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NUCLEAR
Radioactive waste threatens Central Asia
Papers Show U.S. Unease on Pakistan - China
China boosts military spending to build high-tech weapons
Long odds on BNFL winning Japanese contract
Libya sends US last parts of weapons program
Last of Nuclear Equipment Leaves Libya
Libya Gives Up Remaining Nuclear - Related Equipment
Experts: Russia Helped Iraq With Missiles
Proposed Energy Department Budget Would Boost Funds for Nuclear Weapons
Broaden the Nonproliferation Campaign
Nuclear Bunker Busters, Mini-Nukes, and the US Nuclear Stockpile
People more important than fish eggs
Goshute dissidents rebuffed by federal court
Kennedy Gives Bush Stinging Rebuke on War
Kennedy Says Bush Skewed Iraq Data
MILITARY
U.S.: al-Qaida May Be Looking to Africa
US, India to share high altitude warfare technology
India, Israel sign $1.1bn Phalcon deal
AU researcher gets 7 months for selling to China
Kyrgyzstan straddles role on terror issue
Blair Reiterates Case for War, Asserting Grave Danger
Libya discloses chemical weapons
Libya Discloses Production of 23 Tons of Mustard Gas
China Boosts Military Spending in Budget
Aristide wasn't forced out
U.S. Special Forces in Haiti Seeking Out Rebel Leaders
Marines Extend Reach Past Haitian Capital
Iraqi Shiites Fail to Sign Pact After Cleric Balks
Constitution Failure Deals Blow to Iraqis
Iraqi Shiites, in a Blow to U.S., Fail to Sign Temporary Charter
Bush close to imposing sanctions on Syria
CIA leak probe seeks Air Force One chats
U.S., Certain That Iraq Had Illicit Arms
Iraqi Defector Blames CIA Over Weapons
Kerry Says Bush Failing to Fully Equip U.S. Troops
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Leak Investigators to Get Phone Log
Air Force One Phone Records Are Among Data Sought by Subpoena
Leak Investigators to Get Phone Log
OTHER
PG&E's Toxic Plume Creeps Toward L.A. Water Supply
How Industry Won the Battle of Pollution Control at E.P.A.
Accusations in Capitol on Lead Levels in Water
D.C. Handling Of Lead Issue Blasted on Hill
ACTIVISTS
Jewish suburb backs protest
Welcome to the Department of Peace
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- asia
Radioactive waste threatens Central Asia
March 06, 2004
By Burt Herman
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040305-100450-8640r.htm
MAYLUU-SUU, Kyrgyzstan - Outside the rusting, closed Izolit uranium-processing plant, 23 radioactive waste sites exist in the landslide-prone hills - a catastrophe in waiting that could spill poison into the river below and on to the most populous region of Central Asia.
About 70 million cubic feet of tailings left from refining uranium ore during the Soviet era are buried in this mountain valley along the Mayluu-Suu River. The river runs a short distance to Uzbekistan and the Fergana Valley, the region's agricultural heartland with 12 million inhabitants.
Potential disasters could spill from the mountains, said Arip Kokkozov, an official at the Ministry of Ecology and Emergency Situations who monitors Kyrgyz waste sites. Landslides could carry waste into the river; snow and rain could cause leaks from containers built with outdated technology; wind could blow waste through the air; radioactive material could seep into groundwater.
"There are many problems. They need to be solved," Mr. Kokkozov said in his office in the southern city of Osh. "If there was enough money, we could fly it all into space," he joked.
This debt-saddled former Soviet republic has pleaded for outside help to clean up the sites, arguing it doesn't have the resources to tackle the problem alone. Cleaning up Mayluu-Suu will cost an estimated $17 million, officials say.
"I can't say we are receiving enough assistance from abroad, as the cost is very high," said Bolot Aidaraliyev, deputy minister of ecology and emergency situations. "This is not one day's work. Each site requires an individual approach. ... It will take years of work to rehabilitate the sites."
The World Bank has pledged $5 million for this year if preparations to address the problem go as planned. The money would be used to shore up waste sites against landslides and help government agencies get ready for a potential disaster.
Japan is giving about $500,000 under one of the first grants in the project. The European Union also has been involved through its technical assistance program for former Soviet states.
All the former Soviet republics are grappling with environmental problems sown by Moscow's former communist regime, and radioactive, biological and chemical waste sites dot the landscape of Central Asia.
The vast steppes of Kazakhstan were used as a nuclear testing ground, and an island in the Aral Sea shared by Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan held a biological-weapons testing facility. But the waste at Mayluu-Suu poses the most immediate threat to the largest number of people.
Mayluu-Suu, which means "oily water" in Kyrgyz, first got into the uranium business in 1946 as the Soviet Union rushed to develop atomic weapons. Until the 1970s, the town was a restricted military zone that only people who lived and worked in could enter, a place not shown on maps.
It later became known for its light bulb factory, now a Russian-Kyrgyz joint venture that remains the main industry in town. "Our goods provide you with the joy of light," a billboard proclaims in English on the road leading into town.
There are no cheery slogans at the shuttered Izolit factory, where profiles of Lenin and Marx still watch over a model of an atom. The crumpled metal remains of a bridge that once crossed the river to the factory are rusting, half-submerged in the water.
The city's chief physician, Dr. Nemat Mambetov, says health officials found levels of radon - a radioactive gas emitted by decaying uranium - as high as twice the internationally accepted rates in 28 of 30 homes they examined. Dr. Mambetov said cancer rates in town also appear higher than normal, but he has no funding - and no oncologists in town - to do more detailed research.
At High School No. 4, American-studies teacher Valentin Ladeishikov is trying to educate people about the dangers in their back yard, and has founded the city's only humanitarian organization to take on the issue. He said some residents have removed radioactive bricks or metal from waste sites and used them to build houses.
On his classroom chalkboard below a drawing of the U.S. Capitol, Mr. Ladeishikov draws a series of circles showing how the effects of a radioactive leak would expand across the region - creating ecological refugees who would spread worries about contamination for hundreds of miles.
Mr. Ladeishikov has held educational seminars for students on the dangers of stealing material from the waste sites and on what to do if catastrophe strikes. He is trying to get foreign donations to reach more residents.
"They do not realize the danger," Mr. Ladeishikov said.
On the road into the mountains, Raimjan Osmonaliyev, a village elder and former uranium miner, and four other men pray on their knees facing toward Mecca, just steps from the entrance to the uranium mine and the Izolit factory. Mr. Osmonaliyev, 68, said he has no plans to move his six daughters and two sons - and so many grandchildren he has lost count - away from Mayluu-Suu.
"This is now in our blood," he replied when asked about potential harm from radiation. "We've been here since birth; that's why there's no injury from it."
Nearby, a sign warns people not to enter the mine, but the fence posts have been stripped of the barbed wire that once kept out trespassers.
"Even if we're scared, what can we do?" Mr. Osmonaliyev asked. "We can't fly into the sky. We can't escape."
• Additional information is available on the Internet at the EurasiaNet site on Central Asia's environment:
http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/environment/index.shtml.
-------- china
Papers Show U.S. Unease on Pakistan - China
March 6, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-China-Pakistan.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Newly released documents track 30 years of denials and dodging by China on whether it was helping Pakistan develop nuclear weapons, along with efforts by the United States to smoke out the truth, researchers say.
Declassified papers reviewed by the National Security Archive, an institute at George Washington University, show U.S. unease over secret China-Pakistan security and military cooperation dating to the late 1960s, and examples of Chinese assistance to Pakistan's nuclear weapons-related projects in the late 1970s, the researchers said.
William Burr, director of the institute's nuclear documentation project, said exactly what the United States knew remains secret, and the extent of China's involvement with the Pakistani nuclear program is a matter of conjecture.
He said that although the Chinese Foreign Ministry has been investigating charges that China has spread nuclear technology, he did not expect many answers on Pakistan.
``A decision by the Foreign Ministry to publicize the results of its investigation would be a great victory for transparency, although Beijing is more likely to sustain the secrecy surrounding its decisions on the Pakistani nuclear program,'' he said.
Even so, the papers outline decades of efforts by Washington to get to the bottom of Chinese-Pakistani cooperation and to discourage it.
Researchers say the material, dating to 1965, shows:
-- A refusal by Chinese diplomats in 1982 to give an ``unequivocal answer'' to questions about nuclear weapons aid to Pakistan.
--A conclusion by State Department analysts in 1983 that China was helping Pakistan with the production of fissile materials and possibly with the design of weapons.
--The first Bush administration's concern in 1989 over ``reports of Chinese assistance to Pakistan's nuclear weapons program.''
--A denial in 1989 by Chinese diplomats of Chinese nuclear aid to Pakistan.
--U.S. pressure on China in 1992 to impose full safeguards on the sale of a nuclear reactor to Pakistan because of proliferation concerns.
--Concerns in late 1992 over China's ``continuing activities with Pakistan's nuclear weapons programs.''
--The Clinton administration's 1997 certification of improvements in Beijing's nuclear proliferation policies.
Questions about China's nuclear proliferation were raised when Chinese-language documents, supplied by Pakistan, were disclosed in material released recently by Libya. A leading Pakistani nuclear scientist said that he sold nuclear technology to Libya, North Korea and Iran.
On the Net:
National Security Archive: http://www.gwu.edu/nsarchiv/
----
China boosts military spending to build high-tech weapons
BEIJING (AFP)
Mar 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040306044253.xavqtcgu.html
China Saturday boosted its 2004 military spending by 11.6 percent over last year as it stepped up efforts to modernize and outfit its military with high-tech weaponry.
"Expenditures for national defense will rise by 21.83 billion yuanbillion dollars), 11.6 percent more than last year in order to improve the defensive combat readiness of the armed forces under high-tech conditions," Finance Minister Jin Renqing told a session of the National People's Congress.
The increase marked a return to double-digit growth in defense spending after an annual increase last year of 9.6 percent.
It was not immediately clear if the increase would be on top of what was actually spent on defense in 2003, or on the 2003 budgeted figure of 185.3 billion yuan (22.37 billion dollars).
China's stated defense spending grew by 17.6 percent 2002 and 17.7 percent in 2001.
Despite all the accounting pronouncements, China's real military spending remains shrouded in secrecy, with Western analysts routinely estimating a real military budget ranging from between two and three times the stated figure.
At the opening of the congress on Friday, Premier Wen Jiabao also urged more money for the People's Liberation Army, citing a "complex and profound" international situation characterized by a return of "unilateralism."
"Stepping up efforts to modernize our national defense and armed forces is an important guarantee for safeguarding national security and building a moderately prosperous society in all respects," Wen said in his annual address to the nation.
"The tendency for unilateralism is re-emerging, local conflicts continue, international terrorist activity is rampant..., and traditional and non-traditional security issues intertwined," he said.
China's military build-up has become increasingly worrisome to its neighbors. Japan is actively seeking to build a ballistic missile defense that is partially seen as a response to China's increasingly capable ballistic missile force.
The United States has also expressed concern over a missile build-up on China's southeastern coast facing Taiwan, which could be used as a first-strike force in reunification with the island, a stated goal of Beijing.
-------- japan
Long odds on BNFL winning Japanese contract
From Leo Lewis in Tokyo
March 06, 2004
UK Times
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8209-1027521,00.html
BNFL, the British nuclear fuels company, is on the verge of missing an important contract in Japan, where Kansai Electric Power is expected to select Cogema, BNFL's French rival, to supply mixed oxide (MOX) nuclear fuel.
Japan's power companies represent the world's biggest source of MOX business but BNFL has not yet won a contract in the country. If it does not break its way into the Japanese market soon, the future of its £300 million UK-based MOX facility in Sellafield may fall into doubt.
Cogema is fast emerging as the likely choice because BNFL's reputation as a supplier for the controversial fuel, made from reprocessed uranium and plutonium, remains tarnished after a document falsification scandal in 1999. Industry experts in Japan believe that BNFL's image may be so irreparably damaged that any dealings with it would be hard to sell to the Japanese public.
Speculation over the contract resurfaced as Kyushu Electric outlined plans to bring forward construction of a new MOX nuclear power plant in the southwestern province of Saga. Kansai was given the go-ahead to make its choice earlier this month only when the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency gave approval to the idea of buying the fuel from foreign manufacturers. Kansai's original plan was put on hold in 1999 when the BNFL scandal broke.
Fukui local government insiders confirmed that Kansai is unlikely to get clearance to hand the contract to BNFL. In the town of Takahama, where the Kansai MOX facility will be based, a pro-MOX legislator has said that there is "no way that the contract will be given to BNFL".
Doubts have also emerged over BNFL's ability to deliver on the contracts immediately. It is understood to have sub-contracted recent MOX reprocessing orders to Cogema as its own plant is not fully finished.
-------- libya
Libya sends US last parts of weapons program
CRAWFORD, Texas (AFP)
Mar 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040306200402.0xp89ubr.html
Libya has sent to the United States the last components of its program to develop weapons of mass destruction, the White House said Saturday.
More than 500 tonnes of material from its programs to develop nuclear weapons to build missiles left Libya by ship on Saturday, headed for a secret location in the United States, National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack said.
Such materials began arriving in the United States after Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi made his surprise pledge on December 19, following nine months of secret talks with the United States and Britain, to quit his quest for weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
The White House said in late January that 25 tonnes of components and products to build such weapons had been brought by plane from Libya to the United States.
Late last month, Washington took giant steps closer to normalizing relations with Libya on Thursday by ending a two-decade travel ban, easing some economic sanctions and pushing for deeper diplomatic ties.
Washington rescinded a travel ban enforced since relations with Tripoli broke off in 1981, allowing US citizens to use their passports to travel to or through Libya and spend money there.
US President George W. Bush also authorized US firms with pre-sanction holdings in Libya to resume business there, and invited Tripoli to lay the groundwork for eventually normalizing relations by establishing a diplomatic interests section -- but not an embassy -- in Washington.
----
Last of Nuclear Equipment Leaves Libya
March 6, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Libya-Nuclear.html
CRAWFORD, Texas (AP) -- A cargo ship left Libya on Saturday carrying the last of the equipment that Moammar Gadhafi's government had used for its nuclear weapons program, a White House spokesman said.
The ship steamed for the United States laden with 500 tons of material containing ``all known remaining equipment'' associated with Libya's nuclear program, which it agreed last year to abandon.
The equipment included ``all centrifuge parts and all equipment from its former uranium conversion facility,'' spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters covering President Bush's long weekend at his Texas ranch.
The shipment also contained all of Libya's longer-range missiles, including five Scud-Cs, McCormack said.
In addition, ``All Libya's known chemical munitions have been destroyed,'' he said, and stocks of mustard gas were removed from vulnerable warehouses and stored in a single, secure facility.
Last week, Libya made the first concrete move to eliminate its stockpiles when it destroyed 3,300 bombs specifically intended to carry chemical payloads.
U.S. experts plan to open discussions with Libyan weapons scientists beginning Sunday about retraining them for peaceful projects, McCormack said.
In December, Libya agreed to dismantle its weapons of mass destruction programs.
The country is trying to end its international isolation and restore relations with the United States.
--------
Libya Gives Up Remaining Nuclear - Related Equipment
March 6, 2004
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-libya-usa.html
CRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) - In a major step toward completing its pledged disarmament, Libya on Saturday sent to the United States all known remaining equipment associated with its nuclear weapons program, along with its longer-range missiles and launchers, the White House said.
As part of an agreement to rid Libya of weapons of mass destruction, a ship containing 500 metric tons of equipment left the North African nation earlier on Saturday for an undisclosed destination in the United States, White House National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack said.
The shipment included all of Libya's known centrifuge parts used to enrich uranium, and all equipment from its former uranium conversion facility. The White House said the ship was also carrying all of Libya's longer-range missiles, including five Scuds, and all associated equipment, including launchers.
``It's coming to the U.S. We're not saying where or when for security reasons,'' McCormack told reporters after President Bush met with the president of Mexico at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.
Earlier shipments of nuclear weapons-related equipment were taken to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, the U.S. Department of Energy's largest science and energy laboratory. There, lawmakers said, it was destroyed.
Libya announced in December it would abandon efforts to acquire nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and has allowed U.S. inspectors to search its weapons sites and to remove sensitive equipment.
WEAPONS SCIENTISTS
McCormack said the United States would begin discussions with Libyan officials on Sunday on retraining their weapons scientists.
In recognition of Libya's efforts, the Bush administration announced last month it would allow U.S. oil firms to begin negotiating to return. It also ended a restriction on Americans from using their U.S. passports to visit the oil-rich nation.
In addition, the administration decided to allow Libya to establish a diplomatic presence in Washington following its decision to base several U.S. diplomats in Tripoli.
Congressional sources said the United States could roll back additional sanctions in the coming months.
Easing the sanctions could allow U.S. oil companies to resume activities in Libya, which they had to abandon when expanded U.S. sanctions forced them to pull out in 1986. OPEC member Libya produces around 1.4 million barrels daily.
Bush has seized on Libya's pledge to abandon its weapons programs as an example for other countries, including Syria. The Bush administration plans to impose sanctions on Syria within weeks for its support of terrorist groups and for failing to stop guerrillas entering Iraq, congressional officials and other sources said on Friday.
McCormack said all of Libya's known chemical munitions have been destroyed. He said stocks of mustard gas have been moved from insecure warehouses to a single secure facility, adding that the United States will work with Libya to ``achieve the destruction and elimination of the actual agent itself.''
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State William Burns is considering traveling to Libya this month in what diplomats believe would be the highest-level U.S. visit in more than three decades.
-------- russia
Experts: Russia Helped Iraq With Missiles
March 6, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Foreign-Missile-Aid.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Weapons-hunters in Iraq have found evidence that experts from Russia and other countries helped with Iraq's missile programs, but it is unclear whether those countries' governments played any role, U.S. officials said Friday.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Bush administration will compile information it has obtained and eventually present it to those countries. In addition to Russia, officials found signs that experts from Ukraine, Serbia and Belarus may have been involved.
It may be that the alleged assistance came from companies or individuals who came to Iraq without the knowledge or sanction of their home governments, the officials said.
Still, any such assistance would violate the prewar U.N. sanctions that prohibited foreign weapons aid to deposed President Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the officials said. They provided no details on what was discovered or the nature of the technical help.
The information found in Iraq was first reported Friday in The New York Times.
Of all the prewar intelligence assessments regarding Iraq's illicit weapons programs, so far the predictions regarding long-range missile efforts have found the most validation.
``Since the war we have found an aggressive Iraqi missile program concealed from the international community,'' CIA Director George J. Tenet said in a speech last month.
Previously, officials had said Iraq's missile dealings primarily involved North Korea. Last year, then-chief weapons hunter David Kay said Pyongyang and Baghdad had negotiated for the sale of missile technology.
It appears that North Korea kept an Iraqi down payment of $10 million but never delivered any parts from its No Dong class of ballistic missiles, Kay said.
According to Tenet, Iraq had advanced design work for a liquid-propellant missile with ranges of up to 620 miles and was working on other kinds of missiles. Since the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq has been prohibited from having missiles with ranges longer than 93 miles.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Proposed Energy Department Budget Would Boost Funds for Nuclear Weapons
Karen Yourish with Matthew Johnson,
March 6, 2004
Arms Control Today
http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_03/EnergyDepartment.asp?print
The Bush administration is seeking to boost spending on U.S. nuclear weapons programs in fiscal year 2005 to $6.6 billion, up 5 percent from the $6.2 billion appropriated by Congress for fiscal year 2004. That constitutes the bulk of the administration's $9 billion budget request for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), unveiled Feb. 2. In addition to proposing increases for controversial research on a potential new generation of nuclear weapons, the NNSA request includes funds to maintain the weapons stockpile, prevent the spread of weapons to terrorists and rogue states, safeguard Energy Department facilities, and modernize the infrastructure of the weapons complex.
The president's proposals promise another year of bickering between the House and the Senate and between Democrats and Republicans over how much money, if any, should be spent on programs that could result in the development of new nuclear weapons. Last November, after months of back and forth, House and Senate appropriators finally agreed to increase spending on nuclear weapons programs in fiscal year 2004 by $273 million from the previous year-about $150 million less than the administration requested but not quite as much as the Senate was willing to provide.
Already, some congressional appropriators have begun to question the Bush administration's proposals. "With all the proliferation threats we now face with countries like Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea, are we really sending the right signal to those countries and the rest of the world when we embark on nuclear weapons initiatives?" Rep. David Hobson (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water, asked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at a Feb. 12 hearing of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.
Nuclear Earth Penetrators
For fiscal year 2005, Bush has requested $27.6 million for the third and final year of an Air Force-led study on enhancing the capabilities of two existing, high-yield nuclear warhead types-the B-61 and B-83-to penetrate more deeply underground to destroy deeply buried and hardened targets. The request for the potential new weapon, known as the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP), is a 271 percent increase from Congress' fiscal year 2004 appropriation of $7.5 million, which was half of what the administration had requested.
Although administration officials have repeatedly argued they simply wish to conduct research, the budget request lays out a five-year research and development schedule for RNEP. According to the plan, NNSA would conclude research at the end of fiscal year 2005 and in fiscal year 2006 would begin a three-year development phase, after which the NNSA would be ready to produce and induct the warhead into the arsenal. Legislation passed in the Fiscal Year 2004 Defense Authorization Act would require congressional authorization for work beyond the research phase. The NNSA budget document estimates that the RNEP research and development program would cost $484.7 million through fiscal year 2009.
Research on New Warheads
The Bush administration is also hoping to increase funding for the Advanced Concepts Initiative in fiscal year 2005 to $9 million to study new nuclear weapons concepts, including lower-yield weapons designed to strike chemical or biological weapons targets.
Last year, at the administration's urging, Congress repealed the decade-long ban on research leading to the development of low-yield nuclear warheads, which are defined as those with an explosive yield of five kilotons or less TNT equivalent. By comparison, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was a 13-kiloton nuclear device.
Congress granted the administration's $6 million request for the program in fiscal year 2004, but fenced off $4 million until the administration delivers its revised nuclear weapons stockpile plan in light of the reductions of deployed warheads outlined under the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty.
At the Feb. 12 House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee hearing, Rumsfeld said the Energy and Defense Departments are due to release the stockpile plan to Congress later this spring. "You'll get your money then," Hobson said, referring to the $4 million withheld last year.
Enhanced Test Site Readiness
The Energy Department is asking for $5 million more than was appropriated last year to continue preparing the Nevada Test Site to be able to conduct a nuclear test within 18 months of a presidential order. Under the administration's request, the agency's test readiness budget would jump 20 percent to $30 million for work to transition from the current testing readiness window of 24-36 months.
Modern Pit Facility
The fiscal year 2005 budget request also includes $29.8 million-a 176 percent increase from the 2004 appropriation-to construct a Modern Pit Facility to restart full-scale production of the plutonium pits for use in new or refurbished warheads at a rate of 150-450 pits per year. Large-scale pit production for nuclear bombs ended at the Rocky Flats Plant in 1989 due to severe health and safety violations.
Congressional critics of the pit facility contend that plutonium pits are readily available from existing nuclear warheads that are not operationally deployed and that it is premature to design and site a facility until the makeup of the future stockpile is more clearly defined. Some argue that, with a smaller nuclear stockpile, a more modest existing facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory could support future stockpile requirements. The Energy Department maintains that, regardless of the stockpile size, the United States will ultimately require a new pit manufacturing capability for new and refurbished plutonium pits.
In response to congressional concerns, NNSA at the end of January delayed the final environmental impact statement (EIS) for the Modern Pit Facility, scheduled for publication in April. The decision to push back publication of the EIS also delays selection of a preferred site for constructing the facility. "Restoring our capability to manufacture plutonium pits is an essential element of America's nuclear defense policy," Brooks said in a statement Jan. 28. "While there is widespread support in Congress for this project, I believe we need to pause to respond to concerns that some committees have raised about its scope and timing."
National Nuclear Security Administration Budget
Weapons Activities
Fiscal Year 2004 Request $6.37 billion
Fiscal Year 2004 Appropriated $6.23 billion
Fiscal Year 2005 Request $6.57 billion
Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation
Fiscal Year 2004 Request $1.34 billion
Fiscal Year 2004 Appropriated $1.33 billion
Fiscal Year 2005 Request $1.35 billion
Naval Reactors
Fiscal Year 2004 Request $768 million
Fiscal Year 2004 Appropriated $762 million
Fiscal Year 2005 Request $798 million
Office of the Administrator
Fiscal Year 2004 Request $348 million
Fiscal Year 2004 Appropriated $337 million
Fiscal Year 2005 Request $334 million
Total
Fiscal Year 2004 Request $8.84 billion
Fiscal Year 2004 Appropriated $8.71 billion
Fiscal Year 2005 Request $9.05 billion
Key Weapons Programs (Figures are in millions)
Robust Earth Nuclear Penetrator
Fiscal Year 2004 Request $15
Fiscal Year 2004 Appropriated $ 7.5
Fiscal Year 2005 Request $27.6
Advanced Concepts Initiative
Fiscal Year 2004 Request $ 6
Fiscal Year 2004 Appropriated $ 6&
Fiscal Year 2005 Request $ 9
Test Site Readiness
Fiscal Year 2004 Request $24.7
Fiscal Year 2004 Appropriated $24.7
Fiscal Year 2005 Request $30
Modern Pit Facility
Fiscal Year 2004 Request $22.8
Fiscal Year 2004 Appropriated $10.8
Fiscal Year 2005 Request $29.8
&Congress withheld $4 million pending delivery of nuclear weapons stockpile report to Congress
----
Broaden the Nonproliferation Campaign
Daryl G. Kimball,
March 6, 2004
Arms Control Today
http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_03/Focus.asp
Following last month's disclosures of illicit Pakistani nuclear assistance to Libya and Iran, President George W. Bush outlined new measures to restrict the trade of key equipment that can be used to make bomb material. However, Bush's proposals, as well as his overall nonproliferation strategy, are too limited and contradictory to address current and future nuclear weapons dangers adequately.
The nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) guarantees non-nuclear-weapon states the right to nuclear technology for energy and other nonmilitary purposes under international safeguards. Decades of nuclear trade, however, have led to the broad diffusion of uranium-enrichment and spent-fuel reprocessing technologies, which can also be used to make bomb-grade uranium and plutonium. Some states, such as Iran and North Korea, have abused the system and acquired the means to produce these fissile materials.
In response, Bush has proposed that the 40-member Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) not sell enrichment and reprocessing equipment to any state that does not already have the capability. He has also proposed that these nuclear supplier states not provide equipment to nations that have failed to agree to a tougher set of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections. This proposal is mostly designed to limit Iran's nuclear capabilities.
Although a push for new and tighter nuclear export restrictions through the NSG is long overdue, long-term success requires the application of the same standards to all states and more aggressive efforts to eliminate other means of fissile material production. Several important, additional steps should be considered.
First, those states currently without enrichment or reprocessing capabilities, such as Brazil and Iran, will strongly resist efforts to deny them access to such technologies. If these and other states are to be expected to agree to tougher restrictions, their access to low-enriched uranium fuel for light-water reactors (LWRs) will need to be guaranteed. The solution requires the creation of a long-term, multinational fuel supply that would make national possession of uranium-enrichment plants unneeded and uneconomical.
This could be accomplished in a number of ways, each of which presents challenges and requires more visionary U.S. leadership. As IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei has suggested, one approach is to develop a new protocol to the NPT that would bar enrichment and reprocessing capabilities but continue to guarantee access to nuclear fuel supplies and regulate spent-fuel disposition under the supervision of the IAEA. Another option is low-cost access to fuel for LWRs through market-based consortia.
Second, the Bush formula would allow significant nuclear suppliers not part of the NSG, such as Pakistan, to continue to peddle their wares. The recent disclosures about transfers of uranium and uranium-enrichment equipment from the Khan Research Lab warrant, at the very least, revisions to Pakistan's lax export-control system.
Third, Bush should immediately quash two ongoing Department of Energy "nuclear research" programs that actually promote the spread of reprocessing technology and the means to produce plutonium. Spent-fuel reprocessing is an uneconomical, polluting, and unnecessary way to harness nuclear energy. Currently, global stockpiles of separated civilian plutonium exceed 195 tonnes and pose a long-term proliferation threat.
Fourth, the United States should reaffirm its long-standing support for negotiation of a fissile material cutoff treaty. The treaty would verifiably halt the production of highly enriched uranium and plutonium for weapons by all states; establish baseline information on global stockpiles; and help bring India, Israel, and Pakistan into the nonproliferation system. A shift in China's position opens the way to revive the long-delayed negotiation, but now the Bush administration has announced it is reviewing the U.S. position.
Finally, Bush's call for others to abide by tougher nonproliferation rules rings hollow as his administration continues to reject meaningful limits on U.S. nuclear weapons capabilities. Bush remains opposed to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and to verifiably dismantling excessive U.S. and Russian nuclear bombs and missiles. Worse still, the administration has outlined plans for developing new earth-penetrating nuclear weapons at cost of nearly a half-billion dollars over the next five years. Not only are such weapons impractical and unnecessary, but they invite hard-liners in other states to keep their nuclear weapons options open.
The evolving nature of the nuclear threat requires a more comprehensive and robust global nonproliferation strategy than the work in progress outlined by Bush. In the end, it requires more than just pressure on a few of the nuclear "have-nots"-it requires greater restraint and leadership from the nuclear "haves."
----
Nuclear Bunker Busters, Mini-Nukes, and the US Nuclear Stockpile
The Bush administration is contemplating a new crop of nuclear weapons that could reduce the threat to civilian populations. However, they're still unlikely to work without producing massive radioactive fallout, and their development might require a return to underground nuclear testing.
Robert W. Nelson,
American Institute of Physics
http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-56/iss-11/p32.html
Congress is currently considering legislation that would authorize the US nuclear weapons laboratories to study new types of nuclear weapons: Earth-penetrating nuclear bunker busters designed to destroy hardened and deeply buried targets, and agent-defeat warheads intended to sterilize stockpiles of chemical or biological agents. In addition, the Bush administration has requested that Congress repeal a 1994 law, banning research that could lead to development of mini-nukes, low-yield nuclear warheads containing less than the power equivalent of a 5-kiloton chemical explosion, one-third that of the Hiroshima bomb.
The actual development of new nuclear weapons would require additional legislation and would signal a major policy reversal. The US has not developed a new nuclear warhead since 1988 and has not conducted a nuclear test since 1992. And although the Senate did not consent to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1999, the US continues to participate in a worldwide moratorium on underground nuclear testing. Currently, US nuclear weapons laboratories monitor and maintain the existing nuclear inventory through the Department of Energy's Stockpile Stewardship Program. (See Raymond Jeanloz's article in Physics Today, December 2000, page 44.)
In support of its request to repeal the 1994 law, the Bush administration is arguing that the US may need lower yield nuclear weapons to more credibly deter rogue regimes possessing chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. But arms control advocates fear that renewed US development of nuclear weapons would spark similar actions by other nuclear-armed nations and damage long-standing efforts to prevent the further proliferation of nuclear weapons. In addition, critics charge that mini-nukes blur the distinction between conventional and full-blown nuclear war and make the eventual use of nuclear weapons more likely.
Whether the US should go forward with actual development of new types of nuclear weapons will almost certainly be debated vigorously in Washington, DC for the next several years. Physicists and engineers have often participated in public debates over nuclear weapons policy, including new nuclear weapons development.1,2 (See various related articles in Physics Today, July 1975, November 1989, and March 1998
Conventional and nuclear earth penetrators
Figure 1
http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-56/iss-11/images/sm-p32fig1.jpg
The US Department of Defense (DOD) has tens of thousands of conventional earth-penetrating weapons capable of destroying hardened targets like an underground bunker buried within 10 meters of the surface. As figure 1 illustrates, a typical 2.4-m laser-guided missile penetrates just a few meters into reinforced concrete and can create an explosion that leaves a 5-m-wide crater of material.
To supplement its supply of conventional penetrators, the DOD is also developing conventional agent-defeat warheads that combine the advantages of a hardened missile casing with a low-pressure incendiary warhead. Those weapons are designed to penetrate the interiors of a shallow-buried facility and then ignite a thermocorrosive filling that can maintain high temperatures for several minutes; the high temperatures and low pressures are meant to sterilize toxins and bioagents without dispersing them to the environment. The warhead may also release chlorine and other disinfecting gases to destroy any remaining biological agents.4 To judge by the effectiveness of weapons used in the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the precision, penetrating capability, and explosive power of conventional earth-penetrating weapons has improved dramatically over the past decade, and those trends are likely to continue.
Deeply buried and hardened structures, like a command and control bunker or a missile silo tens to hundreds of meters underground, are more immune to conventional explosives, though. Those structures are difficult to destroy even using an aboveground nuclear explosion: Until recently, the huge 9-megaton B-53 nuclear bomb was designated to destroy such targets. Most nuclear weapons now in the US stockpile were designed to explode in the air or on contact with the ground. (For a brief summary of basic designs of nuclear weapons, see the box on page 34.) In either case, the blast wave transmits only a small fraction of the total yield as seismic energy into the ground; the large density difference between the air and the ground creates a mechanical impedance mismatch.
Figure 2
http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-56/iss-11/images/sm-p32fig2.jpg
A nuclear device exploded just a few meters underground, by contrast, couples its energy more efficiently to ground motion and generates a much more intense and damaging seismic shock than would an air burst of the same yield. Figure 2 illustrates the dramatic change in equivalent yield. Exploding a 10-kt nuclear bomb at a depth of 2 m underground, for example, would increase the effective yield by a factor of about 20 and result in underground damage equivalent to that of a 200-kt weapon exploded at the surface.
To exploit that efficiency, in 1997 the US replaced its aging 9-megaton bombs with a lower-yield but earth-penetrating 300-kt model by putting the nuclear warhead from an earlier bomb design into a strengthened alloy-steel casing and a new nose cone. When dropped onto a dry lakebed from 12 km, the missile penetrated a modest 6 m. But even at this shallow depth a much higher proportion of the explosion energy would be transferred to ground shock compared to a surface burst at the same yield.
Were a bomb manufactured using even stronger materials and its mass increased using a dense internal ballast material--as proposed for the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP), for instance--penetration depths could improve somewhat. (The Bush administration requested $15 million to study this improved penetrator.) However, figure 2 illustrates that those improvements would result in only modest gains in the total depth of destruction. Near the explosion, the peak pressure of the shock wave is proportional to the bomb yield and decreases with the inverse cube of the distance from the explosion. Consequently, the destructive effects of an explosion can be expressed as a function of a scaled distance, as is done in figure 2. Most of the benefit of earth penetration is obtained from the first (scaled) meter of burial.
Figure 3
http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-56/iss-11/images/sm-p32fig3.jpg
Still, one might want maximum depth to help contain the blast. How deeply a missile can penetrate a target depends on the mechanical response of both missile and target at high dynamic stress levels. Generally, faster-moving missiles make deeper holes; that correlation is roughly linear up to speeds approaching 1 km/s. At higher velocities, however, the correlation breaks down as materials plastically deform and erode when the impact pressure from the target approaches the finite yield strength of the penetrator: Yp ? 1/2?tv2 (see figure 3). The impact velocity of a missile made with even the hardest steel casing must remain less than a few km/s to avoid deformation.
Taking into account realistic materials strengths, 10-20 m is a rough ceiling on how deeply into dry rock a warhead can penetrate and still maintain its integrity.
Radioactive fallout
Figure 4
http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-56/iss-11/images/sm-p32fig4.jpg
The 10 to 20-m range is far less than the burial depths needed to contain the radioactive fallout from even small nuclear explosions. Figure 4 illustrates the stark disparity in the numbers.5 A 1-kt weapon, for example, must be buried at a depth of 90 m to be fully contained. Also shown is the destructive reach of a shallow-buried (10-20-m) bunker buster as a function of its yield--that is, how deep a target a given bomb could destroy. The seismic shock from the explosion can certainly destroy deeply buried targets. But weapons like the RNEP would still require very high yields (more than 100 kt) to destroy targets buried deeper than 100 m.
To appreciate the enhanced effect and the attendant dangers of a buried explosion, consider the sequence of events that follow detonation of a shallow-buried nuclear weapon, as diagrammed in figure 5. The explosion initially vaporizes the surrounding rock and produces a high-temperature cavity. The initial pressure of the cavity gases exceeds the pressure from overlayers of hard dirt and rock by many orders of magnitude. The cavity expands rapidly, sending outward a strong seismic shock that crushes and fractures rock.
Figure 5
http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-56/iss-11/images/sm-p32fig5.jpg
Surface and shallow-buried nuclear explosions produce much more intense local radioactive fallout than an airburst, in which the fireball does not touch the ground.6 When the blast breaks through the surface, it carries with it into the air large amounts of dirt and debris, made radioactive by the capture of neutrons from the nuclear detonation, as well as fission products from the bomb itself. The radioactive dust cloud produced in the blast does not rise as high as a classic mushroom cloud, but instead typically consists of a narrow column of vented hot gas surrounded by a broad base surge of ejecta and suspended fine particles, as shown in figure 6.
Figure 6
http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-56/iss-11/images/sm-p32fig6.jpg
Casualties from an earth-penetrating nuclear weapon would be due primarily to ionizing radiation from the local fallout. The total number of fatalities due to radiation sickness depends on many factors: the population density, the local terrain and weather conditions, the time allowed to evacuate the area, and the radiation dose. But straightforward estimates based on empirically determined scaling laws show that anyone within the roughly 3W0.6 km2 area covered by the base surge would receive a fatal dose of radiation.3 (W is the explosive energy yield in kilotons of TNT.) For a typical third-world urban population density of 6000/km2 those estimates imply that a 1-kt weapon would kill tens of thousands and a 100-kt weapon would kill hundreds of thousands of people.
Sanitizing stockpiles
High temperatures or intense radiation can destroy chemical or biological agents such as VX nerve gas or weaponized anthrax.7,8 So, one might naturally imagine that the temperature and radiation levels produced in a nuclear explosion would be the ultimate germicide, atomizing shallow-buried stockpiles of chemical agents before they could disperse into the environment.2
It turns out, however, that most of the ejected crater material would be unheated and shielded from the initial burst of radiation. A nuclear blast of yield W would create a crater volume about 105 W m3, which disperses about (2 × 108 W) kilograms of debris.6,9 If all of the 1012 W calories of energy from the nuclear explosion were distributed evenly, the mean energy available per unit mass totals about 5 kcal/kg--sufficient to raise the ejecta temperature by only 5-10°C.
Of course, the heat from the explosion is not evenly mixed, but is confined mainly to a small cavity of vaporized rock and steam that expands and vents to the atmosphere. Because the mass density of soil or rock is roughly 2000 times greater than air, the radiation and high temperatures that are usually associated with a nuclear blast have a much shorter range in a buried explosion. In fact, nearly all of the neutron and gamma radiation are absorbed within just a few meters of the explosion.3 Furthermore, although the initial temperature can exceed a million °C, the heat available to vaporize a cavity of rock extends only to a radius near 2W1/3 m, and the heat necessary to melt rock extends only to about twice that distance.10
As the cavity expands, the vaporized rock cools and condenses. For a contained explosion, such as the 1.7-kt Rainier test at the Nevada Test Site, the remaining gases are mainly superheated steam and carbon dioxide at temperatures less than 1500 K.11 Beyond the cavity, the temperature falls off rapidly with distance, reaching the ambient ground temperature within a few cavity radii (see figure 7). Gases vented from within uncontained explosions cool even more rapidly.
Figure 7
http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-56/iss-11/images/sm-p32fig7.jpg
Containers or munitions filled with chemical or biological agents that are within the final crater volume would be ruptured by the same strong ground shock that crushes the rock. But those agents are unlikely to suffer the high temperatures or radiation levels that would render them harmless unless they are very close to the nuclear weapon. More likely is that the cargo of still lethal chemical and biological toxins would mix with the fallout raining down from the main cloud or would be dispersed with the ejecta thrown out in the base surge.
A far more sensible strategy would be to ensure that whatever toxic material is already stored deep underground simply stays there. Once the entrances and exits to toxic storage facilities were sealed up using conventional tactics and the territory captured, the agents could be safely neutralized.
To test or not to test
If Congress does eventually authorize the development of new nuclear weapons, will the US have to resume underground nuclear testing in order to certify its warheads? The answer depends on the design in question, but in most cases nuclear testing would be unnecessary.
Nearly all the components of a nuclear weapon, including the implosion of its plutonium core, can be tested absent a nuclear explosion. The testing engineers simply replace the fissile material with a chemically identical isotope that does not produce a chain reaction--the weapon performs nearly every step, but does not deliver a nuclear yield. That method should be sufficient to test previously certified designs under new conditions and allow engineers to safely judge the performance of weapons that would experience the severe shock of earth penetrators.
If Congress were to opt for low-yield nuclear weapons, nuclear testing could again be bypassed because of the flexibility already built into existing warheads. Indeed, every modern warhead in the US nuclear arsenal has a low-yield mode. By disconnecting the secondary stage of the thermonuclear reaction and reducing (or eliminating) the phase that boosts the deuterium-tritium gas, a nuclear weapon in the arsenal could be converted into an unboosted primary fission weapon that delivers a subkiloton yield.
Gun-type designs, described in the box on page 34, are so simple and robust--one subcritical piece of highly enriched uranium (HEU) is propelled into another to make a supercritical mass--that they would also require no testing. Unfortunately, would-be nuclear terrorists are also likely to recognize the simplicity of those devices. To minimize the likelihood of nuclear terrorism, therefore, the number of locations in the world where HEU can be found should be greatly reduced.
But if Congress were to authorize the nuclear weapons laboratories at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore to pursue a completely new design--an implosion device using a boosted primary--the inherent uncertainties in warhead performance would almost certainly require that the weapon be fully tested before being certified to enter the US stockpile.12 Such a decision would have profound consequences.
Since the end of the cold war, nuclear weapons have receded in importance; high-precision conventional weapons can now accomplish many missions that until recently would have required nuclear yields. Were the US to research and develop new types of nuclear warheads for the kinds of missions discussed here--bunker busting or targeting chemical stockpiles--the course change would surely signal a renewed US belief that nuclear weapons have a broad range of potential uses. In response, wouldn't foreign nations have a powerful incentive to develop or improve their own nuclear deterrent?
Were the US to resume underground nuclear testing, it is highly likely that Russia, China, and other countries would resume their own programs as well. Those nations could improve their own nuclear arsenals far more than would the US, if there was a return to testing. Such a breakdown in the moratorium would destroy near-term prospects of entry into force of a comprehensive test ban and profoundly undermine efforts to limit nuclear proliferation.
I thank Frank von Hippel for originally suggesting this project and for his thoughtful guidance. I also acknowledge helpful conversations with Sidney Drell, Harold Feiveson, Steve Fetter, Richard Garwin, Raymond Jeanloz, Scott Kemp, Zack Halderman, Michael Levi, Michael May, and Greg Mello.
Robert Nelson is a senior fellow for science and technology at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City and a research staff member of the program on science and global security at Princeton University.
References
1. S. Drell, J. Goodby, R. Jeanloz, R. Peurifoy, Arms Control Today 33, 8 (2003).
2. See the article by J. E. Gover and P. G. Huray in IEEE Spectrum Online at http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/mar03/speak.html.
3. For a more technical description, see R. W. Nelson, Sci. Global Secur. 10, 1 (2002) and R. W. Nelson, Sci. Global Secur. (in press), and M. May, Z. Haldeman, Sci. Global Secur. (in press).
4. For a more detailed description, see the report HTI-J-1000 High Temperature Incendiary J-1000. Available online at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/hti.htm.
5. US Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, The Containment of Underground Nuclear Explosions, rep. no. OTA-ISC-414, US Government Printing Office, Washington DC (October 1989). Available online at http://www.wws.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/byteserv.prl/~ota/disk1/1989/8909/8909.PDF.
6. S. Glasstone, P. J. Dolan, eds., The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC (1977).
7. National Research Council, US Committee on Review and Evaluation of Alternative Technologies for Demilitarization of Assembled Chemical Weapons: Phase II, Analysis of Engineering Design Studies for Demilitarization of Assembled Chemical Weapons at Pueblo Chemical Depot, National Academy Press, Washington, DC (2001).
8. H. Kruger, Radiation-Neutralization of Stored Biological Warfare Agents with Low-Yield Nuclear Warheads, rep. no. UCRL-ID-140193, U. of California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, Calif. (2000). Available online at http://www.llnl.gov/tid/lof/documents/pdf/238391.pdf.
9. J. A. Northrop, ed., Handbook of Nuclear Weapon Effects: Calculational Tools Abstracted from DWSA's Effects Manual One (EM-1), Defense Weapons Special Agency, Washington, DC (1996).
10. T. R. Butkovich, Calculation of the Shock Wave From an Underground Nuclear Explosion in Granite, rep. no. UCRL-7762 Reprint-1965-4-l, U. of California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, Calif. (1967). Available online at http://www.llnl.gov/tid/lof/documents/pdf/19093.pdf.
11. R. A. Heckman, Deposition of Thermal Energy by Nuclear Explosives, rep. no. UCRL-7801, U. of California, Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, Livermore, Calif. (1964). Available online at http://www.llnl.gov/tid/lof/documents/pdf/19111.pdf.
12. National Academy of Sciences, Technical Issues Related to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, National Academy Press, Washington, DC (2002).
13. R. Serber, R. Rhodes, The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How to Build an Atomic Bomb, U. of Calif. Press, Berkeley (1992).
14. S. Glasstone, P. J. Dolan, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, US Department of Defense and US Department of Energy, Washington, DC (1977). 15. R. S. Norris, W. Arkin, H. Kristensen, J. Handler, Bull. At. Sci. 59, 73 (2003).
16. N. M. Short, The Definition of True Crater Dimensions by Post-Shot Drilling, rep. no. UCRL-7787, U. of California, Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, Livermore, Calif. (1964).
17. E. Teller, The Constructive Uses of Nuclear Explosives, McGraw-Hill, New York (1968).
Physics Today References
December 2000, page 44
December 2000, online only supplementary material
July 1975, page 23-29
November 1989, page 32-46
March 1998, pages 24-29 and 34-39
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new york
People more important than fish eggs
NORRIS MCDONALD,
NY Journal News / Gannett
March 6, 2004
http://www.thejournalnews.com/newsroom/030604/06viewmcdonald.html
(The writer is president of the African American Environmentalist Association, an organization with offices in the Bronx and Maryland.)
Some conservationists are more concerned about fish eggs than people.
Riverkeeper and the New York Department of Environmental Conservation are gambling with the health and well-being of New York communities of color by trying to close the Indian Point nuclear power plants. Although adult fish populations in the Hudson River are universally acknowledged as being healthy, the state anti-nuclear movement is using the loss of fish eggs, when most would never reach maturity, as a way to force the plants' owner, Entergy, out of business. The African American Environmentalist Association does not believe in gambling with the lives of people.
The anti-nuclear activists are gambling that Entergy will close the electric generation station at Indian Point if it is required to build massive, unnecessary cooling towers.
Unfortunately, if the anti-nukes win their high-stakes political gamble, inner-city residents as well as Westchester County residents will pay the price. Increased air pollution means more respiratory illness among the old and young, especially in minority communities. The gamble is that, if forced to build billion-dollar cooling towers, Indian Point is not economically viable in the long run. So cooling towers equal closure for Indian Point.
Whether New York's environmental elite like it or not, nuclear power is an environmental-justice issue in a clean-air context. Everyone knows about the poor air quality in many minority neighborhoods. We all know the dirty truth that our communities of color are disproportionately targeted for plant sitings and other polluting facilities. Environmental justice groups universally note that asthma morbidity and mortality are highest in minority communities. It will clearly represent an environmental injustice if one more air pollution source is sited in a New York community of color.
Asthma is not a theoretical concept; it is a real threat to African Americans. According to a report by the Black Leadership Forum, "In 2002, 71 percent of African Americans live in counties that violate federal air pollution standards, compared to 58 percent of the white population. Asthma attacks send African Americans to the emergency room . . . and hospitalizations . . . at three times the rate of whites.''
Global climate change is also a real threat. In a comprehensive 2003 study on the future of nuclear energy, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that "the nuclear option should be retained precisely because it is an important carbon-free source of power. . . . Taking nuclear power off the table as a viable alternative will prevent the global community from achieving long-term gains in the control of carbon dioxide emissions.''
AAEA supports a mix of energy sources. Fossil fuel plants properly fitted with appropriate pollution-control devices are necessary. But they still have emissions. Nuclear power plants are also necessary. If emission-free Indian Point is closed, its almost 2,000 megawatts, enough to power 2 million homes, will be replaced by emitting plants. That is a fact.
And it is also a fact that New York and Westchester County are already in violation of the federal Clean Air Act's State Implementation Plan. New York could lose federal highway and mass-transit funds because of this violation. The anti-nuclear movement does not want to acknowledge the emission-free benefits of nuclear power because it does not fit its political agenda. The African American Environmentalist Association supports nuclear power for the singular reason that emission-free generation of electricity is environmental justice.
Personal attacks by anti-nuclear activists to smear and disparage those with whom they disagree will not change the fact that Indian Point provides emission-free electricity to neighborhoods of color and other communities. Nor will preposterous conspiracy claims that equate the storage of low-level radioactive waste from hospitals, universities, doctors' offices and medical labs with the "dumping'' of commercial nuclear waste. Moreover, the real truth is that almost all nuclear power plants are not located in minority neighborhoods.
Unfortunately, the $6 billion-a-year environmental lobby does nothing to help economic conditions in minority communities. They are not diverse or inclusive organizations. In a recent survey, 21 out of 25 national environmental groups declined to respond to a questionnaire on their diversity-hiring practices. Conversely, Entergy recently received a diversity achievement award from the New York Urban League. Entergy also has to go on record with regard to its diversity in hiring and procurement.
These multimillion-dollar elite anti-nuclear organizations will not bamboozle AAEA. Nuclear power is emission free. And so are we.
-------- utah
Goshute dissidents rebuffed by federal court, told to pursue other avenues
By Judy Fahys fahys@sltrib.com
SATURDAY March 06, 2004
Salt Lake Tribune
http://www.sltrib.com/2004/Mar/03062004/utah/145227.asp?display=print
Dissident Goshutes failed once again Friday to get the federal courts to invalidate a lease allowing spent reactor fuel to be stored on the Skull Valley Goshutes Indian Reservation.
The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver upheld District Court Judge Paul Cassell's 2002 ruling that the dissidents first must let the Interior Department's administrative process take its full course before the courts can consider their complaints. The court also advised the dissidents the Interior Department is the proper place to get help with their internal tribal leadership fights.
"Until plaintiffs make such a filing, exhaust administrative remedies, and present this court with a final agency action," the appeals court said in an opinion released Friday, "their claims regarding legitimate tribal leadership will meet the same fate as those concerning the fuel storage lease."
Officials from the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs were not available for comment on the ruling late Friday. Nor were attorneys for the dissidents, a loose-knit group of Skull Valley members opposed to plans for the reactor-waste storage.
The three-member Goshute Executive Committee, led by Chairman Leon Bear, signed the lease in 1997 to allow Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of out-of-state utility companies, to use 100 acres of the reservation as a way station for up to 44,000 tons of reactor waste. Although the lease terms have never been publicly disclosed, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars is rumored to be at stake for the tribe.
The lease has triggered disputes among the 70 Goshute adults as Private Fuel Storage pursues a license for the facility from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. One battle landed in Cassell's court, after 18 dissidents sued officials of the BIA for giving preliminary approval to the lease. Among the complaints raised was that the agency had taken just three days to review the paperwork.
Friday's appeals court ruling, penned by Justice Stephanie K. Seymour, basically said the dissidents must exhaust the Interior Department's review system before the courts would be able to take up the case.
The dissidents have been in that system since at least 2000. They have four pending complaints before the Interior Board of Indian Appeals in Washington, D.C. In addition, attorneys in those cases more than a year ago asked Interior Secretary Gale Norton to personally address their concerns.
On Friday, Idaho attorney Paul EchoHawk said there has been no word from the Interior Department on any of those cases.
In the meantime, three of those behind the dissident case -- Sammy Blackbear, Marlinda Moon and their attorney, Duncan Steadman -- have been indicted for accessing tribal funds after a 2001 recall and election fight. Also, indicted was tribal Chairman Bear, accused of embezzling tribal funds and failing to report some of his income from the tribe to the Internal Revenue Service.
-------- us politics
INTELLIGENCE
Kennedy Gives Bush Stinging Rebuke on War
March 6, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/06/politics/06INTE.html
WASHINGTON, March 5 - Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts delivered a blistering indictment on Friday of President Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq, accusing Mr. Bush of deliberately exaggerating the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's government.
The speech by Senator Kennedy, to the Council on Foreign Relations, was one of the most detailed and caustic Democratic assaults to date on the issue. Mr. Kennedy has played a high-profile role in Senator John Kerry's presidential campaign, and the tone and timing of his remarks suggest that Democrats plan a new election-year challenge on the issue of Mr. Bush's credibility.
Mr. Kennedy accused the president of resorting to "pure, unadulterated fear-mongering, based on a devious strategy to convince the American people that Saddam's ability to provide nuclear weapons to Al Qaeda justified immediate war."
He also accused the Bush administration of going well beyond the assessments provided by intelligence agencies in prewar depictions of Iraq, its reputed illicit arsenal and its ties to terrorism. The senator singled out George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, as having failed to correct statements by Mr. Bush that described the Iraqi threat as "unique and urgent" and "grave."
Mr. Tenet said last month that his agency had never portrayed Iraq as presenting an imminent threat to the United States.
"Why wasn't C.I.A. director Tenet correcting the president and the vice president and the secretary of defense a year ago, when it could have made a difference, when it could have prevented a needless war, when it could have saved so many lives?" Mr. Kennedy asked.
The White House and the Central Intelligence Agency had no immediate comment on Mr. Kennedy's speech. President Bush has said that he acted on the best intelligence available. The question of whether the Bush administration misused intelligence information about Iraq is among the subjects of a Senate intelligence committee inquiry.
Two Republican senators, Jon Kyl of Arizona and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, circulated a letter noting that Democratic lawmakers as well as Republicans had made prewar statements that portrayed Iraq and its reputed weapons stockpiles as presenting an urgent threat to American security.
In another speech on Friday, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, Representative Jane Harman of California, accused the Bush administration of remaining "in a deep state of denial" about the flaws in the country's intelligence system, as illustrated by a series of intelligence failures, including the apparent misreading of Iraq's illicit weapons capacity.
The fact that no chemical or biological weapons have been found in Iraq, despite prewar assertions by American intelligence agencies that Iraq possessed such devices, is only the most recent sign of those flaws, she said.
Ms. Harman said she intended her remarks in a bipartisan spirit, and delivered them to a conference at the American Enterprise Institute, a research and advocacy organization known for its close ties to the Bush administration.
The congresswoman defended Mr. Tenet as having moved in the right direction to address problems within intelligence agencies, and said she hoped he would remain in his post through the end of Mr. Bush's current presidential term.
"Recent actions inside the C.I.A. are encouraging," Ms. Harman said, "but there are no discernible signs from the vice president or president acknowledging the obvious flaws in our intelligence systems."
-------
Kennedy Says Bush Skewed Iraq Data
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 6, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34879-2004Mar5.html
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) yesterday accused President Bush and his administration of manipulating and distorting intelligence to justify attacking Iraq, and he asked why CIA Director George J. Tenet did not correct the official administration line in the months leading to war.
"Tragically, in making the decision to go to war in Iraq, the Bush administration allowed its wishes, its inclinations and its passion to alter the state of facts and the evidence of the threat we faced from Iraq," Kennedy said in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations.
Kennedy, an active presence in the presidential campaign of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), devoted part of his critique to Tenet, who in a speech last month answered criticism of his agency's prewar conclusions that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Among other things, Tenet said the CIA judgments given to top administration officials included caveats and disclosure of areas where analysts disagreed. Intelligence analysts, he said, "never said there was an imminent threat" posed by Iraqi weapons.
"Tenet," Kennedy said yesterday, "needs to explain to Congress and the country why he waited until last month -- nearly a year after the war started -- to set the record straight. Why wasn't CIA Director Tenet correcting the president and the vice president and the secretary of defense a year ago, when it could have made a difference, when it could have prevented a needless war, when it could have saved so many lives?"
The White House dismissed Kennedy's speech as an election-year attack unsupported by facts.
"I don't think this is the first time we've heard Senator Kennedy make such unsubstantiated and baseless charges," press secretary Scott McClellan said in Crawford, Tex. "Given that it's an election year, it won't be the last time."
A spokesman for Tenet, Bill Harlow, said there would be no comment on Kennedy's remarks other than that the CIA director "looks forward to his public appearance" before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.
Kennedy, a member of that panel, said in his speech that Tenet "will have an opportunity to explain why he waited until last month . . . and why he was so silent when it mattered most."
Yesterday, Tenet spent more than three hours behind closed doors with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence answering questions about the agency's prewar intelligence on Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
Meanwhile, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence panel, Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), described the president and vice president as being "in a deep state of denial" about "the obvious flaws in our intelligence systems."
In a speech to the American Enterprise Institute, Harman said it appeared that Bush "is unwilling to fix the problems in an election year" and instead has set up a presidential commission to study changes needed based on the Iraq experience that does not report until next March, well after the presidential election.
In one portion of her talk, Harman may have provided a hint of what the House panel has discovered in its inquiry into prewar Iraq intelligence: that informants, some of whom were Iraqi exiles or foreign government spies, passed on questionable information.
"The human sources we did have were apparently less reliable than the IC [intelligence community] thought," Harman said. The result, she went on, was "skewing our analysis -- 'garbage in, garbage out.' "
"There are indications," she added, "that other potential sources may have been dismissed because they were telling us something we didn't want to believe: that Iraq had no active WMD [weapons of mass destruction] programs."
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
U.S.: al-Qaida May Be Looking to Africa
By TODD PITMAN
Associated Press Writer
Mar 6, 2004
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AFRICA_AL_QAIDA?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
STUTTGART, Germany (AP) -- Squeezed out of sanctuaries elsewhere in the world, al-Qaida may be looking to the deserts and jungles of Africa as a haven where terrorists could train recruits and plan new attacks, the deputy head of U.S. forces in Europe said Friday.
Key among U.S. military proposals to fight back is deploying American units of about 200 soldiers to train armies throughout the continent, patrol alongside them, or hunt terrorists on short notice if necessary.
"Some people compare it to draining a swamp," Air Force Gen. Charles Wald told The Associated Press, eyeing a map of Africa in his office in Stuttgart. "We need to drain the swamp."
Wald said some terrorists had been sent to Iraq from North Africa, and there were indications that al-Qaida has established a presence and tried to recruit in North Africa over the past two years.
Mauritania and Nigeria are among West African nations alleged by some Western think tanks to have al-Qaida cells and top al-Qaida figures came from Mauritania. The country's government has cracked down on Muslim extremism and tried to stop recruiting of fighters for Saddam Hussein's cause in Iraq.
"They're there for a purpose, whether it's looking for real-estate, or recruiting or looking for arms, whatever it is, we know there's a presence," Wald said. "It may be small but it's a bad indicator."
Africa is an ideal location, with its remote deserts and jungles and centuries-old Arab-African Saharan trade route. Governments are weak and poorly paid authorities are easily bribed. Communications are slow and in some places don't exist.
African armies, relatively small and poorly equipped, have difficulty monitoring the vast territories they are supposed to control, Wald said.
"It's an area we think is becoming appealing potentially for terrorist organizations or individuals to operate with semi-impunity," Wald said. "It has a lot of expanses of open area that are conducive to terrorist operations or sanctuary."
The European Command covers 93 countries from Russia to Syria, and all of Africa except the northeast. It is awaiting a decision from Washington on its proposals for a major reconfiguration of forces for the war on terror.
Critics say the European Command, traditionally focused on Europe, is not well-equipped to pay closer attention to Africa. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative U.S. think tank, is pushing for the U.S.-based Central Command to take over responsibility for the entire continent.
Central Command already oversees operations in the northeast Horn of Africa, where al-Qaida is believed to be most active. Al-Qaida was blamed for deadly attacks in East Africa - the bombing of U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and a Kenyan hotel in 2002.
The European Command's new plans pay more attention to Africa and its oil supplies. The Gulf of Guinea is seen as a possible alternative to the oil reserves in the volatile Middle East. The region already supplies the United States with 15 percent of its oil, a figure expected to rise to 25 percent by 2015.
The chief homegrown concern is the Algerian-based Salafist Group for Call and Combat, which was accused of kidnapping 32 European tourists in the Sahara last year.
Wald said the group had issued a manifesto claiming allegiance to al-Qaida. He and others have blamed the group for robberies in Niger and Mali, although some dismiss the culprits as simple bandits.
The United States is already working to boost security in Niger and Mali.
About 100 U.S. special operations forces are training armies in Mali, Niger, Mauritania and Chad as part of a U.S. State Department-funded program called the Pan-Sahel Initiative, which aims to help those nations guard porous borders against terrorists, arms and other trafficking.
The Sahel is a vast region straddling the southern edge of the Sahara desert.
The European Command has proposed expanding the Pan-Sahel Initiative to include Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria, where terror threats are believed to be growing.
Beyond that, the European Command wants to establish a half-dozen low-maintenance bases at airports or remote camps in Africa. About 200 troops would be deployed to each base at a time.
"They'd be places that we could go into for a small period of time, either train locally with those governments or actually use those to maybe execute an operation from," Wald said.
The European Command now has about 120,000 troops. Wald said that number would likely drop after forces are moved around to account for changes in the world since the Cold War.
Agreements with various African governments to use other airports as fuel stops would help U.S. troops move across the continent as needed.
"The areas (in Africa) are large, you have to be able to respond fast as intelligence becomes actionable," Wald said. "You have to be fast and get ahead of it, and that forces us to think of more mobile, smaller, lighter, nimble forces."
-------- arms
US, India to share high altitude warfare technology
Saturday March 06, 2004
News International, Pakistan
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/mar2004-daily/06-03-2004/main/main2.htm
NEW DELHI: Indian and American defence officials have agreed to conduct joint research on a range of products for soldiers fighting in the mountains, including high-altitude clothing and food, a top US negotiator said on Friday.
The two days of talks between senior defence officials that ended on Friday were the first since India and the US on February 7 agreed to share such information.
"Both India and the United States have something to contribute to the exchange of information in life sciences and material research," said Al Volkman, the director for international cooperation at the US Department of Defence.
He said scientists from both countries have identified clothing, freeze-resistant foods and waste disposal as being among the joint-research projects on high-altitude fighting. "There is a great deal of talent and knowledge on both sides which could result in mutual benefit," Volkman said.
Indian soldiers are positioned at the Siachen Glacier, the world's highest battlefield, in the Himalayas, while American soldiers have been operating in subzero temperatures in Alaska. India and the US have dramatically improved their political and military relations following years of mutual suspicion during the Cold War, when India was a close ally of the Soviet Union. Relations dipped further in 1998 when Washington imposed economic sanctions on India for conducting nuclear tests.
However, ties have since warmed considerably, and the two countries say they have never gotten along better. Army and air force personnel have held several joint exercises in India and the US, reflecting the growing ties between the two militaries.
----
India, Israel sign $1.1bn Phalcon deal
Saturday March 06, 2004
News International, Pakistan
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/mar2004-daily/06-03-2004/main/main5.htm
NEW DELHI: India and Israel signed a $1.1 billion deal on Friday for the supply of three Phalcon airborne early warning radar systems to New Delhi, a defence spokesman said.
Under the terms of the agreement given the go-ahead by the Israeli cabinet on Sunday, Israel would buy Ilyushin-76 cargo aircraft from Uzbekistan, which would then be sent to Russia to be fitted with new high-powered engines.
After structural modifications, the aircraft would be sent to Israel to be mounted with the Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) radar and the complete aircraft would be delivered to India.
The aircraft will be delivered within 44 months of an advance payment by India to Israel, spokesman Amitabh Chakravarty told AFP. The Phalcon system can pick out enemy aircraft flying hundreds of miles away in all weather, at day or night and even those flying at low altitude. It can also intercept and decode radio transmissions.
The deal was signed in New Delhi by CR Mahapatra, joint secretary of the Indian defence ministry, and Israel Livnet, vice president of the Israeli Aircraft Industrial Corporation, Chakravarty said. He did not say whether there would be transfer of technology from Israel to India.
India had reached an agreement on the deal with Israel and Russia in October, a month after a visit to New Delhi by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The deal could proceed after a go-ahead from the US, which had earlier blocked the sale of Phalcons to both India and China. But Israel has said the US had now given Israel the green light to sell the Phalcons.
Israel in recent years has become India's second largest defence supplier after Russia, with armament sales reaching $1.25 billion in 2001. "The Phalcon deal is the biggest leap forward yet for Israeli military exports," Amos Yaron, director of the Israeli Defence Ministry, said in a statement.
"The deal was signed today and we have to make the first advance payment within 45 days," a defence ministry spokesman said. The Phalcon technology would enable India to pry deep into the territory of arch-rival Pakistan, which has repeatedly expressed concern at growing India-Israel defence ties.
----
AU researcher gets 7 months for selling to China
March 06, 2004
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20040305-104748-6776r.htm
A former American University researcher who was once convicted of espionage in China was sentenced yesterday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria to seven months in prison for illegally exporting computer equipment with military applications to China.
Gao Zhan, who pleaded guilty in November to charges of illegal arms export and tax fraud, also was ordered to pay a fine of $2,500, U.S. Attorney Paul J. McNulty said.
Gao's husband, Dongua Xue, also pleaded guilty in November to filing a false tax return, a misdemeanor, Mr. McNulty said.
Mr. Xue is to be sentenced April 9. At the time of their guilty pleas, Gao and Mr. Xue forfeited about $505,000 in proceeds from Gao's offense and agreed to pay about $88,000 in additional taxes, Mr. McNulty said.
Prosecutors had charged Gao with unlawfully selling sensitive computer components to entities affiliated with the Chinese military.
According to the charging documents, the Nanjing Research Institute of Electronics Technology, also known as the 14th Institute, is involved in the development of state-of-the-art radar systems for the Chinese military.
Prosecutors said it is one of China's premier designers of aircraft radars and has designed most of China's strategic and early-warning radars.
Mr. McNulty said Gao admitted that in October 2000 she has sold and shipped 80 military microprocessors to the Nanjing Institute that could be used in airborne battle management systems and missile-target identification systems.
He said she used aliases and made several false statements to suppliers to obtain items that she knew were banned for export, and went to great lengths to conceal her identity, the nature of her business and payments she received from her Chinese customers.
The investigation began in the fall of 2000, when one of the U.S. suppliers of the items became suspicious and notified the U.S. Customs Service, now U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
"Crimes like this can jeopardize our national security and expose our military forces to undue threat. This office will aggressively prosecute anyone who tries to defeat the safeguards that protect against unauthorized export of such technology," Mr. McNulty said.
"Although this sentence reflects the judge's consideration of the cooperation rendered by the defendant to the FBI during this investigation, it also requires her to forfeit all the ill-gotten gain she obtained from her crime," he said.
Gao was arrested in China in 2001 and accused of spying for Taiwan. The Chinese government convicted her but released her to the United States after diplomatic pressure.
-------- asia
Kyrgyzstan straddles role on terror issue
March 06, 2004
By Kadyr Toktogulov
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040305-100449-4823r.htm
BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan - This Central Asian nation hosts U.S. troops but it is also a preferred sanctuary for an al Qaeda-linked terrorist group, thanks to loose border controls and widespread corruption, convicted terrorists have said under interrogation.
"Kyrgyzstan has the most favorable conditions to carry out terrorist attacks and for former members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan to settle down," Azizbek Karimov said in court documents examined by the Associated Press.
He was sentenced to death in January in neighboring Uzbekistan for involvement in two Kyrgyzstan bombings that killed eight persons.
The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) fought alongside the Taliban and al Qaeda against the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in 2001. Labeled a terrorist group by the U.S. government, the IMU was blamed for a series of incursions and kidnappings in Central Asia from 1999 through 2001.
The group, which seeks to overthrow Uzbekistan's secular government, is believed to have been seriously weakened by the U.S.-led antiterrorist campaign since the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Still, Kyrgyzstan Foreign Minister Askar Aitmatov said this year in Washington that "it is too early to talk about the end of terrorism," even though the Taliban regime has been forced from power in Afghanistan.
Kyrgyzstan is host to about 1,100 U.S. troops at the main civilian airport near Bishkek, the capital. The Americans support air operations over Afghanistan, about 450 miles to the southwest.
Last year, the Kyrgyz National Security Service arrested three Kyrgyz nationals for reputedly preparing a terrorist attack against the base.
Earlier bomb attacks at a Bishkek market in 2002 and a bank in the southern city of Osh in 2003 were tied to the IMU. Two other Uzbeks - Ilkhom Izatulloyev, 25, and Assadullo Abdullayev, 24 - were tried in Kyrgyzstan for the bombings and sentenced to death with Karimov, 25.
The attackers told authorities they chose those targets because of the high security around their preferred objectives - the U.S. Embassy in Bishkek and a Turkish-owned hotel.
Karimov and Izatulloyev were active members of the IMU and believed to have been under the direct command of the group's leaders, Kyrgyz officials say. Both lived in Afghanistan and were trained in camps there in 1999-2001until the start of the U.S.-led war on terrorism.
Karimov also trained in Chechnya, where the Russian government has been fighting separatists since the 1990s.
"In our first days in Chechnya, we studied weapons, tactics and topography. We didn't have any special instructions on explosives but we always asked our instructors about how we could make an explosive," Karimov said during his interrogation, conducted in May by Uzbek authorities, who gave copies of the transcripts to Kyrgyzstan.
The two countries cooperated closely in the investigation, and the documents are signed by Karimov. However, the United Nations has complained of "systematic" torture in Uzbek jails and the judicial system is closely controlled by the government, which could cast doubts on the veracity of the documents.
Uzbek President Islam Karimov - no relation to the terrorist - has also criticized Kyrgyzstan before for being soft on extremists.
In Kyrgyzstan, Izatulloyev and another accused IMU member - Ilimbek Mamatov, a Kyrgyz who has not been captured - are said to have prepared the bombs used in the two attacks.
They received the explosives from three Kyrgyz National Guard troops also convicted in January, including Mamatov's brother. The other two were ordered released immediately, after the judge ruled they didn't know the materials would be used in terrorist attacks.
Karimov and Izatulloyev used fake documents when they traveled separately from Afghanistan to Kyrgyzstan in early 2002. In Kyrgyzstan, they both obtained fake passports provided them by Tuokheti Tursun, another fugitive who is a suspected member of a separatist movement in a majority Muslim region of China that borders Kyrgyzstan.
Karimov said he was detained by border guard officials when he flew to the country in 2002 with a fake passport, but was released after paying a $100 bribe.
Kyrgyzstan has long been criticized by international organizations for its passport system and the low quality of its identity documents, which make it easy to obtain false passports. This year, the government is expected to introduce new identity documents.
However, Kyrgyzstan also enjoys the reputation of being the most open country in formerly Soviet Central Asia, with less restrictive regulations on foreign visitors and liberal visa rules.
Deputy Interior Minister Keneshbek Diushebayev conceded recently that there was corruption among police officers that might have helped terrorists. But he denied Kyrgyz police were to blame for the bombings.
Terrorists "take advantage of our liberal political regime," Mr. Diushebayev said.
U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Washington is helping Kyrgyzstan with passport reforms to strengthen border security.
-------- britain
BRITAIN
Blair Reiterates Case for War, Asserting Grave Danger
March 6, 2004
By PATRICK E. TYLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/06/international/europe/06BLAI.html
LONDON, March 5 - Prime Minister Tony Blair argued Friday that the possibility that Islamic extremists might collaborate with countries that possessed unconventional weapons to carry out acts of terror justified an aggressive new standard in international law for breaching the sovereignty of nations.
In a spirited defense of Britain's decision to go to war, Mr. Blair said the United States and Britain were right in acting alone to invade Iraq last year because the Sept. 11 attacks demonstrated a new and "mortal danger" and, therefore, "this is not a time to err on the side of caution; not a time to weigh the risks to an infinite balance; not a time for cynicism of the worldly wise who favor playing it long."
He did not define the threshold level of threat that would justify military intervention by the international community or by other states, however. Nor did he describe the standard of evidence or intelligence for establishing that threshold.
The decision made by President Bush and Mr. Blair to invade Iraq has come under close scrutiny in the wake of the conflict, as weapons inspectors have failed to find unconventional weapons that senior officials in both governments said were present.
Looking back over the past year, Mr. Blair implied that it would have been better to have acted against Iraq through the United Nations. He called for unspecified reforms of the Security Council so that it could more proactively "spread the values of freedom" and "wage war relentlessly on those who would exploit racial and religious division to bring catastrophe to the world."
Speaking to his constituents in Sedgefield, in northern England, Mr. Blair said Britain had pressed hard for a second Security Council resolution specifically authorizing the Iraq war in the hope that Saddam Hussein might have been toppled without resorting to combat.
Mr. Blair's speech appeared to be another attempt to respond to the unceasing criticism of the war that has arisen in Parliament and in the news media. He would like to move the country beyond Iraq to a domestic agenda of education, tax and transport reforms, but this continues to be difficult.
A report in January by Lord Hutton vindicated Mr. Blair and his government of charges that they had exaggerated intelligence on the danger from Iraq's weapons programs. But the victory, along with Lord Hutton's criticism of the BBC's reporting, only ignited resentment and calls for further investigations.
Last week, crown prosecutors abandoned the prosecution under the Official Secrets Act of a 29-year-old translator, Katharine Gun, who admitted leaking to a British newspaper the top-secret request from American intelligence to spy on United Nations diplomats. Government officials said they feared Ms. Gun would become a martyr for the antiwar camp.
One prominent Labor dissenter, Clare Short, followed with the bombshell accusation that British intelligence agencies spied on Secretary General Kofi Annan. On Friday, The Independent carried a front-page interview with Hans Blix, the chief United Nations weapons inspector in 2003, asserting that President Bush and Mr. Blair acted illegally by not obtaining a specific Security Council mandate to invade Iraq.
-------- chemical weapons
Libya discloses chemical weapons
March 06, 2004
By Arthur Max
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040305-100448-7168r.htm
THE HAGUE - Libya acknowledged stockpiling 44,000 pounds of mustard gas and disclosed the location of a production plant in a declaration submitted yesterday to the world's chemical weapons watchdog.
Libyan Col. Muhammad Abu Al Huda handed over 14 file cartons disclosing Libya's chemical weapons programs to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, said Director General Rogelio Pfirter.
The Hague-based agency oversees compliance with the 1993 international treaty banning chemical weapons, which Libya joined last month.
Libya also declared thousands of tons of precursors that could be used to make sarin nerve gas, and two storage facilities, Mr. Pfirter said. The production and storage facilities were near Tripoli and in the south of the country.
The declaration was a major step in Libya's eliminating its weapons of mass destruction, which it unexpectedly promised in December, hoping to end its international isolation and restore relations with the United States.
In addition to cooperating with the chemical weapons agency, Libya is working with inspectors from the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency to eliminate its nuclear weapons programs.
The White House lifted the ban on Americans traveling to Libya and said it would expand the U.S. diplomatic presence in Tripoli. It also said U.S. companies that were in Libya before the sanctions can begin negotiating their return, pending the end of sanctions.
Mr. Pfirter said the documents handed over by Libya "will allow us to certify that everything declared there will be destroyed and will never be used for any other purpose."
He added that he believed Libya's declaration was complete and comprehensive.
In the past week, Libya made the first concrete move to eliminate its stockpiles when it destroyed 3,300 bombs specifically intended to carry chemical payloads.
With international inspectors monitoring the weeklong operation, bulldozers crushed the shell casings to complete the process, which ended Wednesday, the U.N. agency said.
Mr. Pfirter praised Libya's cooperation with the agency since it ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention in January and became a full member of the treaty a month later.
"Not only have they joined the convention, they have been consistent in complying with it in a dynamic form. They have made an enormous effort," Mr. Pfirter said.
He said the Libyan development program and the production of potential weapons ended in the early 1990s, and the mustard gas had not been weaponized.
"They were tested but not used," he said. More than 160 countries are members of the treaty, including the world's largest possessors of chemical weapons, the United States and Russia. Only a few large countries, including Angola, North Korea, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia and Syria, have yet to join.
--------
Libya Discloses Production of 23 Tons of Mustard Gas
March 6, 2004
By JUDITH MILLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/06/international/africa/06LIBY.html
In a formal declaration on Friday, Libya disclosed that it had produced and stored some 23 tons of deadly mustard gas, according to an international disarmament body that monitors the ban on chemical weapons.
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, based in The Hague, said a Libyan delegation had turned over to the organization more than a dozen folders containing details of the illicit chemical weapons program.
In an effort to normalize its relations with the West, the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, announced last December that his country was renouncing chemical, biological and nuclear arms.
As officials at the chemical weapons organization and American officials in Washington began analyzing the Libyan declaration, a State Department-chartered ship loaded with more than 500 metric tons of equipment from Libya's nuclear and other weapons programs was preparing to leave Saturday morning.
The ship, whose name American officials refused to disclose, is carrying nuclear centrifuges and components, equipment from a uranium conversion facility and Libya's five SCUD-C, longer-range missiles, among other equipment and material, administration officials said.
A senior official said that the administration was still discussing the ultimate fate of this material, but that much of it would undoubtedly be destroyed. In late January, two American aircraft flew to the United States carrying nuclear weapons plans, centrifuge designs and components, and containers of chemicals used to enrich uranium.
"This is an astounding achievement," the senior official said of the impending departure of the so-called weapons of mass destruction. "Libya's W.M.D. program will soon be sailing away."
In its declaration to the chemical weapons organization, officials said Libya had acknowledged that it had made the mustard gas over a decade ago at Rabta, a production facility in the Libyan desert 75 miles southwest of Tripoli. It said it had kept the gas and a variety of chemical precursors intended for the production of sarin and other nerve agents at two storage facilities.
Libya also declared that it had tested the gas as a weapon and made thousands of bombs to deliver the lethal agents as part of its chemical weapons program. Libya said the chemical program began in the 1980's and ended in 1990, officials said.
In an interview on Friday, Rogelio Pfirter, director general of the chemical weapons organization, described the mustard gas stockpile as quite sizable, though the former Soviet Union and the United States both declared that they had made thousands of tons of the deadly agent. Mr. Pfirter noted that 23 tons of mustard gas could still have caused serious havoc to civilians and armies of the region had it been used.
He said Libya had also told his organization that while the mustard gas had been tested, it had never been used in a conflict or even put into bombs or other weapons.
Libya had been repeatedly accused of having used mustard gas and perhaps other chemical weapons in 1987 in its conflict with neighboring Chad, accusations Libyan officials had denied. The chemical weapons organization never found the allegations sufficiently persuasive to justify sending a mission to Chad to investigate, an organization official said today.
Officials of the organization are now poring over the declarations for information about which countries or companies might have helped Libya make chemical weapons or provide precursor chemicals. Officials said that while Libyan scientists had made the mustard gas, Libya had received precursor chemicals for deadly sarin and other nerve agents from entities in other countries.
One official said there was no indication yet that such precursors came from Pakistan. Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, has acknowledged having sold nuclear materials and expertise to the nuclear programs of Libya, Iran and North Korea.
Officials at the organization said they expected that Libya's dossier on its chemical weapons program would be accurate and complete.
Only a handful of states have not signed and ratified the treaty banning chemical weapons. Israel has signed, but not ratified the treaty. Egypt, Syria and Lebanon have not signed it. Nor has North Korea, another state whose nuclear and other weapons programs deeply trouble the United States.
Mr. Pfirter said his organization was working closely with American and British inspectors who had visited Libyan weapons sites and advised Libyan officials on how best to carry out the government's renunciation pledges.
Last weekend, the organization monitored the destruction in Libya of more than 3,300 bomb casings that had never been filled but were designed to hold chemical agents.
Officials from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said the group would now begin plans for building a facility to destroy the mustard gas inside Libya.
-------- china
China Boosts Military Spending in Budget
By AUDRA ANG
Associated Press Writer
Mar 6, 2004
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CHINA_POLITICS?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
BEIJING (AP) -- China handed its enormous military a double-digit spending increase Saturday in a show of support, even as the new national budget turned inward to focus on the countryside and its growing income gap with urban areas.
The communist government's proposed increase of 11.6 percent - or $2.6 billion - in military expenditures for the People's Liberation Army came days before an unprecedented referendum in rival Taiwan concerning the island's estranged relations with the mainland.
The increase was needed to improve the "defensive combat readiness of the armed forces under high-tech conditions," Finance Minister Jin Renqing told the National People's Congress in his annual budget presentation.
His report put total revenue for the central budget at $157 billion, up 7 percent - or $10.9 billion - from last year. It also included a 7 percent boost in overall spending from 2003, a move calculated to push the economy forward without widening an already huge wealth gap with areas left behind by a generation of economic reform.
Such an approach, Jin said, will "increase everyone's confidence in accelerated development and stabilize overall reform and development." China's budget is a telling glimpse into what its leaders, the stewards of a once-planned but increasingly freewheeling economy, consider their top tasks. For this year-old complement of leaders, that means doing everything they can to create a "well-off" society that can bring stability.
In line with the optimistic forecast, Jin said the country's $38.7 billion deficit was the same as 2003's - good news for China as it tries to assure the global financial community that it is traveling a responsible path and not allowing its economy to overheat.
"Keeping our proactive fiscal policy stable and consistent while working to improve it will help protect, consolidate and increase the current good momentum in economic development," Jin said. He identified rural issues as the top spending priority and said funding for them will increase by 20 percent, a theme echoed by Premier Wen Jiabao in his state-of-the-nation speech Friday at the opening of the legislative session.
The increase for the PLA, the world's largest armed force, is bigger than last year's and heralds a return to double-digit hikes for the 2.5 million-member force.
Jin did not give a spending total but said outlays this year would increase by $2.6 billion, or 11.6 percent. Last year's announced military budget was $22.4 billion, an increase of 9.6 percent.
The official budget does not include weapons purchases, research and development and other costs. The Pentagon puts actual spending at up to four times the public figures.
"The military needs high-tech equipment," said Huang Teng, a delegate from the northern province of Shanxi. "In my opinion, it wasn't enough of a spending increase. It could have been higher."
The nod to military spending comes just before a March 20 presidential election in Taiwan that will include a referendum on whether the democratically governed island should seek talks with Beijing and beef up defenses if China refuses to stop targeting missiles at it.
The mainland insists Taiwan is part of China and has repeatedly threatened to use force to unify the two sides, separated by a bloody civil war that ended with the communist revolution in 1949. Chinese leaders view the referendum as a rehearsal for rejecting unification.
Taiwan's defense ministry criticized the increase in military spending by its rival, 100 miles across the Taiwan Strait.
"We feel this (rise) has a negative influence on regional stability and peace," Taiwan's defense ministry spokesman, Huang Shuey-sheng, told The Associated Press.
Ma Kai, head of the State Development and Reform Commission, cited the government's other priorities as the development of China's western regions and the revitalization of its industrial northeast - including, he said, ensuring payments to laid-off workers and retirees. Those groups have been vocal and sometimes violent in their objections to not being paid.
"We are clearly aware that there are still many difficulties and problems in China's economic and social development that we cannot afford to ignore," Ma said.
He cited "a pressing need to keep economic growth stable and rapid and free from drastic fluctuations."
Ma insisted China would keep its currency stable for now despite pressure from the United States to loosen controls and let the yuan trade freely. Ma made the carefully calibrated remark as he outlined the country's economic plans.
"We will constantly improve the mechanism for determining the exchange rate for the renminbi and keep it stable at a rational and balanced level," Ma told the legislature.
The United States has urged China, in the midst of a generation-long dalliance with the free market, to allow the yuan to trade freely. Chinese leaders have said they plan to eventually let that happen, but they say doing so now could cause financial chaos.
-------- haiti
Aristide wasn't forced out
March 06,2004
ERIC STEINKOPFF
JACKSONVILLE (NC) DAILY NEWS STAFF
http://www.jdnews.com/SiteProcessor.cfm?Template=/GlobalTemplates/Details.cfm&StoryID=20776&Section=News
If Jim Refinger knows one thing it's this: Ousted Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide is safe.
There was no kidnapping, as some sources reported. There was no injury. And for Refinger there was no mystery.
Refinger was there. The former Jacksonville police sniper and retired Marine was part of a private security team hired to protect Aristide's inner circle.
"We left with him (but) I won't talk about where we went," Refinger said Friday from his home in Jacksonville where he just returned. "We escorted him safely out.
"Everything was done with the full knowledge and cooperation of the president. There was no forcing the president to go anywhere. We protected our principal without a shot fired and he is safe."
Refinger works for Steele Foundation, a security firm based in San Francisco. The company has protection details all over the world and does industrial security and risk analysis, Refinger said.
Aristide had a presidential protection unit, and a team from Steele mirrored the unit in an inner circle. Refinger's job was running the outer circle that kept the inner circle safe.
"We were protecting the protectors, and we worked closely with the Haitian counter-ambush team," he said.
A good fit
Refinger, 55, seems a natural to train and lead a quick reaction force in Port-au-Prince.
He was a Marine 1st sergeant and worked for 16 years with the Jacksonville police department's special incident response team before retiring in July 2002 and going to work for Steele.
"When I got to the Jacksonville police department I wanted to be on their (special weapons and tactics) team," Refinger said. "I started out as a sniper on the SWAT team and later was a sniper instructor for the police department. Now they probably have one of the better teams in the state."
Little wonder. Refinger was with 3rd Force Reconnaissance Company from the end of 1966 to the end of 1969. He said he received "a little ding in the leg" from North Vietnamese rocket shrapnel before training enlisted recruits as a drill instructor at Parris Island, S.C.
In 1983, he was an adviser to the Lebanese Army before the terrorist bombing at the Beirut International Airport Oct. 23 that year.
Refinger was the senior enlisted member of Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, and later first sergeant of Headquarters Company of the regiment before retiring from the Marine Corps in 1986. In addition to his time as a sniper and sniper instructor at the Jacksonville Police Department, he worked as a patrol officer, narcotics officer and later a patrol supervisor.
After he retired from the department, Refinger's Marine buddy and former Camp Lejeune special incident response team member Mark Moore asked Refinger if he'd work for the Steele.
On speaking terms
While working in Haiti, Refinger has picked up a little of the Creole language, especially terms like "stay back," "kneel," "stand there" and "put your hands behind your back."
"Once you are their teacher in a basic course you become special to them," Refinger said. "We did our best to teach them proper police procedures and to treat people with respect because it reflects on the presidency."
Although the country was considered unstable, Refinger said it really wasn't a combat area.
"The threat of rebels didn't really happen until the first of the year," he said. "Most of the time we were protecting (Aristide) from people who loved him too much."
Thousands of people would show up at public events threatening to crush the president with sick children in the belief that somehow the former Catholic priest would cure them.
A lot of people also hated Aristide, seemingly to Refinger because the president came from the poor, lower class.
"It never really came to Port-au-Prince," Refinger said. "We saw some demonstrations and started hearing about it in Gonaives and Cap Haitien. The police got pretty overwhelmed, especially in the small towns, but Port-au-Prince is probably 80 percent pro-Aristide."
The Shamir or ghost pro-Aristide supporters blocked roads leading into the capital, making it difficult, if not impossible for rebels to enter the city.
Refinger speculated that Aristide may have decided to leave to avoid further bloodshed, but questioned whether it was possible to avoid that in Haiti.
The matter is under investigation, said Refinger, who added that he may be called to testify and, therefore, could not go into details about Aristide's departure.
"We got out slick and fast, before they even knew what was happening," Refinger said. "It wasn't until after it was all said and done that we heard a report about kidnapping, but we knew that wasn't the case." More help
While Refinger was in Haiti, his wife Dee visited a couple of times, once for 30 days and most recently for four months. The couple was married in November 2002.
"Our first real date was a gun show and our first movie was 'Hamburger Hill,'" said Dee.
What struck them most about Haiti was the poverty. Wild pigs, cows and chickens wandered the streets and countryside. Infant mortality was so high, they said, that families waited a year to name their children in case they didn't survive. "When you fly over it you can smell the rancid countryside," Refinger said. "The bugs and mosquitoes are bad, the filth comes up over your shoes and people live in that."
The couple also recalled mansions manned by servants who lived in mud huts packed 12 to a room just across the street.
The situation convinced Dee Refinger to help. The couple is sponsoring three children in Haiti.
"They fight to live and survive every day," Dee said.
"There's no middle class in Haiti," Refinger said. "There are haves who have a whole lot and the poor who have nothing."
Contact Eric Steinkopff at esteinkopff@jdnews.com or 353-1171, Ext. 236.
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U.S. Special Forces in Haiti Seeking Out Rebel Leaders
March 6, 2004
New York Times
By TIM WEINER
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/06/international/americas/06CAPI.html
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, March 5 - Newly arrived United States Special Forces sought out rebel leaders on Friday, as marines at the presidential palace were jeered and cursed by demonstrators loyal to the deposed president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
The American commandos are in the rebel strongholds of Cap Haitien and Gonaïves, an American commander said. The commander, Gen. James T. Hill, said the rebels had not laid down their weapons as they had promised, though some had withdrawn from the capital.
Their most prominent leader, Guy Philippe, "is still in the city, and we are still looking for him to lay down his arms," said General Hill, who heads the Pentagon's Southern Command. General Hill, flanked by commanders of French, Canadian and Chilean forces at the international airport here, denounced the rebels' call for the re-establishment of the Haitian Army. The Haitian military, long an instrument of political terror, overthrew President Aristide in 1991.
"There is no need for a Haitian Army," General Hill said forcefully. "I was here when President Aristide disbanded it, and that was the correct thing to do at the time."
Mr. Aristide, who was returned to power by American forces in 1994, disbanded the army in 1995. He left Haiti on Sunday under pressure from the United States and the armed rebels. The rebel uprising began one month ago in Gonaïves, spread to Cap Haitien and then swept into Port-au-Prince on Monday.
The American Special Forces sent to Cap Haitien and Gonaïves are trained and equipped to operate at the limits of the laws of war, and often serve as point men for conventional military forces, gathering intelligence and carving out forward positions.
In the capital, the American ambassador, James B. Foley, said a Haitian "council of elders" was formed Friday afternoon. He said the council would nominate members of a provisional "government of national unity" that would eventually run the country.
At midday on Friday at the presidential palace, several hundred hooting protesters loyal to the deposed president shouted angrily at about 30 marines who passed through the palace gates on foot, in trucks and in armored vehicles, armed with assault weapons, machine guns and missiles.
General Hill described the street politics in Port-au-Prince as peaceful democratic protests. Several thousand Aristide loyalists took part.
"They kidnapped Aristide," Égalité Smith, 31, said of the Americans. "We want no war, but we want no occupation of Haiti."
General Hill acknowledged that "some people say it's an occupation." But he said the mission of the multinational military force here was "the re-establishment of the rule of law." To that end, he said, the military would work to establish a police force from the remains of the national police.
That force was created nine years ago under President Aristide, during the last American military mission here. Many of the policemen sided with the rebels who took the capital by storm on Monday.
The Bush administration is also calling on the Haitian Coast Guard to help prevent Haitian refugees from leaving by boat. The Associated Press reported that the administration had informed Congress that it would pay the salaries of the Haitian Coast Guard for up to three months as well as repair damage to its facilities.
Luis Moreno, the deputy chief of mission for the American Embassy here, visited the coast guard headquarters this week with American troops to assess the security situation for the anticipated return of asylum-seekers intercepted at sea.
Security was uppermost in the mind of Dr. Philippe Desmangles, a surgeon at the Polyclinique Centrale, a hospital sacked during the rebel uprising.
"They've secured an empty palace," he said of the American soldiers here.
"We needed security here," at the hospital, he added. "But that did not interest them. They tell the rebels they cannot be involved in the politics of our country. Some of us feel the same way about them."
The doctor, who was the only surgeon on duty at the only well-functioning hospital in the capital, said he was "one of the best-paid doctors in the country." He makes about $45 a week.
The flow of food, medicine and other international aid has resumed here, but very slowly. Many international aid agencies' stores were looted during the rebel advance on the capital.
Dr. Desmangles said the donations he had received in the last year were "mostly worthless recycled materials."
"We have bullet wounds, dying people, every disease," he said. "If other nations want to help, they will send doctors, not junk."
--------
Marines Extend Reach Past Haitian Capital
Interim Governing Council Named to Ease Transition to Stability and Elections
By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, March 6, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35135-2004Mar5.html
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, March 5 -- U.S. troops extended their reach beyond the Haitian capital Friday in an attempt to stem political violence in the rest of the country. Haiti's political leaders, meanwhile, named an interim governing council to help guide the country until it is stable enough to hold new presidential elections.
Five days after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled into exile, several thousand of his supporters gathered outside the National Palace to demand his return. U.S. Marines, now numbering more than 1,000 in the capital, observed from the palace grounds. But the crowd remained largely peaceful and dispersed by the afternoon without incident.
The first large shipment of food aid also arrived in the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation at a time when the threat of shortages was beginning to alarm humanitarian agencies working here. But the United Nations warned that food shortages were still imminent in much of the countryside because of the sporadic political violence that continued in the wake of Aristide's abrupt departure.
"I would warn those who see the relative calm in many parts of the country as a sign that law and order has been restored -- far from so," Jan Egeland, the U.N.'s emergency relief coordinator, told reporters at the United Nations. "Beyond the capital, there is a security vacuum."
As a multinational force built toward an expected 5,000 troops, the capital continued to cool down after days of looting and violence set off by Aristide's pre-dawn resignation to U.S. officials on Sunday. Aristide, who left office three years into a five-year term in the face of a rising armed insurrection and international pressure, remained in the Central African Republic while he searched for another country to take him.
Food delivery to areas outside Port-au-Prince remained difficult for aid workers and others trying to travel along the country's few roads. Even in the best of times, many of Haiti's 8 million people rely on food aid to survive in a country that has few natural resources.
Anti-Aristide rebels had cut the country in half at the coastal city of Gonaives, and rebel leaders there warned Friday that any new government would have to include at least one of their members. The U.N.'s World Food Program has been trying to avoid the road north from the capital, frequently blocked by the rebels, by shipping relief supplies on barges.
The situation in Cap-Haitien, the largest city in the north, also remained perilous. The U.N. agency said it would not unload the 1,200 metric tons of food it had offshore until it could be assured that armed gangs would not loot it.
Gen. James T. Hill, chief of the U.S. Southern Command, said during a visit Friday that U.S. Special Forces had arrived in Gonaives and in Cap-Haitien. The two cities had become strongholds of the armed insurrection against Aristide, and there were reports Friday that only small groups of rebels had fulfilled their promise to turn over weapons to the Haitian police.
Hill, who met with Haiti's interim president and prime minister during his one-day visit, also said that Haiti did not need to rebuild its army, which had instigated many of the country's frequent coups. Aristide disbanded the army when he was returned to power by U.S. troops in 1994, three years after he was ousted in a military coup. Rebel leaders, many of them former army officers, have called for the army to be reconstituted.
Meanwhile, the three-member commission charged with selecting an interim governing council appointed its members. The seven-member Council of Sages is to select a prime minister to replace Yvon Neptune, a loyal Aristide lieutenant whom rebel leaders and others want arrested for crimes allegedly committed by the former government.
David Lee, chief of the Organization of American States mission in Haiti, said the council consisted of five men and two women selected from academia, human-rights advocacy groups, business, government and the Catholic Church.
-------- iraq
Iraqi Shiites Fail to Sign Pact After Cleric Balks
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, March 6, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A34823-2004Mar5?language=printer
BAGHDAD, March 5 -- Leaders of Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority balked at approving an interim constitution just hours before it was scheduled to be signed on Friday when the country's top Shiite cleric rejected provisions in the document aimed at protecting minority rights, aides to several council members said.
Five Shiite members of Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council, including its acting president and the leaders of three large political parties, holed up in one member's office around noon and refused to attend an elaborate signing ceremony before more than 300 invited guests and a musical ensemble. The Shiite stance forced U.S. officials to cancel the event and prompted urgent negotiating sessions that stretched through the afternoon and into the night, the aides said.
The Shiites' refusal to sign was regarded by some council officials as a stark indication of the deep divisions that exist between rival religious and ethnic groups, suggesting that a consensus on the interim constitution reached earlier this week may not have been as solid as U.S. and Iraqi officials had claimed.
Although the five Shiites had endorsed the document on Monday, they told other members that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani had raised last-minute objections to two key elements: a provision that effectively gives minority Kurds veto power over a permanent constitution, and plans for a transitional government with a single president, the aides said. Leaders of Iraq's Shiites, a group long oppressed by former president Saddam Hussein's Sunni Arab-dominated government, want to ensure that Shiites have political clout in the transitional government befitting their majority status.
Despite the lengthy discussions, members could not resolve differences on Friday, and adjourned shortly before midnight, the aides said. The council released a statement early Saturday saying it would reconvene on Monday "to finalize the issue and sign the law."
The delay is another setback to the Bush administration's efforts to transfer power to Iraqis. The administration had set a Feb. 28 deadline for an interim constitution to be completed, a schedule meant to give Iraqi leaders enough time to prepare for a scheduled June 30 handover of sovereignty.
"The consensus has always been very fragile," said an adviser to one of the council's five Kurdish members. If the Shiites succeed in renegotiating parts of the document, known as the Transitional Administrative Law, Kurds and Sunni Arabs would also seek to make revisions, forcing more extensive revisions and delays, the adviser said.
"If they open the discussion on one point, then we'll open the discussion on other points," the Kurdish adviser said.
An adviser to a Sunni Arab member said Kurdish leaders "were not at all pleased" by the Shiite demands.
In Friday's frantic meetings, aides to Kurdish and Shiite members said no concessions were given to the Shiites. Much of the time was spent attempting to convince the five Shiite members of the importance of a single president and Kurdish veto power over the constitution, the aides said.
The five Shiites agreed to discuss the provisions with Sistani and try to persuade him to accede to the agreed-upon document, two council officials said.
"The Shiites said they will go and talk to Sistani again," one of the council officials said. "But what we don't know is whether they will try to convince him or they will just get him to strengthen his resolve."
The delay again demonstrated Sistani's political clout. A reclusive cleric who lives in the holy city of Najaf, Sistani has long vowed to stay away from the day-to-day operations of government, but he has taken a keen interest in the interim constitution because, he has told visitors, he believes it to be central to Iraq's democratic transition and the establishment of religious freedom for Shiites.
Sistani's pronouncements about the need to have elected individuals draft a constitution scuttled the Bush administration's first transition plan. A second plan, to select an interim government through regional caucuses, also was torpedoed by Sistani, forcing the administration to agree to hold elections for a transitional government by early next year.
The council and the occupation authority have not decided what type of administration will run Iraq between the June 30 handover of power and the elections, although Sistani's approval is regarded as a prerequisite, U.S. and Iraqi officials said.
"The Shiites won't act without Sistani's blessing," the Kurdish adviser said. "This is very troubling to the rest of the members. While we respect Ayatollah Sistani as a religious man, he should not dictate the terms of our government."
The five who refused to sign the interim document were Ahmed Chalabi, a longtime U.S. ally; Abdul Aziz Hakim of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq; Ibrahim Jafari of the Dawa party; Mowaffak Rubaie, an independent Shiite politician who is close to Sistani; and Muhammed Bahr Uloum, a cleric who is heading the council this month under its rotating presidency.
The five had tried to get the eight other Shiites on the council to join them, but they were unable to do so, council officials said.
The five stayed in Chalabi's council office for much of the afternoon, while the other 20 members met in the official chambers one floor below, aides said. The council did not meet as a whole until nightfall, U.S. officials said.
Chalabi has increasingly allied himself with Sistani in recent weeks in an effort to build popular support among Shiites. When eight Shiite members walked out of a council meeting a week ago to protest the manner in which a vote on women's rights was conducted, they retired to Chalabi's house, located in the city's poshest district.
The Shiites' principal objection involves a clause in the interim constitution that says a permanent constitution would not go into effect if two-thirds of the voters in any three provinces rejected it, even if the document receives a nationwide majority. Because the Kurds control three provinces in the north, the provision would effectively give the Kurds veto power over the constitution. The Kurds make up about 20 percent of Iraq's population.
The Kurds had sought the provision as a bargaining chip to prevent a Shiite majority from dictating the terms of the constitution. The five Shiites want the provision deleted.
"Some of these provinces have only 400,000 or 500,000 people," Hamid Bayati, a senior official with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, told the Associated Press. "We cannot have that number of people rejecting a constitution for 25 million people."
Kurdish leaders regard the provision as central to a federal system of government. "This whole issue has to do with how much power does the majority get versus how many rights and protections do the minorities get," the Kurdish adviser said. "In any democracy, there has to be the concept of minority rights."
The five Shiites also want the government that takes power after elections to be headed by a five-member presidency instead of a single president and two vice presidents as currently envisioned by the interim constitution. The Shiites fear that under the arrangement in the current draft -- a single president with two powerful vice presidents -- the authority of the president, presumably a Shiite, would be diluted by the two vice presidents, a Sunni Arab and a Kurd. The objectors therefore want a five-member co-presidency that would give the Shiites a clear 3-to-2 majority, sources said.
Daniel Senor, a spokesman for the occupation authority, would not comment on specific areas of disagreement. He called the dispute "a technical matter related to minority rights."
Senor said the provisions in dispute did not affect fundamental elements of the constitution that had been of concern to the U.S. government, such as the role of Islam in government and women's rights. Under the draft interim constitution, Islam is the official religion in Iraq but not the sole source of legislation. "Ninety-eight percent of the document is still unanimously agreed to," he said.
A senior U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the occupation administrator, L. Paul Bremer, could have tried to force the process but decided this morning to "let the Governing Council members work this out for themselves." He said Bremer was not involved in mediating the dispute.
"Democracy is an inherently messy process," Senor said.
----
Constitution Failure Deals Blow to Iraqis
HAMZA HENDAWI
Sat, Mar. 06, 2004
Associated Press
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/special_packages/iraq/8122043.htm
BAGHDAD, Iraq - It was supposed to provide a ray of hope to a wounded nation, but instead it caused it more pain. On Friday, Iraqi leaders were to sign an interim constitution they have said was so liberal it had no equal in the Arab world and maybe beyond. It redressed the ills of decades of dictatorship, restored the rights of every component in Iraq's tribal, ethnic and religious mosaic and laid down principles of democracy and human rights.
But the 25 members of the Governing Council, Iraq's U.S.-appointed interim leadership, never showed up for the elaborate signing ceremony. Instead, they were bogged down in intensive talks after last-minute disagreements surfaced.
Spokesmen for the council and the U.S.-led coalition tried to play down the significance of the delay, insisting it was due to technical issues. For hours they held out hope the document would still be signed Friday.
But by midnight, eight hours after the ceremony was to have begun, it became clear that Iraq's "historical day" was not to be. Reporters and a handful of coalition officials - no more than 100 from an original audience of at least 600 - were the last to leave the marble-and-glass Convention Center. The complex was at the heavily guarded "green zone" that houses the coalition headquarters on the west bank of the Tigris river.
Hopes were running high in the hours before the document was to have been signed.
"We want so many things. We want law, we want order, a president and a strong government," Iraqi journalist Nahrawan al-Janabi, 25, said before the signing was delayed. "Today is a step. A positive one."
Ahmed Hamed, a member of Baghdad's 37-member city council, said, "People need this. It's a starting point toward security and stability."
Such sentiments are not uncommon in today's Iraq, where a huge political void remains nearly 11 months after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. Humiliated by occupation and torn by a spate of horrific terror attacks, sectarian tensions and a sense of uncertainty, Iraq at times looks like a nation on the verge of chaos, even civil war.
The interim constitution is supposed to give Iraqis the rights and freedoms they never had and facilitate the transfer of power from the coalition on June 30. That would provide something of a reprieve from the woes and the tragedies that have stalked the nation for months.
Reporters were asked to arrive three hours ahead of the ceremony for security reasons. U.S. helicopters hovered in the skies and security was visibly beefed up on the ground, with more than the usual number of troops on duty.
"Please don't do anything to spoil this historical occasion," one coalition organizer said as he went through the "do's" and "don'ts" with journalists.
Organizers brought 25 gold-and-blue fountain pens and neatly arrayed them atop an antique desk once used by Iraq's first monarch, Feisal I, for council members to use when they sign the document. A huge banner behind the desk declared: "We all participate in the building of Iraq."
Guests posed for photos next to the desk. When it became increasingly likely that the ceremony was not going to take place, photographers turned their cameras to the desk, the motionless pens and the empty chairs with name tags reserved for members of the council and the Cabinet.
With cameras flashing, some Iraqi guests lightheartedly sat on the desk and pretended to be signing the document.
A children's choir in gray and white uniforms and a group of classical musicians in black ties also were on hand for entertainment, along with six children wearing colorful Assyrian, Kurdish and Arab costumes - underlining the country's unity.
They all ended up performing to warm applause from Cabinet ministers and coalition officials - perhaps in a bid to lift the morale as the Iraqi politicians haggled behind the scenes.
"Ask the stars and planets about us, they'll tell you that we are an ambitious generation," a group of children sang. "We love our country and our country loves us."
Fatma Hassan Mohammed, one of the guests, said, "I am ready to stay here all night in support of the constitution. They need to introduce changes, this is democracy and freedom of expression."
----
Iraqi Shiites, in a Blow to U.S., Fail to Sign Temporary Charter
March 6, 2004
By DEXTER FILKINS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/06/international/middleeast/06IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 5 - A group of Shiite leaders refused to sign Iraq's temporary constitution on Friday unless changes were made that would strengthen Shiite power, throwing the political process here into disarray and posing a major embarrassment for American officials.
Five Shiite leaders said they had decided to back out of the agreement reached earlier this week after meeting with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's most powerful religious leader. They said they wanted to strike from the temporary constitution a provision that would allow a relatively small minority of the country's voters to block the passage of a permanent constitution, which is to be written next year.
After nearly 12 hours of negotiations on Friday, the other Iraqi leaders rejected the changes and quit for the night. That set the stage for a showdown this weekend, when the Shiite leaders will probably tell Ayatollah Sistani that the rest of the 25-member Iraqi Governing Council, including some of its other Shiite members, refused to budge. The council is scheduled to reconvene on Monday.
Ayatollah Sistani commands the allegiance of millions of Iraqis, and some members of the Governing Council said they were concerned that without his consent, no constitution would work.
"If we don't pass this constitution, it will be a big disappointment," said Mahmood Otham, a Kurdish member of the Governing Council. "But we had an agreement, and these people are trying to reopen everything. It's unacceptable."
The impasse was a blow to American officials, who had erected a stage and invited television cameras from all over the world to witness an elaborate signing ceremony for the new constitution. The document, with its protections for free speech, assembly and religious practice, had been hailed as a measure of how far the American enterprise in Iraq had come.
The disputed provision was inserted to help gain the support of the Kurds, who have been pressing to maintain the large measure of autonomy they gained in northern Iraq over the last 13 years.
Kurdish leaders reacted strongly to the Shiite demands, saying they suspected that the Shiites intended to strip the Kurds of their autonomy and then secure the support of a slim majority of the country's voters for the new constitution.
Iraqi officials said the negotiations on Friday became extraordinarily bitter, with some Kurdish members accusing the Shiites of harboring a greater loyalty to Iran, the Shiite-majority country next door that supported the Shiites in their struggle against Saddam Hussein.
"These five guys showed tonight that they are Iranians, not Iraqis, and that Sistani is an Iranian," a Kurdish official said. "They say they support all Iraqis, but they are forcing all of us to accept Shiite domination."
Despite repeated avowals that he would remain above the push and pull of politics and that he would keep Islam separate from the state, Ayatollah Sistani demonstrated anew his willingness to involve himself in political debates. But this appears to be the first time that he has interceded directly on behalf of the Shiite majority. His earlier calls for direct elections were a more indirect way to flex Shiite political power.
While there has been no recent census in Iraq, the Shiites are thought to constitute a majority in the country. They are clearly eager to exercise the political power that flows from majority status - an ambition that historically has always been frustrated.
No statements were issued Friday night from Ayatollah Sistani's office in Najaf. But the Shiite leaders who made the new demands acknowledged his influence. Hamid al-Bayati, a leader of one of the Shiite parties that rejected the constitution, said the ayatollah had reviewed every draft of the document over the last several weeks.
"We have some concerns about some of the articles in the constitution," said Mr. Bayati, a leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. "The issues arose following meetings with Sistani."
The temporary constitution, which is to serve as the framework for the Iraqi state until nationwide elections can be held this year or next, was supposed to have been signed two days ago. But the signing was delayed after terrorist attacks on Tuesday killed more than 180 people.
Iraqi and American officials had overcome several obstacles to reach agreement on the document, including the role of Islam, the role of women and self-rule by the Kurds.
Iraqi and American officials said Friday that the main provisions, agreed to after all-night bargaining sessions earlier this week, were not in dispute. Nonetheless, they said the new objections were serious enough to threaten the constitution.
The article in the temporary constitution now in dispute deals with the ratification of the permanent constitution, which is supposed to be written sometime next year.
According to language agreed on this week, the permanent constitution would be written by a popularly elected national assembly and put to voters in a nationwide referendum. If a majority of Iraqis approved the document, then it would be permanent. But there is an additional provision that if two-thirds of the voters in 3 of the nation's 18 governorates, or provinces, reject it, the constitution will fail.
The language was inserted in large part to reassure the Kurds, who are fearful of losing control of their affairs to the Shiite majority.
The five Shiite leaders, who represent the most powerful Shiite parties, want to delete that language and allow the permanent constitution to succeed or fail on a simple majority vote. According to several Iraqi officials, the five Shiite leaders are Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution of Iraq, Ibrahim Jafari of the Dawa Party, and two independent members, Mowaffak al-Rubaie and Muhammad Bahr ul-Uloom.
While the five Shiite leaders succeeded in blocking the signing of the constitution, it was unclear if they could persuade enough of their colleagues to go along with the changes. Thirteen of the 25 members of the Governing Council are Shiites.
Iraqi and American officials said the demands had been rejected by an overwhelming majority of the council members, including many Shiites.
"This is a disgrace," said Raja Kuzai, a Shiite member of the council. "This agreement was finished. We have been waiting here all day. They tried to meet with me, but I refused."
The council members went home near midnight and scheduled a new signing ceremony for Monday. Iraqi leaders said they hoped that the five Shiite leaders could persuade Ayatollah Sistani to back down.
By the time the negotiations finally came to a halt, the area around the stage where the signing of the constitution was to have taken place was largely empty.
Iraqi officials and reporters filed past the signing desk, an antique used by King Faisal, the British-installed monarch whose dynasty in Iraq collapsed in 1958.
Arrayed on the desk were 25 blue and gold pens, untouched
-------- mideast
Bush close to imposing sanctions on Syria
By Reuters
Sat., March 06, 2004
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/401684.html
The Bush administration plans to impose sanctions on Syria within weeks for its support of terrorist groups and for failing to stop guerrillas entering Iraq, congressional officials and other sources familiar with the matter said on Friday. Though the White House insists no final decisions have been made, senior administration officials on Friday informed Florida Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a senior member of the House International Relations Committee, that an announcement was "imminent," said her spokesman, Alex Cruz.
Several sources said the administration was leaning toward imposing economic rather than diplomatic sanctions under legislation signed into law by Bush in December.
Washington accuses Syria of sponsoring terrorism, occupying Lebanon and failing to secure its border with Iraq while allowing anti-American fighters to cross into the country.
"Damascus' destabilizing behavior in the Middle East has only gotten worse," U.S. Rep. Eliot Engel, a New York Democrat, said in urging Bush to act.
The administration's move against Syria would stand in stark contrast to President George W. Bush's decision to ease sanctions on Libya as a reward for scrapping its nuclear arms programs. Bush has seized on Libya's pledge to abandon weapons programs as an example for other countries, including Syria.
The Syria Accountability Act bars trade in items that could be used in weapons programs until the administration certifies Syria is not supporting terrorist groups, has withdrawn personnel from Lebanon, is not developing unconventional weapons and has secured its border with Iraq.
The law also authorizes Bush to impose at least two other sanctions from a menu that includes barring U.S. businesses from investing in Syria, restricting travel in the United States by Syrian diplomats, and banning exports of U.S. products other than food and medicine to Syria.
The legislation allows the White House to waive the sanctions, but a senior administration official said: "We will implement the Syrian Accountability Act."
The official declined to say which sanctions would be put in place and when.
Several sources said the announcement was likely to be made next week or the week after.
The White House informed Ros-Lehtinen that the announcement was imminent in response to her letter urging Bush to expedite implementation of the sanctions. The congresswoman heads a House of Representatives subcommittee on the Middle East.
"They're ready to go," another source said of the sanctions, calling it "a serious signal to the Syrians that it needs to throw out terrorist groups."
Syria says its support for the Palestinian and Lebanese groups it calls freedom fighters is merely political and their only activity in Syria is speaking to media.
Allegations from Washington during the Iraq war that Damascus was helping aides of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein flee raised concern in the Arab world that Syria could be the next target of what the U.S. calls its "war on terror."
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld complained last month that Syria was not doing enough to stop guerrillas entering Iraq.
But with trade between the two countries a modest $300 million or less annually, the sanctions would have more political than economic effects.
Sources said they expected the administration to impose the sanctions gradually. These could include blocking transactions in which the government of Syria has any interest and reducing U.S. diplomatic contacts with Syria.
-------- spies
CIA leak probe seeks Air Force One chats
CRAWFORD, Texas (AFP)
Mar 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040305233010.rj45vn7y.html
Investigators probing whether top aides to US President George W. Bush illegally leaked the name of a covert CIA agent have requested records of telephone calls from Air Force One, the White House said Friday.
"We are, at the direction of the president, cooperating fully with those who are leading the investigation," spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters as Bush awaited Mexican President Vicente Fox at his ranch here.
McClellan had been asked about a report in New York's Newsday newspaper that US Justice Department officials looking into the leak subpoenaed records of such conversations in the week before the agent's name was published.
The investigators are hunting for who told columnist Robert Novak that Valerie Plame, wife of a prominent critic of the war in Iraq, was an undercover CIA operative on weapons of mass destruction. The disclosure may be a crime.
McClellan said that the investigators, whose probe began in October 2003, asked that their letter seeking the records be kept private.
Newsday reported that the justice officials also want records from a little-known White House task force called the Iraq Group, created in August 2002 to plan how to publicize the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
"We're still in the process of complying fully with those requests. We have provided the Department of Justice investigators with much of the information and we're continuing to provide them with additional information," said McClellan.
Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are facing criticism over the yawning gap between their pre-war claims that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and the post-war failure thus far to find any.
Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, publicly revealed last year that he had investigated charges that Iraq sought uranium from Africa and reported back to the Bush administration that they were false.
Bush used the allegation subsequently in his 2003 State of the Union speech, and Wilson has contended that the administration leaked his wife's identity to punish him for his disclosure.
Plame's name and her CIA ties were revealed in a July 14 2003 opinion column by Novak, who sourced it to two senior administration officials.
Newsday reported that investigators now want records of telephone calls to and from Air Force One from July 7 to 12, while Bush was visting several African nations.
----
WEAPONS
U.S., Certain That Iraq Had Illicit Arms, Reportedly Ignored Contrary Reports
March 6, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/06/politics/06WEAP.html
WASHINGTON, March 5 - In the two years before the war in Iraq, American intelligence agencies reviewed but ultimately dismissed reports from Iraqi scientists, defectors and other informants who said Saddam Hussein's government did not possess illicit weapons, according to government officials.
The reports, which ran contrary to the conclusions of the intelligence agencies and the Bush administration, were not acknowledged publicly by top government officials before the invasion last March. In public statements, the agencies and the administration cited only reports from informants who supported the view that Iraq possessed so-called weapons of mass destruction, which the administration cited as a main justification for going to war.
The first public hint of those reports came in a speech on Friday by Jane Harman, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute, she said "indications" were emerging from the panel's inquiry into prewar intelligence that "potential sources may have been dismissed because they were telling us something we didn't want to believe: that Iraq had no active W.M.D. programs."
Other government officials said they knew of several occasions from 2001 to 2003 when Iraqi scientists, defectors and others had told American intelligence officers, their foreign partners or other intelligence agents that Iraq did not possess illicit weapons.
The officials said they believed that intelligence agencies had dismissed the reports because they did not conform to a view, held widely within the administration and among intelligence analysts, that Iraq was hiding an illicit arsenal.
The Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment directly on Ms. Harman's remarks. But an intelligence official said: "Human intelligence offering different views was by no means discounted or ignored. It was considered and weighed against all the other information available, and analysts made their best judgments."
The government officials who described the contradictory reports have detailed knowledge of prewar intelligence on Iraq and were critical of the C.I.A.'s handling of the information. Because the information remains classified, the officials declined to discuss the identity of the sources in any detail, but said they believed the informants' views had been dismissed because they challenged the widely held consensus on Iraq's weapons.
"It appears that the human intelligence wasn't deemed interesting or useful if it was exculpatory of Iraq," said one senior government official with detailed knowledge of the prewar intelligence.
A second senior government official, who confirmed that account, said the view that Iraq possessed illicit weapons had been "treated like a religion" within American intelligence agencies, with alternative views never given serious attention. The officials said they could not quantify the reports.
In a speech at Georgetown University last month, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, acknowledged for the first time that intelligence agencies might have been mistaken about whether Iraq possessed illicit weapons. None have been found yet.
Mr. Tenet said it was too soon to make final judgments. But he also defended intelligence analysts' performance, saying that they had not been swayed by political pressure and that "as intelligence professionals, we go where the information takes us."
He met Friday morning in a closed session with members of the House intelligence committee, as part of its inquiry into the prewar intelligence. In another closed session on the subject on Thursday, he spent more than four hours with members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose chairman, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, issued a statement describing "a frank and useful exchange."
Senator Roberts said the committee hoped "sometime in the next several weeks" to issue an "initial report" based on its inquiry, which has focused on whether findings by intelligence agencies were supported by adequate evidence.
Among the reports that were discounted, the senior government officials said, was at least one account from an Iraqi scientist who said mysterious trailers described by other Iraqi defectors as part of a biological weapons program were for another, benign purpose, which the officials would not describe.
In prewar presentations and documents, including the unclassified version of a National Intelligence Estimate from October 2002 and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's presentation to the Security Council in February 2003, the intelligence agencies and the administration cited only human intelligence reports supporting the view that the trailers were for biological weapons.
An unclassified report issued in May by the C.I.A., which is still on the agency's Web site, concluded that the trailers had indeed been for biological weapons. But in the months since the war, most American intelligence analysts have come to believe that the trailers were not for that purpose, and were probably for making hydrogen for weather balloons, according to senior government officials. In testimony before Congress late last month, Mr. Tenet said the intelligence community was divided on the issue.
In the past month, some senior intelligence officials have acknowledged that some information from human sources on Iraq was mishandled, including reports based on interviews in early 2002 with an Iraqi defector who later that year was labeled a fabricator by the Defense Intelligence Agency. The information the defector provided was nevertheless included in the administration's statements, including the October 2002 intelligence assessment and Mr. Powell's speech. Intelligence officials have described the inclusion as a mistake.
--------
Iraqi Defector Blames CIA Over Weapons
March 6, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Chalabi.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Even though the CIA continually questioned the credibility of Iraqi defectors, the Bush administration largely used information from them to build a case for invading Iraq, says the man who led many of the defectors to the CIA.
Ahmad Chalabi, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, said he is being unfairly attacked for the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and wants to testify in an open session of the Senate Intelligence Committee to make his case.
``Intelligence people who are supposed to do a better job for their country and their government did not do such a good job,'' Chalabi said in an interview to be telecast Sunday on CBS' ``60 Minutes.'' The program made his comments available to The Associated Press on Saturday.
As President Saddam Hussein's government fell in Baghdad, the Pentagon flew Chalabi into the country from exile. He heads the Iraqi National Congress, an anti-Saddam exile group that the administration expected to be a major player in postwar Iraq.
In the CBS interview, Chalabi said he still expects illegal weapons to be found, despite the failure of two sets of inspectors and scores of thousands of U.S., British and other troops to find them.
Based largely on information from defectors supplied by Chalabi, the Bush administration said Saddam had to be brought down because of huge supplies of chemical and biological weapons and elements of a nuclear-weapons program that he had.
Chalabi blamed the CIA in the interview for the lack of weapons so far.
``This is a ridiculous situation. Every story that comes out in the press says: `Defectors have an ax to grind, don't believe them.' ... Before the war, they kept saying that, ... so why did the CIA believe them so much?'' Chalabi asked.
CIA officials were skeptical, he said: ``Now you're telling me that despite all this public evidence, the United States government took our word without checking out the people?''
One example was Khidhir Hamza, a former Iraqi nuclear scientist who defected in 1994 and wrote a memoir titled ``Saddam's Bombmaker.'' During dozens of media appearances, articles and testimony before Congress in the past two years, he claimed Iraq was actively trying to build an atomic bomb.
Like prewar claims made by other defectors, Hamza's were not borne out by the evidence.
-------- us
Kerry Says Bush Failing to Fully Equip U.S. Troops
Sat Mar 6, 2004
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=4511308
WASHINGTON - Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry accused the Bush administration on Saturday of failing to adequately prepare and equip U.S. forces for the war in Iraq.
Kerry, giving the Democrats' weekly radio address, said President Bush had misplaced priorities in Iraq, spending billions of dollars on contracts to Halliburton Co. but not providing troops enough body armor and other protective equipment.
The Massachusetts senator said helicopters were flying dangerous missions without top-notch anti-missile systems, National Guard units were getting donated steel from local businesses to put homemade steel armor on their vehicles, and families were buying body armor for their sons and daughters.
"Families should be sending pictures and care packages to Iraq and the Department of Defense should be sending the body armor," Kerry said.
"If I am president, I will be prepared to use military force to protect our security, our people and our vital interests," he said. "But I will never send our troops into harm's way without enough firepower and support."
Kerry called on Bush to support a bill in Congress to reimburse families who "had to buy the body armor this administration failed to provide."
He said he will introduce legislation later this month called the Military Family Bill of Rights "to prevent anything like this from ever happening again."
And to ease the strain on the reserves from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, Kerry said active duty forces should temporarily be expanded by 40,000 troops.
The Pentagon has said it will expand active duty forces by up to 30,000 over four years, but has resisted calls by many in Congress for a permanent increase.
"We cannot let the strongest armed forces in the world be weakened," Kerry said. "We must resolve that America's leaders will never let them down."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Leak Investigators to Get Phone Log
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 6, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A34911-2004Mar5?language=printer
CRAWFORD, Tex., March 5 -- Aides to President Bush agreed to turn over a log of a week's worth of telephone calls from Air Force One and other records to satisfy subpoenas from a federal grand jury investigating the leak of a CIA operative's identity, White House officials said Friday.
The grand jurors also asked the White House to surrender two years of records of any conversations about the case with reporters, including approximately 25 who were specified by name.
The grand jury, which has been taking testimony from current and former White House officials, issued three subpoenas Jan. 22, three weeks after Attorney General John D. Ashcroft recused himself from the investigation.
White House officials said they have turned over much of the material, but not all of it, and intend to eventually provide all the subpoenaed documents.
"It's just a matter of getting it all together," said White House press secretary Scott McClellan.
The document requests are the clearest sign yet that the new prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald of Chicago, is taking an aggressive approach to determining how columnist Robert D. Novak learned the name of the undercover operative, Valerie Plame.
Plame's husband, former U.S. diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV, was a vocal critic of the administration's case for war against Iraq. Administration officials have said that some of their colleagues, apparently seeking to undercut Wilson's credibility, told reporters he was chosen for a sensitive CIA mission to Africa only because his wife helped get him the assignment.
The grand jury subpoenas, first reported by Newsday, also ask for the text of a White House briefing that referred to the controversy but was missing from the White House Web site. Officials posted it Friday and said it had been omitted inadvertently.
The subpoenas also seek documents from July 6 to July 30 relating to the White House Iraq Group, a group of communications, political, national security and legislative aides who met weekly in the Situation Room.
One subpoena demanded a list of attendees at a July 16 White House reception for the 90th birthday of former president Gerald R. Ford. The reception apparently came up in interviews conducted by FBI agents or in grand jury testimony, but Bush's aides said they did not know why.
That was two days after Novak published the column naming Plame. He attributed the information to "two senior administration officials," who could have committed a crime by disclosing the information if they did so intentionally and knew of Plame's undercover status.
Bush was in Africa the week before the column appeared, and the investigators are trying to determine whether anyone in his traveling party had called back to talk to Novak or other reporters about Plame. The subpoena asks for Air Force One's July 7-12 phone records.
Bush's staff was informed of the requests in a Jan. 23 e-mail from White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales that directed staff members to preserve relevant records. He followed that up with a Jan. 26 e-mail asking them to turn over such records to his office. Gonzales wrote that the requests were "pursuant to grand jury subpoenas."
The staff was told to turn over records of any "contacts, attempted contacts, or discussion of contacts, with any members of the media concerning Wilson, his trip, or his wife, including but not limited to the following media and media personnel."
The memo then names about 25 journalists, including Novak and five Washington Post reporters. The subpoena asks for any contacts from Feb. 1, 2002, to the present.
McClellan said at a briefing near Bush's ranch that Gonzales's memo urged "everybody to comply fully with the request from the investigators, and that's exactly what we are doing."
"At this point, we're still in the process of complying fully with those requests," McClellan said. "We have provided the Department of Justice investigators with much of the information and we're continuing to provide them with additional information and comply fully with the request for information."
White House officials said that neither Bush nor Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. had issued a policy about whether aides called by the grand jury could invoke the Fifth Amendment, which protects citizens from having to testify against themselves. .
At the briefing, McClellan said Bush "has made it very clear he wants everybody inside government and outside government to provide those who are leading the investigation with information that might help them get to the bottom of this."
"Our policy, at the direction of the president, is that everybody should cooperate fully with those who are leading the investigation," he said. "That's our policy. I'm not going to speculate about grand jury proceedings. I have no knowledge of anyone invoking their legal right against self-incrimination. I checked with White House counsel's office, and they have no knowledge of anyone invoking their legal right against self-incrimination."
-------
Air Force One Phone Records Are Among Data Sought by Subpoena in C.I.A. Leak Inquiry
March 6, 2004
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON and DAVID JOHNSTON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/06/politics/06INQU.html
CRAWFORD, Tex., March 5 - The White House said on Friday that it had received subpoenas in late January in the investigation into the leak of an undercover C.I.A. officer's name and that it was complying with the demand for an array of information, including records of phone calls to and from Air Force One during President Bush's trip to Africa last summer.
Confirming a report published Friday in Newsday, the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said the White House had received the subpoenas from a federal grand jury looking into how the C.I.A. officer's name came to appear in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak last July 14.
Mr. Novak attributed the information to two "senior administration officials." Knowingly disclosing the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer can be a crime.
The officer, Valerie Plame, is married to Joseph C. Wilson 4th, a former ambassador who had criticized the White House over its assertion, later found to be based on faulty intelligence, that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium for its nuclear weapons program from Africa.
The subpoenas followed a narrower request for information from federal investigators last year. The administration sent an e-mail message to all White House employees in January directing them to comply with the subpoenas, which covered documents and records relating to the White House's communications strategy on Iraq and its dealings with reporters from television networks, news magazines and newspapers including The Washington Post and The New York Times.
"The White House counsel's office did send a letter out to the White House staff, urging everybody to comply fully with the request from investigators, and that's exactly what we are doing," Mr. McClellan said.
The subpoenas appeared to focus more sharply than the earlier request on records involving a week in early July, when Mr. Wilson's criticism was becoming public and when Mr. Bush was in Africa. They suggested prosecutors are closely examining conversations between aides traveling with the Mr. Bush and colleagues or reporters in Washington.
Newsday reported that the subpoenas also sought a list of people who attended a White House reception last July for former President Gerald R. Ford's 90th birthday as well as records of an internal White House group working on communications strategy for the war with Iraq.
Some lawyers involved in the case said on Friday that the request for additional documents may also indicate that, at least as of late January, prosecutors had not obtained concrete evidence that clearly identified who provided Ms. Plame's name to Mr. Novak. Otherwise, the lawyers said, prosecutors might not have needed to summon witnesses who were known to have testified before the grand jury in February.
Among those who have testified are Mr. McClellan; Adam Levine, an aide who operated as a liaison between the White House and television networks; Mary Matalin, a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney; and other White House press and policy officials.
But the precise significance of the subpoenas remains unclear. Of five lawyers interviewed this week about the case, none said that they understood the overall status of the investigation or whether the prosecutors had a working theory of how Mr. Novak had obtained Ms. Plame's name.
The lawyers said that they believed, however, that the prosecutors were nearing a turning point when they would decide whether to charge anyone with a crime or drop the case.
Mr. Novak's column centered on Mr. Wilson, who had concluded in a report two years ago for the C.I.A. that there was no clear evidence that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium ore from Africa in order to build nuclear weapons. Mr. Bush, in building a case for war with Iraq in his 2003 State of the Union address, alluded to attempts by Mr. Hussein to acquire uranium in Africa, attributing the information to British intelligence.
Mr. Novak disclosed in his column that although Mr. Wilson never worked for the C.I.A., his wife, Ms. Plame, "is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction" and that "two senior administration officials" told him that she was the one who suggested sending him to Africa.
--------
Leak Investigators to Get Phone Log
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 6, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34911-2004Mar5.html
CRAWFORD, Tex., March 5 -- Aides to President Bush agreed to turn over a log of a week's worth of telephone calls from Air Force One and other records to satisfy subpoenas from a federal grand jury investigating the leak of a CIA operative's identity, White House officials said Friday.
The grand jurors also asked the White House to surrender two years of records of any conversations about the case with reporters, including approximately 25 who were specified by name.
The grand jury, which has been taking testimony from current and former White House officials, issued three subpoenas Jan. 22, three weeks after Attorney General John D. Ashcroft recused himself from the investigation.
White House officials said they have turned over much of the material, but not all of it, and intend to eventually provide all the subpoenaed documents.
"It's just a matter of getting it all together," said White House press secretary Scott McClellan.
The document requests are the clearest sign yet that the new prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald of Chicago, is taking an aggressive approach to determining how columnist Robert D. Novak learned the name of the undercover operative, Valerie Plame.
Plame's husband, former U.S. diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV, was a vocal critic of the administration's case for war against Iraq. Administration officials have said that some of their colleagues, apparently seeking to undercut Wilson's credibility, told reporters he was chosen for a sensitive CIA mission to Africa only because his wife helped get him the assignment.
The grand jury subpoenas, first reported by Newsday, also ask for the text of a White House briefing that referred to the controversy but was missing from the White House Web site. Officials posted it Friday and said it had been omitted inadvertently.
The subpoenas also seek documents from July 6 to July 30 relating to the White House Iraq Group, a group of communications, political, national security and legislative aides who met weekly in the Situation Room.
One subpoena demanded a list of attendees at a July 16 White House reception for the 90th birthday of former president Gerald R. Ford. The reception apparently came up in interviews conducted by FBI agents or in grand jury testimony, but Bush's aides said they did not know why.
That was two days after Novak published the column naming Plame. He attributed the information to "two senior administration officials," who could have committed a crime by disclosing the information if they did so intentionally and knew of Plame's undercover status.
Bush was in Africa the week before the column appeared, and the investigators are trying to determine whether anyone in his traveling party had called back to talk to Novak or other reporters about Plame. The subpoena asks for Air Force One's July 7-12 phone records.
Bush's staff was informed of the requests in a Jan. 23 e-mail from White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales that directed staff members to preserve relevant records. He followed that up with a Jan. 26 e-mail asking them to turn over such records to his office. Gonzales wrote that the requests were "pursuant to grand jury subpoenas."
The staff was told to turn over records of any "contacts, attempted contacts, or discussion of contacts, with any members of the media concerning Wilson, his trip, or his wife, including but not limited to the following media and media personnel."
The memo then names about 25 journalists, including Novak and five Washington Post reporters. The subpoena asks for any contacts from Feb. 1, 2002, to the present.
McClellan said at a briefing near Bush's ranch that Gonzales's memo urged "everybody to comply fully with the request from the investigators, and that's exactly what we are doing."
"At this point, we're still in the process of complying fully with those requests," McClellan said. "We have provided the Department of Justice investigators with much of the information and we're continuing to provide them with additional information and comply fully with the request for information."
White House officials said that neither Bush nor Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. had issued a policy about whether aides called by the grand jury could invoke the Fifth Amendment, which protects citizens from having to testify against themselves. .
At the briefing, McClellan said Bush "has made it very clear he wants everybody inside government and outside government to provide those who are leading the investigation with information that might help them get to the bottom of this."
"Our policy, at the direction of the president, is that everybody should cooperate fully with those who are leading the investigation," he said. "That's our policy. I'm not going to speculate about grand jury proceedings. I have no knowledge of anyone invoking their legal right against self-incrimination. I checked with White House counsel's office, and they have no knowledge of anyone invoking their legal right against self-incrimination."
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- environment
PG&E's Toxic Plume Creeps Toward L.A. Water Supply
By Marc Lifsher,
March 6, 2004
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-pgampe6mar06,1,5828073.story
Pacific Gas & Electric Co. is poised to begin pumping polluted groundwater from under the Mojave Desert to stop the toxic chemical hexavalent chromium from seeping into the Colorado River and tainting the water supply of 18 million Southern Californians.
The chemical compound, made infamous by the 2000 movie "Erin Brockovich," is "on the brink of contaminating the Colorado River," the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California warned in a strongly worded Feb. 11 letter to state regulators.
"We ask that you take additional emergency action sufficient to protect a resource of such critical importance to California," the letter said.
The slow-moving toxic plume is emanating from land near PG&E's Topock natural gas compressor station, south of Needles on California's border with Arizona.
The utility used the chemical compound, also known as chromium 6, to control such things as corrosion and mold in water cooling towers at the isolated plant, which pushes natural gas along a pipeline from west Texas to the Los Angeles Basin. PG&E dumped the untreated wastewater in nearby percolation beds between 1951 and 1969.
The plume of at least 108 million gallons of chromium 6-tainted water is now threatening the river and causing alarm among experts at the Metropolitan Water District, which operates the Colorado River Aqueduct, a major source of Los Angeles' drinking water.
"The plume has moved past the last sentry well. It's thought to be 125 feet from the river," said Lisa Anderson, an environmental engineer at MWD's headquarters in Los Angeles.
Levels of chromium 6 in a monitoring well near the river have ranged from non-detectable to more than 100 parts per billion over the last few weeks, Anderson said. The mass of the plume, just a few hundred feet behind the leading edge, measures more than 12,000 ppb, and the maximum legal contaminant level for all types of chromium in drinking water is 50 ppb, she said.
Although chromium 6 is a known carcinogen when inhaled, scientists continue to debate whether the chemical represents a danger in drinking water, and at what concentration.
The Topock station plume is on course to reach the river at a point 42 miles upstream from water intakes for both the MWD's aqueduct and the Central Arizona Project, an agricultural and urban water delivery system. The water also is used by three other agencies in California, the Imperial Irrigation District, the Palo Verde Irrigation District and the Coachella Valley Water District.
The state Department of Toxic Substances Control stressed that it had so far found no traces of chromium 6 in the river. And both the department and PG&E, the utility arm of San Francisco-based PG&E Corp., said they were committed to keeping the chemical from reaching the Colorado River.
"We view the situation very seriously. That's why we're telling PG&E to start pumping," said Ed Lowry, director of the Toxic Substances Control Department. "This needs to be addressed now."
Lowry said he was confident that the chromium 6 migration could be halted through a combination of short- and long-term techniques.
Starting Monday, PG&E engineers will begin pumping more than 20,000 gallons a day of groundwater from three extraction wells at Topock and trucking it away for disposal at a toxic waste dump.
"We feel confident that the pumping will [move] the flow of any water with hex [chromium 6] away from the river," said Alfredo Zanoria, a state hydrologist who has worked on the PG&E Topock site since 1997.
MWD also is pushing for quick action by the state and PG&E on a longer-term strategy: construction of a 2,000-foot-long, 150-foot-deep underground barrier between the leading edge of the contamination plume and the river.
"We're supporting the initial pumping to control the plume, but we're urging the department to reach an agreement with PG&E requiring them to put in subsurface barriers," Anderson said.
Technical experts at the Department of Toxic Substances Control say they are unsure how fast the plume is traveling through the complex hydrology of the Mojave Desert.
"We don't believe the thing is moving toward the river at that vigorous of a pace," said Zanoria. He estimated the flow at no more than 3 feet a year.
But department director Lowry said he was taking no chances. He said he had directed PG&E to start the process of building the subsurface barrier, which could take 12 to 18 months for planning and construction. The cost of the project is not known but is a secondary consideration, "with this chemical this close to the river," Lowry said.
PG&E said it was evaluating the barrier proposal.
"It looks to be a promising technique, if it can be installed to work there," said Bob Doss, the company's chief environmental engineer.
The combination of pumping and possible construction of a barrier, no matter what the cost, are evidence that "PG&E's No. 1 priority has been and will always be the protection of the Colorado River and the ecosystem out there," Doss said.
The chromium 6 pollution at Topock is similar to the situation at another PG&E compressor station at Hinkley, near Barstow, where the company first reported high levels of the carcinogenic compound to state officials in 1987. At both sites, chromium 6-laced water used in cooling towers had been dumped in unlined evaporation ponds, where it percolated down into the groundwater.
But there is an important difference between the two operations. The Hinkley station was surrounded by a number of homes, whose residents drank or bathed in the tainted water and breathed air containing fine particles of chromium 6. A number of residents sued PG&E, resulting in a landmark settlement that awarded $333 million in damages. That case inspired the movie "Erin Brockovich," starring Julia Roberts.
The MWD is hoping to avoid those kind of dramatics this time. The Colorado River has been "the backbone of our source of supply for 60 years," said MWD attorney John Clairday. "Our priority is to protect that water at the source."
----
How Industry Won the Battle of Pollution Control at E.P.A.
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
March 6, 2004
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/06/politics/06LOBB.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
Just six weeks into the Bush administration, Haley Barbour, a former Republican party chairman who was a lobbyist for electric power companies, sent a memorandum to Vice President Dick Cheney laying down a challenge.
"The question is whether environmental policy still prevails over energy policy with Bush-Cheney, as it did with Clinton-Gore," Mr. Barbour wrote, and called for measures to show that environmental concerns would no longer "trump good energy policy."
Mr. Barbour's memo was an opening shot in a two-year fight inside the Bush administration for dominance between environmental protection and energy production on clean air policy. One camp included officials, like Mr. Cheney, who came from the energy industry. In another were enforcers of environmental policy, led by Christie Whitman, a former Republican governor of New Jersey.
The battle engaged some of the nation's largest power companies, which were also among the largest donors to President Bush and other Republicans. They were represented by Mr. Barbour and another influential lobbyist, Marc Racicot, who also would later become chairman of the Republican National Committee.
In an administration that puts a premium on keeping its internal disputes private, this struggle went on well out of the public's view. But interviews and documents trace the decisions in which the Bush administration changed the nation's approach to environmental controls, ultimately shifting the balance to the side of energy policy. Senior officials at the Environmental Protection Agency, including Mrs. Whitman, became isolated, former aides said, and several resigned.
Thirty years after the first Earth Day, the incoming administration was still confronting power-plant smokestacks spewing fumes. The policy questions were arcane, involving strategies to control polluting particles. At stake, though, were environmental risks to human health and the nation's ability to produce cheap energy, as well as decisions about how the most polluting industries would be monitored for decades to come.
For operators of some coal-fired plants, the stakes were more tangible. Dozens of plants were facing lawsuits over air pollution brought by the Clinton administration and several northeastern states - including New Jersey under Mrs. Whitman before she became head of the E.P.A. The industry, fearing billions of dollars in new costs, set about to undo the suits.
One of the most important decisions was Mr. Bush's reversal of a campaign promise to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide, a gas that many scientists say contributes to global warming. The administration also has proposed looser standards for emissions of mercury - a highly toxic pollutant - than President Bill Clinton had sought. The most protracted fight concerned the administration's decision to issue new rules that substantially reduced the requirements for utilities to build pollution controls when modernizing their plants. The final policy shift may ultimately help the coal-plant operators shed the lawsuits.
The struggle within the administration, in skirmishes between Cabinet officers and volleys of memorandums, showed how the White House has transformed domestic policy through regulatory revision, rather than more contentious congressional debate.
Administration officials say the changes were needed to raise energy production and lift the burden of cumbersome and costly regulations on industry. They said that the approach will continue the trend of declining emissions and reduce some of the most harmful pollutants by about half in the next decade - cuts as deep if not deeper than the old measures would bring.
"It's not about whether air quality will get better," said James L. Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. "It will, and it must. The question is what path you take to get there."
Critics on Capitol Hill and environmental groups say the policies will slow the cleaning of the air and undercut Congress's authority, while catering to companies that are big contributors to Mr. Bush's campaigns.
"Rather than work with Congress to move us forward on environmental issues, the Bush administration is working with the special interests to undermine them," said Senator James M. Jeffords, the Vermont independent who is the ranking minority member of the Senate environment committee.
But both sides agree on one outcome of the struggle: The nation's approach to air pollution control shifted drastically.
An Early Challenge
As President Bush took office, he said he wanted to swiftly address energy shortages that had caused blackouts in California. Coming from the Texas energy industry, he was convinced that Clinton administration environmental policies were restraining energy production. And utilities geared up to press the new administration for big changes on a handful of issues that were crucial to them.
Their biggest worry was Mr. Bush's campaign pledge to carry through on a Clinton administration effort to impose controls on power plant emissions of carbon dioxide.
The coal-fired power companies, which are among the nation's largest sources of carbon dioxide, were alarmed when Mrs. Whitman in her first days at the agency said Mr. Bush would carry out his promise. Not long after, Mr. Barbour sent his memorandum to Vice President Cheney, who was heading a task force Mr. Bush had ordered to conduct a broad review of energy policy.
Mr. Cheney had been chief executive at Halliburton, an oil-and-gas-services company. Energy corporations had been among the strongest supporters of Mr. Bush's presidential campaign: There were more executives from energy than from any other industry group among Mr. Bush's most elite fund-raisers, called "Pioneers," who each generated more than $100,000 in donations.
The industry's outcry over carbon dioxide reached Mr. Bush. In March 2001, he reversed himself, saying there would be no carbon dioxide controls. "I was responding to realities," Mr. Bush said at the time, "and the reality is our nation has a real problem when it comes to energy."
After that victory, the utilities moved to press their advantage, turning to Mr. Cheney for help on another issue: a set of rules requiring them to add new pollution controls when they upgraded or expanded their plants. The power companies strongly objected to the rules, which were known as "new source review," calling them arbitrary, expensive and outmoded.
A small group of coal-fired utilities was especially unhappy. In 1999, the Clinton administration had sued nine companies, saying they had expanded 51 older plants without adding the required controls. Among those facing suits were the Southern Company, based in Atlanta; the Duke Energy Corporation, based in Charlotte, N.C.; and the FirstEnergy Corporation, based in Akron, Ohio. Southern, one of Mr. Barbour's biggest clients, was facing potential liabilities of hundreds of millions of dollars.
The rules had not previously been vigorously enforced, and the companies contested the suits, saying the Clinton administration had focused on them unfairly and made it too costly to improve their plants.
Mrs. Whitman made it clear she was willing to revise the rules and settle the lawsuits. But, former aides at the E.P.A. said, she favored old-fashioned political horse-trading: She would ease up on the old rules, but only after going to Congress with broad legislation to establish tough new controls on three important pollutants - sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and mercury.
Mrs. Whitman's orders were to "find ways to deal with" the rules "without giving away the farm to industry unilaterally," said Jeremy Symons, a former agency official who works with the National Wildlife Federation, an advocacy group.
Industry lobbyists had a different strategy. C. Boyden Gray, who was White House counsel during the first Bush administration and represented some utilities, said the companies viewed the pollution lawsuits as "a gun to the head." They feared, he said, that if their bid to change the rules got caught up in a bigger battle in Congress, "they might not get anything."
The industry's main lobbying group, the Edison Electric Institute, already had meetings with White House and Energy Department officials about relaxing the pollution rules. The group's president, Thomas R. Kuhn, had been a Yale classmate of President Bush, and was also a Pioneer.
Yet for some companies named in the lawsuits, the institute was not forceful enough. "We needed a strategy and an organization to take a more aggressive approach," said Todd Terrell, a spokesman for Southern. So, at Mr. Barbour's urging, a handful of coal-burning utilities formed their own lobbying group.
At the time, Mr. Barbour was probably Washington's most successful lobbyist. As Republican National Committee chairman from 1993 to 1997, he had helped the party gain control of Congress and had long been one of its most prodigious fund-raisers. His corporate clients included many of the party's largest donors. That added to his entree with Republican officials.
The splinter group, organized by Mr. Barbour in the spring of 2001, was called the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council. Scott Segal, its executive director, said it sought a "more consistent" effort to rewrite the pollution rules. Several government officials and lobbyists said the group's underlying goal was bolder: to persuade the administration to repudiate the old rules and thus torpedo the lawsuits based on them.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the six utility companies now in the council and their employees made more than $10 million in political donations over the last five years, nearly three-fourths of that going to Republicans. Southern and its employees account for nearly $4 million of the total, with 72 percent of their donations going to Republicans.
Mr. Barbour had a meeting with Mr. Cheney on May 3, 2001, just two weeks before the task force was set to unveil its energy plan, Mr. Segal said. Mr. Barbour was accompanied by Mr. Racicot, a friend of President Bush who would become the Republican chairman in January 2002 and is now chairman of Mr. Bush's campaign.
Mr. Segal said that Mr. Barbour and Mr. Racicot "did not dwell" on the lawsuits, but suggested that the administration should abandon the standards that the Clinton administration had applied in bringing them.
Mrs. Whitman's aides said Mr. Cheney's office did not inform her of that meeting. But the next day Mrs. Whitman, knowing the debate was reaching a climax, sent a blunt memorandum to Mr. Cheney.
"We will pay a terrible political price if we undercut or walk away from" the lawsuits, she wrote.
She said it would be "hard to refute the charge that we are deciding not to enforce the Clean Air Act."
She warned Mr. Cheney that a "broad attack" in his final report on the pollution rules would wipe out her leverage over the industry and "permanently destroy our chance to achieve any needed legislative reforms we may seek in the future."
As the task force neared its end, Southern and other utilities in Mr. Barbour's group were busy on another front. On May 15, 2001, they gave $100,000 to the Republican party.
A Shift in Lobbying Efforts
Mrs. Whitman's arguments succeeded in forestalling any recommendation in the Cheney task force report, issued on May 17, to rewrite the rules or cripple the lawsuits. Instead, the task force called only for the E.P.A. to review the rules with the Energy Department, whose focus is to promote energy supply, and for the Justice Department to review whether the suits were valid.
In January 2002, though, Mr. Barbour and his group learned that they would get no help from the Justice Department. Its lawyers found nothing amiss with the pollution lawsuits, concluding that they were supported by "a reasonable basis in law and fact."
That setback did not slow the lobbying. Soon its locus shifted, as the Energy Department, led by Spencer Abraham, became increasingly involved, setting off a fight that reverberated inside the E.P.A. as officials there said they felt outmaneuvered.
Mr. Barbour and Mr. Racicot joined a parade of industry lobbyists seeking out Energy officials. Between July 2001 and November 2001, Francis S. Blake, then the deputy energy secretary, held seven meetings with industry groups about the pollution rules, attended by more than 60 executives and lobbyists, records show. During that time he met with only one lobbyist from an environmental group.
In early 2002, Energy and E.P.A. officials got down to considering new rules. Environmental officials in charge of enforcement grew alarmed at the proposals emanating from Mr. Abraham's department, which often echoed the industry's demands.
In one memorandum, E.P.A. officials attacked an Energy Department draft as "highly biased and loaded with emotionally charged code words" that would ultimately "vitiate" the pollution-control program.
At one point, her aides said, Mrs. Whitman set up what she thought would be a private meeting with Mr. Cheney to discuss E.P.A. concerns. When she arrived at his office, though, she was disappointed to find that Mr. Abraham was already there to present counterarguments.
Soon an exodus began from the E.P.A.'s enforcement branch. Eric V. Schaeffer, who joined the agency during the first Bush administration and was head of the Office of Regulatory Enforcement, sent a resignation letter to Mrs. Whitman that February. "We seem about to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory," he wrote, adding that the White House "seems determined to weaken the rules we are trying to enforce."
Mr. Schaeffer and his boss, Sylvia K. Lowrance, then the agency's top career enforcement official, both said in interviews they repeatedly warned Mrs. Whitman that the rule changes would jeopardize the enforcement lawsuits. Their view, shared by many industry lawyers, was that judges were often reluctant to penalize companies for failing to comply with rules that had been subsequently relaxed. Mrs. Lowrance later took early retirement.
A different view was held by some E.P.A. policy officials, including Jeffrey R. Holmstead, a former aide to Mr. Gray in the first Bush White House, who was now in charge of writing air-pollution regulations. Mr. Holmstead had long criticized the old rules as unmanageable and counter-productive, and he believed revising them would have no impact on the lawsuits in court.
But Mr. Holmstead was uneasy with the lobbyists' participation. "This would have been so much simpler if they hadn't gotten Barbour involved, because that just created this new political intrigue," he said.
In June 2002, Mr. Holmstead had a chance to see how closely the White House was watching. At a party for the 50th birthday of Mr. Abraham, Mr. Holmstead ran into Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff.
Mr. Card "wanted to know how come we were having so much trouble" finishing up the rule revisions, Mr. Holmstead recalled.
Shortly after, on June 13, Mrs. Whitman sent a proposal to the White House. It contained many of the changes that the Energy Department had championed, and was the foundation of the final rule revisions published in October 2003.
Mrs. Whitman has never discussed the decision-making process or broken ranks in public with President Bush. But the new rules showed that the White House had thrown its weight behind energy priorities, both environment and energy officials said.
The rules said utilities would not have to add new pollution-control devices if upgrades and construction projects did not cost more than 20 percent of the plant's value - a loophole all sides said was huge.
Departures From E.P.A.
Mrs. Whitman resigned last May, saying she hoped to spend more time with her family. Several former aides said she was frustrated that she did not have more support within the administration. She declined through a spokesman to be interviewed.
In a statement, Mrs. Whitman said she had supported streamlining the pollution rules because many groups agreed that they "had grown cumbersome, unreliable and unpredictable." She said that Mr. Bush "expects the members of his cabinet to advocate forcefully on behalf of his or her agency" before making major decisions.
Mr. Cheney, Mr. Abraham, Mr. Racicot and Mr. Barbour - now the governor of Mississippi - declined to comment.
Late last year, top E.P.A. officials announced a new pollution enforcement policy that seemed likely to critically weaken the pending lawsuits. By year's end three more of the agency's top enforcement officials resigned. "The rug was pulled out from under us," one of them, Rich Biondi, said.
The new rules evoked fierce opposition, though, as fourteen states sued to block the change. In December, a federal appeals court stayed their use, pending further arguments. E.P.A. officials said they put the new enforcement policy on hold until the court challenge is resolved.
The administration's goal now is to expand the use of a more flexible "cap and trade" regulatory system created in the early 1990's that worked with notable success to combat acid rain. It lets utilities buy and sell credits that give them a pollution allowance. The number of credits available nationwide shrinks over time, creating a cap to ensure that pollution levels decline. Late last year, administration officials announced plans to move to the new cap-and-trade system by revising regulations, rather than pressing for a new pollution bill, as Mrs. Whitman had envisioned.
Under the administration's plan, nationwide sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants would fall to 5.3 million tons by 2015, and nitrogen oxide emissions to 2.2 million tons, according to E.P.A. estimates. Those would be reductions of 51 and 55 percent, respectively, over levels in 2001.
A recent administration move to control diesel emissions has drawn praise from environmentalists. But in December, officials set off a new controversy by proposing a cap-and-trade approach for another pollutant: emissions from coal-fired power plants of mercury, which can cause neurological damage to humans. Instead of starting to curtail the emissions by 2007, as was widely expected, the proposal would give utilities until 2018 to make significant cuts.
Many environmentalists and some former E.P.A. officials said that while the proposed pollution cuts are substantial, they give industry more time to make reductions than existing law. The critics contend that it was foolish to weaken the pollution lawsuits without extracting anything in return.
"They are packaging this as a pollution cut, but in fact it is a pollution delay imposed on a program that the Clean Air Act requires to go faster," said Dave Hawkins, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington.
What is clear is that the energy industry is satisfied with the way the Bush administration has gone. "Cost-effective, and effective, are reasonable ways to describe the Bush administration's clean-air policy," said Mr. Segal of the electricity lobbying group. "The administration has a lot to be proud of on its air policy."
Jennifer 8. Lee contributed reporting from Washington for this article.
-------- health
Accusations in Capitol on Lead Levels in Water
March 6, 2004
By JAMES DAO
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/06/politics/06LEAD.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, March 5 - High levels of lead in the city's drinking water, a problem disclosed last month, prompted several members of Congress to say on Friday that three agencies had misled residents and could have begun correcting the problem last year or even earlier.
In a sometimes heated hearing on Capitol Hill, lawmakers said the agencies had failed to tell thousands of residents promptly that elevated, in some cases dangerously high, lead levels had been discovered in their houses last year. The agencies seemed disconcertingly uncertain about the problem's causes, scope and solutions, the lawmakers and expert witnesses said.
"Mistakes in judgment and procedure were apparently made at every important juncture, as those involved now concede," Eleanor Holmes Norton, the delegate from the District of Columbia to Congress, said. "Any one of those three agencies could have caught the problem much earlier."
The agencies are the Army Corps of Engineers, operator of the reservoir and water treatment plants; the Environmental Protection Agency, monitor of water quality; and the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority, water distributor.
Last month, the water authority, which also provides water to parts of Northern Virginia, acknowledged having found elevated lead levels in two-thirds of the 6,118 houses it tested last year, an extremely high rate, officials said.
The authority contends that the problem appears to be limited to 23,000 homes with aging lead pipes. The City Health Department has advised that children younger than 6 and women who are pregnant or breastfeeding in those houses to drink bottled or filtered water. The officials have also urged parents to have their children's blood tested for lead contamination.
In recent days, elevated levels have been found in a few houses without lead pipes in Arlington County, Va., raising concerns that the problem is more widespread than reported. Even copper plumbing has small amounts of lead, officials said.
Angry with what they consider a bungled response, lawmakers, health experts and environmental groups have called on the Environmental Protection Agency to order the city to expand water testing, speed the replacement of lead pipes and take more aggressive short-term measures to reduce lead levels.
In the hearing on Friday's by the House Government Reform Committee, senior E.P.A. officials said they were "seriously considering" invoking those emergency powers if the city did not act swiftly enough.
"We would be ready to act immediately," said Donald S. Welsh, environmental administrator of Region 3.
Lead poisoning in children can cause learning and behavioral problems, seizures, comas and even death, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In adults, it can damage the kidneys and cardiovascular and reproductive systems, though experts say it is difficult for adults to consume toxic quantities from just water.
Witnesses argued that the problems here, which some experts have linked not only to lead pipes, but also to a water purification process, could be going undetected in many cities.
"It should not be assumed that Washington is the only city in the U.S. affected by lead," Erik D. Olson, senior lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, testified.
Mr. Olson said Seattle and towns surrounding Boston, St. Paul and Newark had struggled to reduce lead in their water in recent years.
"Some of these cities will assert that they are now in compliance with E.P.A.'s lead action level," he said. "But E.P.A. has done little to aggressively ensure that."
Washington residents, particularly parents and pregnant women, have expressed outrage. Many have said they learned of lead in the water only after The Washington Post reported the problem early last month, even though officials at the water authority became aware of widespread contamination as early as last summer.
Marta Beresin, who lives with her husband and two daughters in the Glover Park area, said the water authority left two bottles and a note on their porch in the fall requesting that they test their water. Though testing generally takes just days, Ms. Beresin did not receive her results until February, when the authority sent a note saying one of her samples had 313 parts per billion of lead, 20 times higher than the federal standard of 15 parts per billion.
Ms. Beresin said she spent two weeks in a panic, waiting for blood-test results for her 17-month-old daughter. The results were negative, but Ms. Beresin remains furious that residents were not warned earlier.
"I feel there was a huge cover-up," said Ms. Beresin, a lawyer for the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless.
Paul D. McKay, a Web site designer from Logan Circle, said he was so angry he created a Web site, purewaterdc.com, to spread information and petitions calling for action. Mr. McKay said that he and his wife used bottled water before the lead problem emerged, but that they used tap water to mix their son's formula. Though his boy, 4 months old, has tested negative for lead poisoning, Mr. McKay said, readings are often inaccurate in children younger than 1.
"People are terrified now and therefore angry," he said, referring to thousands of e-mail messages sent to his Web site. "We won't know the impact on our kids for years."
At the hearing, officials of the water authority said they sent notices to residents with high lead levels last year. Lawmakers noted that the notices were in the fine print of fliers that announced Lead Awareness Week or were buried in annual reports with a cover that said, "Your drinking water is safe."
"They should have been much more forthcoming about this," Representative Tom Davis, the Virginia Republican who is chairman of Government Reform Committee, said. "They should have disclosed the problem instead of trying to manage the political fallout. The result is we're dealing with this a year later than we need to have been."
Experts speculated that the spike in contamination was related to a water purification process that the Army Engineers began in 2000. The process involves adding ammonia to water after chlorine, creating chloramine. Some experts said they believed that chloramines were more corrosive for plumbing, leaching lead into the water.
Thomas P. Jacobus, the Army's general manager for the aqueduct, said there was no evidence that chloramines were the problem. Marc Edwards, an engineering professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, said the city should stop using ammonia immediately.
"Stop the damage occurring as we speak," he told the lawmakers.
--------
D.C. Handling Of Lead Issue Blasted on Hill
EPA Threatens to Step In, Oversee Water System
By Carol D. Leonnig and Avram Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, March 6, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34910-2004Mar5.html
Federal officials yesterday described the levels of lead contamination in the District's drinking water as the worst seen by regulators and threatened to step in if local officials do not take immediate steps to protect the public.
The assessment from two senior officials with the Environmental Protection Agency, delivered before the House Committee on Government Reform, represents the most direct response by the federal government in the five weeks since the public learned that thousands of households exceeded the federal lead limit last summer.
The testimony yesterday included dire assessments from experts who warned that immediate action must be taken to protect the public as well as sharp criticism of the EPA and the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority.
The federal government's aggressive posture on Capitol Hill represents a sudden shift in the response to the lead contamination, which was played down initially by WASA and the EPA. The federal agency in February described WASA's actions as following the letter of the law, but yesterday it said the utility may have violated rules by not properly informing the public of the threat to the water supply.
Benjamin H. Grumbles, EPA's acting assistant administrator for water, was pressed by Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.) to name a place where lead levels have registered as high as in Washington. "I don't know of any situation like this in the country, Grumbles said, adding, "Staff tell me there is more lead in EPA Superfund sites."
Donald S. Welsh, regional administrator of the EPA's Region III office in Philadelphia, ordered the District to take immediate steps to protect the public and gave city officials and WASA until Wednesday to provide a detailed plan for accomplishing the goal. The key requirements are that the city provide bottled water or water filters to the 23,000 D.C. homes with lead service lines; convey a sense of urgency to all D.C. residents about the health risks of their tap water; and speed up reporting of lead test results to homeowners.
"If we think their actions aren't appropriate to get a solution, we stand ready to exercise that authority at any moment," said Welsh, whose office oversees the District's water. The EPA last invoked that power in 1993 when the city water supply was contaminated with a harmful bacteria. It allows federal officials to order certain tasks, set deadlines and issue fines if compliance is not met.
Experts testifying before the committee urged other emergency measures, including wide-scale testing of lead in children's blood and an immediate halt to the replacement of lead service lines. The replacement is required by the EPA when lead levels exceed acceptable standards, but there is evidence that the process increases lead contamination.
"When we have hurricanes and floods, we take dramatic steps to ensure public safety," said Ellen K. Silbergeld, a Johns Hopkins University environmental epidemiologist who has reported irreversible damage in infants from short-term exposure to lead. "If the imminent and substantial endangerment posed here doesn't mean you should use your emergency authority, I don't know what does."
City officials, who at the onset described the lead contamination as a problem for WASA that would not involve the D.C. Health Department, yesterday found themselves singled out by the EPA as the party responsible for ensuring the new requirements are met.
City Administrator Robert C. Bobb said the city is "prepared to do whatever is necessary" to reduce public risk, including distributing bottled water to a larger group of residents who may be at risk of exposure and expanding tests for lead in children's blood.
But Bobb said there's no reason for EPA to exercise emergency powers. "There's nothing to demonstrate that we are incapable of managing this," he said. "The city's treating this with extraordinary urgency."
Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), the chairman of the House committee, and other members questioned how the three agencies responsible for assuring a safe water supply could have allowed toxic levels of lead to leach into the water supply and then not inform the public about the threat. The three agencies are WASA, which serves 1 million customers in the District, Arlington and parts of Falls Church; the Washington Aqueduct, which operates two reservoirs and is owned by the Army Corps of Engineers; and the EPA, which enforces federal regulations.
"What is most troubling is that mistakes in judgment and procedure were apparently made at every important juncture," said Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) "And any one of the three agencies could have caught the problem much earlier. All deferred to one another, creating an appearance of collusion and suppression of information."
Tony Bullock, the spokesman for Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D), said EPA officials helped create the city's lead problem by requiring a change in water treatment that some experts blame for the contamination.
"For that same agency to turn around and point out the inadequacies of our response to the crisis they helped create takes a certain level of chutzpah that is even remarkable for Washington," Bullock said after yesterday's hearing. "The mayor is none too pleased with the way the EPA is handling this. It's a classic exercise of the EPA covering its rear."
WASA first began finding high lead readings in water samples taken from homes in 2000 and officially exceeded the level the federal government considers safe in 2002. But most public officials and residents first learned of the problem when The Washington Post reported the elevated lead levels Jan. 31.
At the hearing, officials from WASA, the aqueduct and the EPA sometimes shifted responsibility to one another and gave conflicting accounts of the unfolding lead problem. For example, when panel members asked why WASA was able to invalidate some high-level samples in 2000 to avoid exceeding the federal lead standard, Welsh said the EPA never approved that action.
WASA deputy general manager, Michael Marcotte, responded by saying WASA's water quality manager threw out the tests in consultation with regional officials and that "should be no surprise to EPA."
Welsh, the regional official from the EPA, said WASA may have violated regulations by invalidating the test results. He said the office is also reviewing whether WASA violated the regulations with its "highly ineffective" public notification in 2002 when lead tests reached unsafe levels.
Norton said WASA placed its notice of lead problems in a small-print reference at the back of a brochure. WASA also deleted federally required phrases such as "health risk" and "unhealthy lead levels" that are supposed to ensure that residents understand lead poses a danger to humans, Norton said.
"This was clearly done deliberately," she told WASA officials. "You chose to do it in a way that was the least effective for people to know what was happening."
WASA General Manager Jerry N. Johnson said he did not know why the notification was written in such a way.
"I take full responsibility," he said.
WASA Chairman Glenn S. Gerstell stressed that the aqueduct is responsible for keeping the water from becoming corrosive. Thomas Jacobus, the manager of the aqueduct, said the EPA approved the corrosion treatment.
Moran said Northern Virginia residents now have reason to doubt earlier government claims that their water was fine. He said hundreds of thousands of people in the region could have been drinking unsafe water for years.
Davis said: "I'm concerned about the potential magnitude of this public health crisis. And what are members of Congress supposed to tell the American people: 'Come to Washington, but don't drink the water?' "
Staff writers D'Vera Cohn, Annie Gowen, David Nakamura and Craig Timberg contributed to this report.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Jewish suburb backs protest
March 06, 2004
By Joshua Mitnick
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040305-100501-6903r.htm
MEVASERET TSIYON, Israel - A group of residents from this Jerusalem suburb, in a rare display of solidarity, have joined forces with leaders from nearby Palestinian villages to protest the planned route of the West Bank separation barrier.
Some 200 Mevaseret residents signed a petition in the last two weeks warning that the path of the fence will stir militancy among otherwise peaceful neighbors by cutting them off from farmland, a critical source of income for thousands of Palestinian villagers nearby.
At a time when Israelis are clamoring for the government to hurry up with a barrier meant to protect them from Palestinian suicide bombing, critics of the Mevaseret fence have helped slow the project down.
Joining in a Supreme Court appeal against the fence route brought by eight Palestinian villages, including the neighboring town of Beit Surik, some 30 Mevaseret residents helped win a weeklong injunction on construction northwest of Jerusalem.
Instead of directing the fence through the property of Palestinians, the Mevaseret group wants the fence to hug the Green Line, the pre-1967 West Bank border that virtually runs through their back yards.
"What we're afraid of is that these people, when they lose their last way to get food, will struggle violently," said Hagai Agmon-Snir, a Mevaseret resident who petitioned the Supreme Court.
"There's a sane answer: There should be a fence as close as possible to the Green Line. If the fence is nearer to us, we will be more secure."
Even though the order could be reversed after discussions on the appeal resume tomorrow, the court's request for the army to rethink the path of the fence reflects growing legal pressure both at home and abroad to redraw the route of the barrier.
A week ago, an international panel of judges at The Hague heard Palestinian arguments that Israel's decision to build the fence deep into the West Bank violated international law.
"It's the first time the Israelis joined Palestinians in a petition against the wall. This is having an affect on Israeli public opinion, and most important on the Supreme Court," said Mohammed Dahla, a lawyer representing the Palestinian villages.
"These are people who are saying we are willing to sacrifice our landscape so the Palestinians can make a living. That's very powerful," he said.
Located on opposite ridges separated by a terraced valley of olive orchards, Mevaseret and Beit Surik developed a symbiotic relationship in the decades following Israel's capture of the West Bank. Construction workers from Beit Surik literally laid the foundations in the building boom of the 1980s and 1990s that saw Mevaseret's population expand beyond 20,000.
"We have been living 35 years as good neighbors. Everyone knows each other," said Mohammed Abu Sufian, head of the Beit Surik village council. "There are many that come to our weddings, and we drink coffee together."
Despite the three years of violence, a trickle of Palestinian workers persists. On most mornings, West Bank villagers can be seen plodding on dirt paths emerging from Palestinian olive orchards that extend up to the outskirts of Mevaseret.
Shai Dror, a landscape architect from Mevaseret, said he started the petition two weeks ago, after a Beit Surik resident showed him the copy of a map of the fence route that had been distributed to the villagers.
According to the map, the fence will sweep around the edge of Beit Surik, separating the town from its fields. Mr. Dror said the army should build the fence on the mountain ridge at the outskirts of Mevaseret, allowing the villagers access to their land.
"It's not something that's anonymous. We know the faces and the names. We're talking about people - Yassin, Faraj and Walid," Mr. Dror said.
Mevaseret critics of the initiative sympathize with the plight of their Palestinian neighbors, but worry that a fence on the outskirts of the suburbs would expose residents to sniper fire.
"These people are naive," said Arie Shaman, deputy chair of the Mevaseret council, referring to the petition sponsors. "I identify with the suffering it's going to cause to the people of Beit Surik, and I also recognize the closeness between the communities. But if the fence is near us, it will be easier to shoot into the houses."
----
Welcome to the Department of Peace
Robert Alcock, www.lesspress.com,
6 March 2004
http://www.lesspress.com/politics/welcome.htm
Hello, my name's Robert and I have 400,000 friends.
OK, I don't know all their names, what they look like, what jobs they do or how old they are. But I do know one thing about them: they have all voted for Dennis Kucinich for President. And that makes them friends of mine.
As I write this, Dennis is still on the campaign trail, probably in Florida. He is still standing for the Democratic nomination and still speaking out for peace and justice. He's still spreading his platform: hand over power in Iraq to the UN, repeal the Patriot Act which has butchered civil liberties, cut the bloated Pentagon budget by 15% to fund education, create a health care system for all, and withdraw from the NAFTA and GATT trade pacts that have destroyed millions of jobs.
As I write this, John Kerry has got roughly 1,626 delegates to the Democratic Convention. Dennis has got about 20. Kerry has won 27 out of 30 primaries. Dennis came second in Hawaii. Kerry has been declared the winner by the world's media even though he is still short of the 2,132 needed to claim the nomination. Dennis is so far out of sight, you'd need a telescope to spot him. I bet Kerry's really looking over his shoulder... not.
Well, maybe he should be.
Sometimes when you're playing chess, you get to a point where you're so far behind that you decide, what the heck, I'm probably going to lose anyway, so why not have some fun? You start playing quirky moves, edgy moves, moves that make your opponent nervous. You mix it up. Nine times out of ten, you lose anyway. At least you had some fun. The tenth time, you make your opponent so nervous that he makes a whopping great blunder and suddenly you're back in the game.
That's where Dennis Kucinich is now. And it's time to have some fun.
Until "Super Tuesday", the primaries were fought in the media. Fortunes were lavished on advertising. Howard Dean spent $35 million before the Iowa caucus, came third, screamed and went under, leaving a trail of angry bubbles. Turnouts were higher than in any primary season for decades, and Dennis Kucinich was getting small - but growing - percentages of very large turnouts.
But the media campaign is over now. Kerry's won, didn't you hear? Why bother going to vote? Yet under the radar the Dennis Kucinich snowball is still rolling, and it's getting bigger. From getting small percentages of large turnouts, he could now start to get large percentages of small turnouts. And maybe that will be enough to worry Kerry and make him look over his shoulder. And if he does see a small figure approaching in the distance, what is he going to do about it?
I'll tell you what. Nothing. Nada. He can't do a damn thing. Know why? Because if he were to continue campaigning, it would be a straight admission that, well, maybe he didn't have the nomination quite as sewn up as he and everyone else thought. In other words: Whoops, that was John Kerry passing the fiftieth floor on his way down.
Meanwhile, under the radar, we'll have some fun and see what we can do with those twenty primaries that are left -- and with our 400,000 friends.
What I'm about to say may come as a shock, especially to anyone who calls herself an "activist": If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right. You want to change the world? Start by being happy. You can't make anybody else happy if you're miserable yourself.
So, ask yourself this: What would make you happy? Do you need a job counting pickles, a new radiator, a picture of a fox? Well, friends help each other, so I'll tell you what to do: Go and ask a friend for help. If you don't know anyone who can help you, ask someone who might know someone, who might know someone... You know that 6 degrees of separation idea? Well, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to realize that among those 400,000 people, most likely, is someone who can help you out, and that person is probably a friend of a friend of a friend, and so on.
Take me. I'm a poet. No, really. I write poetry, mostly in traditional forms, like sonnets. For most people, it's not their bag, but people tell me they like my stuff. (You can read it at www.lesspress.com/poetry, by the way.) Now what would make me really happy is to have someone who publishes poetry (a real publisher, I mean, not some vanity press) read my stuff and say "I want to publish this." Do you know anyone who might know someone?
Try it. Start small. Ask for something that will make you happy. And once you've gotten it, try again. Be more ambitious. What would make you happy? Dennis Kucinich winning your state primary? A tricky one, but maybe we can do it if we try. After all, there are 400,000 of us.
One of the things Dennis is best-known for (relatively speaking, I mean) is his proposal to set up a "Department of Peace". When I first heard this idea I groaned. Anybody read George Orwell's "1984"? Orwell's totalitarian state had three departments: the Ministry of Truth (in charge of lies and propaganda), the Ministry of Love (in charge of promoting fear and hatred), and the Ministry of Peace (in charge of everlasting war). The point being, the last thing a government department could ever do is promote genuine peace. People sitting behind big desks in expensive Washington, D.C. office blocks may promote a lot of things - like the use of paper, the number of government regulations, and occasionally each other - but peace, sadly, is not one of those things.
But then I had a thought. Maybe, just maybe, it could work - but it wouldn't look anything like what we now think of as a government department. Get rid of the office building and the desks and the paper and, absolutely, anything resembling promotion or hierarchy or job titles. What's left? A network of people who are trying to bring peace, not because it's their job, but because it's the right thing to do; not based in one location, but all around the world; not under orders from anyone but their own conscience.
What's left? Us.
My friends, we are the Department of Peace. And we're open for business.
Let's have some fun.
Robert Alcock, www.lesspress.com, 6 March 2004
More articles about the Kucinich campaign can be found at www.lesspress.com/politics
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