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NUCLEAR
Countries Undecided on How to Store Nuclear Waste
Very Hot Commodities
Blair under fire again for WMD claims
NEW SCIENCE POLICY, FAST BREEDER REACTOR
UN Security Council discusses Syrian draft on weapons free Middle East
Syria pushes WMD-free Mideast
Libya reveals nuclear secrets, to allow snap inspections: IAEA
U.N. Arms Inspectors Get First Look at Libyan Sites
Libya's Nuclear Program Mostly Dismantled, U.N. Inspector Says
Weapons Inspectors Visit Libyan Sites
Jobless benefits shrinkage
MILITARY
Poland, Israel Sign Missile Deal
Arms trafficking danger
US develops lethal new viruses
Secrets and Lies
Boeing wins 9.6 billion dollar contract for US Navy jets
Boeing lands two fighter contracts
German army could be professional from 2010: defense minister
Jury Acquits Scientist Accused of Spying
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
The Constitution in wartime
ENERGY AND OTHER
AP: Dean Had Own Secret Energy Group
ACTIVISTS
PETA's anti-fur campaign
-------- NUCLEAR
Countries Undecided on How to Store Nuclear Waste
Story by Anna Peltola
REUTERS FINLAND:
December 29, 2003
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/23240/story.htm
STOCKHOLM - Since the start of the nuclear era, highly radioactive waste has been crossing continents and oceans in search of a secure and final resting place.
Nearly all countries produce nuclear waste, some types of which can remain radioactive for thousands of years, but they cannot agree on the best way to store it.
At present highly radioactive waste is put into interim storage where it has to sit for 30-40 years for its radioactivity and heat production to decline. It is still hazardous and should be stored somewhere permanently.
In many countries it is unclear who will pay for the cost divided over hundreds, even hundreds of thousands of years. Utilities could end up with a bigger bill than expected.
Most high-level waste, the most dangerous kind, is spent fuel from the over 400 nuclear power reactors in more than 30 countries. The dismantling of nuclear weapons adds to the pile.
Even nuclear-free states produce waste from industry, hospitals providing radiation therapy, and research centers.
Experts say technology exists for secure underground deposits which could last millions of years. Most countries plan to seal the highly hazardous waste in containers and store it 1,640-3,280 feet underground.
Skeptics say it could be safe for decades or even centuries, but at some point it would be bound to leak or be attacked by terrorists.
"If there isn't a responsible solution to deal with nuclear waste, it may be better to keep it above ground for a while longer when we are looking for technology that is safer," said Martina Krueger, who works for the environmental organization Greenpeace in Sweden.
TO OPEN OR NOT?
Some politicians have demanded that the repositories are built so that future generations can open them and eliminate the waste with the help of new technology.
Others say that would also leave the deposits vulnerable to potential social chaos thousands of years down the line.
If waste is safe in interim storage, why not keep it there?
"Sure it's safe...but what we have to communicate are the trade-offs," said Thomas Sanders from Sandia National Laboratories, owned by the U.S. government.
Some nuclear plants are already running into the limits of their storage capacity. And since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States attention has turned to individual plants and whether these can be protected from terrorist attacks.
European Union countries plan to build repositories by around 2020, but some have not even started considering sites. In 2001 Finland became the first and so far only EU state to decide on a site for a final storage.
The United States plans to deposit waste from its 103 nuclear plants beneath the Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The site should open in 2010, but faces local protests and legal hurdles.
Critics say big central repositories would again increase the risk of accidents or theft because the nuclear waste has to be transported to them from each plant.
WHO PAYS?
In many cases it is unclear for how long nuclear waste is the liability of the firm causing it, and when the state takes over.
This makes it tough for utilities to calculate the cost, especially if the repositories are built in such a way that they have to be guarded for security reasons.
"It is difficult to give precise costs because France hasn't decided on a strategy on long-term waste management," said Yves le Bars, chairman of ANDRA, the national radioactive waste management agency in France, the EU's biggest nuclear power.
"We say it will take between 15 to 25 billion euros to build a repository, operate it and close it for the existing facilities," he said. This would cover high-level waste from France's 58 nuclear plants, assuming fuel would be reprocessed.
Finding a location for a dump is one of the biggest hurdles.
In South Korea the state tried for years to find a county willing to host a repository for low and intermediate level waste. Finally this year, Buan county applied for the deposit and suggested Wi-do island as a host.
The island has 1,000 inhabitants, most of them fishermen.
"They decided to accept the repository because the government is paying a tremendous financial package," said Myung Jae Song, general manager at the Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power Company, the world's fifth largest producer of nuclear power.
Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), suggested in early December that countries should consider shared storage, even though no state should be forced to deal with another's atomic waste.
At Eurajoki, site of Finland's final repository, people were upset by the idea that their town could one day start importing foreign waste, said local politician Altti Lucander.
"It causes confusion and may lead to there being no acceptance for national deposits," Lucander said. (Additional reporting by Mark John in Paris)
-------- accidents and safety
Very Hot Commodities
Ray Johnson Is Aglow Over His Radioactive Treasures
By Steven Levingston
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 29, 2003; Page C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37112-2003Dec28?language=printer
Here at the Emporium antique shop in Gaithersburg, something is spitting radioactivity.
"Whoa! Did you see that?" cries Ray Johnson, a sweet-faced man with a trim white beard and 30 years of experience in radiation safety. The needle on his Geiger counter has swung right off the scale and a loud clicking declares the presence of something hot.
Johnson was moving slowly through the shop, methodically sweeping his pocket-size detector over juicers and casserole dishes, tea caddies and glass dinner bells, when he got the hit.
Few people are as well versed as Johnson in detecting and measuring radiation. He's got two advanced degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is director of the Radiation Safety Academy, a private training and consulting company. For 15 years, his staff has calibrated the radiation meters at the National Institutes of Health and conducted daily inspections of the labs for signs of contamination. In the 1970s and 1980s, he was the chief of radiation surveillance at the Environmental Protection Agency -- the government official in charge of monitoring all sources of public exposure to radiation.
The sight of a radiation expert like Johnson waving a Geiger counter through the air -- even in an antique shop -- could evoke a gallery of nightmare images. The place names alone ring with dread: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl. And lately there's a new fear: a terrorist's dirty bomb.
But on this occasion, Johnson isn't on the job. He's just having a little fun. He has zeroed in on the source of the radioactivity: a square-faced travel clock in a beat-up red leather case. Price: $45. Its age is unknown; it's probably a relic of the 1930s. Its value to Johnson doesn't lie in its quality as a timepiece -- he doesn't even care whether it works. What fascinates him are the dabs of green paint on the hands and numbers of the clock face. That paint, laced with the radioactive element radium to glow in the dark, was used widely in consumer and military products early in the previous century.
Over the screeching Geiger counter, Johnson says reverently of the sorry-looking antique: "That's definitely hot." The price is too high, he grumbles. "But you know what, I'm tempted to buy it anyway. That'd be the hottest thing I own."
What Makes Them Tick
Collecting radioactive timepieces and uranium ore isn't quite the same as chasing after bottle caps or Beanie Babies. A special tool is required: a Geiger counter for alerting the user to invisible electrons and other particles flying off atoms in the process of radioactive decay. The detector becomes a kind of mechanical body part providing, as one collector described it, a "sixth sense." The most fanatical hobbyists pass their probes over everything in sight, jotting in their notebooks the radiation levels in cat litter, camera lenses and old spark plugs. Some prized collection pieces are everyday consumer items that just happen to be hot: radium clocks, alpha-ray-emitting smoke detectors, uranium-glass butter dishes, Fiesta Ware dinner plates tinted orange with uranium oxide, Coleman lantern gas mantles containing thorium.
Also popular are straight-from-the-earth minerals such as carnotite, monazite and pitchblende, the ore that Marie Curie spent years boiling and stirring in her acid-stained smock on her way to the discovery of radium. A rare specimen known to elicit oohs and aahs is trinitite, a glassy, grayish-green material created from the fusion of sand and earth in the first atomic bomb blast -- the Trinity test -- at Alamogordo, N.M., on July 16, 1945.
For the collector, the lure isn't so much any particular rock discovered on a mountainside or a dinner plate found on eBay. The joy comes in tracking down and witnessing a mysterious force of nature. Radioactivity defies the human senses: you can't see it, smell it, hear it, taste it or feel it. It is this hidden quality that enchants the collector. When a Geiger counter chirps intensely over a hot find, the hunter stops and listens with rapt attention -- as if the Earth itself is speaking. Risky Business
Popular apprehension has defined radioactivity since its discovery more than a hundred years ago. One of the earliest researchers said it suggested that Armaggedon now lay at the whim not just of God but of man as well. H.G. Wells fed the fear in 1914 with his novel "The World Set Free," prophesying the creation of atomic bombs capable of nearly wiping out civilization.
Radiation also was recognized early on for its value in the treatment of some cancers and other ailments. But the harmful effects of prolonged exposure soon showed up in scientists and doctors. Safety precautions were little understood and not a high priority. Consumer products containing radium, such as glow-in-the-dark watches, became the rage in the 1920s and 1930s. Young factory women who painted the watch dials licked their brushes to produce a fine point -- unaware of the danger -- and died gruesome deaths from ingesting the radium. Marie Curie herself suffered ill effects throughout her life and eventually died of radiation poisoning. Her furniture is radioactive to this day.
After Hiroshima, the Cold War sustained the public's fear of nuclear annihilation with help from a flood of science fiction movies. In the 1950 film "Rocketship X-M," a crew from Earth lands on Mars to discover the remnants of a civilization wiped out by nuclear war. The low-budget film spurred a genre that capitalized on radiation terror and gave moviegoers memorable afternoons with radiation-spawned mutants such as the giant ants that swarm the Trinity test site in 1954's "Them!"
In the post-Sept. 11 world, public fears have shifted to the possible terrorist use of radioactive materials. But the small-dose items favored by these collectors are exempt from federal regulatory restrictions, according to John Hickey, a senior technical adviser at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "As for using them for terrorist or illegal purposes, these are very low-risk materials," he says.
The NRC specialist says he's not a collector himself, but he does own a chunk of uranium ore picked up out West, and a radioactive Fiesta Ware dinner plate purchased at a flea market. "The guy in the shop said, 'You know, that's got uranium in it,' " Hickey recalls. " 'I know,' I said, 'that's why I'm buying it.' "
Experts say the emissions from collectibles such as a radium clock or a chunk of uranium ore are so low that there is no danger of radiation poisoning. That condition occurs after exposure to a massive radiation dose from a nuclear explosion or accident and can produce life-threatening nausea, vomiting, hemorrhaging and infection. If a risk does exist from collectibles, it is from the delayed effects of long-term exposure, according to Paul Frame, a health physicist and director of the nation's most extensive public collection of radioactive artifacts, at the Oak Ridge Associated Universities in Tennessee.
"Regulatory agencies and radiation safety professionals operate under the assumption that even the smallest of doses that a collector might receive would carry an increased risk of cancer," Frame says. "But there is no conclusive evidence that this is the case. At the same time, it is not possible to rule out that there is zero risk at low doses."
Green glass containing radioactive uranium is in the collection of Ray Johnson, director of the Radiation Safety Academy, a private training and safety company. (Michael Lutzky - The Washington Post)
The collectors try to strike a balance between their passion and the needs of safety. Kat Rogers, a 24-year-old geology student at the University of Wyoming, is crazy about rocks. Her apartment in Laramie is filled with hundreds of specimens, including a growing assortment that spurts the invisible rays. Her favorite is a chunk of hyalite opal. Under ultraviolet light, she says, "it glows so wonderfully."
When she first started handling radioactive materials, Rogers wore a special pair of bulky radiation-proof gloves. But they made it difficult to handle small or delicate items, and she has since weaned herself off them, preferring to apply her knowledge of basic safety precautions. These include washing her hands after touching radioactive materials, minimizing any crumbling of minerals because of the danger of inhaling the dust, storing specimens in protective containers, and ventilating storage areas.
But the strictest precautions won't mollify everyone. "One of my friends won't bring her children into my apartment because she fears they'll get sick from the radiation," Rogers says.
Nutty Results
Tracy Albert grew up on a farm in Saginaw Township, Mich., with goats and pigs in the yard and a chip on his shoulder. In his youth he was more of a brawler than a bookworm -- he eventually dropped out of high school -- but he always had an aptitude for math and science. What money he had he'd take with him on long bike rides to Radio Shack and come home with the latest electronics kit. Today he can't spell well, but ask him to explain the alpha ray emission of radon and you'll hear a learned lecture straight from his own experiments. Some time ago, Albert tired of building Geiger counters and moved on to more complicated devices such as radon detectors. He is so proficient with his gadgets that the 40-year-old traffic electrician for the city of Saginaw is certified by the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a first responder in the event of a radioactive incident. "I've got better detection equipment than anybody around here for 300 miles," he boasts.
With his wife and two young children in the house, he takes strict precautions with his radioactive collectibles: a 1952 radium clock ("the hottest, baddest thing I ever had"), about 40 thorium lantern mantles, some monazite sand from Guatemala, and pitchblende. He keeps it all in an old metal first-aid kit painted bright yellow and labeled "RADIOACTIVE" and stores the kit in a locked building away from the house.
Not long ago, Albert decided to investigate for himself what experts have long said: that Brazil nuts are a highly radioactive food. At the grocery store, he says, "I couldn't find whole Brazil nuts so I got mixed pre-shelled nuts." Back home, he peeled three of the nuts, tossed them into a mortar and pounded them with a pestle until he had a consistent sample in the form of Brazil nut butter. He spread the butter in a small container. When he turned his Geiger counter on the nuts, he discovered that they registered as much as 33 percent hotter than the natural radiation level of the room.
The Brazil nut tree absorbs radium from the soil and concentrates it in the meat of the nut. Research into the radiation risks of consuming the nuts is scarce. A report published in the journal Health Physics in 1968 noted the high level of radioactivity, concluding that "it is to be expected that individuals who regularly eat Brazil nuts for many years will eventually build up elevated radium body burdens." The Food and Drug Administration has no recommendation on Brazil nut consumption other than warning of a possible allergic reaction, as with other nuts.
"I used to eat three to five pounds of Brazil nuts every year," Albert says. "I still eat some, but not as many."
Albert is a member of a Yahoo chat group, CDV700Club, named after a civil defense Geiger counter produced by the tens of thousands during the Cold War. Collectors meet online to share knowledge and experiences, seek answers to knotty questions and locate parts. The rules demand that the discussion remain scientific and cordial, steering clear of politics. For Albert, the members are a lifeline to his passion. "They're like reverend brothers," he says.
Member Jim Hale recently confessed to the chat group that he was injected with a radioactive substance for a gallbladder scan. He scoffed when his wife worried that the medical procedure would leave him radioactive enough to cook the children. Home from the doctor, Hale flipped on his new Geiger counter. "It goes nuts," he says. "I thought, okay, it's broke." Then he tried his vintage CDV-700 instrument once, twice, three times, and on each occasion the needle flew off the scale. Hale had received about 300 millirems of radiation, equal to the average natural exposure a person gets in a year. But that burst -- common in diagnostic tests -- is not strong enough to prompt serious concern, according to G. Donald Frey, a professor of radiology at the Medical University of South Carolina. The usefulness of the scan outweighs the risk. Within a few days, the radioactive substance vanishes from the body, Frey says.
Hale wasn't worried. "I may not be the best," he says, "but as I have demonstrated, I am the brightest." Radioactive Man
Back at Johnson's safety radiation classroom in Gaithersburg, a poster of Bart Simpson's favorite comic book hero, Radioactive Man, shares wall space with a chart showing all the known radioactive elements. The wall reflects the perennial clash between fear and science. Johnson believes that his role as a teacher is to find a middle ground. He instructs high school teachers, government officials, corporate executives, hospital workers and police officers in everything from radiation awareness to nuclear terrorism. Not just a radiation safety expert, Johnson also is trained as a counselor. "I want to make people feel more comfortable with radioactivity by dealing with their fears," he says.
His classroom is lined with collector's items: enough Fiesta dishes, jugs, cups and saucers, and salt and pepper shakers to fill the cupboards of a kitchen; green glass pieces containing uranium -- a horse, a revolver, a pair of shoes; a shelf of bright yellow Cold War Geiger counters; 1920s and 1930s radium travel clocks and watches; and quack cures, including a radium water dispenser known as a Revigator. Because his collection is already excessive -- numbering 800 pieces in all and spilling from the classroom into his home -- Johnson decided against buying the hot watch that thrilled him earlier in the day. "My son says we're running out of room, so I need to look for things I don't already have," he says.
Standing in the center of the classroom 15 feet away from the shelves, Johnson flips on a Geiger counter. It barely ticks, registering only natural background radiation -- proving, he says, that even in a place jampacked with radioactive antiques, the risk is minimal. "Radiation is not inherently sinister or dangerous," Johnson says. "Am I going to convert the world? No. But if I can talk to one person at a time, maybe I'll get somewhere."
-------- britain
Blair under fire again for WMD claims
GETHIN CHAMBERLAIN
Monday, 29th December 2003
Scotsman
http://www.news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1417272003
CLAIMS that weapons inspectors have uncovered massive evidence that Saddam Hussein had a network of clandestine laboratories have landed Tony Blair in trouble for the second time in a month after they were rubbished by the United States' top man in Iraq.
Paul Bremer, unaware the claims had been made by the Prime Minister, said the comments sounded like a "red herring" put about to undermine the coalition by someone opposed to military action. Once Mr Bremer realised the remarks were Mr Blair's, he softened his criticism, but it was too late to stop the Prime Minister's critics accusing him of hyping up the evidence to support his claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction when he opted for war.
Liam Fox, the Conservative Party co-chairman, said Mr Blair would say anything to save his own skin. "This is a huge embarrassment for a Prime Minister who is in a deep political hole. But he is unable to stop digging.
"Once again he seems to have been willing to sex up a piece of information purely to defend his own political position. His assertion that there has been 'massive evidence of a huge system of clandestine laboratories' has been destroyed as untrue by Mr Paul Bremer and innuendo by Hans Blix [the former chief United Nations weapons inspector ]."
Clare Short, who resigned from the Cabinet over the invasion of Iraq, renewed her calls for Mr Blair to resign.
"If you are going to start getting into deceit when you are going to war and risking human life, it has gone too far," she said. "I hope for his sake, but most particularly for the honour of the country and for renewal of the Labour government, I hope he steps down gracefully."
It is the second time this month that Mr Blair's comments about the work of the weapons inspectors have landed him in trouble.
He first made the claim two weeks ago, in an interview to be broadcast to British troops, but Downing Street later admitted that his comments referred to a report issued by the Iraq Survey Group earlier in the year and not to new evidence.
At the time, Mr Blair was accused by Michael Ancram, the shadow foreign secretary, of misrepresenting the findings of the survey group in its interim report in October.
With the Hutton report on the death of the government weapons scientist Dr David Kelly due within the fortnight, Downing Street is desperate for good news on the hunt for weapons of mass destruction.
But instead, Mr Blair faced fresh embarrassment yesterday when his remarks were relayed to Mr Bremer in a TV interview.
Told about a claim that inspectors in Iraq had uncovered "massive evidence of a huge system of clandestine laboratories", Mr Bremer replied: "I don't know who said that. It sounds like a bit of a red herring to me.
"It sounds like someone who doesn't agree with the policy sets up a red herring then knocks it down.
"I don't know where those words come from but that is not what David Kay [the head of the Iraq Survey Group] has said."
But when he learned the comments had come from the US's staunchest ally, he tried to row back from his criticism. "There is actually a lot of evidence that had been made public," he said. He said the survey group had found "clear evidence of biological and chemical programmes, ongoing".
He added: "They show clear evidence of violation of UN Security Council resolutions relating to rockets."
Downing Street stood by Mr Blair's claims, saying the information came straight from the group hunting for the arsenal.
Mr Bremer rejected the claim by Mr Blix that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction left to give up. "You might conclude that Dr Blix is out of touch," he said.
War was justified "historically" regardless of the issue of weapons, Mr Bremer said. "I invite anybody, British or American, who thinks it was wrong to go to war, to come and see the mass graves in Halabjah," he said. "Come there and then tell me that we were not right to liberate this country from Saddam Hussein.
"Weapons of mass destruction or no weapons of mass destruction, it's important to step back a little bit here, to see what we have done historically.
"We, the coalition, the British and American people, have done a noble thing by relieving 25 million Iraqis of one of the most vicious tyrannies in the 20th century."
SAYS WHO?
"The Iraq Survey Group has found evidence of a massive clandestine laboratory network system. When a country with a leader like Saddam tries to hide that, what is it doing?" - Tony Blair.
"I don't know where those words come from, but that is not what [ISG chief] David Kay has said. I have read his reports so I don't know who said that. It sounds like a bit of a red herring to me," - Paul Bremer.
"There is actually a lot of evidence that had been made public ... clear evidence of biological and chemical programmes, ongoing," - Paul Bremer.
-------- india / pakistan
NEW SCIENCE POLICY, FAST BREEDER REACTOR
Monday, December 29, 2003
India Ministry of Science & Technology
http://pib.nic.in/release/release.asp?relid=503
The new Science & Technology Policy - 2003 was unveiled at the Indian Science Congress in Bangalore. It provides the much-needed boost to scientific growth and research.
Indo-US Science Forum takes up joint research in hydrogen energy and fuel cells, as alternative sources of energy....
Eight more nuclear power reactors under various stages of construction. This is the largest number of reactors coming up at a given time in the world. These will add 3960 MW power capacity to the national grid.
Government gives nod for the first 500 MW prototype fast breeder reactor at Kalpakkam. The reactor is the first of its kind in the world that uses plutonium-uranium mixed carbide fuel. In Fast Breeder Reactors the utilisation of nuclear fuel is very optimal.
The Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) has developed an advanced heavy water reactor to tap India's vast thorium resources, the largest in the world.
The performance of India's nuclear power plants achieves a new record. The average capacity factor has crossed 90 percent. Kakrapar-1 has achieved the distinction of world's best performing Pressurised Heavy Water Reactor on the basis of its gross capacity utilisation factor of 98.4 percent....
India supplied so far 1000 super conducting magnets to CERN i.e. the European organisation for Nuclear Research for the Large Hadron Collider project. India is one of the five non-European countries to join the LHC project for discovering new particles.
-------- mideast
UN Security Council discusses Syrian draft on weapons free Middle East
UNITED NATIONS (AFP)
Dec 29, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031229222128.la3n27jr.html
The UN Security Council on Monday discussed a Syrian-proposed draft resolution demanding that all Middle East states -- particuarly Israel -- destroy weapons of mass destruction, but did not make any decision.
The draft was initially introduced last April, but Syria has not asked for a vote yet. Syria's UN ambassador, Fayssal Mekdad, declined to say whether his country will demand a vote before December 31 when Syria's two-year membership in the body expires.
But he did confirm that the resolution targets Israel.
US Deputy Ambassador John Cunningham said the United States, which wields veto power as a permanent member of the council, did not support the proposal. "Our position has not changed since last spring: wrong on substance, wrong on timing," he told reporters.
Meanwhile, Mekdad confirmed for the first time Syria had Israel in mind when it introduced the draft.
"It is directed at everybody but, as you know, all Arab countries without exception have ratified the Non-Proliferation Treaty," he said.
"Israel is the only party in the region which has not ratified the NPT and almost all non-proliferation treaties," the ambassador added.
"So, it is applicable to everybody but, in fact, Israel is the real adressee in this regard because Israel has all this kind of weapons."
Israel is largely believed to nuclear and other weapons, but Israeli officials refuse to comment.
In Washington, Deputy State Department Spokesman Adam Ereli said the United States generally favored "as an overall objective" a region free of weapons of mass destruction.
"But I would note that, well, specific initiatives that might be put forward for political purposes are a different matter," Ereli said.
He added that resolutions presented by one party to a conflict are "generally one-sided and do not address issues in a comprehensive or balanced way."
----
Syria pushes WMD-free Mideast
Monday the UN Security Council is set to discuss Syria's draft resolution, which is aimed at Israel
By Nicholas Blanford,
December 29, 2003
Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1229/p06s01-wome.html
BEIRUT, LEBANON - Libya's decision to abandon its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs has helped resurrect an Arab call for a Middle East free of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.
Syria and Israel, bitter enemies, are coming under intensified pressure to give up their WMD programs. But neither country is likely to comply before a regional peace treaty is signed, analysts say. And with Saudi Arabia reportedly considering acquiring nuclear weapons, prospects for an imminent WMD-free zone in the volatile region look bleak. The United Nations Security Council meets Monday at the request of Arab nations to discuss a Syrian proposal to abolish WMD from the Middle East. The draft, which was first submitted in March, calls for implementation of two previous resolutions "aimed at freeing the Middle East region of all weapons of mass destruction." It also urges Middle East states to sign international treaties barring the spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.
"We have been pursuing this for years because we believe it's the only solution for the Middle East to be truly peaceful and stable," says Bouthaina Shaaban, Syrian minister for emigrants' affairs.
The immediate intention of Syria and other Arab countries is to score political points against Israel.
"Israel is under a great deal of international scrutiny - its treatment of the Palestinians, the construction of the separation barrier, and the general mood in the West that Israel is a bully," says Michael Young, a Lebanese political analyst. "There is a political gain for Syria in saying that 'Israel has nuclear weapons, but we don't. So why don't you go after Israel.' "
Syria has aimed its proposal at Israel, which is believed to be the only country in the Middle East to possess nuclear weapons. Israel refuses to confirm or deny the claim and is not party to treaties banning WMD.
"We believe that the reason Israel is not paying attention is because of the weakness of the international order," Ms. Shaaban says. "If [the international community] was strong and believed in justness, it would treat all countries equally. If the US decides at this moment to take a leading role in the Middle East and treat countries fairly, and the UN takes a strong role, then I don't see why Israel should not give up its nuclear weapons. It's up to the international community now to say what is right."
Syria, though more frequently criticized for its support of alleged terrorist organizations, is also facing renewed pressure from the United States over its suspected WMD.
President Bush earlier this month signed the Syria Accountability Act, which provides for sanctions against Damascus unless it fulfills a number of measures, including renouncing its support for terrorist organizations, abandoning its WMD programs, and entering peace talks with Israel.
Syria was listed last year with Cuba and Libya on a second tier of "axis of evil" countries pursuing WMD programs. The Damascus regime has never officially confirmed that it has WMD, although US officials claim it has dozens of ballistic missiles filled with Sarin and VX nerve agents. It also is suspected of having manufactured small amounts of biological agents.
Analysts believe that Syria's decision to acquire chemical weapons, which reportedly began in 1973, is based on achieving a strategic deterrence against Israel's nuclear capabilities.
"The whole reason for its [the WMD program's] existence is Israel," says a European diplomat in Damascus. "If Israel was to disarm then I am sure that Syria would follow suit."
But Syria will not make the first move, the diplomat adds.
Arab states have long called for removing WMD from the region. Egypt mounted an unsuccessful diplomatic effort several years ago to force Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Both Syria and Egypt were quick to renew the call following Libya's decision to abandon its WMD programs.
Israel "should be obliged to withdraw from all occupied Arab lands and return to the 1967 [Mideast war] borders and to remove its arsenal of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons," Syrian Prime Minister Naji al-Otari said in a speech last week following talks with his Egyptian counterpart Atef Obeid.
Despite significant strategic changes in the Mideast over the past 12 months with the downfall of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, Israel argues that the region is still far from stable. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon warned of Libya's nuclear weapons program over a year ago. More recently, Israeli officials have claimed that Iran's nuclear ambitions represent an "existential threat" to the Jewish state. That has fueled speculation that Israel may seek to emulate its 1981 air raid against Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor with an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.
But in a deal brokered by the European Union, on Dec. 18 Iran signed the additional protocol to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, allowing snap inspections of its nuclear facilities. The move will make it harder for Iran to embark on a clandestine nuclear weapons program. Sunday, UN inspectors visited weapons-related sites in Libya, with full-scale inspections to come.
Although the WMD threat from Iran and Libya has declined, Israel is likely to brush off continued pressure to abolish its nuclear arsenal, says analyst Mr. Young. "The call for a WMD-free Mideast is very embryonic," he says. "The pressure [on Israel] will come with a regional peace settlement and a multilateral process, but this is a long-term issue."
----
Libya reveals nuclear secrets, to allow snap inspections: IAEA
TRIPOLI (AFP)
Dec 29, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031229120249.nmf0yzqo.html
Libya has revealed nuclear secrets, including equipment supplied from abroad, and will allow snap inspections of suspect sites, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohammed ElBaradei said here Monday.
After the surprise decision to come clean on its weapons programmes, Tripoli was prepared to allow IAEA inspectors random acccess just as if it had already signed the additional protocol to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, ElBaradei said.
"Libya informed me that it will act, as of today, as if the additional protocol was enforced," ElBaradei told a press conference.
He added that during their inspections, his team had seen equipment capable of enriching uranium but it was not in operation.
"We did see centrifuges but they were dismantled in boxes," he said. "We had not seen enriched uranium."
He added: "We have seen similar centrifuges. They looked familiar, we can identify their origin. They are quite sophisticated."
Asked where the equipment may have come from, ElBaradei said: "The materials appear to be coming from a number of different people, from a number of different places spanned all over the world."
Libyan officials told the inspectors the equipment had been bought on the black market, he added.
On the success of his visit, ElBaradei said: "It was quite productive. They showed a good deal of transparency. They opened their files. They made the people available to us.
"This visit is a lesson for North Korea to emulate and to others," he added, in what was seen as a reference to Israel.
On Sunday, IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky explained that the team "went to four nuclear sites previously unvisited and all of them were in the Tripoli area".
However, during their inspections, the team saw "no weaponising activities", ElBaradei concluded.
ElBaradei was due to have one more working session with the Libyans early in the afternoon and then take his leave of the foreign minister before flying back to Vienna via Amsterdam.
The visit follows Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi's surprise announcement that his country was giving up the search for chemical, biological and nuclear arms.
The announcement and ElBaradei's visit are the fruit of nine months of secret negotiations between Libya and diplomats from Britain and the United States which ended with Tripoli's dramatic pledge on December 19.
ElBaradei has made it clear he would discuss with the IAEA board to what extent Libya had fallen short of commitments to the NPT, which came into effect in 1970. Libya signed the NPT in 1969 and ratified it in 1975.
Libya was under international sanctions for years over the 1988 bombing of a US airliner over the Scottish town of Lockerbie that killed 270 people.
But the United Nations lifted its embargo in September after Tripoli agreed to pay 2.7 billion dollars (2.2 billion euros) in compensation and accept responsibility for the bombing but denied guilt.
US sanctions remain in place, and the latest move by the unpredictable Kadhafi was seen partly as a bid to get them removed.
--------
U.N. Arms Inspectors Get First Look at Libyan Sites
December 29, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/29/international/africa/29LIBY.html
TRIPOLI, Libya, Dec. 28 (AP) - Libya on Sunday let United Nations nuclear officials inspect four sites related to its nuclear weapons program, all previously secret.
The visits, led by the chief United Nations weapons inspector, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, followed the surprise announcement by the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, more than a week ago that his country would abandon its pursuit of unconventional weapons.
Dr. ElBaradei, head of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, visited the four nuclear sites here in Tripoli, the capital, accompanied by a team of his inspectors.
Dr. ElBaradei spent several hours touring the sites, said his spokesman, Mark Gwozdecky. He described the sites as new facilities that "have never been mentioned in the media before." No further details were given on the sites or about what the inspection teams discovered.
As a signer of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Libya is required to declare all sensitive nuclear installations to the United Nations.
On arriving in Libya on Saturday, Dr. ElBaradei said the country appeared to be far from producing nuclear arms.
Mr. Gwozdecky said Dr. ElBaradei would meet with Matouq Muhammad Matouq, a Libyan deputy prime minister and head of the country's nuclear program, to develop a plan for future inspections. Some of the inspectors also met with Libyan officials on "technical matters" concerning the history of Libya's weapons program, Mr. Gwozdecky said. Dr. ElBaradei did not take part in this meeting, he said.
Dr. ElBaradei is also expected to meet with Libya's prime minister and foreign minister on Monday before returning to Vienna.
Mr. Gwozdecky said some inspectors would remain in Libya until Thursday to visit other sites.
Colonel Qaddafi's pledge to scrap Libya's weapons programs is the latest in a series of moves to end the country's international isolation and shed its image as a rogue nation. It followed eight months of covert negotiations and inspections by British and American intelligence officials.
Libya, long on the United States list of countries that sponsor terrorism, has portrayed the move as a strategic step, insisting it never produced any unconventional weapons. "We didn't arrive to the point of weaponization," Abdel-Rahman Shalqam, the foreign minister, said Saturday at a news conference.
Mr. Shalqam reaffirmed that Libya was committed to full transparency and would sign a protocol allowing wide-ranging inspections on short notice, promises that Colonel Qaddafi made during his announcement more than a week ago.
Colonel Qaddafi said he hoped Libya's action would press Israel to disarm. Israel, the only Middle East nation believed to possess nuclear weapons, refuses to confirm or deny a program for them.
Dr. ElBaradei praised Libya's new openness as a step in the right direction, "particularly in the Middle East."
"This protocol is not meant to be a threat to a country's national security or dignity but an objective tool to give assurance that the activities are for peaceful means," he said.
Mr. Shalqam said the government had started to discuss dismantling Libya's weapons program about four years ago.
The International Atomic Energy Agency was sidelined during the covert American-British talks that led to the disclosure by Libya that it had a 15-year-old nuclear weapons program.
Diplomats who declined to be identified said the agency now had access to American and British intelligence, but Dr. ElBaradei acknowledged on Saturday that his team was nonetheless going in knowing relatively little.
Dr. ElBaradei said Libya had received its weapons equipment "through the black market and middle people."
On the Vienna-to-Amsterdam leg of his flight to the Libyan capital, he said the Libyans had "tried to develop an enrichment capability" for uranium, apparently as part of a nascent weapons program that was later abandoned.
The United Nations lifted sanctions against Libya after it accepted responsibility in September for the bombing of a Pan Am jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 and agreed to pay $2.7 billion to the victims' families.
The United States imposed sanctions against Libya in 1986, asserting that it supported terrorist groups. The embargoes by Washington continue, but it hinted at improved economic relations after Colonel Qaddafi's weapons pledge.
--------
Libya's Nuclear Program Mostly Dismantled, U.N. Inspector Says
December 29, 2003
By PATRICK E. TYLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/29/international/middleeast/29CND-LIBY.html
LONDON, Dec. 29 - The United Nations top nuclear inspector, Mohamed ElBaradei, said today that Libya's nuclear program was years away from producing a nuclear weapon and was largely dismantled.
But Dr. ElBaradei, who heads the International Atomic Energy Agency, nonetheless expressed surprise that Libya had acquired a great deal of high-technology equipment needed to enrich uranium for use in nuclear bombs through black market transactions that have yet to be disclosed.
"What we have seen is a program in the very initial stages of development," Dr. ElBaradei told reporters at a news conference in Tripoli. "We haven't seen any industrial-scale facility to produce highly enriched uranium, we haven't seen any enriched uranium," he added.
Dr. ElBaradei, who also met with the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qadaffi, for about half an hour, said that it was his "gut feeling" that Libya was three to seven years away from producing a nuclear weapon and added, "we are now working with them to neutralize any activities, any programs that could have led to a nuclear weapon."
Still, he added, it was "an eye opener to see how much material has been going from one country to the other, the extent of the black market network." The existence of this shadowy network of middlemen who often circumvent national export controls, he said, proved that those controls were not working.
The visit by the international team of inspectors led by Dr. ElBaradei was arranged hastily in the wake of the dramatic Dec. 19 announcement by Col. Qadaffi that in order to reach a new accord with the West, his country would disclose and dismantle its programs aimed at developing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
The announcement followed nine months of intensive negotiations with British and American officials, and secret visits to Libya in October and early December by experts from the British secret service and the United States Central Intelligence Agency..
President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair both praised Col. Qadaffi's decision, and Mr. Bush hinted that a full disarmament process in Libya could be followed by the lifting of sanctions and the normalization of relations. These steps, which Congress would have to approve, once seemed inconceivable after decades of vilification and recriminations over Libya's support for terrorism.
Dr. ElBaradei's description of the Libyan nuclear program appeared more modest and less alarming than the descriptions given by Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair when they revealed that nine months of secret diplomacy had led to a breakthrough with Libya.
Dr. ElBaradei said most of Libya's illicit nuclear equipment was "quite dismantled" and still packed in boxes.
"Luckily, I think, we are here when they have not developed a full fledged capability and luckily also they have announced that they are ready to eliminate all programs relevant to weapons of mass destruction," Dr. ElBaradei said.
At the same time today, he took the opportunity to call on North Korea to follow Libya's example.
"If a country was to show transparency and active cooperation, that can open the doors" and allow for "a complete change of face," he said, adding: "It is a lesson for North Korea to observe."
--------
Weapons Inspectors Visit Libyan Sites
Access to Nuclear Program Granted
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, December 29, 2003; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36839-2003Dec28.html
TRIPOLI, Libya, Dec. 28 -- United Nations weapons inspectors got their first look at nuclear facilities in Libya Sunday, the first concrete result of the recent Libyan promise to give up the country's nuclear arms program.
The director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, and a team of inspectors toured the facilities, including the small experimental Tajura reactor, which has been identified by Western diplomats as the heart of the Libyan program.
The inspections at the sites, all in the Tripoli area, kicked off a process that IAEA officials said would be long and laborious and would include an accounting of Libya's efforts to build an atomic bomb, dismantling of equipment deemed usable for weapons production and ongoing monitoring.
"They promised us access and delivered," Mark Gwozdecky, an IAEA spokesman, said of the initial outing.
ElBaradei met with the chief of Libya's nuclear program, Matouk Mohamed Matouk. Jacques Baute, who heads the IAEA's Nuclear Proliferation Verification Office, and Pierre Goldsmith, the IAEA deputy director and veteran inspector in Iran, also attended the meeting. In the evening, the IAEA team worked with Libyan officials on a long-term inspections scheme.
Libyan officials also provided a history of their nuclear program. The IAEA requested documents, maps and a list of officials to interview about the nuclear activities.
ElBaradei is scheduled to leave Monday. Three inspectors will remain behind, and three more will join them soon, Gwozdecky said.
The inspections followed months of secret talks among Libyan, U.S. and British officials in which the Libyans decided to reveal their program. The United States had accused Libya of trying to produce nuclear weapons in violation of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Commentary in Arabic newspapers outside Libya suggested that the Libyan leader, Moammar Gaddafi, buckled out of fear that the United States would apply its policy of preemptive warfare to bring him down, as it had the Taliban government in Afghanistan and former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
Bush administration officials have also said the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq prompted Libya's change of heart.
Libyan officials, however, have said fear was not a factor. They contend that the government had concluded that the development of weapons would not protect it and that it needed to promote better relations with the West, including the United States, to procure foreign investment and trade. Last fall, Libya's prime minister, Shokri Ghanem, predicted that trade relations with the United States would open in early 2004. Oil Minister Abdulhafid Zlitni called the move to give up the nuclear weapons program "a wise political decision."
"It was made in favor of using national resources for the welfare of the people. Weapons of mass destruction in my view are a waste of money," he said in an interview.
U.N. sanctions were lifted this year after Libya agreed to pay compensation to families of the 270 victims of the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland. Libya began to ease its way out of international isolation in 1999, when it extradited two suspects in the Lockerbie bombing. European oil companies are operating fields in Libya, but American companies are banned under the U.S. embargo issued in 1986. Oil revenue accounts for more than 90 percent of Libya's export earnings.
ElBaradei said on arriving in Libya on Saturday that the government's weapons program was embryonic and its scientists were far from producing a nuclear weapon. The Libyans had acknowledged working on a pilot program to enrich uranium, a preparatory stage for creating an atomic weapon.
-------- us politics
Jobless benefits shrinkage
by REP. CHARLES RANGEL
New York Democrat
Letters to the Editor
December 29, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20031228-104222-4576r.htm
In a Dec. 17 Commentary column titled "Jobless benefits shrinkage," Bruce Bartlett complained about my suggestion that allowing the extended unemployment benefits program to expire "borders on being immoral." Is giving every multimillionaire a $100,000 tax break while giving the unemployed the cold shoulder over the Christmas holiday immoral? You bet it is.
Mr. Bartlett's column also suggested that current economic conditions do not warrant another extension of unemployment benefits. However, the facts say otherwise. Unemployment is higher today than when the extended-benefits program was established in March 2002. The percentage of jobless workers exhausting their regular unemployment benefits without finding work has reached its highest level on record. Finally, our economy has 2.35 million fewer jobs today than 21/2 years ago, leaving three unemployed workers looking for every available job.
Mr. Bartlett concludes by saying that ending jobless benefits may slightly reduce the unemployment rate and therefore "defuse it as a political issue next year." I am not sure how to describe purposely hurting struggling families now in order to advance political goals next year, but it certainly is not what I would call "moral."
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms
Poland, Israel Sign Missile Deal
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 29, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Poland-Israel-Missiles.html?pagewanted=print&position=
WARSAW, Poland (AP) -- Poland and Israel on Monday signed a deal worth some $350 million over the next 10 years to provide the Polish army with some 2,700 state-of-the-art Israeli anti-tank missiles.
The ``Spike'' missiles, to be delivered between 2004 and 2013, will be produced under license from the state-owned Israeli Rafael arms corporation by Mesko, a Polish firm. Mesko will use components from Rafael, which will supply an initial batch of Israeli-made missiles next year.
The Spike is optically guided, can be shoulder-fired or mounted on vehicles or helicopters, and has a range of 4,000 yards, according to Rafael's Web site.
It will replace the Soviet-era missiles still in use by the Polish military.
The new missile program is part of a wider effort to bring the country's armed forces up to the standards of NATO, which Poland joined in 1999.
Monday's signing ceremony in Skarzysko Kamienna, 90 miles south of Warsaw, was attended by Polish Defense Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski and Israeli Defense Ministry director Amos Yaron.
The contract will give Mesko financial breathing room after a decade of losses. Its value for the first two years was estimated at $35 million.
Poland's Defense Ministry said Monday's deal was the third-largest involving modernization of the country's armed forces since the end of communism in 1989.
Last April, Poland signed a $3.5 billion deal to buy 48 U.S.-made F-16 jet fighters, the biggest defense contract by a former Soviet bloc country since the end of Cold War. It also has signed a $1.2 billion deal to buy 690 AMV Patria armored personnel carriers from Finland.
Israel is one of the world's top defense exporters.
Rafael has also sold various models of the Spike to Finland and the Netherlands, according to a report Monday by Israeli business daily Globes, which said the corporation is expected to log record sales of $900 million for 2003.
Israeli Defense Ministry figures show that Israeli weapons export contracts were worth $4.1 billion in 2002 -- up from $2.6 billion the previous year. Israel's overall exports are around $30 billion.
In June, Defense News, a U.S. weekly specializing in military issues, ranked Israel third in defense exports, behind the United States and Russia.
----
Arms trafficking danger
December 29, 2003
By Loretta Bondi
New York Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20031228-104217-3841r.htm
Revelations on Iran's arms procurement, and on the extent of Libya's secret weapons program, have recently exposed illicit arms-trafficking pipelines stretching across the Middle East, Europe and South Asia. In the United States'ownhemispheric neighborhood, an Organization of American States investigation linked an arms transactionbetween Nicaragua and Panama to brokers catering to the "Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia," a terrorist group by OAS definition. Significantly, one of the middlemen in this transaction was also connected to a Lebanese operator detained in Europe and under investigation by several nations for his ties with al Qaeda and suspected role in attacks on U.S. embassies in East Africa.
Moreover, a December 2003 United Nations report on the implementation of sanctions against al Qaeda underlined the role of middlemen moving weapons and money on behalf of terrorists. The U.N. investigators noted the growing need for an international treaty to control arms brokering and sanction-busting. Yet the United States has been adamantly opposed to such a treaty and to the creation of a U.N. specialized unit that could keep track of and "blacklist" traffickers across the world and their unsavory clients.
Since the 1990s, investigations have exposed well-honed arms smuggling pipelines and networks operated by globe-trotting brokers, transport agents, dealers and assorted facilitators. Whatever the fate of the ultimate paymasters of covert arms deals, the supporting cast of middlemen and peddlers has remained largely unscathed and outside the reach of the law.
Unlike arms manufacturers, dealers and exporters, brokers are uniquely unregulated. This is because only 16 countries in the world have laws that specifically target and hold accountable those middlemen who have consistently made a mockery of sanctions and arms trade controls.
Scant oversight, combined with governments' ineptitude or reluctance to bust illegal operators, has allowed arms peddlers to circumvent even the limited controls that already exist. For example, brokers have long been able to avoid accountability by establishing their bases in countries with extremely lax export laws. They are skilled at using fraudulent shipping documents and clandestine transport routes, such as off-the-beaten-track airstrips, roads and seaports. They are also masters in greasing their way with corrupt officials.
Shadowy as they might appear, arms middlemen have left detectable traces in their wake and seem to constitute a steady cast of characters. Indeed, some of the most notorious brokers have become "household names" in investigative circles. But the international community has been slow to react. Recognizing the perils of such inaction, the United States pioneered a law to control the activities of arms brokers, transport agents and financiers in 1996. To date, this law remains the best and most far-reaching in the world. However, it has also remained largely unenforceable due partly to a lack of cross-border cooperation in investigations and extradition. U.S. officials point out that in order to lend the 1996 statute some teeth, other countries should either adopt similar statutes simultaneously, or sign an international treaty providing uniform standards to law enforcement. The European Union recently took a step in the right direction by adopting a common position to control arms trafficking, but regional initiatives do not cover enough territory to effectively meet such a global threat.
Given these sobering facts, it would have been reasonable to expect that the United States would lead the charge and galvanize other states to rein in illicit operators. Instead, Washington has either ignored or actively opposed a blueprint for action that nongovernmental organizations, experts and the U.N. provided. This blueprint included the framework and language for an international convention to control arms brokers, as well as detailed recommendations for the creation of a specialized Security Council sanctions unit staffed with arms, financial, police and customs experts, who would be charged with issuing early warnings, and keeping track of and exposing illicit arms transactions.
The United States "nay-saying" rationale stems partly from its all-too-apparent disdain for any initiative smacking of multilateralism, particularly when United Nations-led. But it is also a response to the pressure exerted by the U.S. pro-gun lobby to steer clear from any action that might prevent the free flow of arms. It is not by coincidence that the U.S. opposition to a brokering treaty was most vocally articulated during a 2001 U.N. conference aimed at preventing and stemming the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons. Despite reprobation from Washington's closest allies, the U.S. positionremainsunchanged.
It should not be so. The United States has much to gain in ensuring that other countries fall into line with their controls. An international treaty would foster a shared understanding of the challenge posed by illicit arms middlemen across domestic borders. It would also prompt cooperation and empower law enforcers and judiciaries to respond to the clearly linked transnational threats of arms trafficking and terrorism.
Loretta Bondi is director of the Cooperative Security Program at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
-------- biological weapons
US develops lethal new viruses
29 October 03,
Debora MacKenzie,
New Scientist Print Edition
http://www.newscientist.com/news/print.jsp?id=ns99994318
Geneva - A scientist funded by the US government has deliberately created an extremely deadly form of mousepox, a relative of the smallpox virus, through genetic engineering.
The new virus kills all mice even if they have been given antiviral drugs as well as a vaccine that would normally protect them.
The work has not stopped there. The cowpox virus, which infects a range of animals including humans, has been genetically altered in a similar way.
The new virus, which is about to be tested on animals, should be lethal only to mice, Mark Buller of the University of St Louis told New Scientist. He says his work is necessary to explore what bioterrorists might do.
But the research brings closer the prospect of pox viruses that cause only mild infections in humans being turned into diseases lethal even to people who have been vaccinated.
And vaccines are currently our main defence against smallpox and its relatives, such as the monkeypox that reached the US this year. Some researchers think the latest research is risky and unnecessary.
"I have great concern about doing this in a pox virus that can cross species," said Ian Ramshaw of the Australian National University in Canberra on being told of Buller's work.
Ramshaw was a member of the team that accidentally discovered how to make mousepox more deadly (New Scientist, 13 January 2001). But the modified mousepox his team created was not as deadly as Buller's.
No rebound
Since then, Ramshaw told New Scientist, his team has also created more deadly forms of mousepox, and has used the same method to engineer a more deadly rabbitpox virus.
But this research revealed that the modified pox viruses are not contagious, he says. That is good news in the sense that these viruses could not cause ecological havoc by wiping out mouse or rabbit populations around the world if they escaped from a lab.
However, this discovery also means some bioterrorists might be more tempted to use the same trick to modify a pox virus that infects humans. Such a disease, like anthrax, would infect only those directly exposed to it. It would not spread around the world and rebound on the attackers. But there is no guarantee that other pox viruses modified in a similar way would also be non-contagious.
Ramshaw's team made its initial discovery while developing contraceptive vaccines for sterilising mice and rabbits without killing them. The researchers modified the mousepox virus by adding a gene for a natural immunosuppressant called IL-4, expecting this would boost antibody production.
Instead, the modified mousepox virus was far more lethal, killing 60 per cent of vaccinated mice. The addition of IL-4 seems to switch off a key part of the immune system called the cell-mediated response.
Maximised production
Now Buller has engineered a mousepox strain that kills 100 per cent of vaccinated mice, even when they were also treated with the antiviral drug cidofovir. A monoclonal antibody that mops up IL-4 did save some, however.
His team "optimised" the virus by placing the IL-4 gene in a different part of the viral genome and adding a promoter sequence to maximise production of the IL-4 protein, he told a biosecurity conference in Geneva last week.
Buller has also constructed a cowpox virus containing the mouse IL-4 gene, which is about to be tested on mice at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
Cowpox infects people, but Buller says the IL-4 protein is species-specific and would not affect the human immune system. The experiments are being done at the second-highest level of biological containment.
Nine-eleven
Ramshaw says there is no reason to do the cowpox experiments, as his group's work on rabbits has already shown the method works for other pox viruses. While viruses containing mouse IL-4 should not be lethal to humans, recombinant viruses can have unexpected effects, he says. "You'd hope the combination remains mouse-specific."
Why his group's engineered viruses are not contagious is a mystery, he says. It is not, for instance, because the host dies faster than usual, taking the virus with it. But his findings could explain why pox viruses containing IL-4 have never evolved naturally, even though the viruses frequently pick up genes that affect their host's immunity.
Despite the concerns, work on lethal new pox viruses seems likely to continue in the US. When members of the audience in Geneva questioned the need for such experiments, an American voice in the back boomed out: "Nine-eleven". There were murmurs of agreement.
-------- britain
Secrets and Lies
By Iain Macwhirter
28 December 2003
UK Herald
http://www.sundayherald.com/38943
The most extraordinary thing is that he is still in office. Tony Blair took this country to war in Iraq, without a specific United Nations mandate, because he said Britain was at risk from weapons of mass destruction which could be activated within 45 minutes. There were no weapons of mass destruction; there was no 45 minutes.
Going to war on a false pretext is possibly the worst thing a prime minister can do. Few decisions taken by modern political leaders are matters of life and death. But the decision to invade Iraq led to the deaths of more than 50 British servicemen, hundreds of US troops and thousands of Iraqi civilians.
So, why is he still there? Why hasn't the Prime Minister been impeached? Why are Labour still comfortably ahead in the opinion polls? Well, the short answer is that it is virtually impossible to remove PMs, other than at election time. There is no constitutional machinery for holding a prime minister to account, other than a vote of confidence in the House of Commons. Over Iraq, Tony Blair suffered the largest back-bench rebellion of any sitting government in 100 years. But with a 161-seat majority in the Commons, he could see off even that.
Of course, the Prime Minister now insists the capture of Saddam Hussein has vindicated his actions. Nobody could deny that Iraq is better off without this tyrant, a man who gassed his own people, murdered thousands of political prisoners and was responsible for a million casualties in the Iran-Iraq war. But we didn't go to war in Iraq to remove Saddam. Nor did we invade the country for humanitarian reasons. We went to war in Iraq because we were told by Blair that there was a real and present danger to British national security from Saddam's weapons of mass destruction (WMD). This was manifestly not the case.
It is too easy to shrug and say that history is always written by the victors. This episode has inflicted enduring collateral damage on the credibility of parliamentary democracy. Trust in politics and politicians had anyway fallen to an all-time low as a result of Tory sleaze and a surfeit of spin in Labour's first term of office. But now, barely 20% of us say we believe most of what the government says. This is the lowest credibility rating of any government since polling began. It is an appalling reflection on the state of our political culture.
Labour promised us it wouldn't be this way. For a time, we believed it. In 1998, all Blair had to do was describe himself as "a pretty straight kind of a guy". Those few words killed the controversy over Bernie Ecclestone's £1 million donation to Labour, and the subsequent exemption of Ecclestone's Formula One from the government ban on tobacco advertising. Blair would never get away with such appeals to his own probity today. The Prime Minister who promised to be whiter than white has become as grubby as his predecessors. In focus groups, he has become "Phoney Tony".
Arguably, the rot had set in long before Iraq. Spin had already damaged the probity of this administration, thanks to spin doctors like Jo Moore and Alastair Campbell. Since Campbell's departure, there has been a genuine effort to make the government information service less political. "No spin is the new spin," as insiders put it. But the failure to discover significant weapons of mass destruction eight months after the fall of Baghdad has largely undone those attempts to restore trust in the government.
It has been the American connection that has caused most of the trouble. Britain was caught up in President George Bush's rush to turn the war against terrorism into the war against Saddam. The attempt to elide the distinction between Islamic fundamentalism and the secular Iraq began a process of distortion which undermined the credibility of the "coalition of the willing". The intelligence services came under pressure to furnish evidence of Saddam's threat to the world, and his complicity in al-Qaeda's global terror campaign.
Even Bush has now accepted there was no evidence that Saddam had anything to do with the September 11, 2001, attacks. The irony is that there is now strong evidence of a link between Saddam 's men, al-Qaeda and other Islamic suicide sects. Iraq has become a magnet for terrorists from throughout the Middle East. It has become the epicentre of jihad.
It will be interesting to hear at his trial what Saddam has to say about the relationship between Iraq and the countries which toppled him. Britain produced the barrel for the Iraqi super-gun in the 1980s and even gave export licences to the engineering firms that made them. We also sent items like centrifuges which could have been used in a military nuclear programme. The US helped Saddam acquire the technology to make chemical and biological weapons for use against Iran. Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, was one of the diplomats who negotiated Iraq's military procurement programme 20-odd years ago.
And it wasn't just the "coalition of the willing". France sold Saddam two nuclear reactors. Russia supplied arms for which it has still to be paid. If Saddam's regime was the most murderous in the world, then we in the West have blood on our hands.
Those who knew the history of our relations with Saddam, like the former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, found it difficult to endorse the invasion of Iraq. Cook resigned because he believed the government had "blundered" into Iraq on false intelligence. Development Secretary Clare Short also resigned, albeit belatedly.
In one memorable phrase, Short said Blair had been engaged in an "honourable deception" over weapons of mass destruction. What she meant was the PM had had to exaggerate the threat in order to get a reluctant electorate to endorse the war. It was done for the best of reasons - to rid the world of tyranny. But it involved deceiving the British people.
We now know that members of both the British and US intelligence services had been warning that the threat from Saddam was being exaggerated. One of them, Dr David Kelly - Britain's leading authority on Iraq's WMD - told newspapers and TV reporters of his fears that the government's September 2002 dossier on Saddam's WMD had been exaggerated.
There is some doubt as to his exact words, but the main thrust of his concern was made clear in a taped interview with the Newsnight reporter, Susan Watts. In it, Kelly said the 45 minute claim had been "got out of all proportion", that Number 10 was "desperate for information" and it was the press office which was responsible. Watts asked Kelly who exactly had authorised the distortion and he replied: the Number 10 press office. "Was it Alastair Campbell?" asked Watts. Kelly replied: "I think Alastair Campbell is synonymous with that press office because he's responsible for it."
It was that remark, or one very similar, that led indirectly to Kelly taking his own life. He had also volunteered this information to Andrew Gilligan, the defence correspondent of the Today programme. In his fateful 6am Today interview, Gilligan said a senior member of British intelligence had told him Number 10 had "sexed up" the evidence of WMD in the September dossier, and the government "probably knew" the 45 minute claim was wrong.
THIS hasty assessment provoked the greatest confrontation between government and the British Broadcasting Corporation since the Falklands conflict. Indeed, the clash was far in excess of anything that took place during the Thatcher years. It became nothing short of a conflict of credibility between the government and the BBC. Neither won - indeed both lost. The BBC arguably went too far in defending Gilligan and the unscripted, live "two-way" interview in which he claimed Number 10 had sexed up the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) report. The BBC was embarrassed when e-mails emerged indicating that Today editor Kevin Marsh had criticised Gilligan's methods and choice of language in the report.
But Number 10, in turn, protested too much about the errors of detail in Gilligan's report which was - in all major respects - accurate and fair. Kelly may not actually have been a "member of British intelligence", as Gilligan claimed, but he was our leading expert on Iraq's WMD . Kelly may not have directly accused Campbell of "sexing up" the dossier (as Gilligan alleged in his subsequent article in the Mail On Sunday). However, he clearly pointed the finger firmly in his direction.
In his appearance before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, Kelly insisted he had not been Gilligan's source and had not spoken to Watts in the terms alleged. The first casualty - after truth - was in a sense Kelly himself who, unable to cope with the contradictions in his evidence, opened his veins in a copse near his home. This one death came to eclipse all the fatalities in the Iraq war. Kelly became a martyr to spin. The Hutton Inquiry, which has turned conventions of government secrecy upside down, will be his legacy.
Sensing the way the wind was blowing, Campbell seized an opportune moment in the inquiry to resign as Blair's director of communications. He had been vindicated by John Scarlett, the head of the JIC.
What is not in doubt is that the government sought to expose Kelly as the source of Gilligan's story in an effort to undermine it. Blair managed to sidestep responsibility even though he chaired the committee which decided effectively to leak Kelly's name. It used the old trick of inviting journalists to speculate on the name of the mole and then confirming when they came up with the right one.
The Hutton Inquiry, due to report next month, is likely to criticise both the media and the government over Kelly's death. But, in a sense, the damage has already been done.
It is not only politicians who have fallen from grace. The media hasn't had a good war either. The Hutton hearings presented the government and the BBC as engaged in a kind of dance of death, undermining public faith in each other. Suddenly, it seemed as if the hacks were as bad as the politicians.
Rightly or wrongly, Gilligan has come to symbolise what is wrong in the British political media. We've been rumbled. It was, after all, journalists who invented spin. The techniques were perfected by tabloid sub editors who became adept at slanting reports to conform to the prejudices of proprietors like Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell. It is no accident that spin doctors like Campbell came from Fleet Street.
The public have sensed this. In popularity polls, journalists now come even lower than politicians . Britain believes even less of what it reads in the papers than of what it hears from politicians. The current political culture, in which nobody believes anyone, is dangerous. In such a climate, rumour becomes as salient as fact and the nation loses faith in the electoral process. An electorate which no longer believes or cares is vulnerable to the blandishments of the unscrupulous . This is a very serious state of affairs for everyone involved in the political process and defenders of democracy and press freedom. We live increasingly in a political culture defined by mistrust and cynicism. The outcome of the Hutton Inquiry could be the beginning of the rehabilitation of politics or the cause of a catastrophic collapse in public trust. The press and politicians will have to think about how they can persuade the public to believe what they say. For once, both are in the same boat, and it is heading for the rapids.
-------- business
Boeing wins 9.6 billion dollar contract for US Navy jets
SAN FRANCISCO, California (AFP)
Dec 30, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031229232344.wvbctrr0.html
Boeing has won a 9.6 billion dollars contract to supply the US Navy with 210 F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter aircraft and to develop a new version of the plane for electronic warfare, the company said in a statement Monday.
Under the deal, the Navy will buy 42 jets every year from 2005 to 2009, at a cost of 8.6 billion dollars.
Another one billion dollars will go toward developing the new systems for electronic warfare.
Boeing shares closed up 53 cents to 42 dollars.
----
Boeing lands two fighter contracts
By Philip Dine
St Louis Post-Dispatch Washington Bureau
12/29/2003
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/business/stories.nsf/Business/810879C56DA8BF2686256E0C00194866?OpenDocument&Headline=Boeing%20lands%20two%20fighter%20contracts
WASHINGTON - The Navy has awarded Boeing Co. two contracts for military work to be based in St. Louis, worth a total of almost $10 billion.
Both contracts, announced Monday evening, involve Boeing's F/A-18 Super Hornet. Under the awards, Boeing, the world's largest aerospace company, will over the next decade:
Design and develop a new electronic attack plane to replace the Navy's aging fleet of EA-6B Prowlers. The new plane is a variant of the Super Hornet and has been dubbed the Growler, though no official name has been chosen. Boeing was given $979 million to design and develop the E/A-18G, including laboratories, ground tests, flight tests and weapons performance testing.
Build 210 Super Hornets over five years, in a multiyear contract for $8.6 billion. The bulk purchase will save the Navy about $1 billion, Pentagon officials said, because Boeing can reduce the plane's per-unit cost through economies of scale. The 210 planes are expected to include about 90 Growlers.
Rear Adm. James B. Godwin III, the Navy's executive officer for tactical aircraft programs, said the contracts were issued in large part because Boeing's Super Hornet program has consistently met or exceeded expectations on cost and schedule.
"The Super Hornet team has done a fantastic job," Godwin said. The Boeing-led team includes Northrop Grumman, General Electric and Raytheon.
In a key change from Boeing's current contract, the Navy has the flexibility to increase the number of Super Hornets - 42 a year - by six planes a year, but it cannot reduce the number. Under the current contract, the annual number can go up or down by six.
Design and development work on the Growler will mean hiring about 50 engineers in St. Louis, said Pat Finneran, Boeing vice president and general manager of naval aircraft programs.
"We'll be ramping up in January, now that the contract's been signed," Finneran said. Beyond that, Boeing is committed to adding at least 600 jobs over the next four years in St. Louis, and Monday's announcement provides "a solid foundation" for doing that, he said.
The Growler work will extend the Super Hornet production line a couple of years until at least 2011. Because 5,000 of Boeing's 15,000 St. Louis workers work on the Super Hornet, the dual contracts add stability for a third of the work force, Finneran said.
And by letting Boeing "keep the (Super Hornet's) skill base here in St. Louis" intact, the company can compete for contracts on other programs that could add jobs, Finneran said.
"It really secures the work force," Finneran said. It also will protect 8,000 jobs at Boeing's 100 suppliers in Missouri, he said. Nationwide, the Super Hornet provides employment for 22,000 workers.
Boeing's recent ethical problems with the Air Force, which led Chairman Phil Condit to resign this month, played no role in Monday's decision, Godwin said. Boeing was not subject to any extra scrutiny because of the recent events.
Boeing revealed last month that a top executive had spoken with an Air Force acquisitions official about a job while she was still in a position to influence Air Force procurement decisions. As a result, the Air Force is investigating Boeing - but Godwin said there was no thought of awaiting the outcome of the inquiry before awarding the contracts.
Finneran credited the performance of the Super Hornet team ever since the plane's first contract in 1992 for securing the Navy's trust.
"When you have that level of performance, you've built up confidence in the customer," Finneran said.
Rick Smith, president of the local Machinists union at Boeing, called the contacts a government "stamp of approval" for Boeing's workers.
The 210 Super Hornets will be produced from fiscal years 2005 to 2009, with delivery to begin in 2007.
Two developmental Growlers will be built next year to examine the manufacturing concepts, with four operational test aircraft to be built by 2008. After that, the plan calls for 12 Growlers to be delivered in 2009, 18 in 2010 and 22 in 2011. That leaves 34 to be delivered by 2013.
Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo., a member of the House Armed Services Committee, has led the congressional effort for the Growler, starting with a $10 million grant in 2001 to test its feasibility.
"It is extremely gratifying to see the Growler move closer to the flight deck," Akin said. "These aircraft will play a critical role in combat effectiveness and in the survivability of our fighter pilots."
He called the Growler contract "a significant step toward seeing Super Hornets playing a continued, vital role in our national defense."
Sen. Jim Talent, R-Mo., of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the Super Hornet "the foundation of Boeing's operation in St. Louis and an anchor for thousands of jobs in Missouri."
"With today's contact award," he said, "we ensure Boeing's business base in the state for years to come."
Reporter Philip Dine E-mail: pdine@post-dispatch.com Phone: 202-298-6880
-------- europe
German army could be professional from 2010: defense minister
HAMBURG, Germany (AFP)
Dec 29, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031229155237.dnneiu92.html
Germany's Bundeswehr could be transformed from a conscription-based army to one of professional soldiers by 2010, German Defense Minister Peter Struck said in a radio interview Monday.
If the next German parliament in its 2006-2010 term approves such a change "the army will be able fulfill its missions without any major changes to its structures," he told German broadcaster NDR.
Struck, who didn't exclude the possibility of a vote on the issue during the next parliament, stuck to his Social Democratic (SPD) party's position that the current conscription system should remain in place.
Conscription has been a point of contention between Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's SPD party and his coalition partner Greens, which favor establishing a fully professional army.
In the interview, Struck also announced the closure of around 100 more army bases as part of the reform process he earlier described as designed to adapt the army to the Germany's needs.
The government has already announced that total military staffing levels in the armed forces are due to fall from 285,000 at present to 250,000 by 2010, while the numbers of civilian staff are to be cut by half. There are currently 80,000 conscripts.
Germany's annual military budget is set at 24.2 billion euros (30.2 nillion dollars) until 2006. The majority of the funds are spent on personnel and equipment costs, leaving little room for maneuver for foreign deployments -- one of the government's defense policy priorities.
-------- spies
Jury Acquits Scientist Accused of Spying
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 29, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Spy-Trial.html?pagewanted=print&position=
MOSCOW (AP) -- A jury acquitted a Russian physicist of espionage charges Monday, a rare defeat for Russia's top security agency, the main successor to the KGB.
The trial of Valentin Danilov, a professor at Krasnoyarsk Technical University in Siberia, is among a series of high-profile spy cases against Russian researchers that have alarmed the scientific community and raised fears of a resurgence of Soviet-era KGB tactics.
Danilov was accused by the Federal Security Service, or FSB, of selling classified information on space technology to China and misappropriating university funds. He was tried by a jury, a practice still almost unheard-of in Russia.
``After a four-hour-long discussion, eight out of the 12 jurors declared him innocent on all counts, after which the judge acquitted him,'' Danilov's lawyer Yelena Yevmenova told The Associated Press on the phone from Krasnoyarsk.
Immediately after the acquittal, prosecutors said they would appeal the verdict to Russia's Supreme Court, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported. While jury verdicts normally cannot be appealed, the ruling can be called off in case of procedural violations during the trial, the agency said.
Danilov was arrested in February 2001 and spent 19 months behind bars before a judge released him last September pending trial. He insisted that the information he provided is no longer classified and came from open sources, including published scientific journals.
``I think it's the testimony of witnesses -- colleagues from my university -- that made the jurors see that the materials I dealt with were by no means state secrets,'' Danilov told The Associated Press by telephone from Krasnoyarsk.
Human rights advocates say the FSB is deeply suspicious of Russian scientists' contacts with foreigners. They say that its agents have been emboldened by the rise of ex-KGB agent and FSB director Vladimir Putin to the presidency in March 2000.
Grigory Pasko, a military journalist who himself had been convicted on treason charges and then released on parole, accused the security services of fabricating spy cases.
``This will continue until there is a precedent ... when an investigator who falsifies and fabricates such cases is tried,'' Pasko told Echo of Moscow radio.
However, veteran human rights campaigner Lyudmila Alexeyeva said that jury trials could help rein in the security services.
``The more proceedings in Russia are held with juries, the more objective sentences will be,'' she was quoting as saying by the Interfax news agency.
Although the Russian constitution provides for jury trials, they have been used only on an experimental basis over the last decade in nine of Russia's 89 regions. Jury trials are to be introduced throughout the country by 2007.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
The Constitution in wartime
By Nat Hentoff
December 29, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20031228-104213-7580r.htm
At the Constitutional Conventionin Philadelphia in 1787, there was particularly intense debate on the separation of powers between what became our three branches of government. On Dec. 18, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the president has breached that core element of our democracy.
In the case of American citizen Jose Padilla, held - solely on the authority of the president - for 18 months in a Charleston, S.C., brig without charges, indefinitely and without access to a lawyer as an enemy combatant, the Second Circuit ruled:
"The president, acting alone, possesses no inherent constitutional authority to detain American citizens seized within the United States, away from the zone of combat, as enemy combatants."
In the 2-1 decision, the majority cited a 1971 Non-Detention Act by Congress, which itself was a reaction to the widely criticized imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in detention camps during World War II. The act unequivocally states that, "No citizen shall be ... detained by the United States except pursuant to an act of Congress."
Actually, back in 1936 (in Valentine vs. U.S.), the Supreme Court had declared that "the Constitution creates no executive prerogative to dispose of the liberty of the individual. Proceedings against him must be authorized by law." The case involved the extradition of U.S. citizens to France for crimes allegedly committed there.
In the Padilla case, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals emphasized that Congress has not passed, in our war on terrorism, a law giving the president, as commander-in-chief, the unilateral power to hold Padilla without the fundamental rights to due process to which all American citizens are entitled.
Fundamental to the protection of our liberties is the system of checks and balances between the three branches of government that is enshrined in our Constitution. As James Madison emphasized in the Federalist Papers: "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... may justly be pronounced the very definitionof tyranny."
We are nowhere nearastateof tyranny.
The press is free. The civilian courts are open. There are increasing bipartisan measures in Congress to roll back the USA Patriot Act - specifically, the section that dangerously limits judicial supervision over certain acts of theexecutive branch, particularly the Justice Department.
Nor do the administration and its supporters seem to have even the remotest intention of verging on tyranny. I have come to know, for example, Viet Dinh, who, as a close adviser to John Ashcroft in the Justice Department, was the principal drafter of the Patriot Act. He is now a law professor at George Washington University Law Center.
Mr. Dinh and I disagree on a number of actions the administration has taken in the name of security, but he experienced actual tyranny, having been born in Vietnam, and does not want to see it emerge anywhere. After he and I debated the Patriot Act at the National Press Foundation in Washington (while he was still at the Justice Department), Mr. Dinh said to me, "keep us honest."
I've been doing the best that I can. So has the Second Circuit.
The administration's argument from the beginning has been that the Padilla case does not belong in the courts at all because of the president's inherent power as commander-in-chief, during a time of war, to do what he has done to Padilla.
After being brought to the courts, the administration, still holding that view, claims that Congress' Authorization for Use of Military Force joint resolution soon after Sept. 11 does give the president this authority over enemy combatants. But the Second Circuit found that this resolution "contains no language authorizing detention." The president has no power to act on his own without a specific law by Congress.
The court's decision, of course, is being appealed; but, until that is decided, Padilla, the Second Circuit says, "will be entitled to constitutional protections" of all other citizens. Worth noting is that the dissenting judge, Richard Wesley, while agreeing with the government that the congressional resolution supports the president's position - also believes that Mr. Padilla, like any American citizen, has the right to see his lawyer. Will the Supreme Court deny him that, and the rest of due process to which a citizen is entitled?
On the day of the Second Circuit decision, New York Times reporter David Stout wrote about the bedrock question before the Supreme Court: "the delicate balance between personal freedoms and the security of the nation, especially in wartime." Especially in wartime, the Constitution must stand upright for the freedoms we are fighting to defend against the terrorists.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- energy
AP: Dean Had Own Secret Energy Group
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 29, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Dean-Energy.html?pagewanted=print&position=
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean, who has criticized the Bush administration for refusing to release the deliberations of its energy policy task force, as governor of Vermont convened a similar panel that met in secret and angered state lawmakers.
Dean's group held one public hearing and after the fact volunteered the names of industry executives and liberal advocates it consulted in private, but Dean refused to open the task force's private deliberations.
In 1999, he offered the same argument the administration uses today for keeping deliberations of a policy task force secret.
``The governor needs to receive advice from time to time in closed session. As every person in government knows, sometimes you get more open discussion when it's not public,'' Dean was quoted as saying.
His own dispute over the secrecy of the task force that devised a policy for restructuring Vermont's nearly bankrupt electric utilities has escaped national attention, even as he has attacked a similar arrangement used by President Bush.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Dean defended his recent criticism of Vice President Dick Cheney's task force and his demand that the administration release its private energy deliberations.
Dean said his group developed better policy in a bipartisan manner, seeking advice not just from energy executives but environmentalists and advocates for the poor. He said his task force was more open because it held a public hearing and divulged afterward the names of people it consulted even though deliberations were held in secret.
The Vermont task force ``is not exactly the Cheney thing,'' Dean said. ``We had a much more open process than Cheney's process. We named the people we sought advice from in our final report.''
Dean said he still believes it was necessary to keep his task force's deliberations secret, especially because the group was reviewing proprietary financial data from Vermont utilities. ``Some advice does have to be given in private, but I don't mind letting people know who gave that advice,'' he said.
An expert in political rhetoric said it was risky for Dean to attack Bush and Cheney on an issue where he was vulnerable.
``In general, what is good for the vice president should be good for the governor. A candidate who attacks on grounds he is vulnerable is foolish,'' said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a University of Pennsylvania professor who helps run a Web site that compares presidential candidates' rhetoric with the facts.
Dean's campaign said it was ``laughable'' to equate the two panels.
``Governor Dean confronted and averted an energy crisis that would have had disastrous consequences for the citizens of Vermont by bringing together a bipartisan and ideologically diverse working group that solved the problem,'' spokesman Jay Carson said Sunday.
``Dick Cheney put together a group of his corporate cronies and partisan political contributors, and they gave themselves billions and disguised it as a national energy policy.''
In September, Dean argued that the task force Cheney assembled in 2001 and the Bush energy policy that were unduly influenced by Bush family friend and Enron energy chief Kenneth Lay. He demanded that records of its deliberations be made public.
``The administration should also level with the American people about just how much influence Ken Lay and his industry buddies had over the development of the president's energy policy by releasing notes on the deliberations of Vice President Cheney's energy task force,'' Dean said on Sept. 15.
In 1998, Dean's Vermont task force met in secret to write a plan for revamping state electricity markets that would slow rising consumer costs and relieve utilities of a money-losing deal with a Canadian power company, Hydro Quebec.
The task force's work resulted in the Dean administration and state utility regulators advocating that Vermont have the first utility in the country to meet energy efficiency standards.
It also freed the state's utilities from burdensome costs from a long-term deal with Hydro Quebec that had left them near bankruptcy by passing as much as 90 percent of those costs to consumers. Utility shareholders also suffered some losses.
The parallels between the Cheney and Dean task forces are many.
Both declined to open their deliberations, even under pressure from legislators. Both received input from the energy industry in private meetings, and released the names of task force members publicly.
Dean's group volunteered the names of those it consulted with in its final report. While Cheney has refused to formally give a list to Congress to preserve the White House's right to private advice, known as executive privilege, his aides have divulged to reporters the names of many of those from whom the task force sought advice.
The Bush-Cheney campaign and Republican Party received millions in donations from energy interests in the election before its task force was created.
Dean's Vermont re-election campaign received only small contributions from energy executives, but a political action committee created as he prepared to run for president collected $19,000, or nearly a fifth of its first $110,000, from donors tied to Vermont's electric utilities.
One co-chairman of Dean's task force, William Gilbert, was a Republican lawyer who had done work for state utilities. At the time, Gilbert also served on the board of Vermont Gas Systems, a subsidiary of Hydro Quebec.
Many state legislators, including Dean's fellow Democrats, were angered that the task force met secretly.
``It taints the whole report,'' Democratic state Rep. Al Stevens told the AP in 1999. ``I'd have more faith in that report if the discussions had been open.''
Elizabeth Bankowski, a Democrat who co-chaired the task force with Gilbert, told the legislature that the secrecy requirement ``was decided in advance by the governor's office and the governor's lawyer.''
-------- ACTIVISTS
PETA's anti-fur campaign
Letters to the Editor
December 29, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20031228-104222-4576r.htm
Please allow me to respond to your Inside the Beltway item about People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals' new anti-fur flier ("Animal Cracker," Nation, Wednesday). Because our flier exposes the extreme violence of the fur industry, we are not distributing it to young children - we're handing it out only to people at least 13 years old or directly to their mothers. However, the message of compassion is one that children of all ages need to hear.
As a mother myself, I do everything I can to teach my daughter that cruelty and violence are wrong. That's why I cannot understand why any parent would ever choose to wear fur.
Perhaps the fur wearers don't know that animals caught in the wild for their fur face days of agony in traps, tearing flesh and breaking bones in a struggle to get free. On fur farms, animals spend their entire lives confined to cramped, filthy cages, constantly pacing back and forth from stress and boredom. They are poisoned, gassed, strangled or electrocuted.
As parents, we can choose to teach our children cruelty or kindness. Let's choose kindness by shunning products, such as fur, that involve the unnecessary suffering of many innocent animals.
To learn what else you can do,pleasevisitwww.furisdead.com.
LIZ WELSH Staff writer
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
Norfolk
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