 into the line of zeros.
More bizarrely, a similar incident occurred three days later at the same command centre. Again, until the technical glitch was ironed out, US nuclear forces went to DEFCON 3.
Whatever lessons may have been learned during the Cold War - most of the alerts and mishaps were never made public - the problems did not end when the Soviet Union collapsed.
In 1995, Russian early warning radar operators alerted the Kremlin of a missile launch from Spitzbergen in Norway. They estimated that the missile would reach the Russian capital within five minutes.
Russian nuclear forces moved to their version of DEFCON 3 until, someone pointed out that the missile had been part of a scientific experiment.
A general in Moscow - one of 35 countries informed about the launch nine days earlier by the Norwegian government - had forgotten to pass on the relevant information to Russian nuclear early warning sites.
North Korea is new to the "nuclear club" and does have the experience of the mishaps that characterised the Cold War and which may have continued on a similar scale ever since.
And while India and Pakistan have been playing "nuclear turkey", the rest of the world was told that the agreement of Presidents Bush and Putin to reduce their nuclear arsenal minimised the potential for global conflagration.
This week, R V Ramsana, an Indian nuclear physicist, has also reminded us of a doomsday scenario if Pakistan was to release a 12 kiloton warhead - the same power as the one Tibbets released over Hiroshima - and explode it over Bombay. Ransana postulates:
"Up to 860,000 will die from a single missile strike. They would mostly be vaporised in one flash. Depending on wind direction and the location of the blast, millions more could be exposed to fatal radiation. Apart from the human casualties, the environmental consequences would be of the utmost gravity. Radiation would rise into the stratosphere to 30,000 feet. It could be carried for 2,000 miles. The impact on the world economy would be far, far greater than in the aftermath of September 11."
"There's a lot of potential for this idea of Rumsfeld's spiralling out of control," warned David Alberton, a leading nuclear expert, "enough mini-nukes could create the same catastrophe".
He is not alone in believing that. A nuclear conflagration would, according to M V Ransana's 57-page study of the likely effects of his envisioned nuclear attack, could cost 12 million lives.
Mr Rumsfeld should read the report. And ponder. It's high time he did.
ends
Gordon Thomas is a writer on intelligence - his many books include : Gideon's Spies_The Secret History of Mossad Robert Maxwell - Israel's Superspy Seeds of Fire - China and the Story Behind the Attack on America
GLOBE-INTEL is a free subscription service provided by http://www.globe-intel.net
-------- asia
World Bank pledges to reduce danger of radioactive waste in Kyrgyzstan
Tuesday, November 25, 2003
By Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2003-11-25/s_10747.asp
BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan - The World Bank pledged Monday to reduce the danger of uranium waste sites to residents of the densely populated Fergana Valley, which is shared by three countries in formerly Soviet Central Asia.
Kyrgyzstan inherited several radioactive dumps from the Soviet nuclear industry. Officials say waste sites in the southern town of Mayluu-Suu threaten to contaminate the water resources in the Fergana valley.
Through the World Bank, the Japanese government has provided a two-year, US$5 million for ecological projects in Kyrgyzstan. Part of that grant should be used to reduce the risk to the population in Mayluu-Suu, said Joop Stoutjesdijk, who oversees environmental projects at the World Bank.
The Kyrgyz Ecology Ministry has previously said it would cost US$30 million to $40 million to clean up the sites.
The World Bank invited foreign and local experts this month to assess environmental issues in the country and prioritize them. Stoutjesdijk said that radioactive waste sites in southern Kyrgyzstan would be a top priority due to their potential risk.
In October, the Kyrgyz government urged the country's creditors to write off part of the country's foreign debt to allow it to address environmental problems. The impoverished nation of 5 million people is saddled with a foreign debt of more than US$1.5 billion, equal to about 98 percent of its annual gross domestic product, according to the Finance Ministry. Creditors have pledged to write off part of the debt if Kyrgyzstan's market reforms are successful.
-------- britain
Soldier's death was linked to Gulf War, coroner rules
By Kim Sengupta
25 November 2003
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/story.jsp?story=467016
A coroner came close to acknowledging the existence of Gulf War syndrome yesterday when he ruled that service in the 1991 conflict played a part in the death of an Army officer.
The ruling could pave the way for thousands of veterans to claim compensation from the Ministry of Defence, which has denied the existence of the syndrome.
The inquest examined the death of Major Ian Hill, who died two years ago after more than a decade of illnesses, which he believed were caused by the syndrome.
Yesterday, Nicholas Rheinberg, sitting at Warrington coroner's court, said that Major Hill's military service had been a factor in his death.
He said: "It is not for me to make sweeping conclusions based on a day's hearing on the existence of Gulf War syndrome." But he added: "I do not believe it would do justice to Ian Hill to describe his death as natural causes. I am going to describe his death as natural causes to which his military service in the 1991 Gulf War campaign was a contributing factor."
Speaking after the hearing, Mark McGhee, solicitor for the Hill family, said the verdict was the first time a British court had recognised the connection between Gulf War illnesses and a veteran's death.
Carole Avison, Major Hill's widow, said: "While he was alive, Ian fought hard for his illness to be recognised as coming from his time in the Gulf. Now, finally, that has happened."
The court was told how Major Hill, 54, who served in the Army for 20 years, flew to the Middle East in January 1991 to help to set up operating theatres while serving with the Royal Medical Army Corps. Within four days of arriving, Major Hill became seriously ill with flu-like symptoms including severe coughing, fatigue and neck and muscle stiffness, according to a statement he made before his death.
He was diagnosed with bronchopneumonia and was sent home a month later. But he failed to recover fully and attributed the deterioration in his health over the following decade to nerve agent pre-treatment sets (Naps) tablets given before the war in 1991.
"My psychological profile changed," wrote Major Hill, who went on to become a founder member of the pressure group the National Gulf Veterans and Families Association (NGVFA).
"I could not sleep, I was irritable, I had mood swings and short-term memory loss. It was completely out of character."
Ms Avison, 56, from Knutsford in Cheshire, with whom he had four children, described the impact of his illness on the family. "We lost our home, our business, our future and our life together," she told the hearing.
During the course of her husband's illnesses, Ms Avison met many veterans who claimed to have suffered from Gulf War syndrome.
"I have seen this group of people and I have listened to them, and I don't believe in fairy tales," she said. "These are genuine people, they have something wrong with them, and wanted to know what was wrong with them. They were ill people. On the outside they looked OK, but there was something wrong with them on the inside. Someone had given them a death sentence."
The court also heard from Michael Burrows, from Hull, who was given inoculations for anthrax and botulism.
He said: "When I lay down it was like a red mist would come over me. I started to have panic attacks, which continued when I returned from the Gulf."
Air Commodore William Coker, a consultant physician who examined Major Hill in 1994 as part of a study into Gulf War syndrome, said he believed his symptoms were caused by Q fever a disease with flu-like symptoms that spreads from animals to humans contracted in the Gulf. But he said a man in good physical condition should normally recover from such an illness.
The doctor examined about a thousand Gulf War veterans in an attempt to establish whether a syndrome existed. "My conclusion was that there was no distinct syndrome because the pattern of disease was so variable," he said.
Speaking after the verdict, Shaun Rusling, chairman of the NGVFA, said: "It's a very significant finding. It will affect many widows' pensions, because there are a lot more people out there like Ian.
"No compensation has been paid out and the veterans have been treated appallingly by the Ministry of Defence."
-------- business
Constellation Energy to Buy Nuclear Plant
Nov 25, 2003
(AP)
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/N/NUCLEAR_PLANT_SALE?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
ROCHESTER, N.Y. -- Constellation Energy Group is buying the nation's longest-serving nuclear plant for $401 million.
Constellation, which already owns one nuclear plant and part of another one along the Lake Ontario shore, said Tuesday it is acquiring the 495-megawatt Robert E. Ginna pressurized-water atomic reactor from Rochester Gas & Electric, a division of Albany-based Energy East Corp.
The Ginna plant has churned out electricity for 33 years from its perch overlooking the lake in the rural town of Ontario, 16 miles northeast of Rochester.
Under the deal, which is expected to close next summer, Baltimore-based Constellation will sell 90 percent of the plant's energy to Rochester Gas & Electric for an average price of $44 a megawatt hour for 10 years. Constellation also will pay the utility $21.6 million for nuclear fuel.
The acquisition, expected to close next June 30, needs to be approved by various federal and state nuclear regulatory agencies. The sale is contingent on the plant's operating license, which expires in 2009, being extended next year for another 20 years. The Ginna plant supplies half of Rochester Gas & Electric's electrical demand. It began operating commercially in July 1970, making it the most durable of America's 103 nuclear plants but not the oldest. It employs 440 people.
The Ginna plant was refitted with steam generators in 1996. Heated by the uranium reactor, the circulating water turns into steam, which drives turbines that power the generators.
In midday trading on the New York Stock Exchange, Constellation Energy shares rose 15 cents to $36.27 while Energy East shares rose 57 cents, or 2.5 percent, to $23.07.
-------- depleted uranium
Sorrows of Empire
Chalmers Johnson,
November 25, 2003
Guerrilla News Network
http://www.guerrillanews.com/human_rights/doc3463.html
http://engforum.pravda.ru/showthread.php3?s=&threadid=44492
"Although tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people." - Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
With the fall of Baghdad, America's dutiful Anglophone allies--the British and Australians--are due for their just rewards: luncheons for Blair and Howard with the Boy Emperor at his "ranch" in Crawford, Texas. The Americans fielded an army of 255,000 in Iraq, the British 45,000, and the Australians 2,000. It was not much of a war--merely confirming the antiwar forces' contention that an unchallenged slaughter of Iraqis and a Mongol-like sacking of an ancient city were not necessary to deal with the menace of Saddam Hussein. But the war did leave the United States and its two Sepoy nations much weaker than they had been before the war--the Western democratic alliance was seemingly irretrievably fractured; a potentiality for British leadership of the European Union went up in smoke; Pentagon plans to make Iraq over into a client state sundered on Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish realities; and "international law," including the Charter of the United Nations, was grievously weakened. Why the British and Australians went along with this fiasco when they could so easily have stood for something other than might makes right remains a mystery.
The United States has been inching toward imperialism and militarism for many years. Disguising the direction they were taking, American leaders cloaked their foreign policy in euphemisms such as "lone superpower," "indispensable nation," "reluctant sheriff," "humanitarian intervention," and "globalization." However, with the advent of the George Bush administration in 2001, these pretenses gave way to assertions of the Second Coming of the Roman Empire. "American imperialism used to be a fiction of the far-left imagination," writes the English journalist Madeleine Bunting, "now it is an uncomfortable fact of life."1
On March 19, 2003, the Bush administration took the imperial step of invading Iraq, a sovereign nation one-twelfth the size of the U.S. in terms of population and virtually undefended in the face of the awesome array of weapons employed against it. The U.S. undertook its second war with Iraq with no legal justification and worldwide protests against its actions and motives, thereby bringing to an end the system of international order that existed throughout the cold war and that traces its roots back to seventeenth century doctrines of sovereignty, non-intervention in the affairs of other states, and the illegitimacy of aggressive war.
From the moment the United States assumed the permanent military domination of the world, it was on its own--feared, hated, corrupt and corrupting, maintaining "order" through state terrorism and bribery, and given to megalomaniacal rhetoric and sophistries while virtually inviting the rest of the world to combine against it. The U.S. had mounted the Napoleonic tiger and could not get off. During the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s, the president's chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, once reproved White House counsel, John Dean, for speaking too frankly to Congress about the felonies President Nixon had ordered. "John," he said, "once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it's hard to get it back in." This homely metaphor by a former advertising executive who was to spend 18 months in prison for his own role in Watergate fairly accurately describes the situation of the United States.
The sorrows of empire are the inescapable consequences of the national policies American elites chose after September 11, 2001. Militarism and imperialism always bring with them sorrows. The ubiquitous symbol of the Christian religion, the cross, is perhaps the world's most famous reminder of the sorrows that accompanied the Roman Empire--it represents the most atrocious death the Roman proconsuls could devise in order to keep subordinate peoples in line. From Cato to Cicero, the slogan of Roman leaders was "Let them hate us so long as they fear us."
Four sorrows, it seems to me, are certain to be visited on the United States. Their cumulative effect guarantees that the U.S. will cease to resemble the country outlined in the Constitution of 1787. First, there will be a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be and a spreading reliance on nuclear weapons among smaller nations as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut. Second is a loss of democracy and Constitutional rights as the presidency eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from a co-equal "executive branch" of government into a military junta. Third is the replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification of war, power, and the military legions. Lastly, there is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of its citizens. All I have space for here is to touch briefly on three of these: endless war, the loss of Constitutional liberties, and financial ruin.
Allegedly in response to the attacks of al Qaeda on September 11, 2001, President Bush declared that the United States would dominate the world through absolute military superiority and wage preventive war against any possible competitor. He began to enunciate this doctrine in his June 1, 2002, speech to the cadets of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and spelled it out in his "National Security Strategy of the United States" of September 20, 2002.
At West Point, the president said that the United States had a unilateral right to overthrow any government in the world that it deemed a threat to American security. He argued that the United States must be prepared to wage the "war on terror" against as many as sixty countries if weapons of mass destruction are to be kept out of terrorists' hands. "We must take that battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge." Americans must be "ready for pre-emptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives ... . In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act." Although Bush did not name every single one, his hit-list of sixty possible target countries was an escalation over Vice President Dick Cheney, who in November 2001, said that there were only "forty or fifty" countries that United States wanted to attack after eliminating the al Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan.2
At West Point, the president justified his proposed massive military effort in terms of alleged universal values: "We will defend the peace against threats from terrorists and tyrants. We will preserve the peace by building good relations among the great powers. And we will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent." He added an assertion that is demonstrably untrue but that in the mouth of the president of the United States on an official occasion amounted to the announcement of a crusade: "Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, in every place."
In his National Security Strategy, he expanded on these goals to include "America must stand firmly for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity; the rule of law; limits on the absolute power of the state; free speech; freedom of worship; equal justice; respect for women; religious and ethnic tolerance; and respect for private property." In the preamble to the strategy, he (or Condoleezza Rice, the probable actual author) wrote that there is "a single sustainable model for national success"--America's--that is "right and true for every person in every society. ... The United States must defend liberty and justice because these principles are right and true for all people everywhere."
The paradoxical effect of this grand strategy is that it may prove more radically disruptive of world order than anything the terrorists of September 11, 2001, could have hoped to achieve on their own. Through its actions, the United States seems determined to bring about precisely the threats that it says it is trying to prevent. Its apparent acceptance of a "clash of civilizations"--wars to establish a moral truth that is the same in every culture--sounds remarkably like a jihad, even to its basis in Christian fundamentalism. Bush seems to equate himself with Jesus Christ in his repeated statements (notably on September 20, 2001) that those who are not with us are against us, which duplicates Matthew chapter 12, verse 30, "He that is not with me is against me."
Implementation of the National Security Strategy will be considerably more problematic than its promulgation and contains numerous unintended consequences. By mid-2003, the United States armed forces were already seriously overstretched, and the U.S. government was going deeply into debt to finance its war machine. The American budget dedicated to international affairs allocates 93% to the military and only 7% to the State Department, and does not have much flexibility left for further military adventures.3 The Pentagon has deployed a quarter of a million troops against Iraq, several thousand soldiers are engaged in daily skirmishes in Afghanistan, countless Navy and Air Force crews are manning strategic weapons in the waters off North Korea, a few thousand Marines have been dispatched to the southern Philippines to fight a century-old Islamic separatist movement, several hundred "advisers" are participating in the early stages of a Vietnam-like insurgency in Colombia and elsewhere in the Andean nations, and the U.S. currently maintains a military presence in 140 of the 189 member countries of the United Nations, including significant deployments in twenty-five. The U.S. has military treaties or binding security arrangements with at least thirty-six countries.4
Aside from the financial cost, there is another constraint. The American people are totally unwilling to accept large numbers of American casualties. In order to produce the "no-contact" or "painless dentistry" approach to warfare, the Pentagon has committed itself to a massive and very expensive effort to computerize battle.5 It has spent lavishly on smart bombs, battlefield sensors, computer-guided munitions, and extremely high performance aircraft and ships. The main reason for all this gadgetry is to keep troops out of the line of fire.
Unfortunately, as the conflicts in both Afghanistan and Iraq have demonstrated, ground troops follow in the wake of massive aerial bombing and missile attacks. The first Iraq War produced four classes of casualties--killed in action, wounded in action, killed in accidents (including "friendly fire"), and injuries and illnesses that appeared only after the end of hostilities. During 1990 and 1991, some 696,778 individuals served in the Persian Gulf as elements of Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm. Of these 148 were killed in battle, 467 were wounded in action, and 145 were killed in accidents, producing a total of 760 casualties, quite a low number given the scale of the operations.
However, as of May 2002, the Veterans Administration (VA) reported that an additional 8,306 soldiers had died and 159,705 were injured or ill as a result of service-connected "exposures" suffered during the war. Even more alarmingly, the VA revealed that 206,861 veterans, almost a third of General Schwarzkopf's entire army, had filed claims for medical care, compensation, and pension benefits based on injuries and illnesses caused by combat in 1991. After reviewing the cases, the agency has classified 168,011 applicants as "disabled veterans." In light of these deaths and disabilities, the casualty rate for the first Gulf War is actually a staggering 29.3%.
A significant probable factor in these deaths and disabilities is depleted uranium (or DU) ammunition, although this is a hotly contested proposition. Some researchers, often paid for by the Pentagon, argue that depleted uranium could not possibly be the cause of these war-related maladies and that a more likely explanation is dust and debris from the blowing up of Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological weapons factories in 1991, or perhaps a "cocktail" of particles from DU ammunition, the destruction of nerve gas bunkers, and polluted air from burning oil fields. But the evidence--including abnormal clusters of childhood cancers and birth defects in Iraq and also in the areas of Kosovo where the U.S. used depleted-uranium weapons in the 1999 air war--points primarily toward DU. Moreover, simply by insisting on employing such weaponry, the American military is deliberately flouting a 1996 United Nations resolution that classifies DU ammunition as an illegal weapon of mass destruction.
DU, or Uranium-238, is a waste product of power-generating nuclear-reactors. It is used in projectiles like tank shells and cruise missiles because it is 1.7 times denser than lead, burns as it flies, and penetrates armor easily, but it breaks up and vaporizes on impact--which makes it potentially very deadly. Each shell fired by an American tank includes between three and ten pounds of DU. Such warheads are essentially "dirty bombs," not very radioactive individually but nonetheless suspected of being capable in quantity of causing serious illnesses and birth defects.6
In 1991, U.S. forces fired a staggering 944,000 DU rounds in Kuwait and Iraq. The Pentagon admits that it left behind at a bare minimum 320 metric tons of DU on the battlefield. One study of Gulf War veterans showed that their children had a higher possibility of being born with severe deformities, including missing eyes, blood infections, respiratory problems, and fused fingers.
Aside from the damage done to our own troops and civilians by depleted uranium, the United States military remains committed to the most devastating forms of terror bombing, often without even a pretense of precision targeting of militarily significant installations. This aspect of current American military thinking can be found in the writing of Harlan Ullman, a high-ranking Pentagon official and protégé of General Colin Powell, who advocates that the United States attack its enemies in the same way it defeated Japan in World War II. He writes, "Super tools and weapons--information age equivalents of the atomic bomb--have to be invented. As the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki finally convinced the Japanese Emperor and High Command that even suicidal resistance was futile, these tools must be directed toward a similar outcome." Ullman is the author of the idea is that the U.S. should "deter and overpower an adversary through the adversary's perception and fear of his vulnerability and our own invincibility." He calls this "rapid dominance" or "shock and awe." He once suggested that it might be a good idea to use electromagnetic waves to attack peoples' neurological systems and scare them to death.7
The United States government has other ways to implement its new world strategy without getting its hands dirty, including what it and its Israeli allies call "targeted killings." During February, 2003, the Bush administration sought the Israeli government's counsel on how to create a legal justification for the assassination of terrorism suspects. In his 2003 State of the Union speech, President Bush said that terrorism suspects who were not caught and brought to trial have been "otherwise dealt with" and observed that "more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries, and many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies."8
High-tech warfare invites the kind of creative judo the terrorists of al Qaeda utilized on September 11. Employing domestic American airliners as their weapons of mass destruction, they took a deadly toll of innocent American bystanders. The U.S. worries that they might acquire or be given fissionable material by a "rogue state," but the much more likely source is via theft from the huge nuclear stockpiles of the United States and Russia. The weapons-grade anthrax used in the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States almost certainly came from the Pentagon's own biological stockpile, not from some poverty stricken Third World country. The U.S. government has probably solved the case but is too embarrassed by it actually to apprehend those responsible and bring them publicly before a court of justice.9 Meanwhile, the emphasis on using a professional military with its array of "people-zappers" will only strengthen the identification between the United States and tyranny.
If the likelihood of perpetual war hangs over the world, the situation domestically in the United States is no better. Militarism and imperialism threaten democratic government at home just as seriously as they menace the independence and sovereignty of other countries. Whether George Bush and his zealots can ever bring about a "regime change" in Iraq or any other country is an open question, but there is no doubt that they already have done so within the United States. In keeping with the Roman pretensions of his administration, Bush often speaks as if he were a modern Caligula (the Roman emperor who reigned from 37 to 41 AD and who wanted to appoint his horse to the Senate). In the second presidential debate on October 11, 2000, Bush said, "If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator." A little more than a year later, he replied to a question by the Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, "I'm the commander--see, I don't need to explain--I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."10
Bush and his administration have worked zealously to expand the powers of the presidency at the expense of the other branches of government. Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution says explicitly that "The Congress shall have the power to declare war." It prohibits the president from making that decision. The most influential author of the Constitution, James Madison, wrote in 1793, "In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not the executive department. ... The trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man."11 Yet, after September 11, 2001, President Bush unilaterally declared that the nation was "at war" against terrorism, and a White House spokesman later noted that the president "considers any opposition to his policies to be no less than an act of treason."
During October 3 to 10, 2002, Congress's "week of shame," both houses voted to give the president open-ended authority to wage war against Iraq. It permitted the president to use any means, including military force and nuclear weapons, in a preventive strike against Iraq as soon and as long as he--and he alone--determined it to be "appropriate." The vote was 296 to 33 in the House and 77 to 23 in the Senate. There was no debate; the members were too politically cowed to address the issue directly. Thus, for example, Sen. Pete Domenici (R-New Mexico) spoke on the hundredth anniversary of the 4-H Club; Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Kentucky) talked about the Future Farmers of America in his state; and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-California) gave Congress a brief history of the city of Mountain View, California.12
Equally serious, the Bush administration arrogated to itself the power unilaterally to judge whether an American citizen or a foreigner is part of a terrorist organization and can therefore be stripped of all Constitutional rights or rights under international law. President Bush's government has imprisoned 664 individuals from forty-two countries, including teenage children, at a concentration camp in Guantánmo, Cuba, where they are beyond the reach of the Constitution. It has also designated them "illegal combatants," a concept unknown in international law, to place them beyond the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war. None of them has been charged with anything: they are merely captives.
The key cases here concern two native-born American citizens--Yasir Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla. Hamdi, age 22, was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but raised in Saudi Arabia. The Pentagon claimed he was captured fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan, although in a more detailed submission it acknowledged that he surrendered to the Northern Alliance forces, the warlords whom the U.S. had paid to fight on its side, before he engaged in any form of combat. Padilla is a Brooklyn-born American of Puerto Rican ancestry. He was arrested by federal agents on May 8, 2002, at O'Hare Airport, Chicago, after he arrived on a flight from Pakistan. He was held for a month without any charges being filed or contact with an attorney or the outside world. On the eve of his appearance in federal court in New York, he was hastily transferred to a military prison in Charleston, South Carolina; and President Bush designated him "a bad guy" and an "enemy combatant." No charges were brought against him, and attempts to force the government to make its case via writs of habeas corpus were routinely turned down on grounds that the courts have no jurisdiction over a military prisoner.
A year and a half after September 11, 2001, at least two articles of the Bill of Rights were dead letters--the fourth prohibiting unwarranted searches and seizures and the sixth guaranteeing a jury of peers, the assistance of an attorney in offering a defense, the right to confront one's accusers, protection against self-incrimination, and, most critically, the requirement that the government spell out its charges and make them public. The second half of Thomas Jefferson's old warning--"When the government fears the people, there is liberty; when the people fear the government, there is tyranny"--clearly applies.13
The final sorrow of empire is financial ruin. It is different from the other three in that bankruptcy may not be as fatal to the American Constitution as endless war, loss of liberty, and habitual official lying; but it is the only sorrow that will certainly lead to a crisis. The U.S. proved to be ready militarily for an Iraq war, maybe even a North Korea war, and perhaps an Iran war, but it is unprepared economically for even one of them, much less all three in short succession.
The permanent military domination of the world is an expensive business. During fiscal year 2003, the U.S.'s military appropriations bill, signed on October 23, 2002, came to $354.8 billion. For fiscal year 2004, the Department of Defense asked Congress for a 4.2% increase, to $380 billion. When the budget was presented, sycophantic Congressmen spent most of their time asking the defense secretary if he was sure he did not need even more money and suggesting big weapons projects that could be built in their districts. They seemed to say that no matter how much the U.S. spends on "defense," it will not be enough. The next largest military spender is Russia, but its military budget is only 14% of the U.S.'s total. To equal current U.S. expenditures, the military budgets of the next twenty-seven highest spenders would have to be added together. The American amounts do not include the intelligence budgets, most of which are controlled by the Pentagon, nor do they include expenditures for the Iraq war or the Pentagon's request for a special $10 billion account to combat terrorism.
Estimates of the likely cost of the war vary widely. In 2002, President Bush's first chief economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, guessed that attacking Iraq--an economy somewhat smaller than that of Louisiana's--would require around $140 billion, but this figure already looks too small. In March 2003, the Bush administration said it would need an additional amount somewhere between $60 billion and $95 billion just to cover the build-up of troops in and around Iraq, the ships and planes carrying them, their munitions and other supplies, and the fuel they will consume. These figures did not include the costs of the postwar occupation and reconstruction of the country. A high-level Council on Foreign Relations study concluded that President Bush has failed "to fully describe to Congress and the American people the magnitude of the resources that will be required to meet the post-conflict needs" of Iraq.14
The first Gulf war cost about $61 billion. However, American allies such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Germany, Japan, and South Korea chipped in some $54.1 billion, about 80% of the total, leaving the U.S.'s financial contribution a minuscule $7 billion. Japan alone contributed $13 billion. Nothing like that will happen again. Virtually the entire world is agreed that if the lone superpower wants to go off in personal pursuit of a preventive war, it can pick up its own tab. The problem is that the U.S. is becoming quite short on cash. The budget for 2003 forecasts a $304 billion federal deficit, excluding the costs of the Iraq war and shortfalls in the budgets of programs that are guaranteed, backed, or sponsored by the U.S. government. Virtually all of the U.S. states face severe fiscal shortages and are pleading with the federal government for bailouts, particularly to pay for congressionally mandated anti-terrorism and civil defense programs. The Congressional Budget Office projects federal deficits over the next five years of over $1 trillion, on top of an already existing government debt in February 2003 of $6.4 trillion.
In my judgment, American imperialism and militarism are so far advanced and obstacles to its further growth have been so completely neutralized that the decline of the U.S. has already begun. The country is following the path already taken by its erstwhile adversary in the cold war, the former Soviet Union. The U.S.'s refusal to dismantle its own empire of military bases when the menace of the Soviet Union disappeared, combined with its inappropriate response to the blowback of September 11, 2001, makes this decline virtually inevitable.
There is only one development that could conceivably stop this cancerous process, and that is for the people to retake control of Congress, reform it and the election laws to make it a genuine assembly of democratic representatives, and cut off the supply of money to the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency. That was, after all, the way the Vietnam War was finally brought to a halt.
John le Carré, the novelist most famous for his books on the role of intelligence services in the cold war, writes, "America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War."15 His view is somewhat more optimistic than mine. If it is just a period of madness, like musth in elephants, we might get over it. The U.S. still has a strong civil society that could, at least in theory, overcome the entrenched interests of the armed forces and the military-industrial complex. I fear, however, that the U.S. has indeed crossed the Rubicon and that there is no way to restore Constitutional government short of a revolutionary rehabilitation of American democracy. Without root and branch reform, Nemesis awaits. She is the goddess of revenge, the punisher of pride and arrogance, and the United States is on course for a rendezvous with her.
Chalmers Johnson is the president of the Japan Policy Research Institute in California and author of "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire." This essay is an excerpt from his forthcoming book "The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Repbublic" (New York: Metropolitan Books; and London: Verso).
This article is reprinted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus' Project Against the Present Danger.
NOTES
1. Madeleine Bunting, "Beginning of the End: The U.S. Is Ignoring an Important Lesson from History--that an Empire Cannot Survive on Brute Force Alone," The Guardian, February 3, 2003.
2. Ewen MacAskill, "Up to 50 States Are on Blacklist, Says Cheney," The Guardian, November 17, 2001; James Doran, "Terror War Must Target 60 Nations, says Bush," The Times, London, June 3, 2002.
3. Tom Barry, "The U.S. Power Complex: What's New?" Foreign Policy in Focus, Special Report, November 2002, n. 11.
4. Madhavee Inamdar, "Global Vigilance in a Global Village: U.S. Expands Its Military Bases," The Progressive Response, vol. 6, no. 41 (December 31, 2002).
5. William M. Arkin, "The Best Defense," Los Angeles Times, July 14, 2002; "War Designed to Test New Weapons: Interview with Vladimir Slipchenko," Rossiyskaya Gazeta, February 22, 2003, online at .
6. Doug Rokke, "Gulf War Casualties," September 30, 2002, online at http://www.rense.com/general29/gulf.htm; Susanna Hecht, "Uranium Warheads May Leave Both Sides a Legacy of Death for Decades," Los Angeles Times, March 30, 2003; Neil Mackay, "U.S. Forces' Use of Depleted Uranium Is 'Illegal,'" Glasgow Sunday Herald, March 30, 2003; Steven Rosenfeld, "Gulf War Syndrome, The Sequel," TomPaine.com, April 8, 2003; "UK to Aid DU Removal," BBC News, April 23, 2003; Frances Williams, "Clean-up of Pollution Urged to Reduce Health Risks" and Vanessa Houlder, "Allied Troops 'Risk Uranium Exposure,'" Financial Times, April 25, 2003; Jonathan Duffy, "Iraq's Cancer Children Overlooked in War," BBC News, April 29, 2003.
7. See Ira Chernus, "Shock & Awe: Is Baghdad the Next Hiroshima?" CommonDreams.org, January 27, 2003. On the proposed Anglo-American use of such weapons as lasers that can blind and stun and microwave beams that can heat the water in human skin to the boiling point, see Antony Barnett, "Army's Secret 'People Zapper' Plans," The Observer, November 3, 2002. The United States is also sponsoring research on chemical and biological weapons that violates the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention and other international treaties. One of the projects is to produce antibiotic-resistant anthrax. Julian Borger, "U.S. Weapons Secrets Exposed," The Guardian, October 29, 2002; and Thomas Fuller, "Microwave Weapons: The Dangers of First Use," International Herald Tribune, March 17, 2003.
8. "Complete Text of President Bush's State of the Union Address," Los Angeles Times, January 28, 2003. Also see Ian Urbina, "On the Road with Murder, Inc.," Asia Times, January 24, 2003; Ori Nir, "Bush Seeks Israeli Advice on 'Targeted Killings,'" Forward, February 7, 2003.
9. See Marilyn W. Thompson, The Killer Strain: Anthrax and a Government Exposed (New York: HarperCollins, 2003); and Chuck Murphy, "Not Iraq, But Anniston, Ala.," St. Petersburg Times, March 16, 2003. According to Murphy, the U.S. Army is currently storing in the United States, 873,020 pounds of sarin, 1,657,480 pounds of VX nerve agent, and 1,976,760 pounds of mustard agent.
10. Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), pp. 145-46.
11. James Madison, as quoted by Senator Robert C. Byrd (D-West Virginia), October 3, 2002, speaking in opposition to a resolution granting the president open-ended authority to go to war whenever he chooses to do so. See John C. Bonifaz, "War Powers: The White House Continues to Defy the Constitution," TomPaine.com, February 4, 2003.
12. Winslow T. Wheeler, "The Week of Shame: Congress Wilts as the President Demands an Unclogged Road to War" (Washington: Center for Defense Information, January 2003), p. 17.
13. William Norman Grigg, "Suspending Habeas Corpus," The New American, vol. 18, no. 14 (July 15, 2002). Also see "Detaining Americans," Washington Post, June 13, 2002; Nat Hentoff, "George W. Bush's Constitution," Village Voice, January 3, 2003; Benjamin Weiser, "U.S. to Appeal Order Giving Lawyers Access to Detainee," New York Times, March 26, 2003; Dick Meyer, "John Ashcroft: Minister of Fear," CBSNews.com, June 12, 2002; Edward Alden and Caroline Daniel, "Battle Lines Blurred as U.S. Searches for Enemies in the War on Terrorism," Financial Times, January 2, 2003.
14. Leslie Wayne, "Rumsfeld Warns He Will Ask Congress for More Billions," New York Times, February 6, 2003; Thom Shanker and Richard W. Stevenson, "Pentagon Wants $10 Billion a Year for Antiterror Fund," New York Times, November 27, 2002; Jason Nissé, "The $800 Billion Conflict and a World Left Licking Its Wounds," The Independent, March 9, 2003; Patrick E. Tyler, "Panel Faults Bush on War Costs and Risks," New York Times, March 12, 2003; David R. Sands, "Allies Unlikely to Help Pay for Second Iraq Invasion," Washington Times, March 10, 2003.
15. Edmund L. Andrews, "Federal Debt Near Ceiling; Second Time in 9 Months," New York Times, February 20, 2003.
16, John le Carré, "The United States of America Has Gone Mad," The Times (London), January 15, 2003, online at .
----
International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan
QUESTION 11. WHAT DOES THE U.S. GOVT. KNOW ABOUT DU?
November 25, 2003
By Leuren Moret <leurenmoret@yahoo.com>
11. The US government flatly denies risk of DU officially. World Health Organization published a similar report recently. Please tell us what you think the US government really knows.
1943 - MANHATTAN PROJECT:
Memo to General Leslie R. Groves
October 30, 1943
Blueprint for Depleted Uranium weapons
Recommendation from Manhattan Project physicists (Compton, Urey, Connant) to develop radioactive battlefield weapons "which would behave like a radioactive gas" using nuclear trash from the atomic bomb program in order to beat the Germans who might do it first. Depleted uranium was specifically mentioned in other communications.
http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/Groves-Memo-Manhattan30oct43.htm
Source of document:
Major Doug Rokke,
U.S. Army Head of Depleted Uranium Project to clean up Iraq and Kuwait after 1991 Gulf War.
1946 - OPEN LITERATURE
ACTIONS OF RADIATIONS ON LIVING CELLS
by D.E. Lea,
Cambridge University Press (1946)
(includes early research beginning in 1927 by H.J. Muller on genetic mutations in Drosophila from ionizing radiation); through collaboration with the Radiological Society of North America, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, and the Royal Society.
1950 - U.S. ARMY Pamphlet:
THE EFFECTS OF ATOMIC WEAPONS
9.40 "...The uranium and plutonium which may have escaped fission in the nuclear weapon represent a further possible source of residual nuclear radiation...."
9.41 "The alpha particles from uranium and plutonium... are completely absorbed in an inch or two of air.... indicates that uranium and plutonium deposited on the earth do not represent a serous external hazard."
9.42 "Although there is negligible danger from uranium and plutonium outside the body, it is possible for dangerous amounts of these elements to enter the body through the lungs, the digestive system, or breaks in the skin. Plutonium, for example, tends to concentrate in bone and lungs, where the prolonged action of the alpha particles can cause serious harm."
THE EFFECTS OF ATOMIC WEAPONS (1950), U.S. Army
republished 1957, 1962, 1964 as THE EFFECTS OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS,
Dept. of the Army
Pamphlet No. 50-3,
Headquarters, Dept. of the Army (March 1977).
1974-99 - U.S. MILITARY:
Research Report Summaries on Depleted Uranium
Major research on military use of depleted uranium, 1974-1999, Office of the Special Assistant for Gulf War Illnesses - "GulfLINK"
http://www.gulflink.osd.mil/du_ii/du_ii_tabl1.htm
These summaries represent extensive research to test and characterize depleted uranium as a military weapon. The summaries confirm everything that was known in 1943 in the Groves Memo.
1976 - U.S. AIR FORCE:
"INTERNATIONAL LAW - - THE CONDUCT OF ARMED CONFLICT AND AIR OPERATIONS" - November 19, 1976
Judge Advocate General Activities
Air Force Pamphlet AFP 110-31
The U.S. Department of the Air Force manual, "International Law: The conduct of Armed Conflict and Air Operations," AFP 110-31, November 19, 1976 (hereinafter "USAF manual"), governs the actions of all U.S. Air Force pilots including operators of the A-10 Thunderbolts. This Air Force manual acknowledges that the Department of the Air Force must adhere to international and U.S. military law regarding bombardment and air operations.
"It is especially important that treaties, having the force of law equal to laws enacted by the Congress of the United States, be scrupulously adhered to by the United States armed forces." This is the legal policy of the U.S. Department of Defense. (USAF manual, p. 1-7)
Article VI of the Constitution of the United States says: "...all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or the laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding."
"The following are relevant examples of treaties to which the U.S. is a party: Hague Conventions IV of October 18, 1907 (USAF manual, p. 1-7); Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare of 1925 [the Geneva Gas Protocol, June 17, 1925] (USAF manual, p. 1-7); Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilians in Time of War, August 12, 1949." (USAF manual, p. 1-8)
Even without a formal declaration of war, the United States Department of Defense is legally obligated under the U.S. Constitution to obey the laws of war. "The law of armed conflict applies to an international armed conflict regardless of whether a declared 'war' exists." (USAF manual, p. 1-10) "The Armed Forces of the United States will comply with the law of war in the conduct of military operations and related activities in armed conflict however such conflicts are characterized." (USAF manual, p. 1-8)
Although uranium weapons are not banned by name in an existent treaty, they are illegal under binding Air Force law and international conventions. "Any weapon may be put to an unlawful use." (USAF manual, p. 6-1) "A weapon may be illegal per se if either international custom or treaty has forbidden its use under all circumstances. An example is poison to kill or injure a person." (USAF manual, p. 6-1) The International Court of Justice recognizes this rule in its Advisory Opinion, "Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons" (International Court of Justice Reports, 1996). In paragraph 87 of that Opinion, the Court found that the principles and rules of humanitarian law apply to all weapons, including nuclear ones. In other parts of the Opinion the Court stresses the duty to evaluate legality or illegality prior to use in military operations.
The Geneva Gas Protocol prohibits, "the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices." (USAF manual, p.6-3, 6-4) The Geneva Conventions now include the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, their Protocol Additional I, and Protocol Additional II. [The two protocols strongly set out prohibitions of military operations that would unleash hazardous forces (such as an attack on a nuclear power facility or a dam) or would damage the natural environment or water supply. ]
The 1907 Hague Convention IV, at Section II, Article 23, absolutely forbids any use of poison. It states: "In addition to the prohibitions provided by special Conventions, it is especially forbidden
Poison is defined in the Air Force manual in a way that clearly describes uranium munitions: "Poisons are biological or chemical substances causing death or disability with permanent effects when, in even small quantities, they are ingested, enter the lungs or bloodstream, or through the skin. The longstanding customary prohibition against poison is based on their uncontrolled character and the inevitability of death or permanent disability as well as on a traditional belief that it is treacherous to use poison." (USAF manual, p. 6-5) U.S. Air Force Pamphlet [Manual] AFP 110-31
"U.S. Air Force and International Law Forbid the Use of Uranium Weapons"
by Karen Parker, J.D., Diplome (Strasbourg) and Piotr Bein, PhD.
Source: John LaForge,
Nukewatch http://www.nukewatch.com/
1978 - 95th CONGRESS AND U.S. PRESIDENT -
Speech by Senator Bob Dole
Making Bullets Out of Depleted Uranium - Mr. Dole: "Mr. President, an article appeared in the Washington Star on March 14 [1978], reporting that the Pentagon is about to start using depleted-uranium to produce bullets. They seem to have chosen this material for bullets because uranium metal is dense, and because depleted uranium is cheap. Needless to say, I find this proposal shocking. On the one hand this shows a complete lack of sensitivity to the general fear of using radioactive materials. On the other hand, only a strange set of policy decisions could have made this material so cheap that anybody would consider using it for bullets."
Opening paragraph of 140-line long statement by Senator Bob Dole at the 95th Congress, 2nd Session, Vol. 124 (part 29) March 17, 1978, page 7416.
1979 - U.S. ARMY:
Mobility Equipment, Research & Development Command
The U.S. Army Mobility Equipment, Research & Development Command,
March 7, 1979, states:
"Not only the people in the immediate vicinity (emergency and fire fighting personnel) but also people at distances downwind from the fire are faced with potential over exposure to air borne uranium dust."
1984 - U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY -
Testing Problems from DU Contamination
"Prototype Firing Range Air Cleaning System"
by J.A. Glissmeyer, J. Mishima and J.A. Bamberger, Pacific Northwest Laboratory, Richland, Washington, Proceedings of the 18th DOE Nuclear Airborne Waste Management and Air Cleaning Conference, Baltimore, Maryland, August 12-16, 1984. Published March 1985, Editor M.W. First, U.S. Dept. of Energy and The Harvard Air Cleaning Laboratory; CONF-840806 Vol. 2.
"The Ballistics Research Laboratory, a component of the U.S. Army Research and Development Command, contracted with Pacific Northwest Laboratory (PNL) to provide a prototype air cleaning system for a new large caliber firing range where depleted uranium munitions are testfired. ...too costly to operate... rapid particle loading results in short filter life necessitating frequent replacement and disposal as low-level radioactive waste. The rapid particle loading also results in decreased airflow causing an excessive waiting period before personnel can reenter the target area."
"The U.S. Army Material Test Directorate (MTD) and the Ballistics Research Laboratory (BRL) both operate two firing ranges (Ranges A, B, and C, D respectively) for the testing of large caliber depleted uranium (DU) penetrators. The targets are housed in enclosures which contain DU aerosols and fragments produced by the test firings. One of the drawbacks of using a target enclosure is that the airborne DU must be removed by ventilation and air cleaning before personnel can enter the enclosure without respiratory protection."
1984 - U.S. DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION (DOT):
FEDERAL AVIATION ADMINISTRATION (FAA)
FAA Advisory Circular 20-123,
"Avoiding or Minimizing Encounters With Aircraft Equipped With Depleted Uranium Balance Weights During Accident Investigations"
dated 12/20/84,
signed by M.C. Beard, Director of Airworthiness.
This memo circulated to all FAA crash site investigators, which is still valid and in effect (1/11/01- FAA spokesman Les Dorr to M. Ruppert), describes the health hazard of depleted uranium aircraft balance weights at crash sites. The U.S. Government has always treated depleted uranium as a hazardous material. This memo reveals that it has been used as a component of aircraft manufacturing for years with full knowledge by the U.S. Govt.:
"While the depleted uranium normally poses no danger, it is to be handled with caution. The main hazard associated with depleted uranium is the harmful effect the material could have if it enters the body. If particles are inhaled or digested, they can be chemically toxic and cause a significant and long-lasting irradiation of internal tissue."
"- Personnel handling the balance weight should wear gloves.
- Industial eye protection should be worn.
- Respirator mask should be worn to ensure no radioactive dust particle ingestion.
- ...any articles used in the handling of damaged balance weights... discarded... and labeled as radioactive waste..."
Aircraft manufacturers such as McDonnell-Douglas and Boeing have routinely advised health advisory and safety precautions in their aircraft manuals.
From The Wilderness:
FTW SUBSCRIBER BULLETIN 01-01
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/pandora/du.html
[At the Pentagon crash site on Sept. 11, 2001, Leuren Moret reported that EPA official Bill Bellinger of the agency's Region III Environmental Radiation Monitoring Office, confirmed that crash rubble, was radioactive and "probably depleted uranium. He was convinced that depleted uranium is not radiologically toxic, but commented that it is more of a hazard when aerosolized."
"Depleted uranium: devastation at home and abroad" San Francisco Bay View, November 7, 2001
http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/DU-Devastation-Moret7nov01.htm
This was also reported in NATUR magazine January 10, 2002, "Todliches Uran-Recycling" p.10-12.]
1989 - U.S. NAVY - Changes from Depleted Uranium to Tungsten Alloys
" The interesting aspect in the history of this application is that after deciding in 1978 to use a uranium alloy, the U.S. Navy decided in 1989 to change to tungsten alloys, 'based on live fire tests showing that tungsten met their performance requirements while offering reduced probabilities of radiation exposure and environmental impact'."
B.Rostker,
Development of DU Munitions, in Environmental Exposure Report, Depleted Uranium in the Gulf (II), (2000).
http://www.gulflink.osd.mil/du_ii/du_ii_tabe.htm
1990 - Office of the ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, A. H. Passarella, Dir. Freedom of Information and Security Review, February 11, 1990 letter to Mr. Dan Fahey
"Depleted uranium (DU) material can constitute a heavy metal poisoning and radiation poisoning hazard in the pulverized (powder) state only if it is either ingested or inhaled."
Case Narrative: Depleted Uranium (DU) Exposures, 2nd Edition, July 2, 1998, National Gulf War Resource Center, pp. 197-198.
1990 - SAIC: Government Contractor
"Short-term effects of high doses can result in death, while long-term effects of low doses have been implicated in cancer."
"Aerosol DU exposures to soldiers on the battlefield could be significant with potential radiological and toxicological effects."
From the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) report, included as Appendix D of AMMCOM's Kinetic Energy Penetrator Long Term Strategic Study, Danesi, July 1990. This report was completed six months before Desert Storm.
1990 - U.S. ARMY - Armament, Munitions and Chemical Command [AMCCOM]
"...reported in July 1990, that depleted uranium is a "low level alpha radiation emitter which is linked to cancer when exposures are internal, [and] chemical toxicity causing kidney damage." (AMCCOM's radiological task group has said that "long term effects of low doses [of DU] have been implicated in cancer...there is no dose so low that the probability of effect is zero."
Case Narrative: Depleted Uranium (DU) Exposures, 2nd Edition, July 2, 1998, National Gulf War Resource Center, Inc., p. i)
1991 - LOS ALAMOS MEMO - Los Alamos Nuclear Weapns Laboratory
SUBJECT: The Effectiveness of Depleted Uranium Penetrators March 1, 1991
From: Lt. Col. M.V. Ziehm
To: Major Larson "Studies and Analysis Branch" (WR 13)
"There is a relatively small amount of lethality data for uranium penetrators, either the tank fired long version or the GAU-8 round fired from the A-10 close air support aircraft. The recent war has likely multiplied the number of du rounds fired at targets by orders of magnitude. It is believed that du penetrators were very effective against Iraqi armor; however, assessments of such will have to be made.
There has been and continues to be a concern regarding the impact of du on the environment. Therefore, if no one makes a case for the effectiveness of du on the battlefield, du rounds may become politically unacceptable and thus, be deleted from the arsenal. If du penetrators proved their worth during our recent combat activities, then we should assure their future existence (until something better is developed) through Service/DoD proponency. If proponency is garnered, it is possible that we stand to lose a valuable combat capability.
I believe we should keep this sensitive issue at mind when after action reports are written." Los Alamos National Laboratory Memorandum March 1, 1991 Source of this document: Major Doug Rokke, Head of Depleted Uranium Cleanup Project for Iraq and Kuwait after the Gulf War 1991.
1992 - UNITED STATES CENTRAL COMMAND log - following a major fire at a depleted uranium ammunition storage facility in Doha
"EOD POC (point of contact) states that burning depleted uranium puts off alpha radiation. Uranium particles when breathed can be hazardous. 11ACR has been notified to treat the area as though it were a chemical hazard area; i.e. stay upwind and wear protective mask in the vicinity."
United States Central Command log, "11ACR Fire in Doha: Updates from CENTCOM Forward," July 12, 1991, entry 10.
1993 - U.S. GENERAL ACCOUNTING OFFICE (GAO)
"Inhaled insoluble oxides stay in the lungs longer and pose a potential cancer risk due to radiation. Ingested DU dust can also pose both a radioactive and a toxicity risk."
Operation Desert Storm: Army Not Adequately Prepared to Deal With Depleted Uranium Contamination, United States General Accounting Office (GAO/NSIAD-93-90), January 1993, pp. 17-18.
1993 - U.S. ARMY ARMAMENT, MUNITIONS, AND CHEMICAL COMMAND(AMCCOM)
"When a DU penetrator impacts a target surface, a large portion of the kinetic energy is dissipated as heat. The heat of the impact causes the DU to oxidize or burn momentarily. This results in smoke which contains high concentration of DU particles. These uranium particles can be ingested or inhaled and are toxic."
U.S. ARMY ARMAMENT, MUNITIONS, AND CHEMICAL COMMAND(AMCCOM)
"Depleted Uranium Facts," photocopy in Bukowski, et. al, Uranium Battlefields Home and Abroad, March 1993, p. 97.
1993 - U.S. ARMY: Colonel Robert G. Claypool, Medical Corps Director, Professional Services of the Department of the Army, Office of the Surgeon General, August 16, 1993 letter to U.S. Army Chemical School
"When soldiers inhale or ingest DU dust, they incur a potential increase in cancer risk. The magnitude of that increase can be quantified (in terms of projected days of life lost) if the DU intake is known (or can be estimated). Expected physiological effects from exposure to DU dust include possible increased risk of cancer (lung or bone) and kidney damage."
Case Narrative: Depleted Uranium (DU) Exposures, 2nd Edition, July 2, 1998, National Gulf War Resource Center, pp. 263-264).
1993 - U.S. ARMY: Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff For Operations and Plans, Washington D.C. August 19, 1993: Memorandum Thru Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Plans - Director Army Staff - for Assistant Secretary of the Army (Installation Logistics & Environment)
Subject: Review of Draft Report to Congress - Health and Environmental Consequences of Depleted Uranium in the U.S. Army - ACTION MEMORANDUM
[This was a response to a GAO report to Congress on DU issues]
c. "In response to the GAO report, the Deputy Secretary of Defense (DEPSECDEF) issued a tasking memorandum on 8 June 1993. The memorandum directs the Secretary of the Army to:
(1) Provide adequate training for personnel who may come in contact with DU contaminated equipment.
(2) Complete medical testing of personnel exposed to DU contamination during the Persian Gulf War.
(3) Develop a plan for DU contaminated equipment recovery during future operations."
Signed - Brigadier General Eric K. Shinseki [The rest of the memorandum is in regard to implementation of this order.]
[General Shinseki served four years as the Army Chief of Staff and retired in June 2003 after two years of tension between him and Donald Rumsfeld over resources needed for the Iraq war.]
Source of document: Major Doug Rokke, U.S. Army Head of Depleted Uranium Project to clean up Iraq and Kuwait after1991 Gulf War.
1993 - U.S. ARMY: Operations Support Directorate - UNCLASSIFIED SECTION Subject: Medical Management Of Unusual Depleted Uranium Exposures October 2, 1993
4. "Unusual exposures to DU are also expected to cause no medical problems. But in the interest of documenting the expected minimal exposures, the exposures should be documented and specimens taken. Unusual exposures include situations which could result in ingestion/inhalation of DU dust; or the contamination of wounds by DU dust or fragments. These unusual exposures could result from:
A. Being in the midst of the smoke from DU fires resulting from the burning of vehicles uploaded with DU munitions or depots in which DU munitions are being stored.
B. Working within environments containing DU dust or residues from DU fires.
C. Being within a structure or vehicle while it is struck by a DU munition.
5. Safety guidance on appropriate soldier response to accidents involving DU is contained within reference A. and guidance on appropriate management of potentially DU-contaminated equipment is contained within reference B.
6. In cases such as those in described in Paragraph 4, the following steps should be taken:
A. A MED-16 report (RCS MED-15(R4)) should be submitted in accordance with Paragraph 5-10 of Reference B.
B. Specimens should be collected and forwarded for analysis in conformance with the information provided in subsequent paragraphs and paragraph 9-6 of Reference A.
(1) Nasal swipes could be collected... Nasal swipes can be useful if confirming exposure to DU dust environments...
(2) Any filters used for respiratory protection (Protective mask canister, dust masks, field-expedient cloths placed over the nose etc.) should be sealed in plastic bags or other protective containers...
(3) Twenty-four hour urine specimens should be collected..." Source of document: Major Doug Rokke, U.S. Army Head of Depleted Uranium Project to clean up Iraq and Kuwait after1991 Gulf War.
1995 - U.S. ARMY - Environmental Policy Institute (AEPI) Report to Congress
"If DU enters the body, it has the potential to generate 'significant medical consequences'. The risks associated with DU in the body are both chemical and radiological. "
"The radiation dose to critical organs depends upon the amount of time that depleted uranium resides in the organs. When this value is known or estimated, cancer and hereditary risk estimates can be determined"
"Personnel inside or near vehicles struck by DU penetrators could receive significant internal exposures."
"Very few remediation technologies have actually been used to clean up DU-contaminated sites."
"No available technology can significantly change the inherent chemical and radiological toxicity of DU. These are intrinsic properties of uranium."
"The Army should determine the full life-cycle cost of DU weapon sytems. This analysis must take into account not only production costs, but also demilitarization, disposal and recycling costs; facility decontamination costs; test range remediation costs; and long-term health and environmental costs."
"The only systematic DU contamination of Army land occurs during the research, development, testing, and evaluation (RDT&E) cycle for DU ammunition."
"The Army needs to review particle data from Army studies and elsewhere to determine data gaps and conduct experiments to generate the requisite data to fill these gaps."
"The Army needs to develop a better understanding of DU particles generated from impacts or burning."
"The Army should be prepared to provide guidance to other governments on the health and safety risks associated with DU for affected battlefields. This guidance may include information on environmental measurement, monitoring, migration and remediation techniques." From the Army Environmental Policy Institute (AEPI), Health and Environmental Consequences of Depleted Uranium Use in the U.S. Army, June 1995
1997 - ARMED FORCES RADIOBIOLOGY RESEARCH INSTITUTE (AFRRI)
Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute (AFRRI) in Bethesda, Maryland has discovered in animal studies that embedded DU, unlike most metals, dissolves and spreads through the body depositing in organs like the spleen and the brain, and that a pregnant female rat will pass DU along to a developing fetus.
The Nation magazine, May 26, 1997, p. 17-18.
1997 - STATE OF NEVADA - DENIES U.S. AIR FORCE RESUMPTION OF USE OF DU ROUNDS AT NELLIS AIR FORCE RANGE TARGET 63-10
State of Nevada Review Comments to Colonel M.F. Fukey, September 15, 1997
RE: SAI # E1997-160: Draft Environmental Assessment of Resumption of Use of Depleted Uranium Rounds at Nellis Air Force Range Target 63-10
"Our review of the Draft EA and accompanying materials suggest that the environmental effects that could be anticipated from the resumption of air-to-ground firing of depleted uranium (DU) munitions have not been adequately assessed. ....neither the Draft EA nor its predecessor, the Limited Site Assessment, reflect awareness of the scant scientific and technical information on the use of DU and the large uncertainties that characterizes the issue of using DU munitions in the environment. ... the Draft EA cites the study involving the Yuma Proving Grounds (YPG), LA-13156-MS, September 1996, but fails to capture the large degree of uncertainty about the impact of DU in the environment."
"...attempted to construct an environmental transport mechanism for DU as a means of evaluating the risks that environmental DU poses to ecosystems and to humans. ... impossible because of insufficient data and an incomplete understanding of DU in the environment. ... conclusions from the YPG study were based on unsubstantiated conjecture."
"...study found DU residues in all components of the environment, that environmental concentrations varied widely, that corroded DU residues are soluble and mobile in water, that wind dispersal during testing is the prevalent means of dispersal of DU particles, and that an unknown degree of risk was posed to human health by DU in the environment. Moreover, there appears to be no insight into the issue of long-term (100 to 1,000 years and longer) environmental threats posed by DU residues."
"...lack of attention by the Air Force to implementing a comprehensive monitoring program to assess DU airborne emissions and/or transport of DU particulates in surface and groundwater at Target 63-10.... the potential for short and long-term effects on humans and ecosystems from transport and corrosion of DU in the environment... wind dispersal of dust containing DU generated from air-to-ground firing..."
"...the proposed Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) for the Draft EA says that airborne emissions of DU particulates "would settle quickly resulting in minimal air migration." Yet the Draft EA provides no factual evidence, through either on-site monitoring or modeling, to substantiate that dispersal of DU would in fact be minimal and contained to the vicinity of the target area. The document simply states that "air migration of DU particulates is not likely to occur at any great distance due to the extreme density of these particulates and the oxides."
"...the document fails to mention that a major state institution, the Southern Desert Corrections Center, (with an inmate population of over 1,400 ), is located in the same general vicinity and is likely to be closer to the target [less than 12 miles] than the community of Indian Springs."
"....significant issue given the Air Force's failure to provide specific information on the physical forms and probable locations of the estimated 27,000 kilograms (30 tons) of DU that has already been deposited in the target area and on target vehicles. ... this volume of contamination would be expanded by an estimated 2,370 kilograms, or 2.6 tons of DU per year."
"... by not assessing the "cradle to grave" management of existing and expected to be generated DU materials and soil contamination, the EA is deficient in scope, in terms of compliance with Council of Environmental Quality (CEQ) regulations for defining the "range of actions, alternatives and impacts to be considered" (CFR Parts 1508.25)."
"...if Target 63-10 is to be used for DU test and training activities, then a detailed Environmental Radiological Monitoring (ERM) program (i.e., risk assessment/DU transport model) should be developed, peer reviewed, and implemented for actual site conditions..."
http://www.rimbaud.freeserve.co.uk/dustate.htm
[Contamination of military test ranges has occurred all over the United States. The State demanded that the Air Force pick up the DU ordinance on the Nellis Test Range and it was buried in ammunition boxes as radioactive waste at the Nevada Test Site.]
1998 - UNITED STATES NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION (NRC)
According to the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission guidelines for occupational exposure, the 186,000,000 grams of depleted uranium released during the Gulf War combat operations is enough to poison every American man, woman, and child 100 times.
Case Narrative: Depleted Uranium (DU) Exposures, 2nd Edition, July 2, 1998, National Gulf War Resource Center, p. 3.
1998 - U.S. DEPARTMENT OF LABOR/OSHA Health Hazards Data, the Materials Safety Data Sheet from the U.S. Department of Labor/OSHA, says this about depleted uranium: "Increased risk of lung carcinoma and chemical toxicity to kidney. Hazardous decomposition products..."
Case Narrative: Depleted Uranium (DU) Exposures, 2nd Edition, July 2, 1998, National Gulf War Resource Center, Inc.
2000 - UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY (DOE)
The United States Department of Energy (DOE) has said, "One may normally expect that depleted uranium contains a trace amount of plutonium." In a January 20, 2000 letter, DOE Assistant Secretary David Michaels formally admits that, "As background, I would note that our historical information shows that recycled uranium, which came straight from one of our production sites, e.g., Hanford, would routinely contain transuranics [americium, neptunium, plutonium] at a very low level. ... We have initiated a project to characterize the level of transuranics [americium, neptunium, plutonium] in the various depleted uranium inventories."
David Michaels, PhD, MPH, Assistant Secretary Environment, Safety and Health, U.S. Department of Energy, letter, Jan. 20, 2000.)
2001 - DU: THE BLACKLIST - 283 entities are holders of 539 (U238 U235) Patents The patent holders include universities (Univ. Texas 4, Univ. Duke 3, M.I.T. 2, Univ. Ohio 2, Univ. New Mexico 1); nuclear energy companies; branches of the U.S. military (U.S. Army 17, U.S. Navy 3, U.S. Air Force 2); Military industrial complex corporations; United Kingdom Government 1; and individuals. The patents are held but not limited to entities in the U.S., Japan, Germany, U.K, France, Canada, and Korea.
The weekly Christian newspaper "Famiglia Cristiana" (Italy), 1 million copies, published the DU-BLACKLIST: http://www.xs4all.nl/~stgvisie/VISIE/du-blacklist-txt.html
2003 - MEDIA: PENTAGON CONTROLLING THE NEWS - John Hanchette Former Editor U.S.A. TODAY (National Daily Newspaper)
During a speaking tour in the Eastern United States in January 2003 with Gulf War Veteran Major Doug Rokke, I was introduced to John Hanchette who in Doug's words is "one of the good guys on the depleted uranium issue". Mr. Hanchette told me that from 1991 to 2001, as Editor of U.S.A. TODAY, he published news breaking stories on the effects of depleted uranium on Gulf War Veterans. Each time he was ready to publish a story about devastating illnesses in Gulf War soldiers, he got a phone call from the Pentagon pressuring him not to print the story. He has been replaced as Editor at U.S.A. TODAY and is now teaching journalism to college students.
Interview with former U.S.A. TODAY Editor John Hanchetter by Leuren Moret, Olean, New York, January 29, 2003.
2003 - PENTAGON - U.S. Army Colonel
Journalist: "What about the health risks that are associated with D.U.? Or do you deny there are any?"
U.S. Army Colonel: "You are determined to get me to make a statement about the health risks aren't you?"
Journalist: "If you will, I want to see what the behind the scenes view of D.U. is in the Pentagon."
U.S. Army Colonel: "Well.......(long pause, followed by heavy profanity).... Okay, I'll give you some dirt if that's what you're looking for. The Pentagon knows there are huge health risks associated with D.U. They know from years of monitoring our own test ranges and manufacturing facilities. There were parts of Iraq designated as high contamination areas before we ever placed any troops on the ground. The areas around Basra, Jalibah, Talil, most of the southern desert, and various other hot spots were all identified as contaminated before the war. Some of the areas in the southern desert region along the Kuwaiti border are especially radioactive on scans and tests. One of our test ranges in Saudi Arabia shows over 1000 times the normal background level for radiation. We have test ranges in the U.S. that are extremely contaminated, hell they have been since the 80's and nothing is ever said publicly. Don't ask don't tell is not only applied to gays, it is applied to this matter heavily. I know that at one time the theory was developed that any soldier exposed to D.U. shells should have to wear full MOP gear (the chemical protective suit). But they realized that it just wouldn't be practical and it was never openly discussed again."
Journalist: "So the stories that they know D.U. is harmful are true?"
U.S. Army Colonel: "Yes, there is no doubt that most high level commanders who were around during the 80's know about it."
Interview by Jay Shaft, Editor Coalition for Free Thought in Media, "U.S. Colonel Admits That 500 Tons of D.U. Were Just Used in Iraq" May 5, 2003.
2003 - SANDIA NATIONAL LABORATORIES -U.S. Govt. Nuclear Weapons Lab Research funding provided by the Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Biological and Environmental Research, and Sandia's Laboratory Directed Research and Development.
"Sandia nanolaser may help extend life-spans by rapidly analyzing possible neuroprotectant drugs" by Neal Singer
"Helping Gulf War victims" - Sandia has been doing research on the role of mitochondria malfunctions identified as the most immediate cause of Parkinson's, Huntington's, and Alzheimer's. Loss of brain function is caused by neurons killed by malfunctions in the mitochondria. "Malfunctioning mitochondria have also been linked to battlefield aftereffects caused by radiation or by nerve agents like sarin." Gulf War victims frequently develop Lou Gehrig's disease or "ALS (the neuron disease amytrophic lateral sclerosis) which is a neurodegenerative disorder that kills motor neurons causing paralysis and death in three years." It affects both Gulf War veterans and civilians. Funding is now being requested from the U.S. Congress for research "to help Gulf War victims".
SandiaLabNews Vol. 55, No. 19, September 19, 2003
http://www.sandia.gov/LabNews/LN09-19-03/key09-19-03_stories.html#nano
[AN EXTREMELY IMPORTANT U.S. GOVT. ADMISSION THAT CANCER AND BIRTH DEFECTS ARE NOT THE ONLY DISEASES CAUSED BY RADIATION EXPOSURE.]
2003 - MEDIA: WHITE HOUSE/PENTAGON CONTROLLING THE NEWS TBRNews.com
During the middle of March, 2003, tbrnews received an email from a man who claimed to be a mid-level executive with a major American television network. He stated in this, and subsequent, emails that he was in possession of "thousands" of pages of in-house memos sent from his corporate headquarters in New York City to the head of the network's television news department. He went on to say that these memos set forth directives about what material was, and was not, to be aired on the various outlets of the network.
This individual claimed he was developing serious doubts about the strict control of media events and decided that he would pass this material along to someone who might make use of it... All are on corporate stationary, signed or initialed by the senders and again, signed or initialed by the recipients in the news division...
If these memos were true, they showed with a terrible clarity that at least one part of the American mass media was strictly controlled and that the news was so doctored and spun that it might as well be official news releases from the White House and Pentagon:
(Sept 28) There is to be nothing said about the high levels of radiation in Iraq. Depleted uranium is the culprit but if it becomes too widespread, it is to be blamed on Saddam's "hidden A-bomb arsenal"! Our man in the Pentagon was moaning that when GIs start losing their hair and fingers in a few years, there will be more lawsuits. As they say in the military, "not on my watch, Charlie!"
(Nov 17) the Supreme Court is busting Bush's balls now. They are going to take cases about the Gitmo [Guantanamo] gulag and the White House is shrieking with rage. I guess the Court doesn't realize that Bush thinks he is the one to decide what is constitutional and not the Court. He has a rude surprise coming very soon as I understand...
To read more than 1400 memos since February 2003 with daily updates go to http://www.tbrnews.org/index.htm.
-------- iran
U.S. Acquiesces to Allies on New Iran Nuclear Resolution
November 25, 2003
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/25/international/middleeast/25IRAN.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 24 - The United States, bowing to the wishes of its allies, agreed Monday to let the International Atomic Energy Agency adopt a resolution deploring Iran's nuclear program without referring the issue to the United Nations for possible sanctions, administration officials said.
A senior administration official said the resolution, which could be adopted Wednesday in Vienna, would say that the atomic energy agency "strongly deplores" Iran's 18 years of secretly developing a nuclear arms program and hints that further actions might be possible if such activity continued.
Yielding to the insistence of France, Britain and Germany, the administration backed off its demand that Iran be condemned and that allegations of its misconduct be referred to the United Nations Security Council. The three European countries have joined in an unusual coalition to press Iran to cooperate.
Administration officials said that in the end, the United States had little choice but to go along not only with the wishes of its European allies, but also with the urging of the atomic energy agency's leadership, most notably its general director, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei.
The Europeans and Dr. ElBaradei argued that Iran's recent steps, including its announced suspension of its program to enrich uranium, warranted a conciliatory approach. Moreover, they said, confronting Iran would backfire, causing it to cut off any discussion.
"Getting Iran to acknowledge that it has cheated in the past and that it will cooperate in the future may not be everything the United States wants," a European diplomat said. "But to walk away from talking to Iran will block any chance of progress in the future."
On a visit to Washington last week, Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, also argued strenuously for keeping the dialogue with Iran open, telling reporters that it was better to reach out to the government in Tehran than to cut off the possibility of reducing tensions.
As part of the deal negotiated in Vienna, the United States got a clearer indication in the proposed resolution that "all bets are off" if Iran continues to flout the wishes of the world and presses ahead with making nuclear weapons, administration officials said.
"We're pleased that we were able to reach agreement on a text of a resolution," a senior administration official said. "It makes clear that if there are further failures by Iran, all options will be open. This takes care of our requirement to take full account of all of Iran's past breaches."
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell negotiated the language over the weekend with senior envoys from Europe and with Dr. ElBaradei.
European diplomats said the negotiations had an unusual sense of familiarity, given the fact that in the months leading up to the war with Iraq, Dr. ElBaradei joined with France and Germany in demanding that Iraq be given more time to come clean on its illicit weapons programs.
Britain and the United States, working together, opposed them, in the end giving up on getting United Nations Security Council authorization for military action against Iraq.
Diplomats said the three European countries had sent a powerful message as Mr. Fischer joined with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, in arguing for talking with Iran.
At a time when American inspectors have still been unable to find evidence of the illicit arms programs in Iraq cited as a principal reason for going to war, the United States was dealing with the issue of Iran from a position of weakness, many diplomats involved in the matter said.
In Vienna last week, it was clear that after strenuous lobbying, Mr. Powell was unable to persuade more than 3 of the I.A.E.A.'s 35 board members - Canada, Australia and Japan - to go along with a formal censure of Iran that would refer the matter to the Security Council.
While traveling with Mr. Bush last week in Britain, Mr. Powell declared that the wording desired by others on the agency board was "deficient." Dr. ElBaradei argued, however, that a resolution that would keep talks with Iran going would be "a resolution that strengthens my hand."
It was no secret in the nuclear discussions that the Bush administration has itself been divided on the issue. Administration hard-liners contend that continuing discussions with Iran are a kind of trap that would allow Iran to play for time while pressing forward with its nuclear program in secrecy.
A similar argument within the Bush administration has raged over whether the United States should reopen its direct diplomatic contacts with Iran, shut down since May after bombings in Saudi Arabia were linked by some intelligence officials to groups operating in Iran.
It was unclear to what extent any action by the I.A.E.A. would lead to progress on curbing Iran's nuclear program. Even many officials who favor negotiating with Iran say they are pessimistic that Iran will ever give up its nuclear ambitions.
--------
U.S., Allies Agree on Iran Move
Nuclear Steps Deplored; U.N. Could Get Involved
By Glenn Kessler and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, November 25, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11537-2003Nov24.html
The Bush administration reached agreement with key European allies yesterday on a resolution that "strongly deplores Iran's past failures and breaches" in disclosing its nuclear program and establishes a fast-track procedure to take the issue to the U.N. Security Council if any additional violations are discovered, senior administration officials said.
The deal breaks an impasse between the United States and France, Germany and Britain over how to balance support for Iran's recent willingness to reveal 18 years of clandestine nuclear activities with the threat of sanctions for what the United States describes as a nuclear weapons program. The Europeans, who had persuaded the Iranians to submit to stricter inspections, sought a milder resolution by the International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. agency. But the United States pushed for immediate consideration by the Security Council.
Referring the issue to the Security Council would subject Iran to possible sanctions, which the Europeans feared would embolden hard-liners in Iran to end its nascent cooperation. But U.S. officials were insistent that Iran must not be lulled into thinking it had escaped possible penalties.
The agreement, for the moment, defuses a diplomatic hotspot while the administration struggles to steady Iraq and to restrain North Korea's nuclear ambitions. U.S. officials were particularly pleased about the agreement, saying it acknowledges the possibility that Iran has turned a new leaf while leaving little doubt that future transgressions would receive immediate action.
"We endorsed the efforts of the [European] three to get the Iranians to cooperate," a senior U.S. official said. "But there had to be something to make it clear the Iranians have pushed us too far here."
A French envoy, however, described the agreement as "very near to the European logic." The envoy said that the United States dropped its insistence that the Security Council consider the matter, and that the resolution is focused on Iran's "implementing the agreements it reached with us a few weeks ago."
The resolution urges Iran to "adhere strictly to its obligations" to the nuclear agency "in both the letter and spirit" of nuclear nonproliferation rules. The resolution also calls on Iran "to undertake and complete the taking of all necessary corrective measures on an urgent basis."
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell spoke repeatedly to his European counterparts by telephone over the weekend in an effort to find a solution. A meeting of the IAEA's governing board in Vienna had ended in acrimony Friday after the U.S. representative harshly criticized the agency for saying in a report that there was "no evidence" Iran had a nuclear weapons program.
Officials said they expected the resolution to be approved tomorrow without a vote, signifying a consensus among the 35-nation board. "The secretary invested a lot of time and political capital in getting this right," the official said.
In a confidential report earlier this month, the IAEA concluded that Iran had repeatedly breached its nuclear safeguard agreements under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which it is a signatory. The report said Iran manufactured small amounts of enriched uranium and plutonium as part of a secret 18-year nuclear program, and it harshly criticized Iran for hiding evidence of its nuclear program from international inspectors and for numerous "breaches" in its nuclear treaty obligations.
While the amount of plutonium produced was probably minuscule -- far less than needed for a nuclear weapon -- Iran previously denied conducting any such experiments. Plutonium production is generally associated only with nuclear weapons programs.
Iran has agreed to snap inspections and unfettered access to its nuclear facilities under an enhanced safeguards agreement called the "Additional Protocol." The Iranians also pledged to suspend uranium enrichment for an unspecified period.
But U.S. officials are highly skeptical that Iran has disclosed all of its activities or will completely cooperate, and they have pushed hard for a "trigger" if future violations are uncovered. Under the agreement, "any future serious Iranian violations" would spark an immediate meeting of the IAEA board to consider "all options at its disposal."
One U.S. official said this meant that a vote to send the matter to the Security Council could be called without an additional investigation or reports by the IAEA, but merely on the disclosure of new information that Iran had failed to provide to the agency. He gave as an example any credible report from the Iranian opposition group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, which in the past year has produced a stream of reports on Iran's nuclear program that have been confirmed by IAEA investigations.
Ironically, the Bush administration this summer shut down the group's Washington office on the grounds that it is part of a foreign terrorist organization.
One U.S. official said Iran's behavior during the discussions in Vienna helped swing the debate in the United States' favor. The Iranian delegate, he said, annoyed other nations when he indicated that Iran would not sign the additional protocol unless the IAEA resolution met Iran's approval. "It was eye-opening to a lot of fence-sitting nations," he said.
"We had to work three European friends from a text that was too loose, too forgiving, into a text that does the job by making clear that this is about correcting the past, not just about going into the future," said another U.S. official.
-------
Iran May Have More Nuclear Skeletons, Experts Say
November 25, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-iran.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - Iran will escape being reported to the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday for violating its non-proliferation obligations, but arms experts suspect Iran has more nuclear skeletons in its closet that will come to light.
The U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) Board of Governors meets to adopt an IAEA resolution that ``strongly deplores'' Iran's 18-year cover-up of a secret nuclear program that included uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing.
But the resolution, which was put to the board after a week of haggling between France, Germany and Britain and Washington, also ``welcomes Iran's offer of active cooperation and openness.''
The United States had originally hoped to send Iran to the Security Council for possible sanctions for violating its obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). But the European trio opposed this from the start and Washington eventually acquiesced.
Jon Wolfsthal, deputy director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a U.S.-based think-tank, said the disagreement between the European Union's three biggest states and America might resurface in the future.
``It's very likely that Iran has more skeletons in its closet, and if they come to light, there will probably be another split between the United States and Europe on what's the best approach to take,'' Wolfsthal told Reuters.
``My concern is that there is no agreement either within Europe or between the key players on what to do when the shoe drops,'' he said, adding that he was unsure if the Europeans were prepared to take Iran all the way to the Security Council.
The resolution contains a so-called trigger clause -- if further breaches by Iran are uncovered, the IAEA board will meet immediately to consider ``all options,'' one of which is the Security Council.
IRAN'S TWO-DECADE COVER-UP
The IAEA resolution is a response to an IAEA report that details Iran's cover-up of sensitive atomic research for nearly two decades. It said there was ``no evidence'' of a covert arms program but the jury was still out as to whether one existed.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said the United States was very pleased with the resolution, especially the part which immediately refers any future Iranian violation of international agreements to the IAEA board.
``That's...an element that we wanted to see in the resolution, which points out that action will be forthcoming -- appropriately so -- if there is any indication in the future that Iran is not meeting its obligations,'' he told reporters.
Gary Milhollin, head of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, a U.S.-based think-tank, told Reuters the resolution had ``locked Iran into the declaration'' it gave to the IAEA in October that Tehran insists was complete and accurate.
But if Iran has any more secrets, the trust that the Europeans have given them will be betrayed and the IAEA board will be under intense pressure to report Iran to the Council.
``If the present declaration turns out to be false, then all bets are off and this deal unravels,'' Milhollin said. He added he would not be surprised if some of Iran's ``skeletons'' were further undeclared imports of nuclear material.
Wolfsthal said the administration of President Bush clearly supported the IAEA inspection process, though some in Washington saw the resolution as a kind of a trap -- a chance to let the Iranians hang themselves.
-------- iraq / inspections
NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Theft of Cobalt in Iraq Prompts Security Inquiry
November 25, 2003
By JOHN F. BURNS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/25/international/middleeast/25NUKE.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
AMIRIYA, Iraq - A seeming lapse in surveillance by American forces has led to the looting of dangerously radioactive capsules from Saddam Hussein's main battlefield testing site in the desert outside Baghdad and the identification of at least one 30-year-old Iraqi villager, and possibly a village boy, as suffering from radiation sickness.
The two capsules, taken from a site once used by Mr. Hussein's government to test the effects of radiation on animals and perhaps humans, have since been recovered after an American sweep through the area.
But American officers fear that more cases of the sickness may follow, and that they will be powerless to help unless people in the villages of Amiriya and Shamiya break their silence and identify men who looted the desert site in early September.
Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the American commander in Iraq, has ordered an investigation to discover why an arc of eight 75-foot radioactive testing poles at the site was not more closely guarded after American nuclear experts filed a report to the Pentagon identifying them as dangerous after a visit to the site on May 9, American officers said. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has also taken a personal interest in the case.
Under investigation is how American surveillance of the area, now under the control of the 82nd Airborne Division, failed to spot villagers entering the testing site with heavy vehicles to dismantle three of the poles, or towers, for scrap, leaving heavy tire tracks in the desert.
One of the cobalt capsules was found by American troops on Oct. 6 lying in the yard of a villager's house in Amiriya, less than 15 feet from the outdoor clay oven the family used to bake bread.
The second capsule was found partly buried about 75 feet from a house in Shamiya, just east of Amiriya and about 10 miles north of the nuclear testing site, in a position where it, too, would have been approached by family members and neighbors. Along with the capsules, parts of the giant testing poles were found, dismantled for scrap metal.
"We've made every effort to unscramble this thing," said Lt. Col. George Krivo, a spokesman for the American command in Baghdad.
Looting of military depots has been a persistent problem since the fall of Mr. Hussein, prompting suggestions that the 130,000 American troops in Iraq may be too stretched.
The radioactive capsules, less than five inches high and shaped like stainless steel miniatures of the Apollo spacecraft's command module, contained thumbnail amounts of cobalt-60, a radiation source commonly used in X-ray machines and in other medical and industrial applications. The capsules were situated in concrete crypts at the base of the towers, and raised on cables into the towers to create an irradiated environment on the simulated battlefield.
American experts say they have not been able to verify whether the radioactive poles were used under Mr. Hussein for live tests on humans and animals that simulated battlefield conditions under nuclear attack, as reports from Iraqi exiles in the years before the American occupation suggested.
But documents recording tests on humans, including dust-covered strips of film showing the naked upper bodies and heads of men who appeared to have been alive when the films were made, were found by The New York Times at the site during two visits there in mid-November.
American officers who oversaw the complex operation to recover the two unshielded capsules of cobalt-60 have hinted that the failure to identify the looting in September until two weeks later may have resulted from a work overload among experts who gather data from spy satellites.
In a somber reflection of the hostility toward Americans in this area at the southern end of the so-called Sunni triangle, Colonel Krivo said, "If for any reason there are people in those villages who cannot or will not come forward to be tested, that would be very much to their detriment." He added, "The attitude out there is `Why should we trust the Americans?' "
The two houses where the cobalt-60 capsules were found were identified after United States Army Black Hawk helicopters fitted with powerful radiation detectors flew wide patterns across the desert near the testing site, the officers said.
American experts say cobalt could be used in the making of "dirty bombs" - cheap, improvised nuclear devices. But American commanders here are convinced that the looters wanted the metal only for scrap.
American experts, and others from the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, which had the towers under surveillance for much of the 1990's and just before the American invasion of Iraq, say the cobalt capsules were strong enough when Mr. Hussein's scientists first used them in the early 1980's to emit potentially lethal gamma rays. Recent American tests have shown that the radioactivity of the capsules has decayed to about 10 percent of its original potency. But the fact that the capsules were unshielded, American experts say, still posed a danger to anyone exposed to them for a protracted period.
At both villages, local people have steadfastly refused to identify the men who dismantled the towers and moved them to the villages, along with the two capsules, or to tell American and Iraqi investigators where the men are now.
The officers said they believed that after the lapses in spotting the looting, the American command - particularly a Pentagon unit called the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, working in Iraq to dispose of materials found at former chemical, biological and nuclear weapons sites - deserved credit for moving quickly into the villages and taking the capsules back to the testing site.
The testing site was then made safe by moving the capsules from all eight towers to an undisclosed but "safe" place.
In a measure of how concerned the Americans were when they reached the two villages to recover the capsules, the officers described how an American soldier in Amiriya wearing no protective equipment had approached the capsule, mounted atop a 60-pound steel counterweight, had run with it, and had "heaved it over the fence, 100 feet from the house."
So far, about 70 villagers have been tested by teams from the Iraqi Ministry of Health and assisted by Americans, who took blood samples and conducted other tests.
Of those villagers, American officers say, four showed "abnormal results," and two, the 30-year-old man and the 4-year-old boy, were found to have symptoms consistent with radiation sickness. The man, who has the more serious of the two cases, had muscle pains, fatigue and multiple ulcerations in his mouth, the officers say, all classic symptoms of radiation sickness.
The officers did not identify the two victims or give their current state of health, but said they remained under observation.
In the case of the house in Amiriya, only women and children remain there, a situation almost unknown in the male-dominated life of Iraqi villages. American officers did not say in which village the two suspected radiation victims lived, or whether they believed that the 30-year-old man was among the looters.
The officers quoted the Iraqis living at the Amiriya house as saying that all the men in the family had been killed in the American invasion of Iraq, and that they knew nothing about how the radioactive capsule and the two 38-foot lengths of heavy steel lying just beyond a fence marking their yard had gotten there.
In Shamiya, the officers said, the family offered an even less credible explanation, given that American experts inspected all eight towers in May and found the capsules intact.
"They said, `An Iraqi soldier came to the house in April and told us to bury the object here, and to stay away from it,' " the officers said.
The American investigation set in motion by General Sanchez appears to be a rigorous one. "He's investigating this in great detail, and he's personally engaged," Colonel Krivo said of the general. "We will get to the bottom of this."
For years, Western human rights groups reported claims by Iraqi defectors that prisoners were being taken from Mr. Hussein's overcrowded prisons, including his main fortress at Abu Ghraib, about 30 miles north of the testing site, to be used as human guinea pigs.
But initial translations of the Arabic documents found at the site have not yet shown whether the tests recorded in the films involved biological, chemical or nuclear weapons, or who the men in the filmstrips were.
The looting of the capsules seems likely to become a parable for much of the nature of the American occupation of Iraq.
Some defense officials who discussed the incident on the basis of anonymity said events at the desert site showed the Bush administration's error in sending too few troops to Iraq, a decision that high-ranking American officers in Baghdad shortly after its capture said had curbed their powers to crack down on the looting that ransacked the city.
So far, experts working for the Iraq Survey Group, mostly Americans and Britons with long knowledge of Iraq's secret weapons programs, have failed to discover, or at least to announce the discovery of, materials indicating that Mr. Hussein was developing illicit weapons in the final years of his rule.
The site looted was known to the West. In the Persian Gulf war in 1991, it was heavily bombed. Although the site carried several names, the most common of them, the Saddam State Company, left little doubt of the direct link to Mr. Hussein.
After the site came under close inspection by United Nations weapons inspectors who arrived in the wake of the 1991 war, it lost much of its importance as top-secret programs were transferred.
Now, it is a desolate, windswept wasteland, evocative of the billions of dollars Mr. Hussein spent on weapons programs at a time when Iraq was being steadily impoverished by the wars he started and by the United Nations economic sanctions that followed.
But the site's size, about 20 square miles, its history and its strategic positioning in an area that was Mr. Hussein's main political stronghold, made it an inevitable place for American experts to visit shortly after Baghdad fell on April 9.
In the first half of May, a member of a United States Army unit searching for secret weapons said the team had found the eight radioactive testing towers and the concrete crypts beneath them, and had discovered a large radiation source in each crypt.
As reported by The New York Times on May 12, the team recommended that the area be secured by American forces until the radiation sources could be removed.
But the unit's recommendation was evidently ignored. American officers fear that because the villagers may have been continuously exposed to the gamma radiation for as long as a month before they were taken away by American troops on Oct.8, the risks of sickness among the missing villagers could be high.
Judith Miller contributed reporting for this article from New York.
-------- japan
Report: Japan Aims to Make Missile Shield
By Associated Press
November 24, 2003,
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-japan-us-missile-defense,0,2344762.story?coll=sns-ap-world-headlines
TOKYO -- Japan's military wants to help produce components of a next-generation missile shield it is studying with the United States, a move that could force a rethinking of this pacifist nation's long-standing ban on weapons exports, a newspaper reported Monday.
Japan has been conducting research into ballistic missile defense in conjunction with the United States since 1999, prompted by mounting concern about the threat posed by increasingly sophisticated North Korean warheads.
The two allies are working on a missile that could replace the Standard Missile-3, a ship-launched interceptor that is one of the key weapons systems in the U.S. ballistic missile shield commissioned a year ago by President Bush.
Japan's Defense Agency expects development of the new missile to be completed in several years and wants Japanese companies to help manufacture it to keep this nation on the cutting edge of defense technology, the nationally circulated Asahi newspaper reported, citing unnamed agency sources.
Having Japanese factories produce some parts of the missile would require a review of a 3-decade-old policy under which Japan banned weapons exports to all countries, the newspaper said. The 1976 ban was in line with this country's pacifist constitution, which renounces the use of force to resolve international disputes.
The government agreed in 1983 allow the transfer of weapons-related "technology" to the United States, its main ally. But Japanese officials are reportedly concerned that the exception cannot be interpreted as legitimizing exports of parts of weapons systems.
Defense chief Shigeru Ishida recently told Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld the export ban constituted an "obstacle" to helping with the mass production of the next-generation missile interceptors, the newspaper said.
While conducting research into a next-generation missile shield, Japan's military has already decided to acquire two U.S.-designed weapons systems that are part of the U.S. ballistic missile shield scheduled to be operational by 2005.
The Defense Ministry said in August it was seeking more than a billion dollars in next year's budget to buy the SM-3 interceptor and the ground-based Patriot Advanced Capability-3. Deployment is reportedly slated for 2007.
-------- korea
U.S. Plan on N.Korea Involves 5 Nuke States - Kyodo
November 25, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north-plan.html
TOKYO (Reuters) - The United States is devising a plan for North Korea to dismantle its nuclear arms program that would involve the five declared nuclear states -- the United States, France, Russia, China and Britain -- Kyodo news agency reported on Wednesday.
U.S. officials and diplomats close to multilateral talks on North Korea's nuclear weapons program were quoted as saying that fundamental aspects of the plan could be presented to North Korea during a fresh round of talks, likely to take place around December 17-19.
They said the expertise of all the declared nuclear powers was believed needed to verify the complete scrapping of the North Korean nuclear program.
Under the process, North Korea would first be required to make a declaration of all its nuclear activities.
This would be followed by Pyongyang rejoining the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, from which it withdrew in January, and allowing inspections of its nuclear facilities by the United Nations nuclear watchdog.
Experts from the five nuclear powers would then monitor North Korea's efforts at dismantling its nuclear program, Kyodo said.
According to the officials, North Korea's compliance with the plan would be a pre-requisite for providing Pyongyang with the security assurances it wants.
``When they take concrete steps toward scrapping their nuclear program, the security assurance would become effective,'' a senior U.S. official was quoted as saying.
The first round of six-country talks in August, which were attended by the United States, North and South Korea, Japan, China and Russia, failed to make much headway toward resolving the crisis on Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program.
In an attempt to defuse the crisis, Washington said last month it was willing to give Pyongyang unspecified security assurances in exchange for a verifiable and irreversible end to the North's suspected weapons program.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new york
Constellation to Buy NY Nuclear Plant
November 25, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/business/business-utilities-constellation.html
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Baltimore-based Constellation Energy Group (CEG.N) on Tuesday said it has agreed to buy a Rochester, New York nuclear plant for $401 million, building up its presence in the New York power production market.
Constellation will acquire the 495 megawatt R.E. Ginna plant from Rochester Gas & Electric Corp, (RG&E), a unit of Albany, New York-based Energy East Corp. (EAS.N). It will also pay RG&E $21.6 million for nuclear fuel.
Planned upgrades to the plant eventually will increase its total output to 580 megawatts.
Under the terms of the deal, Constellation will sell 90 percent of the plant's output and capacity to RG&E over 10 years at an average price of $44 per megawatt hour.
The acquisition ``provides a steady stream of earnings and cash flow because you've got the power purchase agreement for 90 percent of the power,'' said Mike Worms, an analyst with Harris Nesbitt Gerard.
``And the incremental power that's not sold to Rochester plus the upgrade gives them that much more flexibility and opportunity in the future to either enter into other contracts or sell that power into the market at whatever the prevailing market price is.''
Worms has a ``neutral'' rating on Constellation and does not own any of its shares.
Upon closing the deal, Constellation -- which owns the Baltimore Gas & Electric utility -- will own and operate three nuclear power stations with five units total, putting it on a par with three other power companies for the No. 6 spot nationally.
The acquisition will expand the company's presence in New York, where it owns one unit and part of another at the Nine Mile Point Nuclear Power Station in the city of Scriba, about 50 miles from the Ginna plant.
It also owns the Calvert Cliffs nuclear station on the Chesapeake Bay about 40 miles south of Annapolis, Maryland.
Completing the sale is contingent on a 20-year extension of the plant's license, which currently expires in 2009, from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). RG&E said in a statement that the process to extend the license to 2029 is ``well under way'' and a decision is expected by June 2004.
The acquisition of Ginna will mildly boost earnings between the deal's closing and 2006 and substantially bolster them beyond 2006, Constellation said.
As part of the deal, RG&E will transfer about $202 million in decommissioning funds to Constellation. The money will be used to eventually decommission, or dismantle, and secure the plant's site.
Constellation expects the acquisition to close on June 30, 2004, after receiving required approvals from the NRC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the New York Public Service Commission and other bodies.
Shares of Constellation closed Monday trade on the New York Stock Exchange at $36.12, while shares of Energy East closed at $22.50.
--------
Constellation Energy to Buy Nuclear Plant
November 25, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Nuclear-Plant-Sale.html
ROCHESTER, N.Y. (AP) -- Constellation Energy Group is buying the nation's longest-serving nuclear plant for $401 million.
Constellation, which already owns one nuclear plant and part of another one along the Lake Ontario shore, said Tuesday it is acquiring the 495-megawatt Robert E. Ginna pressurized-water atomic reactor from Rochester Gas & Electric, a division of Albany-based Energy East Corp.
The Ginna plant has churned out electricity for 33 years from its perch overlooking the lake in the rural town of Ontario, 16 miles northeast of Rochester.
Under the deal, which is expected to close next summer, Baltimore-based Constellation will sell 90 percent of the plant's energy to Rochester Gas & Electric for an average price of $44 a megawatt hour for 10 years. Constellation also will pay the utility $21.6 million for nuclear fuel.
The acquisition, expected to close next June 30, needs to be approved by various federal and state nuclear regulatory agencies. The sale is contingent on the plant's operating license, which expires in 2009, being extended next year for another 20 years.
The Ginna plant supplies half of Rochester Gas & Electric's electrical demand. It began operating commercially in July 1970, making it the most durable of America's 103 nuclear plants but not the oldest. It employs 440 people.
The Ginna plant was refitted with steam generators in 1996. Heated by the uranium reactor, the circulating water turns into steam, which drives turbines that power the generators.
In trading on the New York Stock Exchange, Constellation Energy shares rose 48 cents to close at $36.60 while Energy East shares rose 49 cents to close at $22.99.
-------- us nuc waste
Nuclear Fuel Produces Poorly Understood Minerals
DAVIS, California, (ENS)
November 24, 2003
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/nov2003/2003-11-24-09.asp#anchor7
Nuclear fuel waste in long term storage could form mineral phases that are not well understood, according to research by chemists at the University of Notre Dame and the University of California at Davis (UC Davis).
Published recently in the journal " Science," the study hones in on the stability of two minerals - studtite and metastudtite - that contain both uranium and peroxide.
The researchers found that studtite and metastudtite may be readily formed on the surface of nuclear waste under long term storage. This formation comes possibly at the expense of other minerals, such as uranyl oxides and silicates, which have been more thoroughly studied and are better understood, the researchers report.
They explain that studtites most likely form when radioactivity from uranium rich rocks or nuclear fuel converts water to peroxide, which reacts with the minerals.
Nuclear fuel waste under long term storage, for example in the proposed Yucca Mountain depository in Nevada, would remain sufficiently radioactive to form studtite and metastudtite at the surface for thousands of years.
Not enough is known about these minerals to know if they will make radioactive wastes more stable or less, said study coauthor Alexandra Navrotsky of UC Davis.
"It means that the models used to assess fuel corrosion are incomplete," said Navrotsky. "Whether the end result will be more or less corrosion than without studtite is a combination of thermodynamics and kinetics which needs to be explored further."
Studtite also has been found on the surface of spent nuclear fuel stored at Hanford, Washington nuclear site and on material at the site of the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident in Ukraine.
Uranyl peroxides must be considered, the researchers write, in assessing the impact of uranyl materials on the release of radioactivity from nuclear waste in a depository, the researchers said.
-------- us politics
CONGRESSIONAL MEMO
Spending Discipline Proves Unfashionable This Year
November 25, 2003
By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/25/politics/25BUDG.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 24 - The Medicare bill about to clear Congress is the latest example of how budget discipline is being given short shrift at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, critics here and on Wall Street say.
By official calculations, the tax cuts and increases in benefits enacted this year alone will increase the national debt by more than $750 billion over the next decade, and the actual amount could be much larger.
"In fiscal terms, there is no doubt in my mind that this has been the most irresponsible year ever," said Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan watchdog organization that favors restraining the budget deficit.
Ed McKelvey, an economist at Goldman Sachs, declared in the investment firm's newsletter last week that "the U.S. federal budget is out of control."
The official estimates are that the Medicare bill will cost $400 billion over the next 10 years; the tax cuts approved in May, $300 billion in lower revenues; higher Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors adopted in February, $50 billion; and new veterans' benefits, $22 billion.
That comes to $772 billion. If the energy bill backed by the Bush administration becomes law, that would add another $23 billion in tax cuts, bringing the total to $795 billion.
Those figures are conservative. Many health experts expect drug prices to rise more than Congress anticipated in the Medicare legislation. And there will surely be fierce pressure on politicians to eliminate what is called the doughnut hole in the new prescription drug benefit: the lack of coverage for drug expenses each year that exceed $2,250 but are less than $5,850.
On the revenue side of the ledger, early expiration dates, called sunsets, were written into the tax bill this year to hold down the official 10-year cost. Tax breaks for married couples and bigger child tax credits are supposed to end after next year. Lower tax rates on dividends and capital gains are supposed to be terminated after 2008.
Few political analysts expect Congress to allow these measures to expire, and if they are extended, the lost revenue in the tax bill over 10 years could be as much as $800 billion, not $300 billion.
These calculations do not count what in budget terms is called discretionary spending, including the $87.5 billion the president proposed and Congress approved this fall to occupy and rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq.
At almost every stop as he travels around the country, President Bush emphasizes the need for "spending discipline." But he has supported the expensive legislation Congress has approved and has not threatened to veto any measure because of its cost.
"One can't expect Congress to lead the charge when it comes to fiscal restraint," said Robert D. Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office and now president of the Urban Institute, a research center. "They will follow the president's lead. If the president is into tax cuts and spending increases, they are going to do him one better."
During the Clinton administration, the White House and Congress were constrained by what was called the pay-go law: a measure enacted under President George Bush in 1990 that required tax cuts or increases in benefits to be offset by equivalent tax increases or benefit reductions. But that law has been allowed to lapse under this president and the Republican-led Congress.
Already, the $374 billion budget deficit in the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30, by far the largest dollar amount ever, is likely to rise to $525 billion in this fiscal year, the economists at Goldman Sachs estimate.
If that is the case, the annual budget picture will have deteriorated by more than $650 billion during Mr. Bush's term as president, from a surplus of $127 billion in the 2001 fiscal year, his first year in office.
The president and his advisers attribute the turn for the worse mainly to the recession, the need for more domestic security in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, and the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the tax cuts and benefit increases enacted this year were not primarily a response to those developments.
The Bush administration no longer advocates a balanced budget. But it forecasts that the deficit will begin to fall next year. Administration officials say the deficits now are not a serious problem.
Joshua Bolten, the president's budget director, told Congress that the current deficit was "manageable if we continue pro-growth economic policies and exercise serious spending discipline."
The administration's critics say the problem is not so much deficits today as those in the years to come.
The Medicare and tax cut laws have been backloaded, so they will be much more expensive down the road than they are this year. For instance, the full Medicare drug benefit will not be in effect until the 2007 fiscal year, three years from now.
The official cost estimates end in the 2013 fiscal year. But the best, though highly speculative, estimates are that the lower revenues from three years of Bush tax cuts in the following 10 fiscal years, 2014 through 2023, could total $3 trillion and that the prescription drug benefit under Medicare could cost the government as much as $1.5 trillion in those years.
On Sunday, Senator Don Nickles, Republican of Oklahoma, said in a speech on the Senate floor that the drug benefit was "not sustainable in its present form" and would "just accelerate the day" when the whole Medicare program collapsed.
At a breakfast with reporters on Monday morning, Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Democratic leader, was sharply critical of the Republicans' budget record, even though he preferred an even more generous prescription drug benefit than the Republicans produced.
"They have passed an irresponsible fiscal policy," Mr. Daschle said, "starting with tax cuts and now loaded with giveaways."
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Death of five soldiers in helicopter crash reminds America of its Afghan conflict
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
25 November 2003
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/story.jsp?story=467013
The death of five United States soldiers in a helicopter crash just north of Kabul yesterday gave Americans an unpleasant reminder of the unresolved campaign in Afghanistan, the second and often forgotten front in President George Bush's war against terrorism.
The cause of the incident - in which eight soldiers were also wounded - was still not clear, 24 hours after the MH-53 helicopter went down after it left coalition headquarters at Bagram Air Base.
Anti-US militants claimed that sustained machine-gun fire from the ground was responsible, but the Pentagon said mechanical failure was a more likely explanation. Eight soldiers were also wounded in the crash. What is clear is that, two years after the overthrow of the former Taliban regime which sheltered Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida organisation, the war continues and that, in some areas, that former malign alliance is regrouping.
The attacks, some from bases in the tribal areas just inside Pakistan, now constitute an increasing threat, not only for the 8,500 US troops in the field against them but also to international efforts to rebuild the country. Indeed, according to General John Abizaid, head of US Central Command which ran both the 2001 Afghan campaign and the 2003 Iraq war, "daily combat operations in Afghanistan are every bit as much and every bit as difficult as those in Iraq". In the past six months, 13 aid workers have been killed, most recently a French employee of the United Nations who was shot dead in the southern town of Ghanzi. Shortly before the MH-53 came down, two US soldiers were wounded when the jeep in which they were travelling was struck by a remote controlled bomb.
That ambush came near the flashpoint town of Shkin, close to the Pakistan border and not far from where two CIA agents were killed in an ambush last month. In all, some 35 Americans have died from hostile fire since the start of the war; nine in the Shkin region since January, according to the Pentagon.
The fatalities may be less than one-tenth of those in Iraq this year but the continuing violence, despite the presence of over 11,000 coalition soldiers, is evidence of how great swathes of Afghanistan, dominated by war lords or plagued by Taliban and al-Qa'ida resistance, are beyond the grip of the US-supported government of Hamid Karzai, the President, in Kabul. Drug production, sharply reduced in Taliban times, is again soaring. Though Nato plans to send more soldiers to various provincial centres, the numbers available at present fall far short of the hopes of Mr Karzai and his American patrons. In the violence-plagued south and east especially, aid organisations are scaling back their operations.
Even in Kabul, were 5,300 Nato troops are deployed to keep order, signs of instability are multiplying. At the weekend, an explosion damaged the capital's Intercontinental Hotel, and at least one person was killed during a gunfight at the Defence Ministry, sparked by a demonstration by dismissed officers.
Afghanistan was a little noted beneficiary of the $87bn (£51bn) package recently approved by Congress, mainly to cover the cost of operations in Iraq. But the mounting evidence that elements of the Taliban and al-Qa'ida are staging a comeback fuels the argument of critics of the Iraq war, that the Bush administration had lost its focus on the real terror threat.
The Afghan danger has been stressed by George Robertson, the outgoing Nato Secretary General. If order was not restored, he said on the sidelines of a session of the alliance's parliamentary assembly, "we will find Afghanistan on all our doorsteps".
• The US has released 20 prisoners from its military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and returned them to their home countries. But it has added another 20 suspects. No charges have been filed against any of the 660 prisoners at the US navy base. A total of 84 prisoners have been transferred so far to their home countries for release and four others have been returned to Saudi Arabia for imprisonment there.
-------- arms
GE Austrian unit Steyr acquires 29 pct of Slovenian arms factory
LJUBLJANA (AFP)
Nov 25, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031125174142.rar54pka.html
Steyr-Daimler-Puch Spezialfahrzeug, an Austrian subsidiary of US company General Dynamics, has acquired a 29-percent stake in Slovenian armoured cars and cannon tubes factory Sistemska Tehnika, the factory's major shareholder said Tuesday.
"In exchange for the 29-percent stake, SSF gave Sistemska Tehnika the licence for producing Steyr's Pandur 8x8 armoured vehicle," Viator Vektor, the Slovenian transport company that owns 51 percent of Sistemska Tehnika, said in a statement.
"The use of the licence has no time or quantity limitations," it said, adding that negotiations over the deal had lasted for more than four months.
Sistemska Tehnika, a former part of the state-owned Slovenian Steelworks company which is being privatised, is Slovenia's only armoured vehicle producer.
It currently produces SSF's armoured vehicle model Pandur 6x6.
The Slovenian government earlier this year signed a contract to buy 36 Pandur 6x6 armored vehicles for its army by 2005 in a deal valued at some eight billion tolars (34 million euros, 40 million dollars).
Viator Vektor, which is state-owned, will keep its 51-percent stake in Sistemska Tehnika while the Slovenian Steelworks company will hold a 20-percent stake.
The Slovenian weekly Mladina reported on Monday that the deal with SSF would mark the entry of the US military industry in Slovenia ahead of the country's accession to NATO next year.
"Viator Vektor hopes Sistemska Tehnika, with Steyr's and General Dynamic's support, will make large profits on foreign markets through the sale of the 8x8 model," Mladina said.
-------- business
Boeing Dismisses 2 in Hiring of Official Who Left Pentagon
November 25, 2003
By LESLIE WAYNE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/25/business/25TANK.html?pagewanted=all&position=
The Boeing Company dismissed its chief financial officer and a vice president yesterday for what it called ethical misconduct in the hiring of the vice president, a former Pentagon official who had been involved in contract negotiations with the company.
The chief financial officer, Michael Sears, was fired for discussing a job with the Pentagon official, Darleen Druyun, while she was representing the government in talks with the company over a multibillion-dollar contract to supply aerial refueling tankers.
An internal inquiry found that Mr. Sears, once considered a candidate for Boeing's top job, and Ms. Druyun, who was also fired, tried to cover up their discussions, the company said.
"Compelling evidence of this misconduct by Mr. Sears and Ms. Druyun came to light over the last two weeks," Philip M. Condit, Boeing's chairman and chief executive, said in a statement. "Upon review of the facts, our board of directors determined that immediate dismissal of both individuals for cause was the appropriate course of action." That means they will be denied severance benefits.
Boeing said that neither Mr. Sears nor Ms. Druyun, a former civilian Air Force acquisitions official, were available for comment yesterday.
Ms. Druyun, who was vice president and deputy general manager of the company's missile-defense business, is also being investigated by the Defense Department's inspector general over accusations that she gave proprietary financial data to Boeing about a competing aerial tanker bid from Airbus while she was still an Air Force official. She joined Boeing last January after having resigned from the Pentagon as a deputy assistant secretary the previous November.
Boeing's action can be seen as an indication that it wants to get ahead of any government investigation into its actions and polish an image that has already been tarnished. In July, the Air Force withheld $1 billion in rocket launching contracts from Boeing and barred it from that business for 60 to 90 days after determining that the company had illegally acquired thousands of pages of proprietary documents belonging to the rival Lockheed Martin Corporation. It was the stiffest punishment imposed on any major military contractor in decades.
The Defense Department had recently subpoenaed Boeing and asked it to produce documents in the government's investigation into Ms. Druyun, prompting the company to begin its own internal inquiry. The firing of Mr. Sears, 52, and Ms. Druyun, 56, resulted from that internal inquiry, said John Dern, a Boeing spokesman.
"The company is conceding a pattern of misconduct," said Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, a northern Virginia research group that studies the military. "There had been concerns expressed by Boeing competitors about its behavior. But no one was expecting heads this high to roll."
Boeing said that James Bell, senior vice president for finance and the corporate controller, would be the acting chief financial officer.
Richard Aboulafia, a military analyst with the Teal Group, an aerospace consulting firm in Fairfax, Va., said that it was imperative for Boeing to clean its own house, especially as it competed for more military contracts. "The danger to Boeing is that its enemies in Washington will use this and take advantage of it," he said.
Indeed, Boeing's announcement comes at a time that the $50 billion company is expanding into the military business to offset declines in commercial aviation. By next year, military contracts are expected to provide more than half the company's business, and the controversial $20 billion aerial tanker deal was considered a plum for the company.
Washington critics of Boeing - particularly those who contended the $20 billion aerial tanker contract was a sweetheart deal for the company - said its actions confirmed their earlier suspicions of an overly cozy relationship between Boeing and the Air Force during the negotiating of the aerial tanker deal. Under the deal, the Pentagon will lease 20 Boeing 767's and buy up to 80 more.
"It's politically significant," said Keith Ashdown, a military industry analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonprofit group that was critical of the tanker deal. "It's an admission of guilt of someone who was inappropriately hired. Ms. Druyun's obligations were to get the best deal for taxpayers and national security, not to design a gold-plated parachute for her departure from public service."
Specifically, the Boeing investigation found that Mr. Sears failed to follow company procedures for the hiring of government officials.
The contacts between Boeing, based in Chicago, and Ms. Druyun were both direct and indirect. In October 2002, a month before Ms. Druyun had recused herself from working on Boeing business, she and Mr. Sears met to discuss a possible job at Boeing.
In addition, Ms. Druyun's daughter, Heather, who works at Boeing's office in St. Louis, contacted Mr. Sears in September 2002 to let him know that her mother intended to retire. Mr. Dern, the Boeing spokesman, said the company was investigating the actions of Ms. Druyun's daughter.
In its statement, Boeing said that its internal review also found that both Mr. Sears and Ms. Druyun "attempted to conceal their misconduct," but Mr. Dern declined to elaborate on this statement.
As part of its internal investigation, Mr. Dern said Boeing also looked into the sale of Ms. Druyun's four-bedroom home in the northern Virginia suburbs to a Boeing lawyer, John Judy, who was moving from St. Louis to Washington. Mr. Judy had also been working on the tanker deal, although Mr. Dern said that there was "no indication of anything inappropriate" in the sale of the house and that it was "coincidental" to the Boeing-Druyun relationship. The house was sold for $692,000, in line with house prices in the area.
It remains unclear what effect the dismissals will have on Boeing's ability to land more government contracts. Already, an aide to Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who has been the most vocal critic of the Boeing tanker deal, said that he was considering asking the Air Force to hold off on carrying out the contract, whose terms are still being set, to try to renegotiate a better price for the government.
"The evidence to date suggests that this is a one-off event," said Howard Rubel, a military analyst with Soundview Technologies Group, an investment bank in Greenwich, Conn. "Someone made a mistake and it is most important for Boeing to communicate that it has zero tolerance for unethical conduct."
Still, Mr. Rubel added that the summary dismissal of these high executives "is a stunning message."
Already, the Air Force has indicated it is concerned about the pattern of behavior laid out by Boeing.
"The Air Force deplores behavior that jeopardizes the integrity of government procurement activities," It said in a statement. "Air Force leadership is very concerned with the revelation that Ms. Druyun and the chief financial officer are being dismissed from Boeing for cause." The Air Force statement said it might ask the Pentagon's inspector general to investigate contacts between Mr. Sears and Ms. Druyun as part of its existing investigation into Ms. Druyun's actions.
This is not the first time that Ms. Druyun has faced scrutiny. In late 1990, she was one of five top Air Force officials investigated by the Pentagon's inspector general for funneling millions of dollars in expedited payments to the McDonnell Douglas Corporation in an attempt to keep the company afloat. The Pentagon inspector general recommended disciplinary action against Ms. Druyun and the others, but the Air Force later challenged the inspector general's report and exonerated Ms. Druyun of any wrongdoing.
--------
Boeing Fires 2 Top Officials In Hiring Probe
By Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 25, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11875-2003Nov24?language=printer
Boeing Co. fired its chief financial officer yesterday, saying that he covered up his improper attempt to hire a senior Air Force official who supervised Pentagon contracts with the company. The Air Force official, who eventually joined Boeing, also was dismissed.
Michael M. Sears, a 30-year Boeing veteran, and Darleen A. Druyun, a Boeing senior vice president and former Air Force deputy chief procurement officer, were fired for violating company policies on hiring. The company's internal investigation found that Sears approached Druyun about joining Boeing while Druyun was overseeing hundreds of Boeing contracts for the Air Force.
Boeing did not say how Sears and Druyun sought to cover up their actions.
The dismissals revived concerns about the "revolving door" between the Pentagon and defense companies. In addition, Sears's departure adds uncertainty to succession at Boeing, where he was considered a top contender to replace chairman and chief executive Philip M. Condit.
The firings came on the day President Bush signed the defense bill that gives the Air Force permission to lease and buy 100 Boeing aircraft for use as refueling tankers. The Pentagon inspector general already is investigating whether Druyun passed proprietary information to Boeing during the tanker negotiations. The Air Force and the inspector general may renew their scrutiny of how Boeing negotiated the tanker deal and won a competition to launch satellites.
"So far there is no indication that Boeing benefited in any way from Mike and Darleen's improper contact, but we are expanding the internal review to ensure we have all the facts," Condit said in a letter to Boeing employees yesterday.
The Air Force said it is "examining options in this matter," including asking the inspector general to investigate the alleged impropriety. "Air Force leadership is very concerned with the revelation that Ms. Druyun and the chief financial officer for Boeing are being dismissed from Boeing," it said in a statement. "The Air Force deplores behavior that jeopardizes the integrity of government procurement activities. Scrupulous adherence to the letter and spirit of procurement regulations is essential to the underlying integrity of defense acquisition programs."
Sears is the first senior defense industry executive in a generation to be fired over an ethical lapse. Boeing's internal investigation found that he used Druyun's daughter, Heather, a Boeing employee in St. Louis, as a conduit in initial employment discussions in September 2002. The probe turned up e-mails in which Sears contacted Heather Druyun about a possible position and others in which she relayed the messages to her mother.
Sears and Darleen Druyun met for discussions about a job at the company in October, according to Larry McCracken, Boeing's spokesman. Druyun didn't recuse herself from decisions involving the company until Nov. 5, at least two weeks after the initial meeting, the investigation showed. At the time, Boeing and the Air Force were in negotiations over the Boeing tanker contract.
Druyun retired from the Air Force in November and began working at Boeing in January as vice president and deputy general manager of missile defense systems. Druyun was also offered a position at Lockheed Martin Corp. but turned it down because she wanted more responsibility, her attorney has said.
Boeing began its investigation of Druyun's hiring in the summer when she became a target of critics of the tanker deal. The investigation, led by an outside law firm, initially turned up no impropriety. Two weeks ago, the coverup was discovered, McCracken said. The company's board was briefed Friday and met again Sunday night to approve a decision to fire Sears and Druyun, both 56. James A. Bell, senior vice president of finance, was named acting chief financial officer.
Druyun's attorney did not return a call for comment, and Sears could not be reached. No action has been taken against Druyun's daughter, who is a junior employee at the company. "There will be some further investigation to see if she had any part in this," said McCracken.
Boeing was already under an ethical cloud after an Air Force inquiry found in July that the company had proprietary Lockheed Martin documents during a competition for rocket launches. The company was stripped of $1 billion in business and was suspended from new space contracts. Former senator Warren B. Rudman completed an inquiry into the company's ethics last week, but Boeing has now asked him to expand it into Boeing's procedures for hiring government employees.
The Air Force may reopen its own inquiry into the stolen documents in the rocket-launch competition.
The firings will probably lead many defense companies and government officials to reexamine whether a campaign in the 1980s for higher ethical standards was eroded by a recent push for more flexibility in government contracting, said Steven L. Schooner, an associate professor with the Government Procurement Law Program at George Washington University.
"Inevitably this is going to lead to broader scrutiny of how companies hire former government officials," said Loren Thompson, a defense industry consultant.
Some in Congress had questioned Druyun's role in negotiating a $21 billion tanker contract for the Air Force. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a chief critic of the deal, had complained that Druyun seemed to act as an advocate for Boeing rather than for the Air Force.
Druyun's dismissal will probably give critics of the tanker deal more leverage as the Air Force determines how to implement the contract. The Pentagon has been fighting requests by McCain for internal e-mails and documents related to the lease-buy strategy. "It now increases the necessity to get the documents from the Pentagon," said McCain.
Before the latest revelations, Boeing had been working to repair its image with the Air Force, which was considering lifting its temporary ban on awarding new space contracts to the company. To show its commitment, Boeing had created an office of internal governance.
"Boeing always used to be viewed as a conservative, highly ethical, results-driven organization," said Thompson. "The implication [of yesterday's actions] is that the company might have had a chronic ethical problem going back for some time, and taints a fair amount of the work it has been engaged in."
--------
Boeing Continues on Downward Path
Firings Shadow Company's Efforts to Remake Itself as Defense Contractor
By Greg Schneider
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 25, 2003; Page E01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11876-2003Nov24?language=printer
Boeing Co. used to be known primarily for one of the most positive things about modern life: getting on a big 747 and jetting to far-off places.
But this year Boeing has more often been associated with bad news, from the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia, which Boeing built and helped manage, to ethics violations and charges of political favoritism.
Yesterday's announcement that two top executives were fired for what the company called "unethical" behavior was the latest in an unusual series of missteps for one of America's top corporations. One of the fired executives, Chief Financial Officer Michael M. Sears, was considered by many to be the heir apparent to chief executive Philip M. Condit.
And the crux of the scandal, Sears's effort to woo and hire a Pentagon official while the official was still overseeing Boeing programs for the government, leaves a cloud over what has become the company's most lucrative line of business, defense contracting.
"For an airplane company, the term 'spiraling downward' is a pretty unfortunate metaphor, but in some ways for this year it's pretty appropriate for Boeing," said Richard Aboulafia, an industry expert with the Teal Group consulting firm.
This year will be the first time Boeing's arch rival, the European company Airbus, takes the lead in worldwide sales of commercial aircraft, Aboulafia said. That comes amid an overall slump in commercial air travel that will lead to the shutdown of Boeing's venerable 757 production line next year. The slowdown in commercial aerospace dragged Boeing to a $414 million net loss for the first nine months of this year on revenue of $37.3 billion, compared with a loss of $98 million on revenue of $40.4 billion for the same part of 2002.
Some of the blows to Boeing's business have been self-inflicted. Earlier this year, Boeing lost more than $1 billion in military space business after admitting that an employee possessed proprietary documents from Lockheed Martin Corp. during a competition to build Air Force rockets.
With the market for commercial space launches all but non-existent, the company is counting on military launch business and hopes to be allowed to bid for future Air Force rocket contracts. It was not clear whether yesterday's revelations would affect those chances, but the Air Force said it was considering an investigation of Boeing's conduct.
Also yesterday, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said he would renew efforts to fight Boeing's controversial deal to lease tanker planes to the Air Force -- a deal President Bush signed only hours after the announcement of the executives' firings.
Any disruption to the $21 billion tanker deal could have serious ramifications for Boeing, which has said it will have to shut down its production line for 767 jetliners and cut thousands of jobs if the arrangement falls through.
Despite the flow of bad news, Boeing was officially upbeat. "The company has certainly had some challenges this year. While we would have preferred that they not have occurred, the fact is that we have dealt with some very challenging issues and some very challenging times I think openly and with a great deal of candor, and will continue to do so," spokesman John Dern said.
Wall Street analysts congratulated Boeing for taking quick and decisive action in firing Sears and Darleen A. Druyun, a former Air Force acquisitions chief who was hired in January as a senior vice president. The company's stock gained 3 cents to close at $38.89.
"Overall we view this as a neutral event for Boeing," Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Mecray wrote in a bulletin to investors. "While we continue to believe in the long-term health of the company, the next couple of years continue to be overshadowed by the lack of visible commercial demand and an anemic airline recovery."
Those factors -- the perpetual boom and bust of the commercial airline industry -- are what led Boeing to remake itself over the last decade. Boeing has long been one of those corporate names that stands for a whole industry -- the all-American planemaker, just as General Motors means cars and Coca-Cola means soft drinks.
But beginning with the 1996 purchase of McDonnell Douglas Corp., Boeing drove aggressively into defense and space markets in search of a more reliable revenue stream. This year will be the first time government contracting accounts for more of the company's revenue than commercial aircraft.
Some in the aerospace industry say Boeing has seemed willing to do anything to win government business, from promising high technology at low costs to waging behind-the-scenes whisper campaigns to discredit competitors. The company even moved its headquarters from Seattle, where it had been for 85 years, to Chicago in 2001 in a bid to shed its traditional image as "just" a builder of planes. The results have been undeniably successful, as Boeing has become NASA's top contractor and the second-biggest Pentagon supplier behind Lockheed Martin. Boeing is the overall contractor for the nation's missile defense system, runs the International Space Station, builds the Navy's Super Hornet fighter plane, is putting together the Army's entire slate of future combat technology, and manages the space shuttle program in a joint venture with Lockheed.
The government's dependence on Boeing for such major programs makes it difficult to punish the company for serious ethics concerns, said Steven L. Schooner, an associate law professor and co-director of the Government Procurement Law Program at George Washington University Law School.
"Even given the horrific chain of events, the odds are it's not going to affect Boeing's ability to sustain its business relationship with its government customer," Schooner said. "Part of it comes down to the realities of defense consolidation," with few companies left that are big enough to step in if a Boeing or any other contractor gets in trouble on a program.
For instance, though the Air Force banned Boeing from rocket launches in June after the company admitted taking proprietary information from Lockheed Martin, the Pentagon has waived the ban twice. Both times, the military needed satellites launched from the West Coast to reach a particular orbit, and Boeing was the only company that had facilities to do so.
One matter thrown into uncertainty by yesterday's announcements, though, is the issue of who will lead the company into the future. Sears, the former chief financial officer and former president of McDonnell Douglas Aerospace, had been seen as the likely successor to Condit by observers both inside and outside the company.
Sears, who could not be reached for comment yesterday, has a book slated for publication in February titled "Soaring Through Turbulence: A New Model for Managers Who Want to Succeed in a Changing Business World."
Publisher John Wiley & Sons Inc. could not be reached to confirm that the book is still on schedule.
--------
Rumsfeld Orders Review of Boeing Deal
November 25, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Boeing-Rumsfeld.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Tuesday questioned whether the Air Force should go ahead with a multibillion dollar lease deal with Boeing Co. after the company announced the firing of two senior executives, including one linked to the lease negotiations.
When asked whether the contract signing should be delayed until the Pentagon reviews the matter further, Rumsfeld said, ``At a senior staff meeting this morning I asked our senior folks to ask themselves that question and to look into it.''
He said he did not know how long that might take.
Legal authorization for the deal was included in the defense budget signed by President Bush on Monday.
Rumsfeld said Pentagon lawyers would be consulted.
``We're the custodians of the taxpayers' dollars; we have an obligation to see that things are done properly,'' he said.
On Monday, Boeing announced the firing of its chief financial officer, Mike Sears, and former Air Force official Darleen Druyun, just 10 months after Druyun was hired as vice president and deputy general manager of Boeing's Missile Defense Systems unit.
Sears had been considered a top candidate to succeed chairman and chief executive officer Phil Condit.
Boeing said Sears and Druyun were fired for violating company policies on hiring, and that they tried to cover up their misconduct, which is being investigated by the government.
Boeing's internal investigation found that Sears approached Druyun about joining Boeing while Druyun was overseeing hundreds of Boeing contracts for the Air Force.
The Pentagon's inspector general is investigating whether Druyun, while working for the Air Force, passed proprietary information to Boeing during the negotiations over a controversial deal to lease and buy 100 Boeing aircraft for use and refueling tankers.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and others called the leasing agreement a sweetheart deal for Boeing. McCain said Monday about the firings that, ``I think it substantiates our reason for the inquiry and the concern I had about the way that this whole deal was concluded.''
-------- iraq
Pentagon denies mutilation reports
November 25, 2003
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20031124-112310-4977r.htm
The Pentagon yesterday disputed press reports from Iraq that the bodies of two slain U.S. soldiers in Mosul were mutilated by assailants.
Wire-service reports from the scene Sunday quoted Iraqi eyewitnesses as saying the bodies were mutilated. The eyewitnesses told U.S. reporters that the soldiers' throats were slashed and that teenagers picked up cinder blocks and used them to smash the soldiers' heads.
But a Pentagon official and a spokesman at coalition headquarters in Baghdad rebutted those accounts yesterday. They said there was no evidence either man's throat was slashed or of any beatings with rocks or cinder blocks. The official said the cause of death was gunshot wounds.
"There weren't any additional acts of violence committed against the two soldiers," a Pentagon official said.
"The soldiers were not cut nor were their throats slashed," said the allied spokesman. Of rock or cinder-block wounds, the official said, "At this time, we have no indication that this happened."
Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, has been held up by the coalition as a model for creating a peaceful postwar Iraq. But Saddam Hussein loyalists have stepped up attacks there in recent weeks, raising fears within the coalition that the insurgency is spreading farther north.
The Associated Press quoted an eyewitness, 19-year-old Younis Mahmoud, as saying: "They lifted a block and hit them with it on the face."
But the AP dispatch quoted another teenage witness, Bahaa Jassim, as saying the wounds came from gunshots, not stabbings.
"One of the soldiers was shot under the chin, and the bullet came out of his head," the teenager said. "I saw the hole in his helmet. The other was shot in the throat."
The two 101st Airborne soldiers were riding in a civilian vehicle between garrisons in daylight when they were shot by gunmen. The vehicle then crashed into a wall.
The bodies were dragged from the vehicle and "stripped of their personal effect," the coalition spokesman said.
A crowd used rocks to break the vehicle's back window and then looted it. Army soldiers arrived on the scene and found the two bodies lying near the vehicle.
The Pentagon yesterday identified the two dead soldiers as Command Sgt. Maj. Jerry L. Wilson, 45, of Thomson, Ga.; and Spc. Rel A. Ravago IV, 21, of Glendale, Calif.
The Pentagon said the full account will not be known until the Army concludes an investigation.
Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, an allied spokesman in Baghdad, told reporters Sunday: "It is our policy that we do not go into the specific details on injuries sustained by soldiers. And just as a matter of good taste, we would suggest that the media does the same."
Asked whether the soldiers had been shot or stabbed, Gen. Kimmitt said, "We have an ongoing investigation, and we're not going to get ghoulish about this."
----
'Antiterrorfront' to take over some security tasks
November 25, 2003
By Paul Martin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20031125-121024-1214r.htm
LONDON - Iraq's political factions have agreed to establish what they are calling an "antiterror front" to confront the anti-U.S. insurgency, with an organizing committee to meet before the end of this month.
Plans for the force were detailed in a telephone interview with Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader who currently is president of the Iraqi Governing Council.
Members of the antiterror front, which would take over some duties from coalition forces but not immediately replace them, "will come from both inside and outside" the political parties and factions that make up the Governing Council, Mr. Talabani said.
He said a "security committee," which will meet by the end of November, would choose both fighting men and intelligence officers, who would be drawn from existing militias such as his own Kurdish pershmerga, the Iraqi National Council's militia and the Shi'ite Badr Brigade.
The 60,000 pershmerga guerrillas would not be deployed in Arab areas as peacekeepers, but could be used to guard facilities and patrol the borders, he said. That would free up Sunni and other forces for operations in the Sunni Triangle.
Mr. Talabani said the overall antiterror force should include members of the old Iraqi army, including generals.
"But we will not take from Iraq's former intelligence services," he added.
The widely criticized decision by the chief U.S. administrator, L. Paul Bremer, to disband the Iraqi army had "demonstrated great wisdom," Mr. Talabani said.
Many observers have argued that disgruntled army members form a recruiting pool for pro-Saddam Hussein or Islamic terrorists. But Mr. Talabani rejected the idea put forward by other Governing Council members that the army should be recalled.
"Those advocating the recall of the former Iraqi army are propounding the 'stability first' policy that President Bush has rejected," he said. "The Iraqi peoples were victims of the 'stability' imposed by the Iraqi army."
He said that the Iraqi army had "a record of internal repression and external aggression," and that the decree abolishing the Iraqi army had "struck at the roots of the Arab nationalist militarism that plagued Iraq even before Saddam."
He also argued that a swift handover of the anti-insurgency war to newly trained Iraqi forces would be more effective.
He commended the United States for "resolutely striking back at the vicious remnants of Saddam's regime and damaging the network of Ba'athists and foreign Islamists."
But, he warned, "These gains could easily be forfeited if we Iraqis do not bear the brunt of the fighting. ... By taking up arms and routing the terrorists, Iraqis will own their new democracy."
Mr. Talabani, like most Iraqi leaders, favors a much quicker transfer of power and authority to Iraqis. He predicted that Iraqis will regain their sovereignty before the mid-2004 target date set by Mr. Bremer this month.
Yesterday, Mr. Talabani sought the United Nations' recognition of the timetable for Iraqi self-rule. In a letter to the Security Council, he asked for a resolution reflecting plans for an accelerated transfer power to June and elections by the end of 2005.
Security Council members already are discussing the need for such a resolution.
As more power is handed over, Mr. Talabani said, the various political parties and ethnic groups will become more forthcoming in revealing the whereabouts, operations and structures of the insurgents.
"We and other parties have people who know what's going on within Saddam and the Ba'ath Party and Islamic groupings. But until now, parties have had other priorities," he said.
Mr. Talabani also maintained that the bomb attacks that have shaken the country are localized and have not stood in the way of substantial economic and political progress in most of Iraq.
"Iraq is making impressive progress by any standard. Our battle against the terrorists will be long and painful, but while we fight, we will continue to rebuild," he declared in a written statement made available at the time of the interview.
Mr. Talabani, who was in Turkey for talks at the time of two suicide bombings this month, said he had told European ambassadors that Turkey had not been attacked because of its pro-American leanings.
Rather, he said, the bombings were conducted by "a common enemy of all our societies and are part of a war across the world" being waged by Islamic extremists against all Western or moderate Islamic countries.
He said Turkish authorities had agreed to train Iraqi police and security men despite a history of tension between the Turks and the Iraqi Kurds because of a Kurdish uprising in eastern Turkey.
Mr. Talabani said he had assured the Turks that a sovereign Iraq would not support any anti-Turkish activities.
--------
INTERIM GOVERNMENT
Some Members Propose Keeping Iraqi Council After Transition
November 25, 2003
By JOEL BRINKLEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/25/international/middleeast/25COUN.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 24 - Leaders of the Iraqi Governing Council, just days after vowing to dissolve the body when a new provisional Iraqi government is elected in June, are lobbying to stay in power and serve as a second legislative body, perhaps as a senate.
Many details remain to be resolved, and not every council member agrees with this idea. But Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader who is serving as president of the council this month, said in an interview on Monday evening that a majority of the council members "want to keep the Governing Council as it is now."
Some council members who oppose this idea say they believe that the proposal is being promoted by members who are afraid they may not fare as well as they would like in the coming elections. These members also fear that a fight to retain power for the council will be a public relations disaster for the nascent Iraqi state.
"This is from people who have a fear of losing a grip on things," said Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar, an important tribal sheik and council member.
The proponents of keeping the council in some manner include leaders of its most important factions: the two major Kurdish parties, powerful Shiite clerics and prominent exile leaders, among them Ahmad Chalabi. Members like Mr. Yawar who oppose the plan acknowledge that they are in the minority.
American occupation authorities were "very surprised" when the idea was broached with them on Sunday, Mr. Chalabi said. On Monday, an American official said occupation authorities "have concerns" about the idea but declined to discuss it further. Iraqis said they were still in negotiations with staff members from the office of L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator here.
The Governing Council was appointed in July under the direction of American authorities. It has been criticized as ineffective and inaccessible. Only a handful of the 24 members attend most meetings.
On Nov. 15, after intense negotiations with Mr. Bremer, the council's leaders jubilantly announced that a new interim government would be elected in June.
When that happens, Mr. Talabani declared, "the role of the Governing Council will come to an end." But "the next day," said Iyad Alawi, a council member, "people woke up and thought this was done in too hasty a manner."
Like several members interviewed, he said he opposed retaining the Governing Council, at least in its present form. But in the next breath, he added: "It's not realistic to just say goodbye to them. It's not fair to ask them to operate and ratify things and then just dismiss them."
Mr. Chalabi offered a spirited, multilayered defense of the idea, including the notion that: "We will make a security agreement with the United States, but this will not be binding on the new guys. When the Governing Council is gone, there will be voices that want to cancel it." But he also said, "I support the Governing Council going away."
Adel Abdel Mahdi, a representative of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the main Shiite Muslim political party, is among those designated by the council to negotiate with the American authorities. He said in an interview that he supported the proposal without reservation. "We need the Governing Council as a safety valve for the country," he said. "One idea we are proposing is for the council to become a council of state, the final judge of conflicts within the government, the guardian of sovereignty."
Mr. Chalabi is promoting the idea of turning the Governing Council into a senate, while the new interim government would resemble the United States House of Representatives.
Mr. Talabani said he would support that, but that he would prefer adding the council members to the transitional assembly that will be selected in the spring.
For some, it comes down to a matter of emotions. "The Governing Council is the force that opposed Saddam Hussein and, allied with the United States, overthrew him," Mr. Chalabi said. "Now the United States wants to overthrow us?" Mr. Talabani made a similar statement.
Mr. Yawar said: "They think they are entitled to a role because they believe they overthrew Saddam Hussein. It was the United States that overthrew Saddam while we were eating TV dinners."
--------
Iraqi Security Forces Torn Between Loyalties
Work for U.S. Leaves Recruits Uneasy
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, November 25, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11809-2003Nov24?language=printer
BAIJI, Iraq -- At the sprawling Baiji train station, long ago looted of everything but rail cars, the men of the city's Iraqi Civil Defense Corps lamented their first two months as a pillar of the U.S.-trained security forces that will inherit responsibility for keeping order in Iraq.
In a Sunni Muslim town suspicious of U.S. forces and often the scene of armed opposition, villagers have derided the men of the 3rd Patrol as traitors, pelting them with rocks as their trucks pass. Some were stopped in the market by men in checkered head scarves and warned that their commander faced death. Last month, U.S. Special Forces mistook them for guerrillas or thieves -- that point remains in dispute -- and opened fire on them. Worse, they feared, was what lay ahead if U.S. forces withdrew from this northern town.
"I swear to God, we'll be killed," said Hamid Yusuf, holding a secondhand Kalashnikov rifle.
"We all have the same opinion," insisted one of his commanders, Qassim Khalaf.
"One hundred percent," answered Jamal Awad, another patrol member.
"My family's already made a reservation on a plot of land to bury me," said Yusuf, 29, breaking into a grin as the men traded barbs tinged with gallows humor. "As soon as they leave, I'm taking off my hat," he said, tipping his red baseball cap emblazoned with the corps' emblem, "and putting on a yashmak," the head scarf sometimes worn by resistance fighters.
The U.S. administration in Iraq has high hopes for the Civil Defense Corps and other forces it is aggressively training, projecting them as an eventual alternative to the 130,000 American troops in Iraq. Some members have performed with remarkable bravery, and dozens have died in the recent wave of car bombings across Iraq. But Yusuf and the other men with the unit in Baiji -- a scared, disheartened and confused lot -- embody the challenge facing Iraqi forces as a new institution in a country still taking shape.
In their conversations over a day at the train station -- hours of monotony punctuated by minutes of action -- they provided a glimpse of Iraq's ambitions for the future and a sobering lesson about its present. The men of the 3rd Patrol are haunted by unanswered questions. Are they fighting for the United States or Iraq? Are they traitors or patriots? And at what cost do they sacrifice ideals of faith, nationalism and tradition, the essence of their identity?
"We have children, we have families and we need to live," said Yusuf, sitting with the others on a stack of railroad ties, as a brisk wind blew over them. "We don't love the Americans, but we need the money. It's very difficult, but there's no alternative."
The eight men of the 3rd Patrol were trained and equipped by Lt. Col. Larry "Pepper" Jackson, the commander in Baiji, who works by a credo that has made the military in Iraq a marvel of improvisation. Adapt to what you have, he said, and work through the challenges. So far, he has outfitted 198 members of the civil defense force, along with more than 450 Iraqi police officers. As elsewhere in the country, the pace of induction has picked up markedly in recent weeks under the rubric of "Iraqification." Of the 131,000 Iraqis under arms -- more than twice the figure of Oct. 1 -- 8,500 are in the Civil Defense Corps, a contingent that will eventually grow to 40,000.
Jackson put his recruits through three weeks of training -- drilling, marksmanship, first aid and basic combat skills. "And I'm talking basic combat skills," he said. He dealt with the language barrier and even established some camaraderie with the recruits -- some call him captain or general, whichever sounds more senior. He faces no target number for enlistment, but was told to work as fast as he could and recruit as many people as possible. He said he felt induction was proceeding at "the right pace," but that, in the end, it wasn't up to him.
"What's to say what's too fast? I don't know," Jackson said. "That's the thousand-dollar question. What's too fast?"
Either way, he said, the goal remained the same -- to turn authority over to Iraqis sooner rather than later.
"I try to tell them it's not loyalty to me, it's loyalty to your community," he said. "I tell them, 'What are you going to do when it's just you downtown? That's what you need to be trained and prepared for, because eventually that's going to come.' "
'What Can We Do?'
Baiji, about 130 miles north of Baghdad, sits at the tip of the Sunni Triangle, a swath of territory in northern and western Iraq from which former president Saddam Hussein drew most of his support. But its history with the former government tells only part of the story. It is also a region shaped by tribal traditions and reflexive nationalism, stitched together by a fierce interpretation of Islam. Those questions of identity are even more resonant now. The Sunni Muslims who long held sway in this country, where Shiite Muslims make up the majority, face a future without an organized voice, clinging to the privileges to which they have grown accustomed.
The men in the 3rd Patrol share those fears and feelings of insecurity. Perhaps more than anyone else, they understand the difficulty posed by Jackson's advice. They say they are torn between loyalties to family and faith, country and personal welfare. They have yet to determine where they stand.
The clergy in Baiji, they recalled, had praised those fighting U.S. soldiers as sacred warriors and condemned those working with American forces as infidels. One cleric, they said, had insisted that they could not fast during the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims abstain from food or drink from sunrise to sunset. As collaborators with infidels, the cleric's reasoning went, they were infidels as well. Raised listening to the clergy, many of the men said they did not disagree with that logic.
"Under Islam, you should not shake hands with Americans, you should not eat with Americans, you should not help the Americans," said Shakir Mohammed, 23, a deputy commander of his patrol.
"Islam doesn't accept it," added Yusuf.
"But what can we do?" Mohammed asked. "You have to work. It's my job."
Awad, 25, gaunt like the others, shook his head. It was a gesture at once confused and despairing. "We can quit working with the Americans. Fine," he said. "But will the clergy give us salaries?"
Mohammed grinned at the idea. "They pay us," he said, "and we'll stop working with the Americans."
"Money is good," Yusuf said, kissing his hand with flair. "Clothes and food for my children. This is the good thing. Should I sleep without dinner and not work with the Americans? No. I should work with the Americans and have dinner."
Yusuf and most of his colleagues make $130 a month, a respectable salary in a city where U.S.-provided jobs in security are among the few available. The more senior officers in the corps make $140 or $175. All of them hail from large families -- the smallest with six members, the largest with 14. Nearly all belonged to the now-disbanded Iraqi army, and many have young children at home.
On their twice-weekly, 24-hour shifts, they sleep on a tile floor in a room with no windows, bringing blankets from home. They brew tea in a charred kettle and share a cup fashioned from the bottom of a plastic water bottle. Each day of Ramadan, adhering to the fast despite the cleric's judgment, they dispatch one colleague to bring food from the market for the evening meal.
Like soldiers anywhere, they complain most about what they don't have: cars, radios, bulletproof vests, new uniforms, boots and, in a town where attacks have tripled since July, more ammunition. They trade stories about close calls, most hauntingly about the time they came under fire from Special Forces troops a month ago.
Versions of the story conflict. Jackson, acknowledging the sequence of events was "a little sketchy," said the civil defense patrol traded fire with a dozen or so looters at the rail yards. A Special Forces unit arrived and started shooting. In the end, Jackson said, three or four members of the 3rd Patrol were wounded. Yusuf and his colleagues put the number at five.
"Some guys got caught in cross-fire. It was nothing intentional," Jackson said. "There was a lot of confusion. In war, sometimes that happens. War doesn't go perfectly. My concern was taking care of them and their families. That was my concern."
Yusuf and his colleagues acknowledged that the wounded were taken to a U.S. military hospital and given the best care possible. But they dispute the contention that looters were present or that they fired before being shot at. They insist the Special Forces soldiers mistook them for guerrillas. In a fusillade of fire that one of them compared to a horror movie, they said they ran for cover, scattering their lunch of potatoes, tomatoes and bread. Trails of blood, blackened by time, are still smeared across the train platform.
"We were yelling, 'Civil defense! Civil defense!' " said Khalaf, the unit's leader. One of their colleagues, Alaa Nasser, 21, was critically wounded in both legs and remains in a hospital in Baghdad. His colleagues said he needs $425 for an operation. The four others have yet to return to work.
"Only Rambo could have handled the situation," Awad said.
An Emotional Toll
In Baiji's atmosphere of unease, other young men in the city express amazement that the 3rd Patrol is still working. Latif Sayyib makes $2 a day as a carpenter, when he can find work. His brother, Wathban, works at the electric utility. No amount of money, they said, would persuade them to face the risks entailed in joining security forces that they contend are indelibly tainted by the occupation.
They grew up with Yusuf and some of the others, attending school together or playing soccer in the city's dusty streets. Suspicion is so intense in the city that they do their best to avoid contact with their old friends.
"I don't want to see them," Latif said, sitting in his home. "I'll see them in their house, but if I see them in the street or the market, I'll only stay a minute or two because I fear I'll become a target."
His brother nodded.
"Their destiny will be the same as it was in Vietnam," Wathban said. "The Americans left their allies there and they were killed. I think the same will happen here."
In the streets of Baiji, graffiti clutters the walls, tinted black by fires at the city's oil refinery. "Anyone dealing with the Americans will be killed," says one slogan, scrawled by hand. "Saddam will be back, you traitors," warns another.
"The people here don't forget our faces," Mohammed said.
When the men of the 3rd Patrol were training, they said, children threw rocks at them. Awad said he was hit in the back, and had to be kept in bed for three days. Several times, they were pelted with tomatoes as they drove through the vegetable market. They tried to bring civilian clothes with them and change into their uniforms on the job. When they did, their commander threatened to dock $5 from their pay.
Fear has prompted three of the men to leave in the past month, and nearly everyone said they had thought about it.
"Sometimes when I'm in a taxi, I hear the insults," Mohammed said. "I hear them say, 'These people working with the civil defense are traitors, they're agents. Their future will be grim.' "
"It stays in our heart," Awad said.
"We're scared, I swear to God," Yusuf said. "We don't know at what moment we'll be killed. We don't know what will happen tomorrow." Mohammed interrupted him. "Tomorrow? In 15 minutes, we don't know what will happen."
Dusk arrived by late afternoon, as it does during winter in Iraq. The men chatted about the Americans, about their city and their country. It was the talk so familiar in Baiji -- confused, contradictory and ambiguous. Some were fond of Jackson and the soldiers they had met, but angry at the idea of an occupation. Some insisted that the guerrillas were fighting only for money. In the same breath, they insisted that the United States had come for Iraq's resources and that overthrowing Hussein was an afterthought.
"Some people say when the Americans take all our oil, they'll leave," Yusuf said. "They'll leave us to kill each other."
As night approached, they gathered wood for their fire. Dinner arrived -- tomatoes, cucumbers and parsley in a black plastic bag. In a looted warehouse littered with charred wood and shattered glass and concrete, they gathered around -- "like brothers," Mohammed said, in a town that is remarkably unfraternal. And over cigarettes, they talked about what they hoped from their future.
"I want my children to live in safety," said Khalaf, 33.
"We want to be like Kuwait. We want to live in luxury," Yusuf said. " We want fancy cars, not the worn-out cars we have."
"Health," Awad volunteered.
Mohammed nodded his head, then added another. "We don't want to always be scared."
--------
Video Shows Iraqi Firing at Cargo Plane
November 25, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Missile.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- A homemade videotape given to a French journalist showed a man firing a surface-to-air missile at a DHL cargo plane, moments after a U.S. helicopter flew overhead -- apparently without noticing him. The tape appeared to record the insurgent operation Saturday in which a missile struck the wing of a DHL cargo plane, forcing the aircraft to make an emergency landing at Baghdad's airport. It was the first time insurgents struck a civilian plane in Iraq. The U.S. military said there were no injuries to the three-member crew.
No statement accompanied the tape, which was given to Sara Daniel, a journalist with the Paris-based magazine Le Nouvel Observateur. The magazine's next edition comes out Thursday; Daniel distributed the videotape to other news organizations.
Officials at the Pentagon said they had not seen the video and could not comment on it.
The videotape showed about a dozen men standing in an open field, several of them wearing checkered headscarves over their faces. A Black Hawk helicopter flew nearby at an altitude of about 350 feet, but appeared not to spot the men. Three cars were parked nearby.
One of the men raised a shoulder-fired missile, whose type could not be determined. The gunner aimed and launched the missile at an unseen target. Trailing white smoke, the missile initially climbed almost vertically, then executed a sharp right turn as it gathered speed.
The tape continued to roll, but showed the men scrambling to their cars. After a time, the camera was again pointed to the sky as the stricken airliner, trailing flames and smoke, descended toward the airport. No impact is shown.
Insurgents fighting the U.S. occupation of Iraq have released videotapes of attacks on American troops in the past.
One that surfaced last week on the Internet -- apparently for recruiting purposes -- showed blurred, shaky footage of an American Humvee under heavy machine-gun fire and scenes that showed the aftermath of roadside bombings
-------- israel / palestine
U.S. Presses Israel to Stop Work on New Settlements and Barrier
November 25, 2003
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/25/international/middleeast/25SHAR.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 24 - The Bush administration has sent new signals to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel demanding that his government stop its expansion of settlements and the construction of a barrier in the West Bank, administration officials said Monday.
The officials said the administration's concern was conveyed last week in a meeting in Rome between Mr. Sharon and the White House's top Middle East adviser, Elliott Abrams. The session was disclosed in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
"The point was made very clear that there are some things Israel has to start dealing with early on," said one official, referring to the message delivered by Mr. Abrams.
In another step, Dov Weisglass, Mr. Sharon's chief of staff, is to meet Tuesday with senior American officials at the White House to discuss the administration's plan to reduce the amount of loan guarantees to Israel in response to recent Israeli actions, administration officials said.
Mr. Weisglass's meeting was characterized officially by administration aides as part of an ongoing series of consultations. Nevertheless, there were signs that the tempo of American diplomacy in the area and contacts between Israel and the Palestinians might be about to pick up.
Now that Ahmed Qurei has been installed as the Palestinian prime minister, administration officials say they are ready for a new push, if only to test his willingness or ability to crack down on militant groups.
In a related development, Egypt plans to convene a meeting of Palestinian leaders of all political stripes this week to discuss reviving the cease-fire with Israel.
"There's an opportunity here that we have to seize," said Nabil Fahmy, the Egyptian ambassador to the United States.
Administration officials said Mr. Sharon and the Bush administration continued to disagree about Israeli activities in the West Bank.
The administration, American officials said, favors cutting loan guarantees for Israel by about $250 million of $9 billion over three years, invoking a requirement enacted by Congress that such aid be reduced by what Israel spends on certain activities in the West Bank.
The administration says spending on new settlements and on a barrier separating Jewish settlements from Palestinian communities constitute activities that call for a reduction in loan guarantees. Israel says only the settlements should bring such a step.
-------- mideast
Turkish Court Charges 9 in Bombings Inquiry
November 25, 2003
By CRAIG S. SMITH
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/25/international/middleeast/24CND-TURK.html
ISTANBUL, Nov. 25 - Turkey's State Security Court charged nine people today in connection with two suicide bombings last week in Istanbul that killed 30 people.
The Anatolian Agency, Turkey's state press service, reported that the nine had been charged with "belonging to, aiding and abetting an illegal organization."
The news agency gave no further details. The government has imposed a press blackout on the investigation of the bombings, which targeted the British consulate and a British-based bank, as well as on the investigation of two bombings on Nov. 15 that struck synagogues in Istanbul.
The nine people charged were among 12 taken into custody by Turkey's State Security Court on Monday in connection with the suicide bombings. Three of the suspects were released early today.
Muammer Guler, the Istanbul governor, told reporters on Monday that the investigation was progressing quickly, but he provided few details. "We identified the assailant of the bomb attack against the British Consulate," Mr. Guler said, according to Anatolia. "We are investigating his links, and we have found very important clues."
Mr. Guler declined to identify the suicide bomber who struck the consulate, but the Turkish daily Milliyet reported on Monday that he was Feridun Ugurlu, identified earlier as one of the men believed to have supplied the pickup truck in one of the earlier synagogue bombings.
All four of the suicide bombers are believed to have been Turkish, although authorities have only released the identities of the two who attacked synagogues on Nov. 15: Mesut Cabuk and Gokhan Elaltuntas, both from Bingol, a town in southeastern Turkey. The other bomber is believed to have been Azad Ekinci, also from Bingol.
The State Security Court, charged with investigating and trying people for crimes against the government, was set up by the military after a 1980 military coup.
Turkey has promised to restructure the court as part of its effort to join the European Union, which considers the court below its judicial standards.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday that it was too early to confirm a Qaeda link to the attacks, but many experts say the bombings bore the hallmarks of that terrorist network. British and Israeli antiterrorism experts are reported to be helping in the investigation.
Mr. Erdogan emphasized that the attacks would not dissuade Turkey from strengthening its relations with the West or from becoming the first member of the European Union with a largely Muslim population. Turkey has been trying to join the European Community since 1959.
Separately, the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, arrived Monday in Ankara, the Turkish capital, for what his office called a "gesture of solidarity."
Chancellor Gerhard Schroder of Germany and other European leaders have urged the European Union to speed Turkey's effort to join despite stiff opposition from many Europeans, including opposition Christian Democrats in Germany.
-------- un
Iraqis Ask U.N. for Resolution
November 25, 2003
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/25/international/middleeast/25NATI.html
UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 24 - The Iraqi Governing Council asked Monday for a Security Council resolution recognizing a new American-Iraqi agreement for a speedier transfer of power in Iraq.
"In light of what had transpired, it has become appropriate for the Security Council to adopt a new resolution taking into consideration the new circumstances," Jalal Talabani, president of the Governing Council, said in a letter.
The request will force a conclusion to a debate that began last week as the United States and Britain began floating the idea of a resolution that would endorse the new timeline. But several Security Council members said they might negotiate a wider international role in the political transition.
Several Council diplomats said Monday that it was too early to say how the request would affect their positions, but they said they would probably take up the matter next week in a formal session.
--------
Iraqi Council Asks U.N. To Back Transition Plan
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 25, 2003; Page A25
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11802-2003Nov24.html
UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 24 -- Iraq's U.S.-appointed political leadership Monday asked the U.N. Security Council to adopt a new resolution endorsing the Bush administration's plan to transfer power to a transitional Iraqi administration by the end of June.
Jalal Talabani, acting president of the Iraqi Governing Council, appealed to the 15-nation Security Council in a letter to bless the central elements of a U.S.-Iraqi accord calling for the establishment of a newly elected federal government with a new ratified constitution by the end of 2005.
Today's action was expected to trigger a move by the United States and Britain in the coming weeks to introduce a resolution endorsing Talabani's request, according to U.N. diplomats. But John D. Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, conveyed little sense of urgency in passing a new resolution, saying the United States would first "have to study" the letter "with regards to next steps."
Russia, France and Germany, the Security Council's chief critics of the Iraq war, have welcomed the U.S. decision to speed up the hand-over of power. But they have voiced concern that the Nov. 15 political agreement between the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority and the Iraqi council could provide political advantages to members of the council and sideline the United Nations in Iraq's political transition.
The three governments, meanwhile, continued to press the United States to grant the international community a wider role in overseeing Iraq's political transition. Russia's U.N. ambassador, Sergey Lavrov, complained during a closed-door session of the Security Council on Monday that Talabani's letter included no mention of the U.N. role in Iraq's political process.
He insisted that any Security Council action should take note of a Nov. 10 letter from Talabani to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan that says it is "essential" that the United Nations play an active role in the political process in Iraq. He also urged Annan to appoint a new special representative to oversee U.N. activities in Iraq.
In Monday's letter, Talabani said that Iraq was seeking to create "a unified multilateral democratic federal system that respects the Islamic identity of the majority of the Iraqi people while ensuring the rights of religions and sects."
He also said that Iraq would enshrine the principle of civilian control over the nation's security forces, decentralize the administration of the country, and enforce respect for religious freedom and "equality among all citizens" of Iraq.
Talabani noted that the Iraqi Governing Council would "make the necessary arrangements" -- including the organization of a national census, a voter-registration drive and the establishment of regulations for political parties -- for elections for a transitional government in June.
Council diplomats said that the Security Council would not begin debating the Talabani request until next week. In the meantime, the council authorized Angolan Ambassador Ismael Abraao Gaspar Martins, who is serving as the council's rotating president, to reply to Talabani that the council would take note of the letter and give it its consideration.
-------- us
Video shows U.S. chopper apparently failed to spot guerrillas firing missile at plane
11/25/2003
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2003-11-25-iraq-missile_x.htm
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A homemade videotape given to a French journalist showed a man firing a surface-to-air missile at a DHL cargo plane, moments after a U.S. helicopter flew overhead - apparently without noticing him.
The tape appeared to record the insurgent operation Saturday in which a missile struck the wing of a DHL cargo plane, forcing the aircraft to make an emergency landing at Baghdad's airport. It was the first time insurgents struck a civilian plane in Iraq. The U.S. military said there were no injuries to the three-member crew.
No statement accompanied the tape, which was given to Sara Daniel, a journalist with the Paris-based magazine Le Nouvel Observateur. The magazine's next edition comes out Thursday; Daniel distributed the videotape to other news organizations.
Officials at the Pentagon said they had not seen the video and could not comment on it.
The videotape showed about a dozen men standing in an open field, several of them wearing checkered headscarves over their faces. A Black Hawk helicopter flew nearby at an altitude of about 350 feet, but appeared not to spot the men. Three cars were parked nearby.
One of the men raised a shoulder-fired missile, whose type could not be determined. The gunner aimed and launched the missile at an unseen target. Trailing white smoke, the missile initially climbed almost vertically, then executed a sharp right turn as it gathered speed.
The tape continued to roll, but showed the men scrambling to their cars. After a time, the camera was again pointed to the sky as the stricken airliner, trailing flames and smoke, descended toward the airport. No impact is shown.
Insurgents fighting the U.S. occupation of Iraq have released videotapes of attacks on American troops in the past.
One that surfaced last week on the Internet - apparently for recruiting purposes - showed blurred, shaky footage of an American Humvee under heavy machine-gun fire and scenes that showed the aftermath of roadside bombings.
-------- propaganda wars
Technological Dub Erases a Bush Flub for a Republican Ad
November 25, 2003
By JIM RUTENBERG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/25/politics/25ADS.html
DES MOINES, Nov. 24 - It may be called the Case of the Disappearing Pause.
When President Bush laid out the potential threat that unconventional weapons posed in Saddam Hussein's hands last year in his State of the Union address last year, he became tongue-tied at an inopportune moment.
The line read, "It would take one vial, one canister, one crate, slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known." But Mr. Bush stumbled between the words "one" and "vial." And when at the word vial, he pronounced the "v" as if it were a "w."
Yet in a new Republican commercial that borrows excerpts from that speech, Mr. Bush delivers that line as smoothly as any other in the address, without a pause between "one" and "vial," and the v in "vial" sounds strong and sure.
Republican officials acknowledged yesterday that the change was a product of technology. The line, they said, was digitally enhanced in editing "to ensure the best clarity."
The difference between the speech and excerpt was noticed by strategists for former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont. They saw it as they put together their own advertisement attacking the spot, which presents the Democratic candidates as undermining the fight against terrorism. Word trickled back to Democratic officials, who retrieved the tape and confirmed that there was, indeed, a difference.
The Democrats asked whether the Republican National Committee had gone to the White House with sound equipment to have Mr. Bush recite the line anew for what was the first Republican commercial of the campaign season here. That might have meant that the party was not being truthful when it said it had not coordinated with Mr. Bush when it made the advertisement, a possible violation of law.
The Republicans said there were no such doings. "The audio that you hear is from the State of the Union address, the video that you see is from the State of the Union address," a spokeswoman for the national committee, Christine Iverson, said.
Party officials said the line in question was "cut and pasted." Still, Democrats were ecstatic over the perceived chink in an advertisement that they have criticized for days as unfair.
"Audio cutting and pasting is `Bush speak' for them having doctored their own ad," Jim Mulhall of the Democratic National Committee said.
Ms. Iverson said the Democrats were not exactly aboveboard when they made an advertisement this year that featured an excerpt from the State of the Union address in which Mr. Bush said, "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," a statement that was reported to have been based on questionable intelligence.
She noted that the Democratic advertisement had left out the beginning of the sentence, "The British government has learned that. . . . "
A Republican strategist said it was not uncommon for specialists to rework candidate's speeches to sound better in spots, just as newspapers do not tend to include "umms" and "uhs" in quotations.
Douglas E. Schoen, a Democratic pollster who worked for President Bill Clinton, said that making an alteration in the State of the Union address was different.
"The distinction I would make," Mr. Schoen said, "is what the president says at the State of the Union is an essential part of the historical record."
Martin Kaplan, associate dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, was less concerned.
"Changing the sense of something is a serious issue, this isn't that," Mr. Kaplan said. "But it does change the sound of leadership. It's relevant for a president whose narrative is that he's inarticulate."
--------
Iraqi Council Halts Arab TV Network's News Broadcasts
U.S. Approved Move Against Al-Arabiya
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, November 25, 2003; Page A24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10866-2003Nov24?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Nov. 24 -- The U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council banned a popular Arab satellite news network from broadcasting from Iraq and seized equipment from its bureau in Baghdad on Monday after it aired a taped message, purportedly from former president Saddam Hussein, that called for attacks on Iraqis cooperating with the American occupation.
L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator, approved and authorized the move against al-Arabiya, an official with the U.S.-led administration said. The network and its competitor, al-Jazeera, are the most influential news broadcasts both in Iraq and the rest of the Arab world. Jalal Talabani, who currently holds the council's rotating position of president, announced the order and said legal action against the station may follow.
Meanwhile, military officials and a witness raised questions about reports that two American soldiers killed Sunday in the northern city of Mosul had been beaten and had their throats slit, the Associated Press reported.
A military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Army had no indication that the men were beaten with rocks or that their bodies were mutilated. One witness, a teenager who identified himself as Bahaa Jassim, said the soldiers' fatal wounds appeared to have come from bullets.
The decision to shut the al-Arabiya office -- sharply criticized by media watchdog groups -- marked a dramatic escalation in the long-festering dispute that pits the U.S. occupation authority and its Iraqi allies against the two networks.
In September, the stations were temporarily barred from covering the council's news conferences or entering ministries. Throughout the occupation, U.S. officials have been blunt in their judgments that both networks incite violence against American forces with their relentless coverage of attacks on soldiers, their sometimes inflated counts of U.S. casualties and their airing of statements purportedly from guerrilla groups.
But in ordering the move, the U.S. administration and its allies again faced the formidable task of negotiating civil liberties in a country under occupation, without a constitution or an elected government.
U.S. and Iraqi officials "have both been encouraging all journalists in Iraq to practice responsible journalism and have raised concerns before, particularly with the pan-Arab satellite stations, about some of the coverage," said Charles Heatly, a spokesman with the U.S.-led administration. "Ambassador Bremer fully agreed with and supported the Governing Council's decision."
Talabani said at a news conference that the move was taken following the station's broadcast Nov. 16 of an audiotape said to contain the voice of Hussein. It urged Iraqis to fight "those who are installed by foreign armies" as well as the soldiers themselves, calling such attacks a "legitimate and patriotic duty." President Bush dismissed the tape as propaganda, and the CIA said the recording quality was so poor that it could not reach any judgments on the tape's authenticity.
Talabani said the threat amounted to "an incitement to murder."
"Inciting murder or violence is illegal under the laws of the entire world," he said. "Saddam in our eyes is a criminal, a torturer, a war criminal, and whoever disseminates for him exposes himself to legal punishment."
After announcing the order, about 20 Iraqi police officers entered the two-story brick offices of al-Arabiya, methodically registered equipment inside and then seized key broadcasting devices as well as the staff's satellite phones, journalists there said. Hours later, the bureau chief, Wahad Yacoub, signed a statement agreeing not to broadcast from Iraq until the matter was resolved, although he said the network would continue delivering news on Iraq from its head office in the United Arab Emirates.
Journalists said the police warned them that if the agreement was violated, they faced a year in prison and a $1,000 fine.
Members of the news staff lingered around the office Monday evening as police officers met in a room with managers. Ali Khatib, one of the correspondents, said they were told the network could resume broadcasting if it signed a statement promising "not to incite violence."
"I lived in Iraq and I lived when there was a lack of freedom in journalism," said Khatib, 32, a Baghdad native. "Now these days the same weapons are being used against journalists."
Yacoub, who directs a staff of 56 in the network's Baghdad bureau, said they had nothing to do with the tape itself. They said it was telephoned to the headquarters in Dubai, where it was recorded and then broadcast.
"We regret the decision. Actually, we're astonished by it," said Salah Negm, a veteran Arab journalist and the editor-in-chief of al-Arabiya, which began broadcasting this year. "What we do is report the events that happen. We don't make the events. If you want to treat the causes of violence, you cure the causes. You don't punish the media that cover what happens."
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the closure. It said messages from Hussein or other officials of the deposed government are "inherently newsworthy and news organizations have a right to cover them." Joel Campagna, the group's Middle East program coordinator, said the move "raises deep concerns about the future direction of press freedoms in Iraq."
In a media landscape long dominated by staid, state-dominated news programming, al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya have transformed journalism in the Arab world, mirroring sentiments as much as driving them. Al-Jazeera gained notice in the West for airing taped messages from Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.
Al-Arabiya began broadcasting before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and was originally expected to be a more subdued alternative to al-Jazeera. It is run by the Middle East Broadcasting Center, a company owned by the brother-in-law of Saudi Arabia's King Fahd, and was backed by Saudi, Kuwaiti and Lebanese investors.
In Iraq, the fiercely competitive networks have a mixed reputation. They are widely watched by those with access to the growing number of satellite dishes in the country, far overshadowing the influence of a U.S.-sponsored channel. But many Iraqis also complain that the networks glorify guerrilla attacks and exacerbate the violence by giving voice to Hussein and previously unknown guerrilla groups.
U.S. officials, with similar complaints, have tried to pressure Arab governments to restrain the stations.
Bremer, in his weekly Friday broadcast over U.S.-run Iraqi television and radio, quoted from the purported Hussein recording to challenge its message.
A former diplomat said Bremer's response to the tape came in part because of recognition that it was widely heard. The former official noted that a recent State Department poll in Iraq found the two Arabic-language networks were far more trusted than the U.S. channel, now called al-Iraqiya.
Staff writer Walter Pincus in Washington contributed to this report.
--------
Rumsfeld: Arab TV Worked With Insurgents
November 25, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-Iraq.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his top military adviser said Tuesday they have evidence the Arab television news organizations Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya cooperated with Iraqi insurgents to witness and videotape attacks on American troops.
Rumsfeld said the effort fit a pattern of psychological warfare used by remnants of the Baathist government, who want to create the impression that no amount of U.S. firepower can end the insurgency.
``They've called Al-Jazeera to come and watch them do it (attack American troops), and Al-Arabiya,'' he told a Pentagon news conference. ```Come and see us, watch us; here is what we're going to do.'''
Pressed for details, Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both indicated that U.S. forces in Iraq had collected more than just circumstantial evidence that one or both of the Arab news organizations might have cooperated with the attackers.
``Yes, I've seen scraps of information over a sustained period of time,'' Rumsfeld said. ``I'm not in a position to make a final judgment on it,'' but it needs to be examined in an ``orderly way,'' he added.
Neither Rumsfeld nor Myers provided details of any evidence.
``I opined accurately that from time to time each of those stations have found themselves in very close proximity to things that were happening against coalition forces -- before the event happened and during the event,'' Rumsfeld said.
On a related subject, Rumsfeld cited a long list of statistics on the results of recent U.S. efforts to defeat the insurgency -- including a rare reference to numbers of opposition fighters killed.
He said that last week alone, U.S.-led forces conducted nearly 12,000 patrols and more than 230 raids.
``They captured some 1,200 enemy forces and killed 40 to 50 enemy fighters and wounded some 25 to 30,'' Rumsfeld said. ``That's a one-week snapshot, but it provides a sense of the determined offensive pressure which the coalition is applying against the enemy.''
The Pentagon has generally refused to provide numbers of opposition forces killed.
The question about Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera arose when Rumsfeld was asked about a videotape that surfaced in Baghdad showing a man firing a surface-to-air missile at a DHL cargo plane. The tape appeared to record an insurgent operation Saturday in which a missile struck the wing of the cargo plane, forcing the aircraft to make an emergency landing at Baghdad's airport. It was the first time insurgents struck a civilian plane in Iraq.
Rumsfeld said he had been told of the videotape but did not know enough about it to comment, beyond saying, ``It doesn't take a genius to fire off a shoulder-fired missile at an airplane.''
On Monday, the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council in Baghdad raided the offices of Al-Arabiya television, banned its broadcasts from Iraq and threatened to imprison its journalists. Media groups said the action called into question the future of a free press in the country.
Al-Arabiya said it would not fight the ban and would report on Iraq from its headquarters in Dubai.
Asked about the ban, Rumsfeld said he had no opinion because he had not seen the details.
Al-Arabiya has clashed with authorities before for its coverage of Iraq. In July, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera incited violence against American forces with slanted reports.
In September, the Governing Council temporarily banned both news organizations from entering government buildings and news conferences, accusing them of being aware of attacks on American troops before they occurred.
And last week, Rumsfeld called the two stations ``violently anti-coalition'' as he announced the planned launch of a U.S.-run satellite channel to compete with the popular news stations.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- prisons / prisoners
Lawyer Asks Bush to Free Chaplain
Tuesday, November 25, 2003
John Mintz
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11575-2003Nov24.html
An attorney for Army Capt. James Yee, the Guantanamo Bay prison chaplain jailed on charges of mishandling classified documents, asked President Bush yesterday to release the chaplain from a Navy brig pending his military trial, which is scheduled for next year.
Lawyer Eugene R. Fidell said Yee, a Muslim chaplain who is charged with two counts of failing to properly handle classified papers from the U.S. Navy prison camp in Cuba, already has served more time in confinement than he would if convicted on the charges.
Yee was arrested in Florida on Sept. 10 with the papers in his possession after serving almost a year as the chaplain for alleged al Qaeda and Taliban fighters detained at Guantanamo Bay.
"Those charges simply do not warrant pretrial confinement of any kind," Fidell wrote in the letter, noting that members of the military found to have mishandled classified data typically receive reprimands or revocation of their security clearances.
Earlier this month, Fidell succeeded in getting Yee transferred from a maximum-security cell at the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., to a medium-security cell where he now is allowed to read a censored newspaper, watch films, and make two 15-minute phone calls per day to family members or lawyers.
Two other men who worked at the detention facility are also being held in connection with alleged security breaches there.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- energy
North Korea exporting excess electricity to China
BEIJING (AFP)
Nov 25, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031125033628.0x7bfacr.html
Energy-starved North Korea was able to export 19.88 million kilowatt hours of electricity to China's northeastern border city of Dandong in the first 10 months of the year, 143 percent more than the same period in 2002, state press reported Tuesday.
"The sharp increase was attributed to the stable power supply by the DPRK (North Korea), which is helpful for the normal operation of Chinese factories," Xinhua news agency said.
The ability to export excess electricity comes despite the United States suspending shipments of heavy fuel oil to North Korea last October after it asserted that Pyongyang violated a 1994 agreement when it restarted a covert nuclear weapons program.
The fuel was seen as producing a large part of North Korea's energy needs.
China has been North Korea's major benefactor, supplying both coal and fuel for energy as well as millions of tons of food aid since economic hardship and famine struck the Stalinist nation following the collapse of the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
In an apparent sign that state-to-state barter trade was picking up, Xinhua also reported that China had seen its grain exports to North Korea grow to 66,255 tons in the first 10 months of the year, up 52 percent over the same period last year.
Pyongyang further imported 439 head of cattle on November 9 via Dandong, Xinhua said, adding that the beef would be used for meat, not for breeding purposes as in previous exports.
In the 1994 agreement, the US and its allies, namely Japan and South Korea, agreed to supply North Korea with two 1,000 kilowatt proliferation-resistant light water nuclear reactors in exchange for Pyongyang shutting down its controversial heavy water nuclear power plant at Yongbyon.
The North Koreans have been suspected of processing weapons grade plutonium from the spent fuel rods at the Yongbyon plant.
While the two nuclear reactors were being constructed, the Agreed Framework also stipulated that the US would supply North Korea with heavy fuel oil to fulfill its energy needs.
China is currently brokering six-party talks for mid-December that will also include South Korea, Japan and Russia, and which will seek to bring North Korea back to its 1994 position of giving up its nuclear-weapons ambition.
-------- environment
Plan Gives Farmers a Role in Fighting Global Warming
November 25, 2003
By DAVID BARBOZA
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/25/science/earth/25CARB.html?pagewanted=all&position=
MANHATTAN, Kan. - In an unlikely alliance, Kansas Republicans and the advocacy group Environmental Defense are supporting an effort here that seeks to use agriculture as a weapon against global warming.
While the Bush administration and some Republican lawmakers have expressed skepticism about human causes of global warming, Senator Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican and an ardent supporter of President Bush, has helped Kansas State University win part of a $15 million grant for a group of institutions to study whether a form of farming called "conservation tillage" can really help combat the effects of global warming.
In an interview, Mr. Roberts said he saw evidence of global warming for himself in 1998, when he was part of a Congressional delegation that visited the South Pole.
Now, Mr. Roberts and Environmental Defense, the group best known for fighting on behalf of wetlands and threatened species, like the red-legged frog, speculate that if farmers change the way they farm their land, they can pull carbon out of the atmosphere and help mitigate the effects of global warming, and get paid for doing so.
There are already proposals to trade carbon credits like hog or cattle futures.
Some big corporations operating in countries that signed the international climate treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol are planning to use the carbon credit system that the protocol established, if the protocol takes effect. They intend to pay farmers in participating countries for carbon credits while they search for other ways to cut their carbon emissions. President Bush has rejected the Kyoto agreement. Congress is now considering a system that will cap national carbon emissions and allow the trading of carbon credits among farmers.
"This is an enormous opportunity for farmers," said Richard Sandor, who helped pioneer Chicago futures trading in the 1970's and now leads the Chicago Climate Exchange, the start-up venture that will soon begin trading the rights to emit gases associated with global warming. "They can now grow two crops: one above the ground - food; and one below ground - carbon."
Mr. Roberts wants the federal government to offer incentives to farmers who help improve the environment and replenish the soil with much-needed carbon.
"It's simple: carbon in the air - bad; carbon in the soil - good," Mr. Roberts said recently in a telephone interview. "We've got to get more out of the air and into the soil."
Catching and holding carbon is called sequestration. It keeps the carbon from being incorporated into carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.
In agriculture, sequestration involves using an array of land management techniques, like no-till farming, in which tractors do not plow the land before planting, that improve the soil and that allow plants to better absorb carbon from the atmosphere.
About 10 percent of Kansas farmers already practice no-till farming (largely because of the soil benefits), but experts say that this technique and some others, like the new forms of crop rotation and the use of "cover crops" during the winter, could help alter the environmental landscape.
One way to reduce carbon in the atmosphere is to cut emissions from cars and power plants. Using agriculture to pull carbon from the atmosphere is an alternative.
"It's estimated that American agriculture can offset about 20 percent of carbon emissions in the U.S.," said Dr. Charles Rice, a professor of soil microbiology at Kansas State, which is part of a consortium of universities studying carbon sequestration. "If we had to switch from coal and oil to hydrogen immediately, we couldn't do it. It's not economically or technologically feasible."
There are, of course, some scientists and environmental groups, like Greenpeace, that are critical of carbon sequestration. They favor sticking to stricter controls on power plant and industrial carbon emissions as a way to combat global warming. They say land management techniques may let heavy industries off the hook and prevent them from curbing emissions.
Other experts doubt that trustworthy ways can be found to measure how many tons of carbon are banked, and thus how many credits a farmer may earn.
Then there is the question of permanence, some say. What if a farmer gets credits that are sold to a utility, and then the soil is mismanaged and carbon lost?
But scientists and environmental experts say whether or not heavy industry curbs emissions, carbon sequestration is a powerful tool in the effort to improve degraded soils and the combat global warming.
"We just see this as a tremendous opportunity for farmers and the environment," said Melissa Carey, a climate change policy expert at Environmental Defense. "You can get atmospheric benefits, water quality, soil quality, local air quality benefits. That's a pretty attractive package."
In pushing the benefits of conservation tillage, and the work being done at Kansas State, Environmental Defense has also scored some big political points: an alliance that means that a prominent Republican is involved in global warming issues.
Indeed, Senator Roberts is leading a spirited push here in Kansas, a state dominated by agriculture.
"The Kansas prairie is a great big carbon sponge," Mr. Roberts said. "If you pay the farmers to maintain these conservation projects, you'd be able to clean up the environment."
To reap these benefits, however, farmers will have to change the way they farm the land.
One of the most significant changes would be moving to no-till farming. Soil experts say plowing the soil releases carbon stored underground, it degrades the soil and contributes to soil erosion and other problems.
"Tillage is one of the worst things you can do to the soil," said Dr. Rice at Kansas State. "Spraying the soil with a chemical is often less harmful."
By not tilling the soil, and allowing plant life and natural debris to decompose, agricultural experts say, the soil will strengthen and more readily absorb carbon from the atmosphere through plant photosynthesis.
Researchers say that for centuries farmers have depleted soils by constant plowing, typically to kill weeds.
By some estimates, about 50 percent of the carbon stored under agricultural lands has been lost over the last 200 years because of plowing and turning over the soils.
Pulling that carbon back into the soil, and keeping it trapped there by simply planting in the dead plant debris after winter will not only improve the soils, experts say, it will help solve a host of other environmental problems as well, like soil erosion.
"Soil degradation is the No. 1environmental problem," said Dr. Rattan Lal, a professor of soil science at Ohio State University and one of the leading authorities on carbon sequestration. "It leads to water quality problems, soil problems and the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere," he said. "We now have six billion people; by 2050 we'll have nine billion. To do that we'll have to double food production. And to do that we're going to have to put nutrients back into the ground. Conservation tillage is one way to feed the people, and it also leads to carbon sequestration and mitigates global warming."
Of course, farmers have been reluctant to abandon age-old traditions of plowing the soil, but new equipment and chemicals are making no-till farming more popular around the world.
With conservation tillage, herbicide use to control weeds does increase, but some researchers say the additional herbicides are not more harmful because the reduction of erosion leads to less runoff and because water filters through the soil better, leading to better degradation of the chemicals.
Dr. Rice has several experimental plots where he is evaluating soil from plowed land and soil from no-till land. "Look, there's carbon trapped inside of these," he says after picking up chunks of no-till soil and cupping them in his hand.
Researchers here and at other universities are now trying to find ways to measure carbon absorption in the soil. But they warn that even if America's agricultural land is made super-absorbent, the soils can only absorb so much carbon before they become saturated.
That could take 30 or more years. But after that, researchers here say, big industry will either have to cut emissions, or find new ways to combat global warming.
-------- genetics
Hill Negotiators Agree to Bar Patents for Human Organisms
Associated Press
Tuesday, November 25, 2003; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11576-2003Nov24.html
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office would be barred from issuing patents on human organisms, such as genetically engineered embryos, under an agreement reached by lawmakers yesterday.
Rep. David Joseph Weldon (R-Fla.), a medical doctor who sponsored the provision to be included in a giant spending bill, said it would codify the patent office's existing rule that human organisms are not subject to patents.
Weldon said an agreement was worked out with senators to make it clear, in a report accompanying the provision, that the patent ban would not interfere with stem cell research.
The provision would ban patents for genetically engineered human embryos, fetuses and human beings but would not affect patents on genes, cells, tissue and other biological products. It would also not stop scientists from seeking patents for the procedures or methods of creating a biological product.
The patent office's director, James E. Rogan, in a letter last week to Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), said his office viewed the Weldon amendment as "fully consistent with USPTO's policy on the non-patentability of human life-forms."
He said the measure gave "unequivocal congressional backing" for a rule "refusing to grant any patent containing a claim that encompasses any member of the species Homo sapiens at any stage of development."
Weldon said in a recent floor speech that his amendment would leave the patent office free to address new or borderline issues. As an example, he noted that the patent office does grant patents in cases where an animal has been modified to include a few human genes so it can produce a human protein or antibody.
Michael J. Werner, chief of policy for the Biotechnology Industry Organization, which had opposed the provision, said yesterday that he had not seen the final language of the bill but that, from what he had heard, it appeared to be compatible with the goals of the biotech industry.
"Our companies are interested in being able to do stem cell research, regenerative medicine and the development of treatments for diseases -- not in getting patents on embryos," he said.
Werner has noted that rather than being interested in product patents on embryos, the industry has an interest in obtaining process patents relating to stem cell therapies, which would be allowed under the measure's new language.
The amendment is included in a package of unfinished spending bills that Congress is expected to approve and send to the president next week. Earlier this year, Weldon sponsored legislation that would impose a total ban on all human cloning. The bill passed the House but has stalled in the Senate.
Washington Post staff writer Rick Weiss contributed to this report.
-------- health
World AIDS Deaths, Infections at New Highs
November 25, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-aids.html
LONDON (Reuters) - Deaths and new cases of HIV/AIDS reached unprecedented highs in 2003 and are set to rise still further as the epidemic keeps a stranglehold on sub-Saharan Africa and advances across Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
New global estimates released Tuesday based on improved data show about 40 million people worldwide are living with HIV/AIDS, including an estimated 2.5 million children under 15 years old. About five million people were infected in 2003 and more than three million died.
``The AIDS epidemic continues to expand -- we haven't reached the limit yet,'' said Dr Peter Piot, head of the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).
``More people have become infected this year than ever before and more people have died from AIDS than ever before,'' he told Reuters. ``It is the first cause of death in Africa and the fourth cause of death worldwide.''
BURDEN OF EPIDEMIC
Sub-Saharan Africa remains the worst affected region with about 3.2 million new infections and 2.3 million deaths in 2003. Southern Africa is home to about 30 percent of people living with HIV/AIDS, yet the region has less than two percent of the global population.
In Botswana and Swaziland the infection rate of HIV/AIDS among adults is 40 percent. One in five pregnant women in some African countries is infected with the virus, which is more easily transmitted from men to women than the other way around.
``In two short decades HIV/AIDS has tragically become the premier disease of mass destruction,'' Dr Jack Chow, of the World Health Organization (WHO) told a news conference.
``The death odometer from HIV/AIDS is now at 8,000 a day and accelerating.''
Piot said the epidemic, fueled by intravenous drug use and unsafe sex, is spreading in India, China, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Vietnam, the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Estonia and Latvia. And he predicted that it could be years before the back of the epidemic is broken in terms of new infections.
``The burden of the HIV epidemic will become bigger and bigger over time because it takes on average seven to 10 years after infection before you fall ill and, if there is no treatment, before you die,'' he said.
``In other words, even if by some miracle all transmission of HIV stopped, people would still become ill. We are only at the beginning of the impact of AIDS, certainly in Africa.''
REASONS FOR HOPE
But Piot added that the ``AIDS Epidemic Update: December 2003'' report also provides hope. There are fewer people being infected in several East African cities and there is also more money than ever being spent on AIDS.
``Thirdly, there is also a momentum on treatment, even if today only 75,000 Africans -- less than one out of 50 who need it -- are treated with effective therapy. There is now movement to roll out this treatment on a very large scale,'' he added.
In a major boost to combat the epidemic, South Africa has announced a plan to provide free antiretroviral drugs to hundreds of thousands of infected people.
Other African countries are also committing resources.
``You can't be dealing with education. You can't be dealing with poverty and you can't be dealing with security today without taking the HIV/AIDS epidemic into consideration,'' said Dr. Debrework Zewdie, the director of the World Bank Global HIV/AIDS program.
Piot described the developments as a new phase in the fight against AIDS and a time of great opportunities.
``We need to be as passionate about making sure our children do not become infected with HIV as about treating people who are already infected today,'' he said.
-------- hunger
Hunger Rising Again in Developing Nations
November 25, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-UN-Hungry-Millions.html
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Despite international efforts to reduce poverty, hunger is on the rise again after falling steadily during the first half of the 1990s, according to a report Tuesday by the U.N. food agency.
Nearly 850 million people go to bed hungry every night, the vast majority in Africa and Asia, and the number of undernourished people in the developing world is climbing at a rate of almost 5 million a year, it said.
``The State of Food Insecurity in the World,'' an annual report by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, paints a grim picture of a failing global campaign against hunger.
The latest estimates from 1999-2001 ``signal a setback in the war on hunger,'' the report said, and the prospect of meeting the U.N. goal of cutting in half the number of malnourished people by 2015 appears ``increasingly remote.''
``The goal can only be reached if the recent trend of increasing numbers is reversed,'' said FAO Assistant Director-General Hartwig de Haen. ``The annual reductions must be accelerated to 26 million per year, more than 12 times the pace of 2.1 million per year achieved during the 1990s.''
The Food and Agriculture Organization said it is time for nations to examine why hundreds of millions of people go hungry in a world that produces more than enough food for every man, woman and child.
``Bluntly stated, the problem is not so much a lack of food as a lack of political will,'' the report said.
Except when wars or natural disasters briefly put a spotlight on developing countries, ``little is said and less is done'' to end the plight of the 798 million people in the developing world who suffer from chronic hunger -- a figure that outnumbers the total population of Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa, the FAO said.
At the U.N. World Food Summit in 1996, governments set a goal of cutting in half the number of undernourished people by 2015 and used the period 1990-1992 as a baseline. At the U.N. Millennium Summit in September 2000 -- the largest gathering of world leaders in history -- this goal went to the top of the list of global priorities.
According to the FAO report, during the first half of the 1990s, the number of chronically hungry people decreased by 37 million. But since the 1995-1997 period, the number has increased by over 18 million. This means the overall decline since 1990-1992 was only 19 million.
But the FAO said a closer analysis of the figures revealed ``an even more alarming trend'' -- that the number of undernourished people in the developing world actually increased by 4.5 million per year between 1995 and 2001.
On the good news side, 19 countries have reduced the number of hungry people since 1990-1992 by a total of over 80 million. The list spans the globe and includes six countries in Latin American and the Caribbean and seven in sub-Saharan Africa.
``It includes both large and relatively prosperous countries like Brazil and China, where levels of undernourishment were moderate at the outset, and smaller countries where hunger was more widespread, such as Chad, Namibia, Sri Lanka and Guinea,'' the report said.
Twenty-two countries -- including Bangladesh, Haiti and Mozambique -- succeeded in ``turning the tide against hunger'' in the second half of the 1990s, after rising through the first five years, it said.
At the other end of the scale are 26 countries where hunger increased by almost 60 million from 1990-1992 including Afghanistan, Congo, Burundi, North Korea, Somalia, Tanzania, Guatemala, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the report said.
China reduced the number of hungry people by 58 million from 1990-1992, but progress has slowed. By contrast, India reduced the number of malnourished people by 20 million between 1990-1992 and 1995-1997, but the number increased by 19 million over the following four years, it said.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Protesters 'invaded airbase on bikes'
November 25, 2003
Norfolk EDP24 News
http://www.edp24.co.uk/content/News/story.asp?datetime=25+Nov+2003+20%3A09&tbrand=EDPOnline&tCategory=NEWS&category=News&brand=EDPOnline&itemid=NOED25+Nov+2003+20%3A09%3A51%3A527
Anti-war protesters cut a hole in a fence and rode bicycles onto an American airbase, chaining themselves together, a court heard yesterday.
The protesters broke into RAF Lakenheath in the week leading up to Iraq war with the intention of stopping planes taking off.
District judge Kevin Gray heard at Mildenhall magistrates court that Zina Zelter and Rupert Eris cut a hole in the perimeter fence on March 11.
Samantha Maher and Martha Scott then cycled to a runway and padlocked themselves together, staying there for at least two hours. Nicola Deane did the same with another protester.
All five gave evidence yesterday, saying the Government had not listened to the people of Britain, who were largely opposed to war and they felt direct action would disrupt preparations.
They chose Europe's largest fighter base because they said it has nuclear bombs.
Maher, 26, and mother-of-two Deane, 33, both of Jex Road, Norwich, deny aggravated trespass while Zelter, 29, of Blaby Road, Leicester, and Rupert Eris, 40, of East Runton, near Cromer, deny criminal damage. Martha Scott, 27, of Sarah William Close, Norwich, also denies trespass.
Maher told the court: "I went to the base because the war was about to break out. Everything that could have been done had been done - I had written to MPs, postcards, signed petitions and gone on marches - and war was still going to happen. The only other option left was to protest physically."
Scott said: "I had to do something. I couldn't just stand by and let things happen. I am only one person but if everybody stood up for what they believed in we would get things done."
Eris, who works in a school for children with special needs and in conservation, said he cut the fence and stayed outside to ensure no one accidentally strayed in or injured themselves.
Zelter, a violin teacher, said she had been offered a caution for the offence, but it would have meant admitting she had done something wrong.
"I am a pacifist. I wanted to save Iraqis lives, prevent the war from happening and I believe the war was utterly wrong. It has had devastating consequences and I had a responsibility to stop it."
Prosecuting, Ian Francis told Zelter: "You know very well what you were doing was not going to have to a significant difference to whether the war started, but you meant to do it symbolically."
Angela Zelter, 52, of East Runton, denies aggravated trespass, and Clive Fudge, 54, of Suffolk Square, Norwich, denies disrupting lawful activity.
The case continues.
-------
------- OneList (submissions from subscribers)
------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!
-----------
Posted
without profit or payment for research and educational
purposes only,
in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107.