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NUCLEAR
Agency sees safety breakdown at Flats
Recent incidents at Rocky Flats
N.J. Gets Seaport Radiation Detectors
Tajikistan's Plutonium Scare
Sources: Berlin to Drop Sale of Nuke Plant to China
Chinese defense minister heads to India and Pakistan
ISRAEL: Washington backs Middle East's nuclear outlaw'
EDITORIAL: Pluthermal power
US, South Korean troops launch massive joint exercises
N.J. Seaport Gets Radiation Detectors
Al-Qaeda claims to have briefcase nukes: bin Laden biographer
More nukes may be aimed at Russia
Colo. Congressman Seeks Rocky Flats Probe
Los Alamos Nuclear Waste Comes Under Cleanup Order
Critics Say Government Is Rushing Cleanup of Nuclear Site
K Basins proposal not good enough
Memoir Criticizes Bush 9/11 Response
Treasury: O'Neill Got Classified Papers
Debate Grows Over Bush's Handling of Terror Threat
MILITARY
U.S. trains African troops to fight terrorism
Nepal Strife Kills Hundreds
3,600 displaced by Kosovo violence: UN
federal contracts
Inspectors Confirm Libya Chemical Arms Declaration
Recount Call Grows In Taiwan
Politicians in Taiwan Quarreling Over Recount
Election Fallout: Mounting Tension
Britain, France Condemn Killing
Iraqi Militias Near Accord To Disband
Delivery Delays Hurt U.S. Effort to Equip Iraqis
Hamas Leader Killed in Gaza
5 Palestinians Killed by Israeli Troops in Gaza Strip Clash
Thousands in Gaza Mourn Slain Hamas Leader and Vow Revenge
Full text: Hamas vows revenge
Pro-U.S. Candidate Wins in El Salvador
Tunnels Found in Pakistan Tied to Foreign Militants
Pakistan Asks Tribes to Seek Surrender by Qaeda Fighters
Tribal elders intercede in border fight
Universities spy for MI5 on foreign students
'CIA knows' Kerry's foreign support
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
FBI budget cut after Sept. 11 attacks
FBI Budget Squeezed After 9/11
U.S. Faces Quandary In Freeing Detainees
ENERGY
Solar Power Switched on at San Francisco's Moscone Center
Atlantic Winds Could Blow in Energy Jobs
World wind power to grow, but boom days over
The Oil Future
House GOP prods Senate on energy
OTHER
Buffalo Kill To Control Disease Questioned
60 Bottlenose Dolphins Dead in Florida Panhandle
Focusing on the Bottom Line
ACTIVISTS
Immigration Issue Sparks Battle at Sierra Club
After Gentler Tactics, a Peaceful Antiwar Protest
INTERNATIONAL SPACE CONFERENCE SET FOR PORTLAND, ME.
Iraq war based on lies and misinterpretations
DU conference now on audio download
Antiwar Voices:
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Agency sees safety breakdown at Flats
Watchdog group takes DOE to task for fire, violations
March 22, 2004
By Ann Imse,
Rocky Mountain News
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_2748287,00.html
A federal watchdog agency has accused Department of Energy officials at the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant of being so lax that they missed the severity of a fire in a building full of plutonium last May.
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board said that the DOE, which is supervising contractor Kaiser-Hill's dismantling of the highly contaminated plant, allowed a "wholesale breakdown" in safety. It also called the DOE's supervision of Kaiser-Hill ineffective for failing to notice repeated safety violations.
After the incident in May, the DOE reported a small fire to the safety board. Only after the board questioned inconsistencies in the story did local DOE officials investigate and discover that flames reached 15 feet and endangered the lives of workers, the board said. It took the DOE 51 days to report that account to the safety board.
As it turned out, the fire, inside a two-story metal box, started in a pile of trash that included bottles of liquid plutonium. Workers risked a potentially fatal radioactive flash when they poured water on it to douse the flames.
Safety board Chairman John Conway said in an interview that he believed DOE officials were ignorant of the fire's severity rather than complicit in a cover-up.
"There wasn't enough DOE oversight to discover this," he said.
Numerous safety violations
Further investigation by the safety board found numerous serious safety violations by Kaiser-Hill that had gone unnoticed by the DOE. Another investigation of the fire, carried out in February by Kaiser-Hill and independent experts, called for a complete review of the company's ability to respond to a future emergency.
DOE officials in Washington reacted to the safety board's findings by admitting to "significant deficiencies" by both local DOE officials and Kaiser-Hill. The DOE said it has begun an independent review of the entire safety management system at Rocky Flats, as requested by the board in a letter to the secretary of Energy.
Kaiser-Hill spokesman John Corsi said, "We didn't meet our own high safety expectations . . . We're committed to continuous improvement, and we strive for zero incidents."
Joe Legare, the No. 2 DOE official at Rocky Flats, said, "The criticism from the safety board was pretty strong . . . but we learned a lot getting it."
He said it took 51 days to respond to the board's questions because the DOE provided an in-depth reply. He also said there was disagreement over the safety board's conclusions.
And where the safety board called Kaiser-Hill's safety performance "unsatisfactory," Legare said: "Kaiser-Hill is doing an excellent job with their safety record," with few workdays lost to injury.
In the past year, Rocky Flats has seen a rash of potentially dangerous incidents, including another small fire five weeks ago.
The DOE recently fined Kaiser-Hill $522,000 for safety violations. Kaiser-Hill is being paid $340 million for the six-year project and is on track to earn a bonus of up to $120 million for finishing early and under budget.
The safety board is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1988 to watch over the nation's nuclear weapons plants, which are run by the DOE.
Its concerns about Rocky Flats arose shortly after the May 6, 2003, fire and mounted over the summer and fall, culminating in a scathing letter to the secretary of Energy in December.
The May fire involved a 20-foot-tall glove box, used to protect workers from touching radioactive plutonium except through leaded gloves.
The letter said that Kaiser-Hill dismantled the fire scene, hampering investigators' attempts to discover the cause.
Only by examining photographs of materials removed from the glove box did board investigators discover that they included chemical-soaked towels and 4-liter bottles of plutonium solution. Both plutonium and the cerium nitrate-soaked towels can ignite spontaneously.
That combination was similar to the volatile mixture that was in a glove box 35 years ago, which ignited the plant's most dangerous fire. That accident, in 1969, occurred in a building with 7,000 pounds of plutonium. Then, firefighters narrowly averted a roof collapse, which could have allowed radioactive plutonium dust to spread over Denver.
The fire last May was nowhere near as damaging and remained inside the glove box. But the blaze alarmed safety officials because it occurred in a building full of plutonium and thus had the potential to be extremely dangerous.
It happened in Building 371, where Rocky Flats had collected the remaining weapons-capable plutonium at the plant and was packaging it for shipping to South Carolina for storage. Legare declined to reveal how much plutonium was in the building that day, saying that the information is still classified.
The fire started when workers began to dismantle the 20-foot-high glove box, which contained a dumbwaiter that once was used to move plutonium from one floor of the factory to another. They cut holes near the top, letting pieces of metal fall inside.
Smoke drifted up the dumbwaiter shaft. Safety investigators said they believe that the metal pieces fell onto old leaded gloves, which had degraded and produced nitric acid. The impact ignited them.
Big mistakes in fighting fire
Workers first tried pouring pints of water onto the fire - a serious mistake, the safety board said. Water on plutonium can cause a nuclear reaction that flashes intense radiation and can be fatal to people nearby.
The workers then opened holes in the glove box to spray fire retardant on the flames. But that was another mistake, the board said, because it added air, fueling the fire.
Workers also turned the building fans to exhaust, which might have released radiation to the atmosphere.
Rocky Flats firefighters, who are specially trained to fight plutonium fires, didn't arrive for 11 minutes. That's because workers called their boss instead of the fire department, the board concluded.
While firefighters were en route, workers thought they had doused the blaze and reported it out. But then the fire reflashed, so firefighters arrived to find 15-foot flames.
Workers didn't immediately evacuate the building as required, the board said. And they re-entered it while the fire was still smoldering and before tests had been done for airborne radiation contamination.
Four firefighters had to be decontaminated.
The board said the safety violations began even before the fire.
Kaiser-Hill said it did weekly inspections of all glove boxes to make sure that no combustibles were left behind - but its staff didn't find the trash left in the glove box that caught fire. Some of it had been there since 1986.
Also, pre-fire radiation readings showed that the amount of plutonium in the glove box had risen. The board said that should have been a clue that plutonium trash apparently had been tossed inside.
Victor Holm, head of the Rocky Flats Citizens Advisory Board, said he was particularly concerned because the fire department wasn't called immediately and the workers tried to douse it themselves.
"The workers' probable motive was, 'If we can get this thing put out, nobody will know about it,' " Holm believes.
DOE officials admitted that they had failed to supervise the dismantling of the glove boxes in that building, because they were concentrating on the packaging of plutonium elsewhere.
"We lost our edge on being vigilant here," said Paul Golan, chief operating officer for environmental management at the DOE in Washington. "I personally was disappointed it happened. We are going to have to make sure it doesn't happen again."
Golan said he also has ordered a DOE-wide review of all past plutonium fires to create a better prevention plan, because these types of accidents could turn catastrophic.
The DOE site manager and the Kaiser-Hill building manager were transferred. Officials at Rocky Flats said both rotations were routine and had nothing to do with the fire.
Conway said he expects the final DOE report to discuss whether safety problems were caused by a rush to finish the plant's dismantling early and under budget, which would trigger a bonus of up to $120 million.
Both Kaiser-Hill and DOE denied safety was being compromised by the rapid pace. They said a serious accident was the biggest threat to the schedule.
Corsi of Kaiser-Hill pointed to a staff report from the safety board that found "no widespread evidence that work was overly rushed."
Conway said he could not say if Rocky Flats had solved its safety problems, because he has received only an interim response to the board's complaints.
He also noted that Rocky Flats had another less dangerous fire only about a month ago.
Meanwhile, the safety board eliminated its permanent staffer at Rocky Flats last spring because its limited staff was needed at other nuclear weapons facilities, Conway said. He said budget limitations have kept the board's staff to 100, even though it is authorized for 150.
---
Recent incidents at Rocky Flats
March 22, 2004
Rocky Mountain News (Colorado)
http://rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_2748288,00.html
March 26, 2003: Workers hook up air blowers to a ventilation system without proper checking. Airflow was reversed and 23 workers contaminated.
March 31: A badly taped air hose slipped loose and radioactive contamination spread throughout a room. Two workers affected.
May 6: Plutonium solution and chemical-soaked towels ignite after being improperly dumped in a glove box. The fire occurred in Building 371, which then contained all of the remaining weapons-grade plutonium. Four firefighters affected.
Feb. 5, 2004: The Department of Energy fines contractor Kaiser-Hill $522,000 for safety violations that showed a "significant lack of attention or carelessness," including improper storage of plutonium and combustible materials in 2002 and the incidents of early 2003.
Feb. 12: Workers pour too much filler foam into a tunnel under Building 991 and the concentrated heat of curing turns into a smoldering fire, destroying the foam.
Feb. 13 and 16: Kaiser-Hill halts work for safety meetings.
----
N.J. Gets Seaport Radiation Detectors
By WAYNE PARRY
Associated Press
Mon Mar 22, 2004
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=624&ncid=753&e=2&u=/ap/20040322/ap_on_sc/seaport_radiation_detectors
JERSEY CITY, N.J. - Jersey City has become the nation's first seaport to use new radiation detectors that scan all incoming cargo for nuclear or radiological weapons, federal officials said Monday.
Similar devices are planned for 90 percent of the country's seaports by the end of summer, said U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Robert C. Bonner.
"The best way to prevent a terrorist attack is by preventing terrorists or terrorist weapons from entering our country in the first instance," Bonner said at the Global Marine Terminal in Jersey City.
Several million cargo containers - about 95 percent of U.S. international trade - enter the United States every year through its 361 sea and river ports. Since Sept. 11, many people have worried that terrorists might use the containers to sneak biological weapons or other arms into the country.
Previously, only about 8 percent of the cargo containers at Global Marine Terminal were examined for signs of radiation because the process was done by hand, said Richard O'Brien, the port's deputy chief inspector.
Now, all 500 or so containers that leave there each day will be screened by passing them through five 20-foot-high detectors, he said.
The terminal is part of Port Newark-Elizabeth, which is the largest seaport on the East Coast.
The new detectors, which were installed in February and cost nearly $1 million, have already flagged radiation in cargo, O'Brien said. In each case, he said, the culprit was something harmless such as natural radiation emitted by pottery or ceramic tiles.
The scanners resemble inverted football goal posts. Every container that has been taken off a ship and loaded on a truck must pass through one of four primary screening units before leaving the terminal.
If radiation is detected, the container goes through another unit for a closer scan and, if necessary, is scrutinized with hand-held or truck-mounted devices.
There are 248 of the portals already in use at border crossings with Canada and Mexico, O'Brien said.
-------- asia
Tajikistan's Plutonium Scare
DUSHANBE, Tajikistan, (ENS)
March 22, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2004/2004-03-22-03.asp
Police have foiled an attempt to smuggle weapons grade nuclear material for sale in Afghanistan or Pakistan. The arrest of three men arrested for allegedly trying to smuggle plutonium through Tajikistan has highlighted concerns about the security of the republic's borders.
Officials estimate the black market value of the seized plutonium, a nuclear element produced from uranium and used to make weapons as well as in power stations, at more than US$20,000.
According to the Tajik Drugs Control Agency (DCA), this amount of plutonium is far too small to make a nuclear bomb, but analysts agree that it is more than sufficient to make a so-called dirty bomb, in which radioactive material is spread by conventional explosives. The tiniest amounts used in such a bomb would cause cancers and render the blast area uninhabitable for years.
Defense analysts have long considered Tajikistan to be the weakest link on the long established smuggling route linking Afghanistan with Russia and western Europe. A recent series of attacks blamed on Islamic extremists has heightened fears that a "dirty bomb" could be constructed using plutonium smuggled through Central Asia.
A road crosses Tajikistan, a high mountain country at the heart of Central Asia. (Photo courtesy Tajikistan Ministry of Transport) The DCA say that a man arrested on March 15, who was identified only as a 50 year old resident of the city of Fergana in Uzbekistan, has confessed under questioning that he was intending to sell the plutonium to potential buyers in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
The republic's security ministry launched an investigation when two Tajik citizens were arrested two days later on suspicion of aiding the alleged smuggler.
The DCA, a government agency set up in 1999 with the help of the United Nations to tackle drugs trafficking, arrested the man as he travelled from northern Tajikistan to Dushanbe.
Although the arrest was conducted by DCA, those arrested were handed over to the Tajik security ministry, which is responsible for cases such as these. If found guilty, the men face between six and eight years imprisonment.
However, these heavy sentences are unlikely to deter others living in impoverished Tajikistan, where the majority of people live below the poverty line, and salaries are as low as 13 dollars a month. These conditions encourage many residents to try any method of making money, no matter how dangerous or illegal.
Although other Central Asian countries such as Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan have a common border with Afghanistan, the route through Tajikistan is considered the most accessible way to get across.
What makes Tajikistan convenient for smugglers in search of buyers in Afghanistan and Pakistan, is that its 1,300 kilometer (807 mile) long frontier is less tightly guarded than that of neighboring Uzbekistan. While Russian border troops help Tajikistan to protect most of the frontier, the mountainous stretches are particularly porous. Even in the more heavily guarded sections, corruption has made it possible for smugglers to bribe their way through. Map of Tajikistan in Central Asia (Photo courtesy CIA World Fact Book) The Turkmen-Afghan border is also porous, but the fact that the republic has isolated itself politically from the other Central Asian nations has meant that movement is restricted.
Although security is tight on the Uzbek-Tajik border, the route taken by the arrested man, observers say the determined smuggler can still find a way through.
This is not the first time that weapons grade material has been confiscated from would-be smugglers in Tajikistan. However, the plutonium in those cases originated within the republic - a legacy of the uranium mines and enriching factories built by the Soviets but now decommissioned.
This time there seems little doubt that the plutonium came from Russia. According to Major Avaz Yuldashev of the DCA, "The container holding the plutonium had special marking signs which identify it as having been produced at one of Russian nuclear plants."
Vladimir Echouprov, a coordinator with Greenpeace's energy department in Moscow, confirmed that Russia does have factories which produce such containers for plutonium, and said that the country has several potential sources from which the illicit material could have come.
Weapons grade plutonium used in warheads and nuclear powered submarines, and nuclear waste from power plants are mostly processed at the Mayak factory in Chelyabinsk, in the Urals region. There are also a number of military plants where uranium is processed and warheads are produced.
{Published in cooperation with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting - http://www.iwpr.net .}
-------- china
Sources: Berlin to Drop Sale of Nuke Plant to China
By REUTERS
March 22, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-germany-china-nuclear.html
BERLIN (Reuters) - The German government is likely to drop its controversial plan to sell a mothballed nuclear plant to China, sources close to the government said Monday.
Plans to allow the sale had been fiercely criticized by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Green coalition partners and some of his own Social Democrats.
Critics said the plant, designed to reprocess plutonium to make so-called mixed-oxide, or MOX fuel rods for nuclear power stations, could be used to manufacture atomic weapons.
They also said the export would smack of hypocrisy, since Berlin is committed to phasing out nuclear power on German soil.
``We think it's over,'' said one source close to the government who declined to be named. ``It's all being shelved with the aim that it should be forgotten.'' Other sources close to the government concurred with that view.
The first source said Schroeder's Chancellery had realized that the coalition would not back the sale.
The plant, built by industrial group Siemens AG in Hanau near Frankfurt, was mothballed in 1995 without ever going into service.
It was due to be sold to China in a deal estimated at 50 million euros ($61.72 million).
A government spokesman said Siemens' request for an export license was still being checked.
Schroeder, who announced the deal during a visit to China last year, said at the time the German government had no legal grounds to ban the sale, given that the Chinese had guaranteed the plant would not be used for military purposes.
-------- india / pakistan
Chinese defense minister heads to India and Pakistan for security talks
BEIJING (AFP)
Mar 22, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040322032828.9wcslhui.html
Chinese Defence Minister Cao Gangchuan left Monday for talks in India, Pakistan and Thailand on regional security issues, state media said. Cao, also vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission and a State Councilor, said his trip was is in line with China's diplomatic efforts to build solid ties with its neighbours.
"China is willing to actively create a harmonious, stable and peaceful regional, political and security environment with all Asian countries, including Pakistan, India and Thailand," Cao told Xinhua news agency.
During his trip, Cao will meet his counterparts in the three countries as well as other government leaders.
-------- israel
ISRAEL: Washington backs Middle East's nuclear outlaw'
3/22/04
Norm Dixon
Green Left Weekly,
http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2004/576/576p12.htm
"Every civilised nation has a stake in preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction... We're determined to confront those threats at the source", US President George Bush declared in a February 11 speech.
"We will stop these weapons from being acquired or built. We'll block them from being transferred. We'll prevent them from ever being used. One source of these weapons is dangerous and secretive regimes that build weapons of mass destruction to intimidate their neighbours and force their influence upon the world."
Arguing for combative new "arms control" measures that would further entrench the West's control over nuclear weapons, Bush casually repeated the now thoroughly exposed lie that the US-led war against Iraq was launched because Baghdad "refused to disarm or account for ... illegal weapons and programs".
Bush used the speech to signal that Iran remains in Washington's gun-sights, alleging that Tehran "is unwilling to abandon a uranium enrichment program capable of producing material for nuclear weapons". Bush also demanded that North Korea "completely, verifiably and irreversibly dismantle its nuclear programs".
The February 11 speech marked a new high for hypocrisy and cynicism. It was prompted by embarrassing revelations that Washington's closet ally, Pakistan, has been the world's leading peddler of nuclear weapons technology for more than a decade - and its customers have included Iran and North Korea. Until 2003, Washington tolerated the activities of Pakistan's state-sponsored nuclear smuggling and spying rings.
US allies
Washington has never opposed "dangerous and secretive regimes" developing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons "to intimidate their neighbours and force their influence upon the world" - only those that are not US allies.
Saddam Hussein's Iraq developed and used its chemical weapons arsenal, and began an effort to build nuclear and biological weapons, while an ally of the US prior to 1991. Washington began nuclear cooperation with Iran in 1957 under its "Atoms for Peace" program and encouraged US corporations to sell "dual use" nuclear technology to the US-backed Shah of Iran's dictatorship.
But the most spectacular - and under-reported - example of Washington's support for nuclear proliferation is its dealings with Israel.
The corporate press endlessly parrots US (and Israeli) charges that "weapons of mass destruction" in the hands of Iraq, Iran, Libya and Syria pose a grave threat to peace. However, Israel is the only state in the Middle East that possesses nuclear weapons and the delivery systems to use them anywhere in the region and beyond.
Israel is the only state in the Middle East that has considered using them, and the only state in the region that refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It refuses to allow international inspections of its nuclear, chemical or biological facilities. Yet Israel's nuclear monopoly is rarely acknowledged by the capitalist media, and is persistently covered up by Washington.
Israel may well be the world's fifth-largest nuclear power, ahead of Britain, and could even rival China for fourth place. Estimates of its stockpile range from 200 to more than 400 nuclear weapons, including medium- and long-range nuclear missiles, aircraft-mounted nuclear bombs and submarine-based nuclear cruise missiles, as well as sophisticated low-blast, deadly radiation-producing ("neutron bombs") nuclear artillery shells and even nuclear land mines.
French role
According to a 1999 research paper prepared for the US Air Force Counterproliferation Center by US army academic Warner Farr, Israel began its quest for nuclear weapons soon after its creation in 1948. In 1953, Israel's Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion ordered the development of nuclear and chemical weapons as a counter to the Arab countries' larger armies.
In 1956, as quid pro quo for joining the French and British governments' invasion of Egypt, France agreed to supply Israel with a large "research" nuclear reactor. France and Israel secretly agreed to pool their efforts to rapidly develop nuclear weapons and associated technologies, including uranium enrichment and plutonium separation.
A reactor and related facilities were secretly built underground at Dimona, in the Negev Desert near Beersheba, using the cover story that it was a "manganese plant". Hundreds of French technicians helped build it.
Ben-Gurion appeared before the Knesset on December 21, 1960, and lied to the world when he stated the reactor was being built "entirely for peaceful purposes". As Farr notes, the facility's sole purpose was to produce nuclear bombs.
The Dimona reactor began operation in 1962. The French-built plutonium plant within the complex began production in 1965. On the eve of the 1967 "Six-Day War", Israel had enough plutonium to produce at least one working nuclear bomb. According to journalist Seymour Hersh, in his 1991 book The Samson Option, after 1968 Israel was producing nuclear bombs at the rate of three to five bombs a year.
However, in 1986, the British Sunday Times published an expert examination of data supplied by former Dimona technician Mordechai Vanunu. It revealed that Israel possessed 200 highly sophisticated nuclear bombs. It was estimated that Israel was producing enough plutonium to make 10 to 12 bombs a year. (By the time Vanunu's revelations were published, Israeli agents had lured him to Rome, where he was drugged and shanghaied to Israel. He was secretly tried and condemned to 18 years' jail, most of which has been spent in solitary confinement. He is due to be released in April.)
US collusion
While Washington was not Israel's main collaborator in its first acquisition of nuclear weapons, it made a significant contribution, which has expanded over the years. Israel's original nuclear scientists and technicians were trained in US universities and government weapons labs. This cooperation continues to this day.
In 1955, the US supplied Israel's Nahal Sorek research reactor, which began operation in 1960 under the Atoms for Peace program. Farr notes that there is evidence that Israel had access to data from US nuclear tests in the 1950s and '60s.
On March 7, Israel's Haaretz newspaper reported that the US provided at least six tonnes of weapons-grade uranium under Atoms for Peace. Considering Israel's chronic shortage of uranium in the early years of its weapons program, some of this prized material almost certainly was diverted to Dimona. The US also supplied Israel with heavy water.
According to British Sunday Times reporter Peter Hounam's 1999 book, Woman From Mossad: The Torment of Mordechai Vanunu, Dimona's control panels were supplied by Tracer Lab, the company that outfits US military reactors, with the knowledge of US intelligence agencies.
Hersh revealed that US President Richard Nixon's administration in 1971 approved the sale to Israel of hundreds of kryptons, high-speed switches used in nuclear weapons, and supercomputers used in the design of nukes. Jane Hunter reported in the June 24, 1994, Middle East International that US President George Bush senior's regime sold at least 1500 nuclear "dual-use" items in Israel, in defiance of the NPT.
As Stephen Zunes of the liberal US Middle East Policy Council pointed out in a 1997 article: "Given the enormous costs of any nuclear program of the magnitude of Israel's, it would have been very difficult ... without the tens of billions of dollars of direct and unrestricted American financial support. In effect, the United States has subsidised nuclear proliferation in the Middle East."
However, Washington's greatest assistance has been to use its political and diplomatic might to shield Israel from demands that it give up its nuclear monopoly in the region. In his 1998 book, Israel and the Bomb, Avner Cohen, an Israeli working at George Washington University's National Security Archive, recounted US President John Kennedy's 1961 meeting with Ben-Gurion in New York to express Washington's concern that, if news of Israel's nuclear weapons program ever leaked, Arab states might approach the Soviet Union for nuclear weapons.
However, Kennedy did not demand that Israel abandon its effort, simply that Ben-Gurion agree that Israel will never admit in public that Israel was pursuing atomic weapons. Ben-Gurion agreed to token annual "inspections" by US officials beginning in 1962. In return, the US would not press Israel to disarm. This meant no detectable nuclear tests and no public threats to use nuclear weapons. This arrangement formed the basis of Washington's "don't ask, don't tell" policy in relation to Israel's weapons of mass destruction, or "nuclear ambiguity" as it is referred to in Israel, which remains in effect to this day.
`Apartheid' bomb scandal
Washington even permitted the white supremacist regime in South Africa to acquire nuclear weapons with Israeli assistance. From 1967, Israel turned to apartheid South Africa for uranium for Dimona and access to secret facilities to test nuclear weapons and nuclear-capable medium-range missiles. In return for this, and Israel's busting of economic sanctions imposed on the pariah state, the racist regime was given the "apartheid bomb".
Hersh detailed how US President Jimmy Carter's administration remained silent when US satellites in 1977 revealed that a nuclear test site was being jointly prepared in the Kalahari Desert. Two years later, on September 22, 1979, US satellites observed a joint Israeli-South African nuclear explosion in the Indian Ocean. Washington kept silent about this disturbing atomic partnership.
In 1997, South Africa's deputy foreign minister Aziz Pahad and apartheid-era military chief Constand Viljoen confirmed that the racist regime had accumulated six nuclear bombs via its dirty deals with Israel. In an unprecedented speech, a member of Israel's Knesset, Issam Makhoul, declared in 2000: "The crime of manufacturing nuclear weapons in Israel was combined with another crime, the collaboration between Israel and the neo-Nazi apartheid regime in South Africa."
In 1981, Washington went even further to maintain Israel's nuclear monopoly in the Middle East by providing Tel Aviv with high-resolution photographs, enabling Iraq's incomplete Osiraq nuclear reactor to be destroyed by Israel' s US-supplied fighter planes. While the US publically criticised the attack, Hersh reports that in private "[US President Ronald Reagan] was very satisfied".
A token ban on the delivery of more US jets to Israel imposed after the attack was lifted just two months later. The US House of Representatives passed a motion endorsing the Israeli aggression and called for the US to seek the repeal of UN Security Council motion 487, which had condemned the attack.
The December 26 Haaretz reported that "former US president Bill Clinton promised two [Israeli] prime ministers, Benjamin Netanyahu [in 1998] and Ehud Barak [in 1999], that the US would ensure that Middle Eastern arms control initiatives did not impair Israel's strategic deterrence capabilities".
For a nuclear-free Middle East
In Israel and the Bomb, Avner Cohen summed up the Israeli ruling class' frightening attitude towards fighting a nuclear war: "[Israel] must be in a position to threaten another Hiroshima to prevent another holocaust."
According to Farr, on October 8, 1973, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, placed Israel's nuclear missiles and aircraft on alert during Israel's war with Egypt and Syria. William Burrows and Robert Windrem, in their 1994 book Critical Mass, state that this was not the first time. They write that in 1967, two Israeli nuclear bombs were ready for use.
In 1985, Israeli spy Jonathon Pollard was found to have supplied Israel with US nuclear targeting data on the location of Soviet military targets and information on Soviet air defences. And during the 1991 Gulf War, Israel's nuclear weapons were primed and ready for launch throughout the 43-day long conflict.
Supporters of Israel's policy claim that it requires a nuclear "deterrent" to dissuade attacks from the Arab and Muslim states' larger armies. However, Israel long ago achieved superiority over its neighbours in terms of conventional arms thanks to decades of massive US military aid. More recently, apologists for Israel's nuclear might have rested their argument on the claim that Arab countries with "weapons of mass destruction" surround Israel.
However, this justification has been weakened by recent events. It is now confirmed that Iraq totally destroyed all its weapons of mass destruction at least 10 years ago. Libya has abandoned its feeble weapons programs and Iran has agreed to international inspections of its nuclear energy facilities, which the International Atomic Energy Agency agrees are not part of a program to develop nuclear weapons.
If anything, it is Israel's massive arsenal of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons that drives nearby states to seek a military deterrent. This fact is recognised in Washington, according to a report in the April 17, 2003, Washington Post. Present and former US intelligence officials told the newspaper that the development of Syria's chemical weapons and Scud missiles were started more than 30 years ago as "a force equaliser with the Israelis".
Arab and Muslim states have repeatedly urged Israel to join them in creating a WMD-free zone in the Middle East, but this has been stymied by Tel Aviv and Washington. The 1991 UN Security Council resolution under which the US justified its invasion of Iraq included the goal of "establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction and all missiles for their delivery". Washington has not sought to implement that in relation to Israel.
Since 1987, Israel has ignored at least 14 resolutions passed by the UN General Assembly and the IAEA General Conference calling on Israel to join the NPT. In December, the General Assembly passed such a resolution by a vote of 164-4, with 10 abstentions.
In December, Syria asked that a draft resolution be discussed by the UN Security Council calling for the implementation of previous resolutions "aimed at freeing the Middle East region of all weapons of mass destruction" and urging all Middle East states to sign international treaties forbidding the spread of WMD. The US and Britain, permanent members of the Security Council with veto power, disregarded Syria's request.
"We have been pursuing this for years because we believe it's the only solution for the Middle East to be truly peaceful and stable", Syrian government minister Bouthaina Shaaban told the December 29 Christian Science Monitor.
"If the US decides ... to take a leading role in the Middle East and treats countries fairly, and the UN takes a strong role, then I don't see why Israel should not give up its nuclear weapons. It's up to the international community now to say what's right."
There is even support for such a zone in the Israeli Knesset. Haaretz reported on December 26 that United Tora Judaism MP Meir Porush stunned the chamber when he declared: "The state of Israel should dismantle its nuclear weaponry like Libya is doing."
However, despite the mounting pressure, Israel's rulers have no intention of giving up their nuclear monopoly. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told the daily Maariv newspaper in October that Israel will not dismantle its "special measures": "Looking ahead, these things are very important... It is impossible to expect that the US will remain [in the Middle East] for ever."
Nor does the US intend to give up its backing for the Middle East's only nuclear outlaw and key strategic ally in the region. A "senior American official" bluntly told the December 26 Haaretz : "I don't think there will be a change in policy toward Israel in the nuclear field. The Arabs will raise the issue, and Israeli will need to find a way to explain its policy. But we understand that as long as Israel is facing Arab rejectionism from so many directions, the way to deal with this is via quiet discussions."
As Jordan's former UN ambassador Hasan Abu Nimah wrote in an article on the Electronic Intifada web site on January 22, Israel's nuclear monopoly and Washington's unstinting backing for it have nothing to do with self defence. Washington and Tel Aviv are pressing for "the unilateral disarmament of Israel's adversaries, not in order to make the region safer, but simply to ensure continued Israeli military hegemony" of the oil-rich Middle East.
Stephen Zunes notes that "the primary concern of the United States is not the prospect of horizontal nuclear proliferation per se, but any challenge to its military hegemony in the post-Cold War world. With [US planners] moving away from the prospect of a major East-West confrontation to ones involving medium-intensity warfare against Third World regional powers, the desire for a nuclear monopoly by the major powers and certain allies like Israeli becomes all the more critical."
-------- japan
EDITORIAL: Pluthermal power
The Asahi Shimbun, IHT
March 22, 2004
http://www.asahi.com/english/opinion/TKY200403230117.html
Thorough review is needed of nuclear fuel cycle policy.
After years of problems and delays, Japan's power industry has taken a major step toward its long-cherished dream of using plutonium as fuel for conventional nuclear reactors.
The breakthrough came when Fukui Prefecture recently approved a plan by Kansai Electric Power Co. plan to purchase plutonium-uranium mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel from overseas to burn in reactors at its nuclear power plant in Takahama, a town along the Sea of Japan coast. The power company hopes its pluthermal operations will begin in 2007.
Kansai Electric was forced to shelve the project in 1999 following revelations that British Nuclear Fuels, the supplier of MOX fuel, had falsified data. Kansai Electric says it will select its supplier of MOX fuel carefully after taking necessary steps to enhance its system for fuel quality control.
Other electric utilities also want to use MOX fuel and are holding meetings to explain their plans to local residents. The exception is Tokyo Electric Power Co., which is still reeling from the repercussions of a string of cover-ups at its nuclear facilities. The power industry hopes to have 16 to 18 reactors using MOX fuel by 2010.
For this to happen, though, the utilities must first regain public confidence in their nuclear power operations. A series of accidents and scandals have raised serious concern about their safety. The companies should not try to hide from the fact that there is also a very basic question as to whether it is really necessary to burn plutonium in ordinary reactors.
Admittedly, there is an urgent need for the industry to find ways to dispose of growing plutonium stockpiles. As British and French plants have reprocessed some 7,000 tons of spent fuel from Japanese nuclear plants under outsourcing contracts, about 33 tons of plutonium are now stored in Britain and France, and Japan is obliged to take possession of it.
Burning this byproduct of nuclear fuel reprocessing in pluthermal operations may be a realistic option for Japan if it is to keep its international pledge to store no plutonium, the key ingredient for nuclear weapons.
But the real question being asked now is whether Japan should set out to promote widespread use of plutonium as nuclear fuel.
This question is closely linked to the operations of the almost-completed reprocessing plant in Rokkasho, a village in Aomori Prefecture. Should this plant be put into operation to reprocess spent nuclear fuel from domestic power plants to produce even more plutonium? This is an issue that must be considered separately from the problem of plutonium stored overseas.
Japan has been trying to establish a nuclear fuel cycle in which all spent nuclear fuel would be recycled into plutonium to be used as fuel for fast-breeder reactors. Use of MOX fuels in conventional reactors has been regarded as a transitional step until the technology for fast-breeder reactors is deemed safe enough for a full-fledged nuclear fuel cycle. With practical use of fast-breeder reactors nowhere in sight, however, it is questionable whether the widespread use of plutonium in existing reactors should be promoted in such a way to create a fait accompli.
Using MOX fuels in pluthermal operations won't do much to save on uranium resources since using plutonium is far more costly. In addition, operations at the reprocessing plant in Rokkasho are supposed to eventually lead to the construction of facilities to manufacture MOX fuels, which would demand a major investment.
The government should suspend the planned launch of the reprocessing plant in Rokkasho and carry out a sweeping review of its nuclear fuel cycle policy. The review should redefine the roles and objectives of pluthermal operations.
If the reprocessing plant is not put into operation, there will be a serious shortage of sites to store the growing stockpile of spent nuclear fuel. The government should explore every possibility to resolve this problem, including the construction of temporary storage facilities and storage in existing nuclear power plants.
-------- korea
US, South Korean troops launch massive joint exercises
SEOUL (AFP)
Mar 22, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040322035759.alpnj5rc.html
US and South Korean troops launched massive joint military exercises Monday as part of annual war games designed to deter Stalinist North Korea, officials said. The week-long exercise included part of the US troops based here, 5,000 US soldiers from abroad and South Korean military contingents, as well as a US aircraft carrier backed by cruisers and destroyers.
The annual exercise, called RSOI/FE 04, focuses on a mock battle aimed at evaluating command capabilities to receive US forces from abroad.
Hundreds of thousands of South Korean troops are mobilized every year for anti-commando operations and computer war games but South Korea refused to disclose the number of soldiers taking part in this year's drills.
US authorities also maintained low-key publicity on the exercise due to a strong backlash from North Korea, which has reacted nervously to any US-South Korea joint drills amid the impasse over its nuclear weapons programs.
In an angry commentary Sunday, the North's goverment newspaper Minju Josun described the exercise as a "dangerous saber-rattling row to round off war preparations for a preemptive attack" on North Korea.
"It is the temperament of the army and the people of the DPRK (North Korea) to retaliate against provocation and return fire for fire," it warned.
US authorities say the exercise is purely defensive and designed to improve the ability of allied forces to defend South Korea against external aggression.
The 1950-53 Korean War ended in a fragile armistice and the Korean peninsula remains the world's last Cold War frontier with nearly two million troops ready for combat either side of the tense frontier.
The exercise comes as South Korea and the United States are locked in talks on the relocation of some 37,000 US troops stationed here under a mutual defense pact.
The realignment includes a plan to relocate a 15,000-member US infantry division from the frontline with North Korea to bases south of Seoul.
The presence of US troops in South Korean has been a source of anti-American protests, while conservative groups have opposed any changes to long-standing security ties with the United States.
US troops are seen as deterring North Korea's 1.1 million strong army, and their departure would make Seoul, which is just 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the border with North Korea, more vulnerable to artillery attacks.
-------- terrorism
N.J. Seaport Gets Radiation Detectors
March 22, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Seaport-Radiation-Detectors.html
JERSEY CITY, N.J. (AP) -- Jersey City has become the nation's first seaport to use new radiation detectors that scan all incoming cargo for nuclear or radiological weapons, federal officials said Monday.
Similar devices are planned for 90 percent of the country's seaports by the end of summer, said U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Robert C. Bonner.
``The best way to prevent a terrorist attack is by preventing terrorists or terrorist weapons from entering our country in the first instance,'' Bonner said at the Global Marine Terminal in Jersey City.
Several million cargo containers -- about 95 percent of U.S. international trade -- enter the United States every year through its 361 sea and river ports. Since Sept. 11, many people have worried that terrorists might use the containers to sneak biological weapons or other arms into the country.
Previously, only about 8 percent of the cargo containers at Global Marine Terminal were examined for signs of radiation because the process was done by hand, said Richard O'Brien, the port's deputy chief inspector.
Now, all 500 or so containers that leave there each day will be screened by passing them through five 20-foot-high detectors, he said.
The terminal is part of Port Newark-Elizabeth, which is the largest seaport on the East Coast.
The new detectors, which were installed in February and cost nearly $1 million, have already flagged radiation in cargo, O'Brien said. In each case, he said, the culprit was something harmless such as natural radiation emitted by pottery or ceramic tiles.
The scanners resemble inverted football goal posts. Every container that has been taken off a ship and loaded on a truck must pass through one of four primary screening units before leaving the terminal.
If radiation is detected, the container goes through another unit for a closer scan and, if necessary, is scrutinized with hand-held or truck-mounted devices.
There are 248 of the portals already in use at border crossings with Canada and Mexico, O'Brien said.
--------
Al-Qaeda claims to have briefcase nukes: bin Laden biographer
Mar 22, 2004
SYDNEY (AFP)
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040322035419.fnucom5t.html
The Al-Qaeda network claims to have bought ready-made "smart briefcase" nuclear bombs on the black market in central Asia, the biographer of the group's founder told Australian television Monday.
Pakistani writer Hamad Mir told the ABC network that Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, told him of the bombs in November 2001 after the journalist interviewed bin Laden following the September 11 attacks on the United States.
In an interview to be broadcast later Monday Mir said he told al-Zawahri it was difficult to believe Al-Qaeda had nuclear weapons when they did not have the equipment to maintain or fire them.
"Dr Ayman al-Zawahri laughed and he said 'Mr Mir, if you have 30 million dollars, go to the black market in central Asia, contact any disgruntled Soviet scientist, and a lot of ... smart briefcase bombs are available'," Mir said in the interview, parts of which were released in advance.
"They have contacted us, we sent our people to Moscow, to Tashkent, to other central Asian states and they negotiated, and we purchased some suitcase bombs," he said.
In articles Mir wrote shortly after interviewing bin Laden, he quoted the Al-Qaeda leader as saying his group had access to nuclear weapons, but without further details.
Western intelligence agencies have dismissed Al-Qaeda claims to have nuclear weapons, although in 2001 documents giving details of how to build a nuclear bomb were found in an Al-Qaeda safe house in Afghanistan.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
More nukes may be aimed at Russia
Move would reverse decade-long trend
By Ian Hoffman
Bay Area Daily Review
Monday, March 22, 2004
http://www.dailyreviewonline.com/Stories/0,1413,88~10973~2033993,00.html
The Pentagon is weighing the prospect of keeping multiple nuclear warheads on its land-based ballistic missiles, a reversal of a decade-long move toward aiming fewer nuclear weapons at Russia.
Strategic-force planners are looking at preserving as many as 800 warheads on the nation's 500 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles, up from earlier plans for one warhead per missile.
The heavy Minuteman missiles, based in Wyoming, Montana and North Dakota, carry warheads designed by University of California scientists as "hard-target killers" for destroying concrete missile silos. They chiefly are aimed over the North Pole at Russian ICBM sites.
Researcher Hans Kristensen, a weapons consultant for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the notion of keeping 800 warheads on the Minuteman missiles is puzzling, given the thaw in U.S.-Russian relations.
But it could reflect the Air Force's desire to reinforce targeting of Russia's most threatening multi-warhead missiles, SS-18s and SS-19s. They were to have been scrapped under an early 1990s arms-reduction treaty that also committed the United States to single-warhead missiles.
"It's tit-for-tat nuclear planning, where Russia is on the other side of the nuclear cross hairs. One would hope we had gotten beyond that now," said Kristensen, who unearthed the proposal in Air Force statements last year.
"It seems like we're continuing to fight yesterday's battles," said Victoria Samson, a research analyst at the Center for Defense Information in Washington.
Pentagon officials confirmed the idea is under consideration as part of a larger study of U.S. strategic forces, covering sub-launched missiles, bombs and cruise-missile warheads, as well as missile defenses.
That assessment is aimed partly at finding the proper mix of U.S. strategic forces to meet the May 2002 Moscow Treaty. With that pact, President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin pledged to reduce their "operationally deployed" strategic arsenals to 1,700 to 2,200 weapons by the end of 2012.
The treaty replaced an earlier agreement known as START II, originally proposed by President George H.W. Bush. In 1991, close on the heels of the START treaty, the elder Bush suggested a new agreement to reduce nuclear tensions between the superpowers by scrapping or converting all multiwarhead, land-based ICBMs to single warheads, a process known as downloading.
"This step would eliminate the most unstable part of our nuclear arsenals," he said.
In negotiating that treaty, the United States and Russia agreed that keeping large forces of multiple, retargetable warheads, or MIRVs, on vulnerable, ground-based missiles was destabilizing.
The destructive power invested in a missile -- and the ease of destroying it in a fixed silo -- underscored the use-it-or-lose-it logic of nuclear confrontation and, the argument went, tempted each side to consider a disarming first strike.
The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty in 1996, but it bogged down in the Russian Duma for the next four years. Russian lawmakers criticized the treaty as lopsided in its emphasis on reducing land-based nuclear forces, where Russia deployed the largest portion of its strategic arsenal. The treaty did not require conversion of multi-warhead missiles on submarines, leaving the most invulnerable U.S. nuclear forces untouched.
When the Duma ratified START II in 2000, Moscow insisted on a variety of new arms-control measures, including promises that the United States would not withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. President Bush pulled out of the treaty on June 13 so the United States could deploy missile defenses. The next day, Russia's foreign ministry declared START II dead.
That frees Russia to preserve its SS-18 and SS-19 missiles, aimed chiefly at the United States, and the United States to keep multiple warheads on at least some of its Minuteman missiles.
"According to the war we're looking at that, we're looking at eventually ... 500 missiles that could be uploaded to as many as 800 warheads," Gen. Robert Smolen, the Air Force director of nuclear and counterproliferation, told Air Force Magazine last July. "So somewhere in that mix of 500 is 800. And it could be one on some, two on another, three on another."
Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the reasons for keeping 800 warheads are difficult to understand "unless there's some clear pattern of force modernization in China or something else we haven't heard of. It's a very substantial force-mix change if it's taking place."
The Pentagon could chose to retain 500 warheads on the Minuteman missiles and hold 300 ready to upload on short notice. But if all 800 are kept on the missiles, the Bush administration will be forced to sacrifice 300 other, generally more versatile nuclear weapons in order to stay under the Moscow Treaty's cap of 2,200.
Last week administration officials continued their upbeat assessment of the new U.S. relationship with Russia in congressional testimony.
A. Elizabeth Jones, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, told lawmakers that the two nations "have become strong allies in the global war on terrorism."
Most notably, she said, "we have essentially eliminated the threat of global nuclear annihilation. No longer are Russian and American missiles targeted against our respective homelands."
NRDC's Kristensen said that's not the message that the Air Force is sending. "If that's what they call a new relationship with Russia, I don't think so," he said. "We saw that for 40 years."
Contact Ian Hoffman at ihoffman@angnewspapers.com .
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- colorado
Colo. Congressman Seeks Rocky Flats Probe
March 22, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Rocky-Flats.html
DENVER (AP) -- A Colorado congressman has asked the Environmental Protection Agency to respond to claims that environmental crimes at the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant were covered up by the Justice Department.
The claims are raised in a new book co-written by the foreman of a grand jury that investigated activities at the site in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The book alleges the Justice Department cut a deal with Rockwell Corp., then the site's operator, to pay an $18.5 million fine to avoid indictments of company and Energy Department officials for covering up illegal waste dumping, falsification of records, illegal burning and other crimes.
Under the agreement, the grand jury was sent home and its report sealed. Two weeks ago, a federal judge rejected a petition by grand jury members to release the report.
Last week, Rep. Mark Udall, D-Colo., sent a letter to EPA and state health officials asking them to look into the claims in the book by Wes McKinley. Udall released a copy of the letter Monday.
``I am writing to ask if your agencies have examined these allegations, and if so, what has been done to address the cleanup of materials and areas that relate to these allegations,'' said Udall, whose district includes the Rocky Flats site.
Frank Montarelli, an EPA spokesman, said the agency was responding to the letter but had no other comment.
Matthew Gonring, a vice president for Rockwell Automation, said he had not seen the book -- ``The Ambushed Grand Jury: How the Justice Department Covered Up Government Crimes and How We Caught Them Red-Handed'' -- so he could not comment in detail.
But he said that ``these are old accusations and have been addressed and thoroughly vetted with the EPA and other regulatory parties.''
Rocky Flats manufactured plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons from the 1950s to 1989. The last weapons-grade plutonium was removed in August, and the site will eventually become a national wildlife refuge.
On the Net:
Book: http://ambushedgrandjury.com
-------- new mexico
Los Alamos Nuclear Waste Comes Under Cleanup Order
ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico, (ENS)
March 22, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2004/2004-03-22-09.asp#anchor1
An enforceable, fence-to-fence environmental cleanup order for Los Alamos National Laboratory LANL was agreed on Friday between the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED).
The agreement will ensure that the environmental problems created during LANL's 60 years of operations are cleaned up in a timely manner enforceable by the state of New Mexico.
It will also allow New Mexico to collect $43 million, which is the LANL portion of DOE funding specifically prescribed by Congress for environmental cleanup work at DOE sites. The funding could not be allocated without an agreement between the state and DOE. Los Alamos was the only site in the lower 48 states without a signed agreement, leaving the $43 million in new cleanup funding in limbo.
Liquid industrial and radioactive waste remain at the site from 60 years of nuclear weapons production and stewardship. In addition, there is mixed low level waste and transuranic waste that is being treated and disposed of off-site at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico under a plan that is expected to take until 2010 to complete. Some 2,000 high activity drums account for about 60 percent of the risk of dispersible radioactivity.
U.S. Senator Pete Domenici, a New Mexico Republican, and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, a Democrat who served as energy secretary in the Clinton administration, jointly praised the agreement they termed "hard-fought."
Following months of stalemate that threatened to derail specific cleanup work at LANL, the agreement reached came after Domenici and Richardson worked together with the state and federal agencies to kick-start negotiations. Domenici is chairman of the Senate Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee, which has funding jurisdiction over DOE and its national laboratories.
"The state and DOE have now agreed to a plan that should bring about real results, which is specifically what Congress wants in place before releasing the funding," Domenici said. "The agreement will enable us to accomplish the cleanup in a shorter timeframe, almost 20 years earlier than originally projected."
"This cleanup order will protect New Mexicans for generations to come," Richardson said. "It is a tough plan that will ensure our resources, including our precious, limited water, will be cleaned up and protected."
Governor Richardson recognized U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman, who played a key role in helping to resolve this issue. "I want to recognize his public support and his behind-the-scenes work that helped get these talks on track. His constant efforts for the health and safety of New Mexicans were once again evident in the role h played here," Governor Richardson said.
"As chairman of the subcommittee that provided the funds for accelerated cleanup, I will work to ensure a timely release of the cleanup funds for Los Alamos so we can get to the task at hand," Domenici added. "I'm grateful to Governor Richardson and his administration for their cooperation to get this agreement. It is the result of good, solid negotiating and it will be good for New Mexico."
Domenici has kept in close contact with Richardson on the cleanup issue, and provided a copy of the legislation covering the use of additional federal funding for accelerated lab cleanup work. Domenici and his staff also intervened with DOE representatives to foster better relations between the two negotiating teams as the agreement was crafted.
In November 2002, the state attempted to compel action by DOE and sought a Correction Action Order seeking comprehensive LANL cleanup.
Within the FY2003 and FY2004 Energy and Water Appropriations bills, Domenici provided additional and new funding for accelerated cleanup at DOE labs and affected sites only if an agreement for this work had been reached between each state and DOE.
Richardson repeatedly emphasized the importance of this issue to LANL/DOE leadership in Washington and in New Mexico, including talks with lab director Pete Nanos.
Nanos said, "Resolution of the jurisdictional and legal disputes associated with the original order is very welcome news. We are eager to resume expedited cleanup of legacy wastes throughout the laboratory site just as soon as the impounded funds are released."
Los Alamos National Laboratory is operated by the University of California for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) of the U.S. Department of Energy and works in partnership with NNSA's Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories.
Los Alamos is charged with ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to defense, energy, environment, infrastructure, health and national security concerns.
-------- washington
Critics Say Government Is Rushing Cleanup of Southeast Washington Nuclear Site
Mon, Mar. 22, 2004
By Andy Dworkin,
The Oregonian, Portland, Ore. Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/business/national/8250171.htm
Mar. 21 - In the past year, the long saga of Hanford Nuclear Reservation has reached a dramatic turning point. There is unprecedented progress on cleaning the vastly polluted site, say regulators and environmentalists. But many add they have never been more worried that the U.S. Department of Energy will try to limit further cleanup, leaving Hanford significantly polluted for generations to come.
"The Department of Energy is articulating now where they want to go," said Greg deBruler, Hanford analyst for the Columbia Riverkeeper environmental group. "The Department of Energy wants to get out real fast."
The conflicting feelings on the former nuclear-processing site flow from two historic changes in the Energy Department's project to clean the 586-square mile location on the Columbia River in Southeast Washington.
In recent years, workers have finished several pressing, safety-related projects -- such as stabilizing potentially explosive waste tanks -- that have let them focus on long-term cleanup plans. At the same time, the Bush administration accelerated efforts to clean all U.S. nuclear-waste sites by emphasizing efficiency, such as paying contractors more for working quickly.
But critics say the government is also "accelerating" by lowering its standards, so it can leave sites sooner, with more pollution remaining.
"There are two sides to this coin. One side is tremendous on-the-ground progress," said Doug Riggs, coordinator of the Hanford Information Network advocacy group. "What I see today is the flip side of this coin, which is a rejection of public comment . . . and a top-down, we-know-best approach."
Hanford's leaders agree big changes are being made but deny that they are out to shortchange legal requirements for cleaning the site.
"What we're trying to do is look at a range of options," said Keith Klein, manager of the site's Richland Operations Office. But Klein said any choices will hew to state and federal environmental laws, and follow agreements with Washington state and federal environmental regulators.
Worry and pride in progress bubbled up at public "State of the Site" meetings Hanford officials held last week.
Recent accomplishments include stabilizing radioactive waste at the site's "Plutonium Finishing Plant," moving all spent nuclear fuel from riverfront basins and carting about half the polluted soil away from the river. Workers have channeled most of the liquid waste in leak-prone, single-shelled, underground tanks to safer double-shelled tanks. Construction crews are making progress on a complex of factories that will melt the liquid waste into glass, which can be stored more safely.
Such progress raises a series of questions for the future: How should empty liquid waste tanks be cleaned and disposed of? How far must the government go to clean every last bit of riverfront?
Klein and others use one phrase to define the problem: "How clean is clean?"
Many environmentalists want most of the site cleaned for "unrestricted use," meaning people could drink the water or live on the land, even if the cleanup takes decades.
But Klein says parts of Hanford may be so polluted that cleanup hits a point of diminishing returns, bringing much more cost and worker-safety risk than benefit. Some Energy Department officials question how much deep-buried groundwater or soil can reasonably be cleaned, for instance.
Instead, Hanford administrators say it may be wiser to clean defined parts of the site to lower standards, such as for industrial use.
At the same time, Energy officials want to explore faster and cheaper ways to finish cleanup, such as novel ways of treating liquid waste.
But advocates balk at many of those ideas, including proposals to:
--Designate some groundwater at Hanford as suffering "irreversible and irretrievable" pollution, freeing the government from some cleanup.
--Designate the 51-mile stretch of Columbia shorefront as a park for recreational use. That assumes people would use the land only about 56 hours a year, letting the government clean less than if it planned for "unrestricted" use.
--Figure out new ways to treat 60 percent of the liquid waste instead of sending it all through glass melters, like those under construction.
--Permanently close 40 underground waste tanks within several years, though only one tank is empty of waste now, and no one has defined how to treat and "close" tanks.
Such ideas worry Oregon and Washington officials, who are asking the Energy department to reconsider some recent proposals. Linda Hoffman, interim director of Washington's Department of Ecology, sent a letter asking top Energy Department leaders "to engage in thoughtful conversation" about their plans, which "bring to a head" debates on the site's long-term use.
Oregon officials worry that the Energy Department is too quickly moving to make irreversible decisions about such issues as Hanford's future land use.
"We think it's ludicrous to assume that you know what the future land use will be there for hundreds or thousands of years," said Ken Niles, assistant director for nuclear safety of the Oregon Department of Energy. "Rather than restrict the use of land in the future, we would rather see a better cleanup now."
Environmental advocates have sharper words for the Energy Department. Several say officials in Washington, D.C., are making decisions with less public opinion and scientific data than ever.
Paige Knight, president of the advocacy group Hanford Watch, said Hanford administrators recently decided, without promised public debate, to pursue an alternate technology for treating tank waste that hasn't been scientifically proved.
"They're trying to make decisions without the data," she said. "I'm wondering how much we're going to be left high and dry. . .I don't believe that these people sincerely have our best interests at heart."
Advocates say their fears are exacerbated by a federal proposal to ship tons of radioactive waste from other Energy Department sites to Hanford for treatment and, in some cases, storage. Moreover, the site's plans call for using unlined soil waste trenches into 2007, instead of moving entirely to lined trenches this year, as once discussed.
"The Department of Energy wants to get out of cleaning this," deBruler told dozens of people gathered at a Portland meeting last week. "I've been working on this 15 years, and now is the time for people to come together and say, 'No." "
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----
K Basins proposal not good enough
Monday, March 22nd, 2004
By Annette Cary,
Tri-City Herald staff writer
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/tch/local/story/4877685p-4813458c.html
A Department of Energy plan to start the long-delayed removal of radioactive sludge from the leak-prone K Basins this spring may sound good.
But the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board isn't buying the plan.
DOE implies that the work it plans to begin soon will fulfill its commitment to start the project. It's not the start at all, counters the board.
"The board considers that the startup of a process that applies only to a small fraction of the sludge -- and a smaller fraction of the hazard posed by the sludge -- would not satisfy the implementation plan commitment to begin sludge removal," wrote John Conway, the board chairman, in a letter to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. Congress created the board within the executive branch of the federal government to provide independent oversight of the nation's nuclear weapons complex.
DOE has a plan for the least contaminated -- but still dangerous -- sludge, which is in one subcompartment of the K East Basin. But it won't work for most of the highly radioactive sludge. No plan has been released and approved by regulators to remove it.
The commitment to a date to start removing sludge was to serve as an interim check that a process had been developed and systems put in place to handle all the sludge, according to the board.
The start of the project is 14 months behind the latest schedule. Regulators are requiring that most of it be removed in a little more than five months.
The basins were built in the early 1950s with a design life of 20 years for temporary storage of spent nuclear fuel. But some fuel has been stored in the indoor pools for nearly 30 years.
Much of the spent fuel was placed in the East Basin in open canisters exposed to the water. Some of the fuel has corroded, fallen apart and collected on the bottom of the basins to form a sludge that contains uranium, plutonium and other radioactive isotopes.
DOE considers the contaminated fuel, sludge and spent nuclear fuel to be one of Hanford's most urgent threats to human health and the environment.
But in a portion of the K East Basin, the North Load-Out Pit, the sludge is less contaminated.
DOE plans to start removing that sludge first, which accounts for about 12 percent of the sludge. There's also some similar sludge in the K West Basin, but together they account for just 20 percent of the waste.
"The North Load-Out Pit has emerged as DOE's first choice for removal because it poses the least hazard and is expected to be the easiest to handle and dispose," Conway wrote.
The cesium concentration in the pit is approximately an order of magnitude lower than the remainder of the K East Basin sludge, according to the board. The uranium concentration is approximately two orders of magnitude lower.
"Accordingly, the strategy being developed for the North Load-Out Pit is not expected to be applicable to the remaining sludge in the basins," Conway wrote.
Nick Ceto, EPA's Hanford project manager, cautioned that, "We continue to be very frustrated there is no clear pathway for all the sludge."
The safety board has asked DOE to provide a revised plan by April 30 that shows the plan for removing and disposing of each sludge type in both basins and disposing of any irradiated fuel and fuel fragments that may be found in the sludge. It's also asking for revised milestones for the completion of sludge removal from the basins, along with the interim steps needed to get there.
"The milestones should be realistic, resource-loaded and account for time to perform adequate hazards analysis (and other tasks)," the board said.
Fluor Hanford, the contractor doing the sludge removal at the K Basins, had hoped to start sludge removal from the North Load-Out Pit last week.
That was one deadline set by DOE in a series of steps Fluor needed to complete to reclaim up to $2 million of fees it failed to earn in 2003 because of delays in work to remove sludge from the K Basins.
Fluor still plans to start the work this spring, said Judy Connell, director of communications. An operational readiness review is scheduled for April. Then DOE must conduct an operational review, which is not yet scheduled.
According to a letter sent to the safety board in February, DOE was considering options for what to do with the most hazardous K East Basin sludge. It mentioned putting the sludge into containers until treatment options are evaluated.
It also talked about grouting a portion of the sludge in place as part of the basin demolition. The grouting option apparently since has been abandoned.
Not only is the sludge highly radioactive, it's also difficult to handle. It can't be picked up in a solid chunk. When touched, it dissipates in the water.
The sludge from the North Load-Out Pit will be removed and put in containers for treatment and packaging in a laboratory just north of Richland in the 300 Area of Hanford. The containers of the sludge likely will be sent to an underground storage site near Carlsbad, N.M.
DOE originally had agreed to a completion date of December 1999 for removal of all the sludge in the K East Basin, but that deadline slipped because of project management and engineering issues, including changes in technical approaches to the issue. The latest revised deadlines called for the start of sludge removal by the end of December 2002.
Removal of spent fuel from the basins is on schedule. About 80 percent of the fuel has been removed. It all should be out by the July deadline.
Now DOE needs to make a firm commitment to remove sludge on schedule and ensure those commitments become contractual obligations, according to the board.
"DOE is continuing to work with the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, and the office of the secretary has told us to address all of their concerns," said Andrea Harper, spokeswoman for DOE's Richland office.
-------- us politics
Memoir Criticizes Bush 9/11 Response
President Pushed Iraq Link, Aide Says
By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 22, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13607-2004Mar21?language=printer
On the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, according to a newly published memoir, President Bush wandered alone around the Situation Room in a White House emptied by the previous day's calamitous events.
Spotting Richard A. Clarke, his counterterrorism coordinator, Bush pulled him and a small group of aides into the dark paneled room.
"Go back over everything, everything," Bush said, according to Clarke's account. "See if Saddam did this."
"But Mr. President, al Qaeda did this," Clarke replied.
"I know, I know, but . . . see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred."
Reminded that the CIA, FBI and White House staffs had sought and found no such link before, Clarke said, Bush spoke "testily." As he left the room, Bush said a third time, "Look into Iraq, Saddam."
For Clarke, then in his 10th year as a top White House official, that day marked the transition from neglect to folly in the Bush administration's stewardship of war with Islamic extremists. His account -- in "Against All Enemies," which reaches bookstores today, and in interviews accompanying publication -- is the first detailed portrait of the Bush administration's wartime performance by a major participant. Acknowledged by foes and friends as a leading figure among career national security officials, Clarke served more than two years in the Bush White House after holding senior posts under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He resigned 13 months ago yesterday.
Although expressing points of disagreement with all four presidents, Clarke reserves by far his strongest language for George W. Bush. The president, he said, "failed to act prior to September 11 on the threat from al Qaeda despite repeated warnings and then harvested a political windfall for taking obvious yet insufficient steps after the attacks." The rapid shift of focus to Saddam Hussein, Clarke writes, "launched an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq that strengthened the fundamentalist, radical Islamic terrorist movement worldwide."
Among the motives for the war, Clarke argues, were the politics of the 2002 midterm election. "The crisis was manufactured, and Bush political adviser Karl Rove was telling Republicans to 'run on the war,' " Clarke writes.
Clarke describes his book, in the preface, as "factual, not polemical," and he said in an interview that he was a registered Republican in the 2000 election. But the book arrives amid a general election campaign in which Bush asks to be judged as a wartime president, and Clarke has thrust himself loudly among the critics. Publication also coincides with politically sensitive public testimony this week by Clinton and Bush administration officials -- including Clarke -- before an independent commission investigating the events of Sept. 11.
"I'm sure I'll be criticized for lots of things, and I'm sure they'll launch their dogs on me," Clarke told CBS's "60 Minutes" in an interview broadcast last night. "But frankly I find it outrageous that the president is running for reelection on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism."
On the same broadcast, deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley said, "We cannot find evidence that this conversation between Mr. Clarke and the president ever occurred." In interviews for this story, two people who were present confirmed Clarke's account. They said national security adviser Condoleezza Rice witnessed the exchange.
Rice, in an opinion article published opposite The Washington Post editorial page today, writes: "It would have been irresponsible not to ask a question about all possible links, including to Iraq -- a nation that had supported terrorism and had tried to kill a former president. Once advised that there was no evidence that Iraq was responsible for Sept. 11, the president told his National Security Council on Sept. 17 that Iraq was not on the agenda and that the initial U.S. response to Sept. 11 would be to target al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan."
White House and Pentagon officials who spoke only on the condition of anonymity described Clarke's public remarks as self-serving and politically motivated.
Like former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill, who spoke out in January, Clarke said some of Bush's leading advisers arrived in office determined to make war on Iraq. Nearly all of them, he said, believed Clinton had been "overly obsessed with al Qaeda."
During Bush's first week in office, Clarke asked urgently for a Cabinet-level meeting on al Qaeda. He did not get it -- or permission to brief the president directly on the threat -- for nearly eight months. When deputies to the Cabinet officials took up the subject in April, Clarke writes, the meeting "did not go well."
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, Clarke wrote, scowled and asked, "why we are beginning by talking about this one man, bin Laden." When Clarke told him no foe but al Qaeda "poses an immediate and serious threat to the United States," Wolfowitz is said to have replied that Iraqi terrorism posed "at least as much" of a danger. FBI and CIA representatives backed Clarke in saying they had no such evidence.
"I could hardly believe," Clarke writes, that Wolfowitz pressed the "totally discredited" theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, "a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue."
Wolfowitz, in a telephone interview last night, cited statements by CIA Director George J. Tenet and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell affirming that Iraq once trained al Qaeda operatives in bomb making and document forgery.
"Given what George Tenet and Colin Powell have said publicly about Iraqi links to al Qaeda, I just find it hard to understand how Dick Clarke can be so dismissive of the possibility that there were links between them," Wolfowitz said.
Like Tenet, Clarke was a Clinton holdover who faced initial skepticism from Bush loyalists. But Rice asked him to keep the counterterrorism portfolio and discouraged him from leaving in February 2003.
In the first minutes after hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, Rice placed Clarke in her chair in the Situation Room and asked him to direct the government's crisis response. The next day, Clarke returned to find the subject changed to Iraq.
"I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that [Defense Secretary Donald H.] Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq," he writes.
In discussions of military strikes, "Secretary Rumsfeld complained that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan" -- where al Qaeda was based under protection of the Taliban -- "and that we should consider bombing Iraq."
Clarke's disputes with the White House are notable in part because his muscular national security views allied him often over the years with most of the leading figures advising Bush on terrorism and Iraq. As an assistant secretary of state in 1991, Clarke worked closely with Wolfowitz and then-Defense Secretary Richard B. Cheney to marshal the 32-nation coalition that expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Clarke sided with Wolfowitz -- against Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- in a losing argument to extend that war long enough to destroy Iraq's Republican Guard. Later, Clarke was principal author of the hawkish U.S. plan to rid Iraq of its nonconventional weapons under threat of further military force.
In his experience, Clarke writes, Bush's description by critics as "a dumb, lazy rich kid" is "somewhat off the mark." Bush has "a results-oriented mind, but he looked for the simple solution, the bumper sticker description of the problem."
"Any leader whom one can imagine as president on September 11 would have declared a 'war on terrorism' and would have ended the Afghan sanctuary [for al Qaeda] by invading," Clarke writes. "What was unique about George Bush's reaction" was the additional choice to invade "not a country that had been engaging in anti-U.S. terrorism but one that had not been, Iraq." In so doing, he estranged allies, enraged potential friends in the Arab and Islamic worlds, and produced "more terrorists than we jail or shoot."
"It was as if Osama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush, chanting 'invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq,' " Clarke writes.
----
Treasury: O'Neill Got Classified Papers
Mon Mar 22, 2004
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER,
AP Economics Writer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040322/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/o_neill_documents
WASHINGTON - Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who painted an unflattering portrait of President Bush in a book in January, received 140 government documents for the book that should not have been released after he left office, the Treasury Department's inspector general says.
The report Monday from Jeffrey Rush Jr. said that no federal laws had been violated in the release of the documents but that Treasury needed to improve the way it handled sensitive documents.
In response to a Freedom of Information Act request by The Associated Press and other news media, Rush's office released several hundred pages covering its investigation of how O'Neill received some 19,000 government documents that were used to write a book highly critical of President Bush.
The new report found that 140 of those documents had not been marked classified even though they contained national security or sensitive but unclassified information.
"Had these 140 documents been properly marked as classified, the documents would not have been entered into Treasury's unclassified computer system and O'Neill would not have received them," the report said.
Reacting to the report, Treasury Department spokesman Rob Nichols said that O'Neill's successor, John Snow, had already begun a major overhaul to improve Treasury's document-handling procedures.
"The issue is extremely important to the department as well as to the secretary," Nichols said. "We have already begun to take steps to train the appropriate personnel in the handling of classified information."
Treasury began its investigation in January after CBS's "60 Minutes" showed a document marked "secret" during an interview in which O'Neill promoted the new book, "The Price of Loyalty."
O'Neill, who was fired in December 2002 when Bush decided to shake up his economic team, put in a request after leaving office for all the documents that had crossed his desk that he was entitled to have. He turned the 19,000 documents he received over to former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, the man O'Neill had selected to tell the story of his two years in the Bush administration.
The book depicted Bush as a disengaged president who oversaw a White House in which major decisions were made by Bush's political team and Vice President Dick Cheney.
One of O'Neill's major accusations was that from its earliest days in office, the Bush administration was looking for ways to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, a contention that has also surfaced in another book by a former insider, Richard Clarke, who served as Bush's former counterterrorism coordinator.
Nichols said he could not provide any further characterization of the 140 documents that the inspector general said had been misclassified or say whether there was concern that the documents were now out of government control.
Author Suskind, through his attorney, declined to be interviewed for Treasury's investigation, because such an interview would be "inconsistent with his responsibilities as a journalist," the report said.
Suskind has said in the past that one of the major reasons O'Neill wanted to do a book on his two years in the Bush administration was his desire to let the public known as much as possible about what goes into government decision making.
In addition to the book, Suskind has set up a Web page so that the public can review selected documents used in the book. Suskind said in a previous interview that none of the documents revealed in the book or posted on the Web site contained classified material.
O'Neill, who was interviewed for the report, said he received the documents he had requested on computer discs and turned them over to Suskind without reviewing them because he believed the discs contained only unclassified material.
On the Net:
Treasury Department: http://www.ustreas.gov
O'Neill book: http://thepriceofloyalty.ronsuskind.com
----
POLITICAL POINTS
Debate Grows Over Bush's Handling of Terror Threat
March 22, 2004
New York Times
By CARL HULSE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/22/politics/trail/22TRAIL-CLARKE.html?hp
The accusations by Richard A. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism specialist, that the Bush administration failed to take the threat of Al Qaeda seriously before Sept. 11 overtook other campaign developments on Sunday and promised to reverberate this week when the Sept. 11 commission conducts a public hearing.
Administration officials moved quickly to respond to the harsh criticism by Mr. Clarke and his account of how top White House advisers were fixated on Iraq. They issued a detailed rebuttal that said Mr. Bush had "specifically recognized the threat posed by Al Qaeda."
But Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida, who is a former chairman of the Intelligence Committee, barely let Mr. Clarke's appearance on CBS's "60 Minutes" end before he issued a scathing statement about the administration's record on terror.
"The facts are that within six months of the first bombs falling on Afghanistan, this administration was diverting military and intelligence resources to its planned war in Iraq, which allowed Al Qaeda to regenerate," said Mr. Graham, who was one of the first lawmakers to label the war with Iraq a distraction from the fight against terror. "As the people of Indonesia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and most recently Spain have learned painfully well, this president failed to execute the real war on terrorism."
Mr. Clarke's new book was also a topic on the Sunday talk shows as lawmakers and analysts tried to interpret the implications of such critical views coming from a White House insider with access to the highest levels of the administration.
"I am much more concerned about the safety of my granddaughter in school here in Washington because of Al Qaeda than I am with 10 Saddam Husseins," Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said on ABC. "And we took our eye off the ball because of a preoccupation with Iraq."
But his Democratic colleague, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, said on Fox that he saw "no basis" for the accusation that the administration was too focused on Iraq in the wake of Sept. 11. "I think we've got to be careful to speak facts and not rhetoric and not to go about what happened in the past so totally that we divide ourselves," he said.
The focus on Mr. Clarke's account of what he described as the president's failure on terrorism could not be welcome at the Bush campaign headquarters, where strategists had been celebrating what they saw as new success with their attacks on Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate.
A furor over the president's handling of terrorism threatened to shift attention from the Bush campaign's efforts to keep Mr. Kerry on the defensive over tax and spending policy.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
U.S. trains African troops to fight terrorism
March 22, 2004
By Edward Harris
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040321-110607-5767r.htm
TIMBUKTU, Mali - Green Berets ran mock ambushes last week in the sand dunes of central Mali, where Malian troops fired blanks at a pretend enemy - and shouted "bang, bang," when the blanks ran out.
The exercise was part of a months-long American effort to train troops in Mali and three other impoverished West African nations where Islamist militants linked to al Qaeda are suspected to have operated.
The foes "could be anyone: bandits, smugglers, terrorists," said one U.S. special operations soldier, part of a U.S. force that began arriving in Mali in November.
The 200 American soldiers visited Mali under the State Department's Pan-Sahel Initiative, a $7 million program to help soldiers in Mali, Niger, Chad and Mauritania boost their battle skills amid the worldwide fight against terrorism.
The Sahel is a dry, dusty region crisscrossed by ancient Arab trade routes just south of the Sahara Desert. The U.S. military thinks the open deserts and weak, impoverished governments invite refuge for terrorists, and U.S. forces have stepped up activity in the region as a result.
U.S. officials also say many African armies are too small and ill-equipped to patrol the vast territories they nominally control.
A Green Beret, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the program aimed to boost the ability of the Malian military to secure the country's borders against lawlessness and insurgents.
Malian Lt. Col. Younoussa Maiga agreed. "The Americans are helping us reinforce what we already have," he said.
As camels loped by, scores of Malian troops dove into the scorching sand from U.S.-donated vehicles, firing blanks at pretend enemies. A small group of Green Berets looked on and gave advice.
"We've trained them to such a degree that we only have to make small corrections," said one Green Beret. "But even these small things can make a difference when it's live."
Top U.S. military officials say the threat from terrorists in Africa is growing.
Last year, more than a dozen European tourists kidnapped in Algeria were released in Mali by the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, an Algerian insurgency the United States says has pledged fealty to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
-------- asia
Nepal Strife Kills Hundreds
March 22, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/22/international/asia/22NEPA.html
KATMANDU, Nepal, March 21 - Nepalese government forces and Maoist rebels have fought one of their fiercest battles since the collapse of a cease-fire more than seven months ago, officials said Sunday. At least 18 police officers and soldiers were killed, while the army said it had killed hundreds of insurgents.
Hundreds of rebels entered Beni, 168 miles west of Katmandu, the capital, around midnight and battled security forces for 12 hours before reinforcements chased them away. The rebels attacked the Beni jail, bombed the district administration office and ignited the police station.
-------- balkans
3,600 displaced by Kosovo violence: UN
Monday, March 22, 2004
Pakistan Daily Times
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_21-3-2004_pg7_53
PRISTINA: At least 3,600 Serbs and other non-Albanians have been forced to flee violence from ethnic Albanian groups in the province of Kosovo over the past days, a UN official said on Saturday.
The vast majority of the displaced people are Serbs, but there are also gypsies and people from the Ashkali minority of Indian descent, said Peggy Hicks, who heads the UN's office for people returning to Kosovo. She said that 1,100 of the people have taken refuge in camps run by the NATO multinational force, known as KFOR, while others have claimed sanctuary in Serb areas that have so far not been affected by the violence.
A leading United Nations administrator here warned that the latest anti-Serb violence in the province of Kosovo was an attempt at ethnic cleansing which would not succeed.
David Mitchels, Regional Administrator for the UN administration UNMIK in the divided Serbian province, was commenting on latest strife between the ethnic Albanian majority and the Serb minority which has caused 28 deaths and more than 600 injured. "We are talking about an attempt at ethnic cleansing, but it will not succeed," Mitchels, administrator for the north of the province, told journalists here.
Kosovo's ethnic-Albanian president, Ibrahim Rugova, declared a day of mourning for Monday after violent clashes between Serbs and Albanians left at least 28 dead and over 600 injured. -Agencies
-------- business
federal contracts
States News Service
Monday, March 22, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13808-2004Mar21?language=printer
Anteon International Corp. of Fairfax won a $460 million contract from the Naval Air Systems Command for program management and technical support services.
EG&G Services of Gaithersburg won a $163.87 million contract from the Naval Surface Warfare Center for technical and engineering support.
Anteon International Corp. of Fairfax won a $65.3 million contract from the Naval Sea Systems Command to support team submarine corporate operations.
AT&T Corp. of Columbia won a $61.29 million contract from Defense Information Technology Contracting Organization for the Government Emergency Telecommunications Service.
Coherent Systems International Corp. of Lexington Park, Md., won a $49.9 million contract from the Naval Surface Warfare Center for research and development in the professional, technical and management efforts related to time-critical targeting technologies.
Bell-Boeing Joint Program of Patuxent River, Md., won a $49.75 million contract from the Naval Air Systems Command for modification of the V-22 aircraft for flight testing.
Sysco of Suffolk won a $45 million contract from the Defense Supply Center for full-line food distribution services.
Radian Inc. of Alexandria won a $37.1 million contract from the Air Armament Center for various hardware components of the Deployable Power Generator Distribution System.
Coherent Systems Joint Venture LLC of Lexington Park, Md., won a $30.24 million contract from the Naval Air Systems Command's Aircraft Division for technical and scientific support for research, development and other services.
DCS Corp. of Alexandria won a $28.86 million contract from the Naval Air Systems Command's Aircraft Division for technical and scientific support for research, development and other services.
ASRC Airfield & Range Services Inc. of Greenbelt won a $19 million contract from the Army's Northern Region Contracting Center for management, planning, execution, communication, interpreter/translation, integration, enrollment and training to teach basic security, patrolling and weaponry skills to high- and mid-level officers and facility and patrol guards in Baghdad, Iraq.
Westat Inc. of Rockville won a $15.11 million contract from the Environmental Protection Agency for technical support of a prospective cohort study on health effects of microbial pathogens in recreational waters.
America's Phenix of Washington won a $12 million contract from the Naval Air Warfare Center's Aircraft Division for small business innovative research on erosion resistant coating for multiple engine lines.
Johns Hopkins University of Laurel won a $9.9 million contract from the Wright-Patterson Air Force Research Laboratory for the application of guided missile systems scientific and engineering research and development.
LB&B Associates Inc. of Columbia won an $8.24 million contract from the Defense Energy Support Center for refueling services for the Navy.
Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. of McLean won an $8.19 million contract from the Naval Air Warfare Center's Aircraft Division for technical and engineering services in support of the Ship and Shore Based Electronic Systems Division.
Radian Inc. of Alexandria won a $7.5 million contract from the Army's Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command for long lead items for crew protection kits for medium tactical vehicles.
AAI Engineering Support Inc. of Hunt Valley won a contract valued at up to $7.5 million from the General Services Administration's Federal Supply Service for logistics.
DDL OMNI Engineering LLC of McLean won a contract valued at up to $6.18 million contract from the General Services Administration's Federal Supply Service for logistics.
McNeil Technologies Inc. of Springfield won a contract valued at up to $6 million from the Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration for communications, records management and administrative services.
These contracts were awarded by the federal government to companies in Maryland, Virginia and the District. For more information, call States News Service at 202-628-3100, ext. 266.
-------- chemical weapons
Inspectors Confirm Libya Chemical Arms Declaration
Mon Mar 22, 2004
(Reuters)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/nm/20040322/wl_nm/libya_weapons_dc
AMSTERDAM - International inspectors have verified Libya's declared stockpile of chemical weapons, including 23 tons of deadly mustard gas, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said Monday.
Libya joined the arms control body based in The Hague last month and started destroying its chemical weapons in a new step toward mending ties with the West, after agreeing to pay damages for the 1988 Pan Am plane bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland.
Two teams of inspectors completed an initial inspection last Friday and have confirmed a declaration made by Libya on March 5 of its chemical weapons, the OPCW said in a statement.
"Inspectors have inventoried all declared chemical weapons and the related equipment and verified that the chemical weapons and equipment have been secured," the OPCW said.
Libya, which announced in December it would abandon any efforts to acquire nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, had reported stockpiles of about 23 tons of mustard gas and precursors for the production of sarin and other nerve gas.
The inspectors also verified that a production facility for chemical weapons was deactivated, the OPCW said.
OPCW Director-General Rogelio Pfirter praised Libya's cooperation: "Libya has and, we expect, will contribute significantly to our common mission of entirely eliminating these horrific weapons."
The OPCW, which enforces a global chemical weapons ban with 160 signatories, has already monitored Libya's destruction of more than 3,300 bomb casings designed to carry chemical agents. Under the treaty it signed last month, Libya is committed to destroying all its chemical weapons and the capacity to produce them by April 29, 2007.
U.S. officials said last week that Libya would send a delegation to Washington soon to lay the groundwork for Tripoli reestablishing a diplomatic presence there. Washington has also allowed U.S. firms to start returning to the oil-rich nation.
-------- china
Recount Call Grows In Taiwan
Loser in Election Seeks U.S. Support
By Philip P. Pan and David E. Hoffman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 22, 2004; Page A09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13608-2004Mar21.html
TAIPEI, Taiwan, March 22 -- Thousands of protesters blocked traffic outside Taiwan's presidential office Sunday and refused police orders to disperse as Lien Chan, the narrow loser in Saturday's presidential balloting, pressed his demand for a recount and appealed for international help in resolving the disputed election.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Lien urged Taiwan's closest ally, the United States, to express concern about the fairness of the election, which he lost by a margin of two-tenths of a percentage point. He also asked the United States to send forensic specialists to examine unsubstantiated allegations by his supporters that President Chen Shui-bian staged an attempt on his own life Friday to win the sympathy of voters.
"Your country should stand for clean elections. This is important," said Lien, 67, the chairman of the Nationalist Party. "We see [Saturday's vote] as a very unfair election. You should be concerned with this."
The Bush administration boosted Lien's chances in the race by sharply criticizing Chen during the campaign for proposing a referendum that had angered the Chinese government. But a State Department spokesman said in a statement that the United States expected both candidates and their supporters to "use the established legal mechanisms to resolve any questions about the election results."
Lien approved of the Taiwanese High Court's decision Sunday to seize and seal all ballot boxes across the island, and he said he would accept the court's ruling on his request for a recount. "We don't trust the administration," he said, "but we have to trust our courts."
A senior Nationalist Party official, Ting Shou-chung, said about 300 lawyers are gathering evidence of election fraud to support the lawsuit the party filed Saturday. He estimated the party had received reports of irregularities at about a quarter of Taiwan's 13,000 polling places. The court could begin hearing the case Monday.
Chen's narrow victory followed a bitterly fought campaign and an apparent assassination attempt in which he suffered a minor gunshot wound to his abdomen and his vice president, Annette Lu, was hit in the knee. Police said Sunday they still had no suspects in the shooting, which took place as Chen and Lu waved at crowds of supporters in the southern city of Tainan while campaigning in an open sport-utility vehicle.
On the night of the attack, Lien condemned the shooting and wished Chen a speedy recovery. But he expressed unspecified doubts about the incident the next night, after he lost the election, and said public sympathy generated by the shooting allowed Chen to pull ahead of him in the final hours of an extremely tight race.
Asked to elaborate during a 40-minute interview in Nationalist Party headquarters, Lien suggested the president might have staged the attack. "I am not saying it on my own behalf, but I think a lot of people are suspicious," he said, adding later that such suspicions were reasonable. He said he wanted to invite internationally known forensic and medical specialists to Taiwan to investigate.
Several opposition politicians also have suggested Chen staged the shooting. The speculation helped fuel a night of angry demonstrations by Lien's supporters in cities across Taiwan after the election results were announced. The protests subsided Sunday, but as many as 10,000 Lien supporters rallied in front of the presidential office and thousands remained early Monday.
Chen refrained from making any appearances or statements Sunday. His aides said he wanted to avoid provoking the protesters and maintain calm among his own supporters. But to help end speculation about the shooting, his office issued a set of photos showing him lying on a surgical table as doctors cleaned and treated his gunshot wound.
Su Tseng-chang, the governor of Taipei county and Chen's national campaign chief, said the allegations of a staged shooting "have not only angered us, but they have angered many people in Taiwan. We feel when people are hurt, we should express concern and care for the victims and their families, not doubt the fact they were hurt."
Bi-khim Hsiao, a legislator and spokeswoman for Chen's Democratic Progressive Party, described Lien's remarks about the shooting as "highly inappropriate" given the current volatility of Taiwanese society. She said Chen's supporters were "boiling under a cover" about the accusations.
She also said there was no need for the United States to send specialists to investigate whether Chen had been shot. "However, if there are international specialists who would be willing to cooperate with our very capable local investigators and provide any leads on the case, I don't think anyone would reject that," she said. "At the same time, I want to urge them to have more confidence in our local investigators."
Hsiao dismissed Lien's suggestion that the United States and other countries should express concern about the fairness of the election, noting that many foreign observers were present for Saturday's vote and none has reported any election fraud.
But thousands of demonstrators blasted horns, waved flags and carried signs with messages such as, "Check the ballots," "Nullify the election" and "Where is my vote?" Riot police equipped with water cannons set up metal barriers and surrounded the presidential office but took no action to clear the crowd after the protesters ignored a police order to leave by 10 p.m. Sunday.
Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou, Lien's campaign manager, visited the rally several times Sunday to urge the crowd to go home and prepare for school and work. Lien said he also urged the demonstrators to leave, but he suggested the chief responsibility for the protests lay with Chen's government and called on it to order an immediate recount and a special inquiry into the assassination attempt.
"I hope that social stability will be maintained. In order to achieve that goal, it is necessary for the government to respond quickly. Do the things that need to be done," Lien said. "If you try to avoid it, it will get worse. And then I don't know what will happen."
--------
Politicians in Taiwan Quarreling Over Recount
March 22, 2004
By KEITH BRADSHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/22/international/asia/22TAIW.html
TAIPEI, Taiwan, Monday, March 22 - Leaders of Taiwan's opposition Nationalist Party on Sunday demanded a court-supervised recount and an investigation into the presidential election they lost a day earlier and threatened to keep supporters in the streets until their demands were met.
But the administration of President Chen Shui-bian rebuffed the demand for an investigation and said any decision on a recount would have to work its way through the judicial system. Taiwan's High Court said Monday that a three-member panel of judges would hear the dispute but that a decision might take months; the presidential inauguration is scheduled for May 20.
In a sign of public anxiety, Taiwan's stock market fell nearly 7 percent Monday morning and would have fallen even further if not for rules preventing individual stocks from falling more than 7 percent in a trading session.
Lien Chan, the Nationalist candidate who lost the election to President Chen by less than a quarter of a percentage point of the vote, said in an interview on Sunday evening that he wanted an immediate recount. He also called for an investigation by international medical and ballistics experts into the unusual shooting incident in which President Chen was wounded Friday afternoon, touching off a national surge of sympathy.
But Mr. Lien went on to say that he would respect whatever decision might be reached by this island's judiciary system. He added that he hoped and expected that the political dispute would not draw in Taiwan's military, which is still led mainly by generals with Nationalist leanings who made their careers during four decades of martial law up to 1987.
With President Chen having recently replaced Taiwan's top judges, Mr. Lien's stance showed a willingness to accept democratic values at the possible cost of losing the chance to overturn the election result.
On Sunday night, a government spokesman, Lin Chia-lung, rejected Mr. Lien's demands that a recount be carried out immediately and that an investigative task force be set up. Mr. Lin said that it was enough that Taiwan's High Court had ordered early Sunday that all ballot boxes be sealed in case they were needed later, and added that it would be for the judicial system to decide when and whether to order a recount.
As many as 10,000 of Mr. Lien's supporters showed up for a peaceful protest in front of the Presidential Office building on Sunday afternoon, many of them middle-aged and a few of them elderly. At midday Monday, fewer than 2,000 were left.
Mr. Lien said the United States, which has not yet recognized President Chen as the winner, should be concerned about events in Taiwan because they could affect the island's political stability and make it more susceptible to pressure from Beijing, which regards Taiwan as part of China and has criticized Mr. Chen as promoting a separatist agenda. Mr. Lien said, "If the process of democratization here in Taiwan is being undermined or corrupted, the international community, including the United States, should be concerned."
His willingness to accept a court decision is important because late last year President Chen replaced all 15 members of the Council of Grand Justices, Taiwan's highest court, when the terms of the previous justices expired.
President Chen won by fewer than 30,000 votes. Mr. Lien complained that the president had put the military and the police on alert late Friday after the incident in which the skin of the president's abdomen was torn by what Mr. Chen's aides described as a bullet that ended up between his skin and his clothing.
Mr. Lien estimated that the nationwide alert prevented 200,000 military and police personnel from voting on Saturday, and said that the military and police usually vote for the Nationalists. But the Defense Ministry told a legislative committee on Monday that while security forces had been put on a higher alert, that did not involve any extra personnel and so did not affect voting.
Of 13.3 million votes cast, about 337,000 were declared invalid. That was nearly three times as many as in the previous presidential election, an increase that Mr. Lien cited as suspicious.
But before the election, a liberal group had called on voters to void their ballots to protest a lack of attention to the poor during the campaign. New, more stringent rules also took effect this year for testing the validity of ballots.
President Chen trailed in most polls before Friday, but appeared to gain a surge of sympathy after he received his wound. The injury occurred as Mr. Chen was riding in a motorcade through his hometown, Tainan, in southern Taiwan.
By midday Monday, no arrests had been announced.
--------
NEWS ANALYSIS
Election Fallout: Mounting Tension
March 22, 2004
By JOSEPH KAHN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/22/international/asia/22ASSE.html
TAIPEI, Taiwan, March 21 - President Chen Shui-bian's hair-breadth victory in a disputed election seems likely to deepen political and ethnic tensions among the Taiwanese people, political experts say, and may increase the chances of a future confrontation with mainland China.
Leading a campaign that emphasized Taiwan's separateness from mainland China, he won the election on Saturday by fewer than 30,000 votes of more than 13 million cast, defeating Lien Chan, who advocated easing tensions with Beijing. The narrow win faces a legal challenge from the opposition and at least raised the possibility that the election could be overturned in court.
But assuming, as many experts here do, that Mr. Chen will stay in office, the close election puts him deeply in debt to his most hard-line political allies. A vocal coalition of supporters backed him on the expectation that he will achieve formal independence for the island within four years, and he will need their support to muster majorities in the legislature.
Mr. Chen is also likely to rely heavily on the United States to make sure that China does not use military force to topple him from power. Though Washington recognizes China's claim of sovereignty over Taiwan, it has also vowed to defend the island against a Chinese attack.
Mr. Chen, who suffered a gunshot wound on the eve of an election in what police called an attempted assassination, has spoken in almost messianic terms about his mission for a second term. In what might be interpreted as defiance to his would-be assassin and to China, Mr. Chen declared on Saturday that, "No matter what direction the bullets come from, A-bian will not be defeated." He often refers to himself by his nickname, A-bian.
"One thing is for sure about Chen Shui-bian: He is determined to be the founding father of a new nation by 2008," said Yan Xuetong, a prominent Chinese foreign policy expert at Qinghua University in Beijing. "The question for China is where it will draw the line, and how it will act to stop him."
Mr. Yan said it was a small consolation to China that two referendum questions on relations with the mainland that were held along with the presidential poll did not achieve the required voter participation to be considered valid, despite Mr. Chen's strong support. But he said he doubted that Mr. Chen would stop putting forward referendums on sensitive topics and may even make them a regular feature of Taiwanese politics.
"I believe he will keep the referendums coming, one after the other, until he has achieved independence," Mr. Yan said.
Mr. Chen sometimes promised during the campaign to take a softer approach to managing mainland relations and played down promises to draft a new constitution for the island. "Let us together open the door to peaceful and stable cross-Strait dialogue and negotiations," he said in his victory speech on Saturday night.
Even if he does intend to move Taiwan toward formal independence, he will face important constraints. One is the fact that his Democratic Progressive Party does not control a majority of parliamentary seats. Another is that President Bush has made clear that he will not support any steps by Mr. Chen to change the status quo in cross-Strait relations.
A third could be that the still powerful Nationalist Party, which had been given a slight edge in the election by pollsters until the attack on Mr. Chen, now will work even harder to thwart his agenda.
But analysts noted that the dominant campaign theme of Mr. Chen and his allies was that they are the best promoters of Taiwan's national identity. They sometimes disparaged rivals as representing the interests of Beijing, drawing sharp ethnic lines between Chinese mainlanders who arrived when Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists fled to Taiwan in 1949 and those who consider themselves native Taiwanese.
Mr. Chen's re-election, however narrow, showed that he had increased his share of the vote to 50.11 percent from 39 percent in 2000, when he won his first term by a plurality.
"This election was really the point of no return for Taiwanese identity," said Philip Yang, a political expert at nonpartisan Taiwan Security Research. "It gives Chen a mandate on that question."
That identity involves promoting the island's main local language, culture and education that distinguish Taiwan from the mainland. It elicits visceral support from many Taiwanese who were suppressed by the Nationalists after 1949, including Mr. Chen, while alarming some descendants of mainlanders who consider themselves Chinese.
What worries the United States and China is the grand target of the Taiwan identity movement: the name of the nation itself. It is now officially called the Republic of China, which allows China to claim it is still part of the motherland.
But some hard-line Taiwanese, including former President Lee Teng-hui, Mr. Chen's strategic ally in the election, are insisting on renaming the island the Republic of Taiwan and severing any remaining ties to China.
Mr. Yang of Taiwan Security Research said he expects Mr. Chen to focus first on winning a parliamentary majority in elections in December. Then he might begin revising Taiwan's constitution, including, perhaps, the island's official name. Many expect Mr. Chen to put forward a draft of a new constitution in 2006 and to work for final passage in 2008, his final year in office.
"My fear is that after this election China may conclude that Taiwan is slipping away," Mr. Yang said. "They will have to stop it, and they will not make the mistake of being a paper tiger."
-------- europe
Britain, France Condemn Killing
March 22, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/22/international/middleeast/22WIRE-REAX.html
BRUSSELS, March 22 -- Britain and France condemned Israel's killing of Palestinian Hamas movement leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin on Monday and said it would only fuel violence.
European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana also condemned what he called the extra-judicial killing as "very, very bad news for the peace process."
But Germany avoided condemnation of the helicopter rocket attack on the wheelchair-bound Muslim cleric as he left a mosque in the Gaza Strip. Berlin urged all sides to show restraint.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told reporters on arrival at a regular EU foreign ministers' meeting that Israel had a right to defend itself against terrorism but had to act within international law.
"It is not entitled to go for this kind of unlawful killing, and we therefore condemn it," he said. "It's unacceptable, it's unjustified, and it's very unlikely to achieve its objective."
French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said: "France condemns the action against Sheikh Yassin. At a time when it is important to mobilize for the relaunch of the peace process, such acts can only fuel the cycle of violence."
Before leaving Berlin for the EU session, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said all sides should contribute to avoiding further escalation.
Other EU ministers voiced fears that retaliation by Hamas supporters could inflame the Middle East and spread to Europe.
"I'm afraid that it may have very, very negative consequences not only in terms of Israeli-Palestinian conflict but I'm afraid that the threat of terrorist attacks also on other countries, including European (ones), is growing," Polish Foreign Minister Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz told a press breakfast.
"I really fear that we will see new violence," Luxembourg's Lydie Polfer told reporters.
Yassin was spiritual leader of the Hamas Islamic militant group, which has vowed to destroy Israel.
"I understand that Israel defends its own country. However the picture of a wheelchair-bound person who was killed with a rocket is probably not the best way of promoting Israeli security," Cimoszewicz said.
"Of course we are against assassinations like this. This is not the way ahead. There's only one way ahead, and that is political," said Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller.
-------- iraq
Iraqi Militias Near Accord To Disband
Move Would Aid U.S. Handover
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Robin Wright
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 22, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13338-2004Mar21?language=printer
IRBIL, Iraq -- Leaders of Iraq's two largest militias have provisionally agreed to dissolve their forces, according to senior U.S. and Iraqi officials. The move is a major boost to a U.S. campaign to prevent civil war by eliminating armed groups before sovereignty is handed over to an interim Iraqi government on June 30, the officials said.
Members of the two forces -- the Shiite Muslim Badr Organization and the Kurdish pesh merga -- will be offered a chance to work in Iraq's new security services or claim substantial retirement benefits as incentives to disarm and disband. Members of smaller militias will also be allowed to apply for positions with the new security services, but those that choose not to disband will be confronted and disarmed, by force if necessary, senior U.S. officials said.
The occupation authority is still negotiating with Kurdish and Shiite leaders, who want more extensive guarantees than they have been offered. But U.S., Kurdish and Shiite officials said they had secured an agreement in principle and likely will announce a formal deal within the next few weeks.
"We believe that all militia members should be part of one national army and police force," said Hamid Bayati, a top official of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Shiite political party that controls the Badr Organization, which is estimated to have at least 10,000 members.
Jalal Talabani, one of Iraq's two top Kurdish leaders, said in an interview that Kurdish officials have "an agreement with the coalition to find an honorable solution for the pesh merga."
The demobilization effort would effectively dismantle groups that have been allied with the United States for years in the fight to topple former president Saddam Hussein. The 50,000-member pesh merga, which defended an autonomous swath of Kurdish-dominated northern Iraq from Hussein's army for 12 years, helped U.S. troops capture several cities during last year's war. The Badr Organization, formerly known as the Badr Brigades, conducted attacks in southern Iraq from bases in neighboring Iran for years with the tacit support of the U.S. government.
Now, however, senior American officials in Iraq say breaking up armed groups is essential to Iraq's democratic transition and that demobilization of the Kurdish and Shiite militias is the first step toward that goal.
"There is broad agreement that there is no place in the new Iraqi democracy for militias," L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator of Iraq, said in an interview here after talks on the subject with top Kurdish leaders.
Iraq experts and crisis analysts warn, however, that dismantling the militias will not necessarily eliminate the dangers posed by tensions among Iraq's many religious, ethnic and political factions. Deep-seated allegiances to ethnic or religious leaders will probably prove stronger than loyalty to the fledgling security forces of a national government that has yet to take shape, they say.
"Many militiamen will likely be absorbed into existing security organizations such as the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, where their loyalties will continue to be divided between their Baghdad paymasters and local or sectarian affiliations," Michael Knights, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote last week in a paper on Iraq's militias.
Anthony Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said: "There's a real question about how many members of the new security forces will again become Sunnis or Shiites first once a crisis erupts."
Disbanding the militias will be particularly important for the next two big steps after the transfer of sovereignty on June 30: writing a constitution and holding elections.
"You can't have a free and fair election unless parties can mobilize their following, candidates can campaign and people can vote free of intimidation and violence. We know from experience in other post-conflict situations that it is very difficult to achieve that kind of climate of freedom and security when there are substantial armed militias," said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.
Accordingly, analysts say, substantial progress must be made while the U.S.-led occupation still has leverage in Iraq. "There has to be a strategy for demobilization that takes advantage of the international force now in place and avoids the creation of a vacuum that spoilers inevitably will fill with bombs and bloodshed," said Mark Schneider, senior vice president of International Crisis Group, which recently issued a study of Iraq's militias.
Kurdish leaders, who until recently had insisted on controlling pesh merga units even after their absorption into the Iraqi security services, have acceded to U.S. demands and now are willing to place those forces under the authority of Baghdad. "We recognize the authority of the central government," Talabani said. "That is the reality."
Under the occupation authority's demobilization plan, Kurdish militiamen would be guaranteed one of several options: a position in the police force, the border patrol, the civil defense corps or the new army; a civilian government job; or retirement with a pension.
"There will be extensive financial inducements," said a U.S. official in Baghdad familiar with the plan. "They will be offered an amount of money that is significant by Iraqi standards."
The official said the occupation authority is aware of failed attempts to dismantle militias in other emerging democracies. "If you don't provide meaningful incentives and you just say 'demobilize' to people who are dependent on the income of being a militiaman, they won't do it," the official said. "They need good jobs or good pensions."
Kurdish leaders also want to create a national guard in northern Iraq made up of former pesh merga. Though Talabani said the new force would fall under national -- not regional -- command, occupation authority officials say they oppose the idea of creating a new security service just for the Kurdish area.
Bayati, the Shiite leader, said the occupation authority has told the Badr Organization that, unlike the offer being extended to the Kurds -- wholesale acceptance of militia units and subsequent dispersal of members to various security forces -- the Shiite militia's members will have to apply as individuals for jobs with the army, the police and the civil defense corps.
"We want them to be treated like the pesh merga," Bayati said. "They should be accepted as a whole. They should not be taken one by one as individual volunteers."
Despite their large numbers, the two Shiite and Kurdish militias may not pose the biggest dangers to democratization, analysts caution. Since Hussein's ouster, several small armed groups have coalesced around emerging political leaders, often calling themselves bodyguards rather than militias.
"There's at least as much urgency in controlling a range of groups of armed civilians that are affiliated with other political parties, tribes or gangs and -- unlike the highly disciplined pesh merga and Badr forces -- are unpredictable, with each trying to create facts on the ground that a future centralized security structure will find extremely difficult to undo," said Schneider, of the International Crisis Group.
Of particular concern to the occupation authority and the U.S. military is the Mehdi Army, a militia controlled by Moqtada Sadr, a Shiite cleric who has called for U.S. forces to leave Iraq. The Mehdi Army, estimated to have a few thousand members, has sought to assert control in several cities in Shiite-dominated southern Iraq. The group is also alleged to have been responsible for an October ambush in a Baghdad slum that killed two U.S. soldiers.
"They're just thuggish, fundamentalist fighters," the U.S. official said.
The official said the presence of the Mehdi Army has made it more difficult for the Badr Organization to demobilize because of fears Sadr will use his group to exert pressure on members of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution.
"If we can crack that nut and take them out, it would be a turning point," the official said. "If they're no longer a factor, the Badr would be more amenable to demobilization."
Wright reported from Washington.
--------
Delivery Delays Hurt U.S. Effort to Equip Iraqis
March 22, 2004
By THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/22/international/middleeast/22EQUI.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 21 - Senior American commanders in Iraq are publicly complaining that delays in delivering radios, body armor and other equipment have hobbled their ability to build an effective Iraqi security force that can ultimately replace United States troops here.
The lag in supplying the equipment, because of a contract dispute, may even have contributed to a loss of lives among Iraqi recruits, commanders say. A spokesman for the company that was awarded the original contract said much of the equipment had already been produced and was waiting to be shipped to Iraq.
The frustration had been voiced privately up the chain of command by a number of officers, and broke into public debate in recent days. Training and equipping more than 200,000 Iraqi security forces has been one of the top stated priorities of the Bush administration.
Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, praised the work of Iraqi security forces helping to secure his area of control in western Iraq, which includes the dangerous region around Falluja and the Syrian border. But he said the effort had faltered because of a lack of combat gear for the police, border units and the new Iraqi Civil Defense Corps.
"Not only are the security forces bravely leading the fight against terrorists, they are in some cases insisting on doing it alone," General Swannack said 11 days ago. "They want to defeat these enemies of a new and free Iraq. If we had the equipment for these brave young men, we would be much farther along."
He said that in his region of western Iraq, which includes a long stretch of the Syrian border, foreign fighters, their money and weapons were suspected of entering Iraq along smugglers' routes. In this area, he said, "we are still short a significant amount of vehicles, radios and body armor to properly equip" the new Iraqi force.
Commanders in other parts of Iraq have also warned of serious problems. "There are training, organizational and equipment shortfalls in the Iraqi security forces," said Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, the new American commander in northern Iraq. "There's no question about that."
The American military also suffered from shortages of crucial equipment during the war and even into the current phase of stability operations. In particular, soldiers complained of an insufficient supply of the newest bulletproof vests and, when improvised explosives began taking lives, of armored Humvees. Their complaints have been echoed loudly by members of Congress.
But the equipment for America's combat troops and that for Iraqi security services is obtained through separate contracting and procurement processes.
The first batch of equipment for the Iraqis has been paid for and was to have been delivered under a $327 million contract to a small company, Nour USA Ltd., of Vienna, Va. But the Pentagon canceled that deal this month after protests by several competing companies led to a determination that Army procurement officers in Iraq botched the contract. Army officials found no fault with Nour.
Sloppy contract language, staff turnover, incomplete paperwork and stressful combat conditions on the ground led to a badly flawed process, senior Army officials in Washington said. "I've seen things go wrong before, but I've never seen anything like this," said a senior Army official with 28 years' experience in government contracting. "We messed up."
The Army is rushing to seek new bids for the contract, but officials said that could take two to three months. In the meantime, officials are looking to see if they can use other funds and piggyback on existing contracts for weapons and other equipment that federal agencies like the F.B.I. already have to speed the delivery of vital matériel to Iraq.
"Part of it is just the magnitude of how much was needed - thousands of police cars, hundreds of thousands of uniforms," Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, the deputy director of operations for the Army staff in Washington, said in an interview. "It was just a lot harder to get stuff in than we anticipated."
The $327 million contract was to supply several battalions of the new Iraqi security forces with rifles, uniforms, body armor and other equipment. The original contract, awarded in January, did not specify the number of troops to be supplied. Instead it identified specific amounts of equipment - for instance, 200 trucks and 20,000 compasses. That contract was to be the first of several to equip the Iraqi forces.
A spokesman for Nour USA, Robert R. Hoopes Jr., said the company had protested the Army's cancellation of the contract, saying it could cost $20 million to $30 million in termination cost to the company and its suppliers.
Mr. Hoopes said much of the equipment in the original contract - including radios, compasses, canteens and body armor - had already been produced and was sitting in warehouses in the United States and Eastern Europe, waiting to be delivered to Iraq. "The stuff is sitting on the dock, ready to go," Mr. Hoopes said in a telephone interview.
General Swannack took command of his region in September, and the required equipment still has not arrived as he turns over his area to the Marines. To help solve the problem, the general dipped into his commander's discretionary fund, to buy radios, body armor and vehicles for Iraqi security forces.
Other commanders have also spent division financial resources to buy combat equipment already financed by Congress in a supplemental money package for Iraq.
But those expenditures restrict the commanders' ability to spend money on things like rebuilding schools, mosques and hospitals, part of what they view as a critically important effort to stabilize the nation and build rapport with the Iraqis.
American officers in Iraq responsible for local training even go so far as to say the slow delivery of equipment may have contributed to deaths among new Iraqi security forces, who did not have effective protection and could not radio for backup troops, who in any case may not have had the vehicles to speed to assist their colleagues under fire. "Bureaucracy kills," an American military officer in Iraq said.
Other officers in Baghdad who are involved in creating a new Iraqi security architecture, but who discussed the equipment problem on the condition that they not be identified, described a new concern: that they now will be caught between a cycle of famine and feast.
Having gone months awaiting the gear financed by Congress, they fear that they suddenly may be overwhelmed with equipment and money once the bottleneck is cleared, and that it may be difficult to manage the flood of matérial rushed to them haphazardly to solve the problem and quiet their complaints.
One American division completing its tour in Iraq was able to avoid those difficulties, simply as a matter of fate.
The First Armored Division, responsible for the security of Baghdad and central Iraq, took control of an area in which a number of military warehouses were situated. Using gear captured from the old Iraqi security forces, division officers were able to equip all seven battalions of the new Iraqi defense corps that they recruited and trained.
Nour USA's president, A. Huda Farouki, is a friend of Ahmad Chalabi, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council who has close ties to several senior Pentagon officials. But Nour executives and senior Army officials say that relationship played no role in awarding the contract to Nour.
Instead, Army officials blamed the small contracting office in Baghdad, which had little experience in handling contracts of this size, for several mistakes.
The language used to describe the required work was "so ambiguous, we just couldn't defend it against the protests," said the senior Army official in Washington. Several important documents related to evaluating competing bids were never written, the official said.
"They were overwhelmed, but that's no excuse for not having done the procurement according to the procurement rules," the Army official said. He said the new contract, which Nour can reapply for, would be handled by seasoned contracting officers in Washington.
Thom Shanker reported from Baghdad for this article and Eric Schmitt from Washington.
-------- israel / palestine
Hamas Leader Killed in Gaza
Founder of Militant Palestinian Group Is Targeted in Israeli Airstrike
By John Ward Anderson and Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 22, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13744-2004Mar21?language=printer
GAZA CITY, March 22 -- Israeli aircraft attacked and killed Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader and founder of Hamas and Israel's top target, as he was pushed in a wheelchair from morning prayers at a Gaza City mosque early Monday, according to announcements blared over mosques across the city.
Thousands of Palestinians poured into the streets of Gaza and the sounds of gunfire and hand grenade explosions echoed across the city as news of his death surfaced just after 5:30 a.m. dawn prayers.
Israeli AH-64 Apache helicopters fired three missiles at Yassin just outside the mosque, killing the partially blind and paralyzed Hamas leader, along with seven other people, including three bodyguards. At least 15 other people were wounded, including two of his sons, according to hospital officials.
"His body is in pieces," hospital director Ibrahim Habbash said, describing Yassin's wounds. "His head can't be seen because the rocket was shot at him directly."
Thousands of angry, shouting Palestinians, some firing Kalashnikov rifles into the air, surrounded the morgue at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City where Yassin's body was brought. Leaders shouted revenge against Israel as many men in the crowd sobbed.
"They assassinated a symbol, not a person," said Jumaa Saqqa, a spokesman for Shifa Hospital where hundreds of boys and men were climbing over the hospital fences and onto nearby rooftops to watch the growing crowd that was incited even more by the hoarse, vengeful calls of Hamas leaders amplified by a massive stack of loudspeakers tied atop a brown van.
Hamas, in announcing Yassin's death, said Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon "has opened the gates of hell and nothing will stop us from cutting off his head," the Associated Press reported.
The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed group linked to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, said on Monday it was declaring war on Israelis in response to the assassination of Yassin.
"War, war, war on the sons of Zion. An eye for an eye. There will be a response within hours, God willing," the group said in a statement.
In the West Bank city of Ramallah, mosque loudspeakers called for a general strike, the Reuters news agency reported, while in Gaza, shops and schools spontaneously closed down. Street protests were breaking out in cities throughout the two territories, witnesses said.
Ahmed Qureia, the Palestinian prime minister said, "This is a crazy and very dangerous act," the Reuters news agency reported. "It opens the door wide to chaos. Yassin is known for his moderation and he was controlling Hamas and therefore this is a dangerous, cowardly act."
Avi Pazner, an Israeli government spokesman, acknowledged that the killing could provoke more violence.
"We believe this is very important to weaken Hamas in the long run," Pazner said. "In the short run we will face more tension, but in the long run there is no doubt whatsoever we have improved the possibility of more security by weakening an extremely dangerous and murderous terrorist organization."
Pazner said all police and military organizations in Israel had been ordered their highest alerts in anticipation of attempts to launch a wave of attacks. Israel sealed off the West Bank and Gaza Strip, barring Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip from entering Israel, he said.
"The reaction will be unbelievable," said Raad Hamdan, 22, a student who joined the unruly, grieving mob. "This man is an emblem for the people. This action was a big mistake by [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon. We will not be crying, but carrying out operations in the middle of Tel Aviv."
Sharon was awakened during the night and informed that the military was preparing to strike Yassin, Israel Army Radio, the military's official radio station, reported Monday morning. Hamas, the most dominant Palestinian militant organization in the Gaza Strip, has claimed responsibility for scores of suicide bombings and hundreds of attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers during the 3 1/2 year Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation.
Israeli aircraft waged an unsuccessful missile strike against Yassin on Sept. 6.
"His death is not the death of Hamas," shouted Abdullah Samir, 40, a businessman who joined the crowd outside the hospital morgue. "They can't kill his spirit and what he believed in. We will be victorious."
"This will make the situation very dangerous," added Ahmed Ismail, another Gaza resident. "We are ready for more and more attacks. Ahmed Yassin is a leader like [Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat and Hamas will not stop the suicide bombings. We will not be silent."
Yassin, who has limited his public appearances since the September assassination attempt, has been paralyzed since age 17 when he was injured while practicing gymnastics on a beach.
The State Department said Sunday night that the United States was aware of reports of Yassin's death and was investigating the circumstances. The United States was in touch with both Israeli and Palestinian officials. Lou Fintor, a State Department spokesman, said the United States was urging both sides to exercise restraint.
In an interview with the Washington Post in August 2001, Yassin said he was aware that Israel's government had targeted him.
"We are a people not afraid of death, and when one of us dies, it's like a wedding day for him," Yassin said. "One who is martyred attains a very high spiritual level, and so his death is like a celebration -- we offer candy, sweets and cold drinks, because we know he'll be so high in heaven."
Hamas was founded in 1987 and has become the most popular and powerful militant group fighting against Israel in the ongoing Palestinin uprising. It's leaders have often been at odds with the leadership of the Palestinian Authority, taking far more radical anti-Israeli positions and scuttling efforts to negotiate peace agreements in the ongoing conflict. Even so, Hamas participated in a temporary cease-fire last summer that brought a lull in the violence and had moderated some of its public pronouncements.
The organization -- known in Gaza as much for its charity work as its violent attacks against Israel -- has been loosing funding from international donors since the United State and the European Union designated it a terrorist organization.
In the past year, the Gaza Strip and Hamas increasingly have become the primary focus of the Israeli military which directed most of its activities against the West Bank in the first years of the intifada.
Hamas gained prominence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the Palestinian uprising that began in September 2000 with its hard-line stance against the existence of the state of Israel, and its influence has in many instances outstripped that of Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat.
It was Israel that in the late 1980s encouraged the emergence of Hamas, an Arabic acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement that also means "zeal." Eager to cultivate a political opposition that would undercut Arafat's secular Palestine Liberation Organization, the Israelis pushed the Islamic movement in the Gaza Strip, which eventually gave rise to Hamas.
Hamas has used suicide bombings and social spending to become the most influential Palestinian militant group, capable of calling tens of thousands of supporters into the streets of Gaza City at a moment's notice. The group reportedly spends tens of millions of dollars a year on schools, hospitals, orphanages, mosques, food and water distribution, sports leagues and other programs.
The Israeli Defense Force have renewed incursions and attacks inside Gaza since a double suicide bombing by two Gaza residents on March 14 at the Israeli port city of Ashdod which killed 10 Israelis. They were the first suicide bombers to attack inside the Gaza Strip, which is surrounded by a fortified and well-patrolled fence. Israeli officials have since said they believe the bombers may have entered Israel in the container of ship.
Moore reported from Jerusalem. Staff writer Robin Wright in Washington contributed to this report.
----
5 Palestinians Killed by Israeli Troops in Gaza Strip Clash
By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 22, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13340-2004Mar21.html
GAZA CITY, March 21 -- Five Palestinians were killed in a gun battle after Israeli troops entered a town in the southern Gaza Strip early Sunday to arrest a Palestinian militant, witnesses and Gaza hospital officials said. The militant and his wife were among the dead.
At least six other Palestinians were shot in the head and chest areas during the incursion and were in serious condition, according to a doctor at Nasser Hospital in the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis. An Israeli military spokesman said no troops were injured in the operation.
The spokesman said the purpose of the incursion into Abasan -- a town east of Khan Younis, adjacent to the border with Israel -- was to arrest Basim Kadeh, 39, a senior member of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, who made Qassam rockets, mortars and other weapons that have been used against Israeli targets in and around Gaza.
Israeli troops have launched several incursions in an offensive against Palestinian groups that began after 10 Israelis were killed by two Gaza suicide bombers in an attack March 14 at the Mediterranean port of Ashdod, 20 miles north of the strip.
Palestinian witnesses said Israeli special forces, supported by helicopter gunships, were the first to penetrate into Gaza at 3 a.m. Sunday. Minutes later, the witnesses said, Israeli tanks, bulldozers and other armored vehicles began to encircle the area where Kadeh lived. At about 6:30, Palestinian militants and neighbors waged a fierce firefight with the encroaching Israeli forces, the witnesses said.
During the operation, an Israeli military spokesman said, Kadeh and his wife, Sanaa, 35, attempted to escape from their house. Soldiers opened fire and apparently struck a bag Kadeh was carrying that contained explosives, which blew up, killing him and his wife, the spokesman said.
An Israeli military statement said that forces also saw two other "suspicious" people trying to flee the area. "During the pursuit, one of the figures, a wanted Hamas operative, was struck by an IDF vehicle and was killed," the statement said, referring to the Israeli Defense Forces. "Another operative who was armed with an RPG [rocket propelled grenade] was shot by the forces."
The director of Nasser Hospital, Mohammed Abu Dalal, said in a telephone interview that the man who was hit by the vehicle, Thonaei Kadeh, 21, a relative of Basim Kadeh, died from a gunshot wound to the head. He said the rest of the man's body was not closely examined.
A member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement interviewed by telephone said he saw Israeli soldiers in a jeep chase Thonaei Kadeh and run over his legs when he fell. "Then the soldiers got out and shot at the ground," the militant said, "and when they left we found him on the ground" shot in the head. The militant spoke on condition that he would be identified only by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed Abu Daggah. Maj. Sharon Feingold, a spokeswoman for the Israeli military, said soldiers hit the man with their jeep while he was trying to flee because they did not want to get out of the vehicle and expose themselves to possible hostile fire.
The victim "was shot after being struck by the jeep," Feingold said, adding that she did not have the details of the incident and did not want "to go into the exact tactics that we use."
Palestinian hospital officials identified the two other men killed in the operation as Abdul Rahmen Durdes, 23, and Raaft Abu Taimah, 21. Israeli tanks fired several missiles at the Kadeh family's housing compound, then sent bulldozers in to demolish two homes, witnesses said. The Israeli army statement said soldiers destroyed a weapons laboratory, Kadeh's house and another structure in which he had been hiding.
Also Sunday, two Palestinians died from wounds received in clashes with Israeli soldiers earlier this month, hospital officials said.
----
Thousands in Gaza Mourn Slain Hamas Leader and Vow Revenge
March 22, 2004
The New York Times
By JAMES BENNET
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/22/international/middleeast/22CND-MIDE.html?hp
GAZA, March 22 - Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader and founder of the militant Palestinian group Hamas, was killed early Monday by an Israeli missile that struck him as he left a mosque in Gaza City, his family and Hamas officials said. They said at least two bodyguards had been killed with him.
Sheik Yassin, a symbol to Palestinians of resistance to Israel and to Israelis of Palestinian terrorism, was by far the most significant Palestinian militant killed by Israel in more than three years of conflict.
Black smoke curled over Gaza City as Palestinians began burning tires in the streets and demonstrators chanted for revenge. Mosque loudspeakers blared a message across Gaza of mourning for Sheik Yassin in the name of Hamas and another militant group, Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades.
Thousands of Palestinians took part in a funeral procession for the Sheik and others killed in the attack.
The Israeli military confirmed the killing, saying in a statement that the sheik was "responsible for numerous murderous terror attacks, resulting in the deaths of many civilians, both Israeli and foreign."
The army said it had targeted a car carrying Sheik Yassin, but Palestinians at the scene said that the Sheik was not in car when he was hit.
The Israeli weapons punctured the pavement of the street where Sheik Yassin, a quadriplegic, was being escorted home. Blood spattered the walls of surrounding buildings. "I could not recognize the sheik, only his wheelchair," said one witness, Maher al-Beek.
In interviews with American television stations this morning, the White House's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said that the United States did not have advance warning of the assassination, and urged calm in the region.
In refugee camps like Rafa and Khan Yunis, strongholds of Palestinian militancy, thousands of people took to the streets. Ismail Haniya, a political leader of Hamas, addressed more than a thousand people who gathered outside the autopsy center at Shiffa Hospital in Gaza City.
"You don't have to cry," he said. "You have to be steadfast, and you have to be ready for revenge, because the sheik has implanted the soul and the spirit of martyrdom and courage in your souls."
He said that "the blood of Sheik Yassin will run in the veins of all Palestinians," and predicted that his death would give "more momentum for the liberation of Palestinians from the criminals, the Jews."
Hospital officials said the sheik's body had been smashed in the attack.
Like other political leaders of Hamas, Sheik Yassin denied involvement in planning specific attacks, but Israeli officials said he was directly connected to terrorism.
Ahmed Qurei, the Palestinian prime minister, condemned the attack. "This is a crazy and very dangerous act," he said, according to Reuters. "It opens the door wide to chaos. Yassin is known for his moderation, and he was controlling Hamas, and therefore this is a dangerous, cowardly act."
The Israeli Army said it had closed off the Gaza Strip, which is bracketed against the Mediterranean by an Israeli fence, and shut checkpoints that effectively divide it into three sections.
Israel has again stepped up its pressure on militants in Gaza since two Palestinian suicide bombers from a Gaza refugee camp blew themselves up last Sunday at the Israeli port of Ashdod, killing 10 Israelis. That attack was jointly claimed by Hamas and Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades.
The country has also appeared eager to show that a plan announced by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to withdraw Israeli settlers and soldiers from Gaza did not amount to a victory for Palestinian militants, as some of them had claimed.
Israel tried to kill Sheik Yassin on Sept. 6, dropping a 550-pound bomb on a Gaza apartment building where he was holding a meeting. The sheik escaped with a slight shrapnel wound to his right hand, and 14 other people were wounded. That strike came as Israel declared "all-out war" on the group after a suicide bombing in Jerusalem in August.
On Jan. 16, the Israeli deputy defense minister, Zeev Boim, said Sheik Yassin was "marked for death" by Israel.
"He should hide himself deep underground where he won't know the difference between day and night," Mr. Boim said at the time. "And we will find him in the tunnels, and we will eliminate him."
Sheik Yassin responded: "We do not fear death threats. We are seekers of martyrdom."
Hamas is officially committed to Israel's destruction, not just a withdrawal from the occupied territories. The word means `zeal` in Arabic, and that is an acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement.
The group runs a network of low-cost clinics and schools that have broadened its ideological reach while helping to give its popularity a boost among Palestinians. Israeli security officials regard it as the most organized and disciplined of the militant groups.
Sheik Yassin helped found Hamas in 1987. He later spent eight years in an Israeli prison, before being freed in 1997 as a gesture to King Hussein of Jordan after a bungled assassination attempt on a Hamas leader in Amman, the capital.
The targeted killing followed an Israeli raid on Sunday into the southern Gaza Strip that left four Hamas militants and one Palestinian woman dead. Israel said it had been seeking to arrest one of the Hamas men who died in the operation.
Also on Sunday, Prime Minister Sharon gained qualified backing from his top right-wing rival, Benjamin Netanyahu, for Mr. Sharon's plan for a Gaza withdrawal. Mr. Netanyahu said he might back the plan if Mr. Sharon achieved an "appropriate return," including support for retraining some blocks of settlements in the West Bank, from the United States.
He also said Israel must remain free to act militarily in Gaza after any withdrawal.
----
Full text: Hamas vows revenge
Monday, 22 March, 2004
(BBC)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3557445.stm
The military wing of Palestinian militant group Hamas, the Ezzedin al-Qassam Brigades, has issued a statement promising to avenge the death of its founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. It says Israel would not have carried out the killing without US approval and threatens retaliation. Here is a translation of the statement:
O Murderous Zionists, you have bestowed martyrdom upon our Sheikh, and we will bestow violent death upon you on every city and every street.
O masses of our Mujaheed and Islamic people, the sons of our Palestinian people:
The terrorist Zionist Nazis have targeted our founding leader His Eminence the Mujahid Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, after performing morning prayers at the Islamic Complex [Al-Mujamma al-Islami] Mosque.
What the Zionists have committed today illustrates the pinnacle of breakdown and failure.
By directing their rancorous rockets at the chair of the disabled Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, they thought they had killed him.
The Zionists did not know that millions of Muslims will go out to "visit with destruction all that fell into their power" [part of Koranic verse].
Today, Ahmed Yassin will come out from every city, street, and alley to grant them violent death, after they have granted him martyrdom, which total paralysis did not prevent him from seeking.
Today, the criminal [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon has issued a death sentence for hundreds of Israelis on every street and every inch of land occupied by the Zionists.
We vow Sheikh Abu Muhammad [Ahmed Yassin] to continue our march, and pursue Zionists everywhere they hide.
Abu Muhammad, your martyrdom-seeking sons will inform you of their retaliation soon.
So rest in peace our leader, teacher, sheikh, instructor, icon, our joy, and our dearest.
O Sheikh, Palestine and the Islamic nation will not miss you because you have planted strong righteous men in every house and every street. They have carried your thought and marched on your path.
While announcing to the entire world the death of the founder of the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, and the guide of the Muslim Brotherhood Group in Palestine, His Eminence Leader Sheikh Ahmed Isma'il Yassin, also known as Abu-Muhammad, and his companions, Ezzedin al-Qassam Martyrs, stresses the following:
1. He who made the decision to assassinate Sheikh Ahmed Yassin has made a decision to kill hundreds of Zionists.
2. The Zionists did not take such a step without the approval of the terrorist US administration. Therefore, it should bear responsibility for this crime.
3. The Zionists will soon see, not hear, our response, God willing.
4. The response to the assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin will not be made on the level of all the Palestinian people's mujahideen factions only, but all Muslims in the entire Muslim world will have the honor to respond to this crime.
They ask you when will that be, say: Maybe it will be quite soon [Koranic verse].
-------- latin america
Pro-U.S. Candidate Wins in El Salvador
Businessman Saca, 39, Was Backed by Bush Against Ex-Guerrilla
By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 22, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13621-2004Mar21.html
SAN SALVADOR, March 21 -- The candidate of a conservative, fervently pro-American party captured the presidency of El Salvador in a hotly contested election Sunday, soundly defeating a party headed by a former Marxist guerrilla.
With 83 percent of the ballots counted, Tony Saca, a sportscaster-turned-businessman, had nearly 57 percent of the vote. Schafik Handal, 73, a veteran guerrilla commander of the civil war that ended 12 years ago, won about 36 percent. The remaining votes went to two smaller parties.
Sixty-three percent of eligible voters -- a record number -- turned out for an election that offered a stark choice for the future of this poor Central American country. Saca, 39, of the Nationalist Republican Alliance, or Arena, promised to continue his party's free-market, pro-U.S. policies. Handal had pledged to move in a different direction, reviewing recent economic reforms and shifting more resources to the poor. He also wanted to withdraw El Salvador's 380 troops out of Iraq, and pursue closer ties with Cuba. U.S. officials declared during the campaign that relations would suffer if Handal won.
Saca, in a nationally televised speech Sunday night, said voters had "said yes to democracy, yes to the future, and yes to a safe country." His campaign slogan, "A safe country," appeared to refer to both his anti-crime promises and his party's claim to be a bulwark against communism.
His supporters poured into the street in front of the Arena headquarters in San Salvador, cheering, singing and waving flags in the party's red, white and blue colors.
For their part, FMLN supporters, some of them weeping, gathered at an outdoor rally in the capital. There, a somber Handal acknowledged Saca's electoral victory.
"We recognize this, but are not congratulating him . . . because Arena and Mr. Saca got this vote by using fear. And a vote of fear is a vote without liberty," the bearded former revolutionary told hundreds of followers clad in red, the party's color.
The election was fraught with Cold War overtones, as the two parties that once clashed with arms, traded slurs and accusations about the civil war. In a sign of the enduring polarization in this country, Saca's campaign team sang the party's theme song just before his victory speech, that included a line that "El Salvador will be the tomb where the Reds end up."
Handal trailed in most public opinion polls leading up to the election. But his party, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, has become increasingly popular in local elections. While Arena has presided over 15 years of peace and economic growth, many Salvadorans complain that this hasn't led to improvement in their wages or job prospects. About half the country lives in poverty, according to official statistics.
"The country is in bad shape," said Marcela Sosa, 26, an administrative assistant who cast her vote in a giant auditorium in the suburb of Mejicanos, where thousands of people crowded the streets waving the red flag of the FMLN. "Everyone says, we've had 15 years [of Arena rule]. Let's see what happens if we elect a different government."
But Sosa's sister and her boyfriend said they could not bring themselves to vote for Handal.
"In El Salvador, he represents the most recalcitrant roots of communism," said Oscar Quiteno, 43, the boyfriend, who wore a T-shirt bearing the image of Saca's smiling face.
The war was a constant theme of the campaign, reflecting the deep scars from a conflict that left 75,000 dead. On Sunday, Handal attended a memorial service for Oscar Arnulfo Romero, the respected Roman Catholic archbishop of San Salvador who was gunned down while celebrating Mass in 1980 after he criticized army abuses during the civil war. A postwar truth commission blamed the founder of Arena, Roberto d'Aubuisson, for the death.
"We are going to dedicate our vote to Monsignor Romero," Handal said.
For his part, Saca cast his vote surrounded by a crowd of supporters yelling, "Fatherland, yes! Communism, no!" Hundreds of his backers cruised around the capital in cars and pickup trucks decked with the red, white and blue flag of Arena.
Handal, the secretary general of El Salvador's Communist Party for 21 years before it was disbanded in 1994, denied during the campaign that he would dismantle the country's democratic system. But U.S. officials expressed concern about his economic proposals, which included reviewing the privatizations of Salvadoran industries and reopening negotiations on a free-trade accord with the United States. They also were wary of his warm ties with Cuba, a former backer of the FMLN. In one much-criticized incident, Handal wrote to Cuban President Fidel Castro praising his crackdown on pro-democracy activists last year.
Several U.S. officials warned during the campaign that relations could deteriorate under a Handal government. While some Salvadorans complained that the officials were meddling, many were clearly alarmed about alienating this country's principal trading partner. Arena supporters launched a campaign to convince voters that a Handal victory would lead to a cutoff in the 2 billion dollars Salvadorans receive each year from immigrants living in the United States. Handal scoffed at such charges, calling them part of a fear campaign.
Saca is a popular former soccer announcer who developed a string of radio stations and became head of the country's business association.
Handal became involved in politics at 14 when he took part in a national strike that toppled a former military dictator. A longtime communist, he had to go into exile twice because of his political activities.
-------- pakistan / india
Tunnels Found in Pakistan Tied to Foreign Militants
March 22, 2004
By DAVID ROHDE and CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/22/international/asia/22CND-STAN.html?hp
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, March 22 - Pakistani troops discovered a network of tunnels today inside the homes of tribesmen believed to be sheltering foreign militants.
One tunnel was over a mile long and linked two houses. Another appeared to be an escape tunnel that led to a nearby riverbed. The tunnels, in the border region near Afghanistan, suggested that militants had been hiding there for weeks, if not months.
The discovery came as Pakistani officials said no evidence had emerged that Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda's second-ranking official, was among militants who have been surrounded in fierce fighting.
The strong resistance first encountered by Pakistani troops last week prompted Pakistani officials to suggest that a "high-value target," possibly Dr. Zawahiri, had been trapped. But today Pakistani officials said the tunnels could have allowed militants to slip past army forces on the first night of fighting.
The battle slowed today as tribal elders tried to negotiate a cease-fire after five days of fierce fighting and heavy casualties on both sides.
The Pakistani military called a jirga, or traditional council, of all regional tribes in the town of Wana, said Brig. Mehmood Shah, the security chief in Pakistan's tribal areas. It was agreed at the meeting, he said, that elders would try to negotiate a surrender of the armed militants and the release of some 14 soldiers and government officials they are holding hostage.
Hours after the meeting, suspected militants fired rockets at the army camp at Wana, Reuters reported, and militants and soldiers exchanged fire for about two hours early today.
The military's appeal to the elders was clearly prompted by the rising anger of local people at the military action, which has killed at least 17 Pakistani soldiers and some 25 militants as well as several civilians.
Twelve members of one family, including women and children, were reported killed when their vehicle came under fire on Saturday as they were leaving their home.
But the military's change of tactics may also be because it has made slow progress in the face of unexpectedly fierce resistance from the foreign militants.
Brigadier Shah said Sunday that resistance appeared to be dying down, and intercepted communications between the militants suggested that they were running out of ammunition. Yet he also conceded that it could take a month to clean up the area of resistance, where 500 to 600 militants and local tribesmen are scattered over some 20 square miles.
"The search could wind up in a couple of days, but the cleanup operation to flush out foreign militants from the area could last for about a month," he said in an interview in the city of Peshawar.
Reports six weeks ago said Dr. Zawahiri - or even Osama bin Laden - was hiding in the Shawal Mountains, which lie on the Afghan border, two Pakistani officials said recently. But they said the Qaeda leader left the area before the lead could be pursued.
Instead, the Pakistanis have run up against hardened Uzbek fighters, remnants of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a Qaeda-affiliated group and ally of the Taliban that favors guerrilla fighting over terrorism. Pakistani officials acknowledge what Afghan officials have been saying for a year: The Uzbeks, along with other Russian-speaking fighters and some Arabs, have been in the tribal areas of south Waziristan since escaping from Afghanistan in spring 2002.
They are the last effective group of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which has been all but crushed, despite a few reported incidents in Central Asia attributed to the movement. Yet the Uzbeks remain among the toughest fighters the Taliban, Afghanistan's former rulers, ever commanded. Afghan intelligence officials have blamed these fighters for many of the cross-border attacks inflicted on Afghan and American military positions in southeastern Afghanistan in the last year. The Uzbeks have also clashed with Pakistani forces in Azam Warzak, the scene of the current fighting, in June 2002, when up to 40 fighters escaped from a farmhouse where they had been surrounded. A week later, Pakistani forces ambushed Uzbeks in a vehicle in north Waziristan.
Members of the movement played important roles in the two bloodiest battles of the American-led campaign in Afghanistan, the uprising of foreign fighters held prisoner in Qala Jangi in northern Afghanistan in November 2001 and Operation Anaconda, a United States-led military campaign in eastern Afghanistan in spring 2002.
The Uzbeks, like many Al Qaeda fighters, are the product of the religious schools and military camps of the Pakistani border regions, but their goal, rather than international terrorism, was nationalist: to overthrow Uzbekistan's Communist leader, Islam Karimov, and create an Islamic state.
The political leader and founder of the movement, Tahir Yaldash, known as Qari Tahir, is leading the current fighting in Waziristan. His more famous military commander, Juma Namangani, was killed in American airstrikes in northern Afghanistan in November 2001.
The two men began their movement during the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, and met Mr. bin Laden and other Qaeda leaders in the early 1990's in Pakistan, according to a senior Afghan intelligence official. In 1998, they formed the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, operating out of eastern Tajikistan and making incursions into Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.
As the Taliban took control of northern Afghanistan, the movement established bases and training camps there.
--------
Pakistan Asks Tribes to Seek Surrender by Qaeda Fighters
March 22, 2004
By CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/22/international/asia/22STAN.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Monday, March 22 - After five days of fierce fighting and heavy casualties on both sides, the Pakistani military turned Sunday to tribal elders to try to persuade hundreds of Qaeda fighters surrounded in the mountainous border region to surrender.
The military called a temporary cease-fire while it held a jirga, or traditional council, of all regional tribes in the town of Wana, said Brig. Mehmood Shah, the security chief in Pakistan's tribal areas. It was agreed at the meeting, he said, that elders would try to negotiate a surrender of the armed militants and the release of some 14 soldiers and government officials they are holding hostage.
Hours after the meeting, suspected militants fired rockets at the army camp at Wana, Reuters reported, and militants and soldiers exchanged fire for about two hours early on Monday.
The military's appeal to the elders was clearly prompted by the rising anger of local people at the military action, which has killed at least 17 Pakistani soldiers and some 25 militants as well as several civilians.
Twelve members of one family, including women and children, were reported killed when their vehicle came under fire on Saturday as they were leaving their home.
But the military's change of tactics may also be because it has made slow progress in the face of unexpectedly fierce resistance from the foreign militants.
Brigadier Shah said Sunday that resistance appeared to be dying down, and intercepted communications between the militants suggested that they were running out of ammunition. Yet he also conceded that it could take a month to clean up the area of resistance, where 500 to 600 militants and local tribesmen are scattered over some 20 square miles.
"The search could wind up in a couple of days, but the cleanup operation to flush out foreign militants from the area could last for about a month," he said in an interview in the city of Peshawar.
Military officials were also distancing themselves from earlier suggestions that Al Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, could be among the cornered fighters.
Reports six weeks ago said Mr. Zawahiri - or even Osama bin Laden - was hiding in the Shawal Mountains, which lie on the Afghan border, two Pakistani officials said recently. But they said the Qaeda leader left the area before the lead could be pursued.
Instead, the Pakistanis have run up against hardened Uzbek fighters, remnants of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a Qaeda-affiliated group and ally of the Taliban that favors guerrilla fighting over terrorism. Pakistani officials acknowledge what Afghan officials have been saying for a year: The Uzbeks, along with other Russian-speaking fighters and some Arabs, have been in the tribal areas of south Waziristan since escaping from Afghanistan in spring 2002.
They are the last effective group of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which has been all but crushed, despite a few reported incidents in Central Asia attributed to the movement. Yet the Uzbeks remain among the toughest fighters the Taliban, Afghanistan's former rulers, ever commanded. Afghan intelligence officials have blamed these fighters for many of the cross-border attacks inflicted on Afghan and American military positions in southeastern Afghanistan in the last year. The Uzbeks have also clashed with Pakistani forces in Azam Warzak, the scene of the current fighting, in June 2002, when up to 40 fighters escaped from a farmhouse where they had been surrounded. A week later, Pakistani forces ambushed Uzbeks in a vehicle in north Waziristan.
Members of the movement played important roles in the two bloodiest battles of the American-led campaign in Afghanistan, the uprising of foreign fighters held prisoner in Qala Jangi in northern Afghanistan in November 2001 and Operation Anaconda, a United States-led military campaign in eastern Afghanistan in spring 2002.
The Uzbeks, like many Al Qaeda fighters, are the product of the religious schools and military camps of the Pakistani border regions, but their goal, rather than international terrorism, was nationalist: to overthrow Uzbekistan's Communist leader, Islam Karimov, and create an Islamic state.
The political leader and founder of the movement, Tahir Yaldash, known as Qari Tahir, is leading the current fighting in Waziristan. His more famous military commander, Juma Namangani, was killed in American airstrikes in northern Afghanistan in November 2001.
The two men began their movement during the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, and met Mr. bin Laden and other Qaeda leaders in the early 1990's in Pakistan, according to a senior Afghan intelligence official. In 1998, they formed the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, operating out of eastern Tajikistan and making incursions into Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.
As the Taliban took control of northern Afghanistan, the movement established bases and training camps there.
Mohammed Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan, for this article.
--------
Tribal elders intercede in border fight
March 22, 2004
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040321-100709-3479r.htm
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, March 21 -- Tribal elders Sunday urged a tribe under attack by Pakistani soldiers to turn over whoever they are protecting as hopes fade it's a top al-Qaida figure.
CNN reported that tribal leaders are being permitted by the Pakistani forces surrounding a heavily fortified area near the Afghanistan border to try to broker an end to fierce fighting.
Pakistan officials had earlier speculated that the heavy resistance as well as some intercepted communications suggested a high-level al-Qaida official, perhaps even the No. 2 leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, was present.
Then speculation grew they were protecting a Chechen leader or even a local outlaw or that if al-Zawahiri had been there, he had since escaped.
Military sources said one intercepted communication talked of the need to evacuate someone who was wounded and would need a dozen guards.
U.S. troops are carrying on their own search for al-Qaida fighters on the Afghanistan side of the border although about 12 Americans are providing technical support for the Pakistani operation, CNN reported.
-------- spies
Universities spy for MI5 on foreign students
By Michael Day and David Bamber
22/03/2004
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/03/21/nspy21.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/03/21/ixnewstop.html
Universities are routinely spying on foreign students in Britain in order to help the authorities to keep potential terrorists under surveillance, the Telegraph has learnt.
Students' emails are being intercepted and mobile telephone calls listened to in an attempt to ensure that terrorists do not use universities as cover for their activities. Special Branch and MI5 are running the vetting operation in co-operation with most of the country's universities. The scheme was quietly set up after the September 11 attacks in America, and goes much further than the controversial voluntary vetting system that was introduced in 1994 to prevent the transfer overseas of technology related to weapons of mass destruction.
Under that scheme, some universities agreed to contact the Government when assessing applications from potential students from certain rogue states. Since September 11, however, the institutions have been asked to go further and secretly gather and assess information on foreigners studying at their institutions. The universities cannot be named for legal reasons.
A close eye is kept on students from the "red flag" countries India, Pakistan, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Israel and North Korea. Applicants from those states are vetted, and asked to list their parents, previous study courses and employment. Those causing suspicion are then flagged for further monitoring.
Details of students' telephone numbers, email and home addresses are being passed by universities to the police, MI5 and the Foreign Office, said an official connected to British and American security. The official, who also has links to a leading university, said: "They are helping the security services look at students from the red flag countries. It's pretty well known that it's happening.
"With all the forms students fill in it is not difficult to get their mobile phone numbers or emails, or find out what kind of activities they are doing or where they hang out."
He said that the dramatic escalation in the terrorist threat since September 11 meant that spying on potential terrorists had become a key consideration. "You've got this situation now where if you're from a certain country you will be under suspicion. And the more Madrid-type incidents there are the more this will be stepped up."
Suspected terrorists who have studied in Britain recently include the lecturers Dr Azahari Husin, 45, who went to Reading University, and Shamsul Bahri Hussein, 36, who read applied mechanics at Dundee. They are wanted in connection with the Bali bombings in October 2002, when 202 people, including 26 Britons, died.
Ramzi Yousef, the al-Qa'eda plotter behind the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing that killed six people, studied engineering at Swansea.
One senior university official said: "Since September 11, we are co-operating with the security services in a much deeper way than before. We take it very seriously."
In many large universities it is official policy to have a senior academic who liaises with the security service and police about students they suspect are carrying out undercover activities. MI5 and MI6 have also used academics to recruit British students.
Now, Scotland Yard Special Branch officers monitor e-mails and mobile telephones and universities are expected to pass on suspicious meetings, activities or absences.
Several students are believed to have been ordered to leave Britain as a result of such monitoring, after it was discovered that they had links to extremist groups.
The policy has angered some critics. Ian Gibson, the Labour chairman of the Commons science and technology committee, said that his committee had heard evidence that foreign students were being spied on.
"I think there will be a number of universities that are doing this," he said. "It goes absolutely against the principle of freedom in academia and allowing people to associate with whom they like or think what they like."
A Conservative member of the select committee, however, was more pragmatic about the surveillance. Robert Key, the MP for Salisbury, said: "Given the current security situation I wouldn't be against it as long as the Government was in complete control of the situation."
Chris Weavers, a vice-president of the National Union of Students, said: "I think there needs to be very strong justification for any such surveillance. Just assuming that any individual from a certain country might be a risk is utterly unrealistic. However, he admitted: "We've seen many people from the United Kingdom who have been involved in terrorists attacks."
It would not be legal for the police or security service to intercept directly e-mails or telephone calls without a warrant or permission from the Home Secretary. Both, however, are exempt from the Data Protection Act.
----
'CIA knows' Kerry's foreign support
By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 22, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040321-115704-2651r.htm
If the White House wants to know which foreign leaders support presidential candidate John Kerry, it should check with the CIA, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy said yesterday.
Although the intelligence agency is prohibited from domestic spying, Mr. Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, suggested that the CIA knows which countries support Mr. Kerry through surveillance at the U.N. building in New York.
"All we have to do is go down the list of members of the United Nations to find out where the support is. The CIA knows it. They work for the president. They can give him the names of all of those countries," Mr. Kennedy told "Meet the Press" in an interview yesterday.
Mr. Kennedy was "alluding to the well-known fact that the CIA and other domestic intelligence agencies have a good handle on what is discussed at the United Nations," his spokesman Jim Manley said after the interview.
The Washington Times surveyed embassies of key countries opposing the U.S.-led war in Iraq - including France, Russia, Canada and Mexico - and embassy officers said there had been no meetings since the beginning of 2003 between Mr. Kerry and visiting presidents, prime ministers or foreign ministers.
A review of Mr. Kerry's public schedules showed no opportunities for face-to-face meetings between the senator and any foreign heads of state or heads of government.
Mexico's former U.N. Ambassador, Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, accused the United States and Britain of spying on diplomats before the Iraq war, saying "privileged" information was obtained through "eavesdropping." The Chilean government says its telephones at the United Nations were bugged.
A CIA spokesman yesterday declined to comment on Mr. Kennedy's assertion.
The mission of the CIA is to collect foreign intelligence and foreign counterintelligence, but it cannot involve the domestic activities of U.S. citizens, according to frequently asked questions on the agency's Web site.
Domestic spying restrictions were placed on the CIA in the 1970s after the Rockefeller Commission investigation found the agency spied on antiwar demonstrators at the direction of Presidents Johnson and Nixon.
Mr. Kerry has "met with leaders over a period of time" and it "isn't a big mystery," Mr. Kennedy said.
"If the White House is really interested in those leaders, they control the CIA - the CIA gives them those lists," Mr. Kennedy said. "Everyone knows at the United Nations where the countries stand."
The Bush campaign said it would be improper for the White House to direct the CIA to spy on Mr. Kerry.
"This isn't about the White House; this is about the American people," said Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman. "The American people have the right to know what that candidate has told foreign leaders in order to get that endorsement and why those foreign leaders might support him."
The Kerry campaign said last week the senator would not accept endorsements from foreign leaders, after former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who has said Jews secretly run the world, endorsed the senator. Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Spain's Socialist prime minister-elect, also has voiced support for Mr. Kerry.
"The American people would be curious to know why the former Malaysian anti-Semitic dictator said he supports Senator Kerry," Mr. Mehlman added. "Why does the North Korean government apparently support him?"
Earlier this month, Mr. Kerry said he met face to face with foreign leaders who want him to beat Mr. Bush in the fall election but has refused to name names.
"We are the ones who get to determine the outcome of this election, not unnamed foreign leaders," Vice President Dick Cheney said last week, and Mr. Bush challenged Mr. Kerry "to back it up with facts."
.Bill Sammon contributed to this report.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- homeland security
FBI budget cut after Sept. 11 attacks
March 22, 2004
THE WASHINGTON POST, Newsday
supplemented with wire reports.
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-usterr223718770mar22,0,1564960.story?coll=ny-nationalnews-headlines
WASHINGTON - In the early days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush White House cut by nearly two-thirds an emergency request for counterterrorism funds by the FBI, an internal administration budget document shows.
The document, dated Oct. 12, 2001, shows that the FBI requested $1.5 billion in additional funds to enhance its counterterrorism efforts with the creation of 2,024 positions. But the White House Office of Management and Budget cut that request to $531 million.
Attorney General John Ashcroft, working within the White House limits, cut the FBI's request for items such as computer networking and foreign language intercepts by half, cut a cyber-security request by three-quarters and eliminated entirely a request for "collaborative capabilities."
The document was one of several administration papers obtained and given to The Washington Post by the Center for American Progress, a liberal group run by former Clinton chief of staff John D. Podesta. The papers show that Ashcroft resisted FBI requests for more counterterrorism funding immediately after the attacks.
The documents are being released as Clinton and Bush administration officials prepare to testify this week about their counterterrorism efforts before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.
White House spokesman Taylor Gross noted that FBI funding has increased by more than 50 percent between 2000 and 2004, not including supplemental funds such as those requested after Sept. 11. Under President George W. Bush, "the FBI has been reformed to make counterterrorism its No. 1 priority," Gross said. "No matter what sort of rhetoric gets thrown about in a campaign season, it doesn't change the fact that this president is committed to fighting the war on terrorism."
The document showing the FBI request after the Sept. 11 attacks was part of the OMB "passback" process, in which the budget office reviews and pares agency requests. Though it is typical for the White House to reduce agency requests, Bush's foes think the sharp reduction in the FBI's counterterrorism request could be politically damaging for the president.
"Despite multiple terror warnings before and after 9/11, [Bush] repeatedly rejected counterterrorism resources that his own security agencies said was desperately needed to protect America," said David Sirota, spokesman for Podesta's group, which plans to post the documents on its Web site today.
In a further blow to the Bush camp a former counterterrorism coordinator said that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, "looked skeptical" when she was warned early in 2001 about the threat from al-Qaida and appeared never to have heard of the organization.
"Her facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard the term before," wrote Richard A. Clarke in a new book, "Against All Enemies," that is scathingly critical of Bush's response to the 2001 terror attacks.
Clarke, expected to testify tomorrow before a federal panel investigating the attacks, recounted his meeting with Rice as support for his contention that the Bush administration failed to recognize the risk of an attack by al-Qaida in the months leading to Sept. 11, 2001. Clarke retired in March 2003.
Clarke said that within one week of the Bush inauguration he "urgently" sought a meeting of senior cabinet leaders to discuss "the imminent al-Qaida threat."
Months later, in April, Clarke met with deputy secretaries. During that meeting, he wrote, the Defense Department's Paul Wolfowitz told Clarke, "You give [Osama] bin Laden too much credit," and he said Wolfowitz sought to steer the discussion to Iraq.
This story was supplemented with wire reports.
-------- police
FBI Budget Squeezed After 9/11
Request for New Counterterror Funds Cut by Two-Thirds
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 22, 2004; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13541-2004Mar21.html
In the early days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush White House cut by nearly two-thirds an emergency request for counterterrorism funds by the FBI, an internal administration budget document shows.
The document, dated Oct. 12, 2001, shows that the FBI requested $1.5 billion in additional funds to enhance its counterterrorism efforts with the creation of 2,024 positions. But the White House Office of Management and Budget cut that request to $531 million. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, working within the White House limits, cut the FBI's request for items such as computer networking and foreign language intercepts by half, cut a cyber-security request by three quarters and eliminated entirely a request for "collaborative capabilities."
The document was one of several administration papers obtained and given to The Washington Post by the Center for American Progress, a liberal group run by former Clinton chief of staff John D. Podesta. The papers show that Ashcroft ranked counterterrorism efforts as a lower priority than his predecessor did, and that he resisted FBI requests for more counterterrorism funding before and immediately after the attacks.
The documents are being released as Clinton and Bush administration officials prepare to testify this week about their counterterrorism efforts before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. They add to an already vigorous debate in which Bush officials and former Clinton aides are blaming each other for failing to take the terrorist threat seriously enough.
White House spokesman Taylor Gross noted that FBI funding has increased by more than 50 percent between 2000 and 2004, not including supplemental funds such as those requested after Sept. 11. Under President Bush, "the FBI has been reformed to make counterterrorism its No. 1 priority," Gross said. "No matter what sort of rhetoric gets thrown about in a campaign season, it doesn't change the fact that this president is committed to fighting the war on terrorism."
The document showing the FBI request after the Sept. 11 attacks was part of the OMB "passback" process, in which the budget office reviews and pares agency requests. Though it is typical for the White House to reduce agency requests, Bush's foes think the sharp reduction in the FBI's counterterrorism request could be politically damaging for the president, who has accused his opponent, Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), of trying to cut intelligence funding in the mid-1990s.
Five days after Ashcroft agreed to reduce the FBI emergency request from $1.5 billion to $531 million, the White House asked Congress for a similar amount, $538.5 million, for the FBI as part of a $20 billion supplemental spending package responding to the Sept. 11 attacks. Just over two months later, Congress approved the $20 billion package as part of a defense spending bill but gave the FBI $745 million. Amendments that would have increased FBI funding further failed under the threat of a Bush veto if the package exceeded $20 billion.
The FBI's overall budget grew from $3.3 billion in fiscal 2001 to $4.3 billion in fiscal 2003.
"Despite multiple terror warnings before and after 9/11, [Bush] repeatedly rejected counterterrorism resources that his own security agencies said was desperately needed to protect America," said David Sirota, spokesman for Podesta's group, which plans to post the documents on its Web site today.
The group released two other administration documents, parts of which have already been made public, showing that just before the Sept. 11 attacks, Ashcroft did not agree to $588 million in increases that the FBI was seeking for 2003. That request included funds to hire 54 translators and 248 counterterrorism agents and support staff. But in his 2003 request sent to the White House, dated Sept. 10, 2001, Ashcroft did not propose that any FBI programs get increases above previously set levels and proposed small cuts to some programs related to counterterrorism.
Other documents indicate that before Sept. 11, Ashcroft did not give terrorism top billing in his strategic plans for the Justice Department, which includes the FBI. A draft of Ashcroft's "Strategic Plan" from Aug. 9, 2001, does not put fighting terrorism as one of the department's seven goals, ranking it as a sub-goal beneath gun violence and drugs. After the attacks, fighting terrorism became the department's primary goal. By contrast, in April 2000, Ashcroft's predecessor, Janet Reno, called terrorism "the most challenging threat in the criminal justice area."
-------- prisons / prisoners
U.S. Faces Quandary In Freeing Detainees
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 22, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13580-2004Mar21?language=printer
The Bush administration repatriated a group of British detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison earlier this month despite months of deep reservations by top Pentagon officials, who believed that they were hardened Taliban and al Qaeda operatives too dangerous to send home, according to officials familiar with the events.
Under intense pressure from its staunch ally Britain and after months of debate involving several Cabinet agencies, a consensus view was reached allowing the five men deemed least threatening to go home, with assurances from the British that they would be investigated to the limits of British law, administration officials said. Four others remain at Guantanamo Bay.
The internal struggle over the fates of the nine Britons illustrates the difficult security, foreign policy and public relations decisions facing the government as it attempts to determine the futures of more than 600 people still detained at the prison on a U.S. Navy base in Cuba.
Some experts in international law said the episode suggests that close U.S. allies have an advantage getting their nationals released from Guantanamo Bay, where alleged combatants from more than 40 nations are held. Some U.S. officials reject that assertion.
"It's absolutely clear preferential treatment is being given to nationals from states we feel are helping us in Iraq and the war on terror," said Peter Spiro, a former State Department official and now a professor of international law at Hofstra University.
Four of the five British men repatriated two weeks ago were trained at military camps in Afghanistan, joined forces with the Taliban or al Qaeda, and were captured on a battlefield or in flight, U.S. officials said.
Mark Jacobson, who worked for the Defense Department helping to fashion U.S. policy for the detainees until he left for academia last fall, said a number of Pentagon officials are frustrated that the British government released all five of the repatriated Britons within 24 hours of their March 9 return. He said the past activities of the five men closely resemble the actions of John Walker Lindh, an American sentenced in a U.S. court to 20 years in prison after he pleaded guilty in 2002 to helping the Taliban.
"That's quite a difference, 24 hours versus 20 years," said Jacobson, formerly a special assistant for detainee policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and now a professor specializing in national security at Ohio State University.
But Jim Wilkinson, deputy U.S. national security adviser, said that "the British have given our government assurances they'll take every step to ensure these individuals are not a threat, consistent with British law." British officials said that their law precludes prosecution for offenses committed overseas, and that information gleaned in Guantanamo Bay cannot be used in any trial because the detainees were not provided lawyers.
It could not be learned what steps the U.S. government asked the British to take to guard against future violence by the five men. Jacobson said Washington has asked other governments to closely monitor their returned nationals. British officials have said publicly for months they would not agree to secret surveillance of their citizens.
The United States has returned 131 detainees, most of them Afghans and Pakistanis who were simply set free. But the Russian, Spanish and Saudi governments have agreed to detain a small number of their repatriated nationals, and Denmark said it would keep close tabs on a former detainee returned there.
Attorneys for relatives of the five released Britons denied that they have ties to terrorists, and said any accusations against their clients arising from their time at Guantanamo Bay are invalid. "A confession from there is not worth the paper it's printed on because of the inhuman conditions," said Louise Christian, an attorney for one of the five. U.S. officials deny that detainees are mistreated. Many Europeans, including many in the British public and government, believe the detentions at Guantanamo Bay violate international norms, and want the prisoners either charged or released.
This is not the first time military officials have expressed concern about releasing a detainee. A number of Pentagon officials said they were uneasy with the freeing last month of Danish detainee Slimane Hadj Abderrahmane because of his past ties to Muslim extremists, Jacobson said. Defense officials fear a repetition of their experience with one Afghan detainee who, upon release, rejoined the Taliban, U.S. officials said.
The British and U.S. governments started negotiating the releases last summer, soon after Washington designated two Britons at Guantanamo Bay as eligible for trial before a military tribunal. The State Department was inclined to give in to British requests that all nine of its nationals, including two headed for tribunals, be sent home, but the Pentagon bitterly disagreed, said people familiar with the talks.
"There was considerable interagency debate, a real fight, over releasing these guys," Jacobson said. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld "weighed in. . . . DOD said it knew for certain the four who ended up staying were a threat, and also felt most of the other five were a threat, just a little less of one."
White House officials were split between the competing Defense and State positions, informed sources said.
A compromise was reached under which four of the Britons, including two deemed eligible for special military trials, would remain in detention, while the other five would return home. Defense officials asked for stronger British assurances that they would be investigated and monitored, the sources said. But the British explained that prosecution was almost out of the question, officials said.
Last month, before the release of the five, Pierre Prosper, the State Department's negotiator on the releases, told British reporters that Washington required promises that the repatriated men would be "detained and investigated, and/or prosecuted."
Last week State Department spokesman Lou Fintor said: "The United States is aware that under U.K. law, the U.K. might not be able to prosecute or detain the five detainees. However, the U.K. is a close ally in the war on terrorism, and agreed to take responsibility for its nationals if they return to the U.K. and to take steps ensuring they wouldn't engage in or otherwise support terrorist activities."
Last week Home Secretary David Blunkett, Britain's top law enforcement official, said in a statement, "Having been briefed by the security service, I stand by my assessment that those returned do not constitute a threat to public safety."
Last week the U.S. Embassy in London, partly in reply to a barrage of British media criticism of detentions of the nine Britons, released a statement with thumbnail descriptions of some of the five released men -- but without their identities. The statement suggested at least some of them had ties to al Qaeda.
One received weapons training at an al Qaeda safe house in Kabul in 2001 and was a "weapons-carrying fighter" in Tora Bora, an escape route for Osama bin Laden's forces, the U.S. government statement said. "This person was wounded in battle with Coalition forces and was subsequently captured."
Two others trained for 40 days in 2000 at a military camp in Afghanistan, learning to shoot a Kalashnikov and observing weapon demonstrations, the statement said, adding "these two and a third returned to Afghanistan shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, to fight jihad with the Taliban. They lived in caves for several weeks" and carried guns before being captured.
"One of the individuals states he considers the U.K. and U.S. governments to be his enemies and traveled to Afghanistan after 9/11 for an organization known to be associated with al Qaeda," the U.S. statement said. "He also associated with al Qaeda extremists in the U.K."
The five Britons returned to freedom are Asif Iqbal, 22; Shafiq Rasul, 26; Rhuhel Ahmed, 22; Tarek Dergoul, 26; and Jamal al-Harith, 37. U.S. officials said al-Harith has the least sinister background of the five.
U.S. government officials also released to London's Daily Telegraph a statement with short descriptions of the four Britons still at Guantanamo Bay. The two named as candidates for trial before military tribunals are Moazzam Begg, 36, and Feroz Abbasi, 23.
Begg allegedly was trained in making chemical bombs at an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, and in late 2001 was on al Qaeda's front lines facing U.S. troops, the U.S. statement said. He translated motivational speeches for al Qaeda fighters, then escaped with them into Pakistan, where he allegedly harbored them in a safe house, it said.
The government contends that Abbasi attended four courses at al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan on topics such as assassination, and met bin Laden three times. He allegedly volunteered for suicide missions, fought with al Qaeda and when arrested in late 2001 had grenades strapped to his leg.
Detainee Martin Mubanga, 29, allegedly trained in bomb-making at an al Qaeda camp, and pledged bayat, or allegiance, to bin Laden. He was arrested in a Pakistani house also used by senior al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida, who is also in detention, the government said.
The fourth, Richard Belmar, allegedly studied urban warfare at an al Qaeda camp, and as part of the training al Qaeda sent him to scout the then-vacant British Embassy in Kabul for future use by the terrorist network, according to the statement. When Belmar, 23, was captured, it said, he had a notebook with a list of 33 Jewish groups in New York.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Solar Power Switched on at San Francisco's Moscone Center
SAN FRANCISCO, California, (ENS)
March 22, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2004/2004-03-22-09.asp#anchor5
A new solar electric system was unveiled at the Moscone Center on Thursday, and San Francisco's premier meeting and exhibition facility now has the largest city owned solar installation in the United States.
Mayor Gavin Newsom and officials from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) joined with city and state officials in dedicating the new 675 kilowatt solar electric system that covers 60,000 square feet with an array of solar panels.
The electricity generated by Moscone's solar system, combined with savings from energy efficiency measures, delivers the equivalent energy to power approximately 8,500 homes.
"It is with great pride that we dedicate this historic Moscone Center solar installation," said Mayor Newsom. "San Francisco is a leader in the use of clean and renewable energy sources - solutions that make sense for both the environment and the economy."
The solar project marks the city's first major step towards achieving its goal of obtaining all municipal energy from pollution free sources, while creating jobs and driving economic development, the mayor said.
The Moscone Center Energy project consists of two parts: solar power generation and energy efficiency. The solar electric system is a PowerLight photovoltaic roofing assembly installed on the Moscone Center roof. This system utilizes solar modules to convert sunlight directly into electricity. The solar panels also provide thermal insulation and protect the roof from ultraviolet rays and thermal degradation, which reduces heating and cooling energy costs and extends the life of the roof.
New building controls and energy efficient lighting reduce energy requirements. Together, the solar power and energy efficiency measures will make available more than five million kilowatt hours annually.
The Moscone solar installation was funded in part by the San Francisco Mayor's Energy Account (MECA). Established in 2001, MECA directed funding to finance energy efficiency programs in city buildings and facilities.
"Reliable solar generation benefits both the city and the entire Bay Area region by reducing congestion on the electricity grid as well as improving air quality and preventing other environmental impacts," noted SFPUC Assistant General Manager for Power Policy Ed Smeloff.
"PowerLight is proud to be part of a public-private partnership that allows local government to take a leadership role in implementing clean, renewable power," said PowerLight President Dan Shugar.
"San Francisco is distinguishing itself as a forerunner in deploying technology innovations that are critical to our collective future. The Moscone Center energy project demonstrates that solar electric generation and energy efficiency are smart investments for business and government."
By reducing the purchase of fossil fuel-generated electricity, Moscone Center's solar system spares the environment from tons of harmful emissions. Over the next 30 years the solar generated electricity and energy efficiency measures will reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 35,000 tons. These emissions reductions are equivalent to removing 7,000 cars from Bay Area roads or not driving 88 million miles in the San Francisco Bay Area.
----
Atlantic Winds Could Blow in Energy Jobs
ANNAPOLIS, Maryland, (ENS)
March 22, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2004/2004-03-22-09.asp#anchor3
Electricity use in the Mid-Atlantic region is projected to grow by almost 20 percent over the next decade. To meet this future demand for energy, wind and solar power are the best bets for job growth, according to a new report from the Maryland Public Interest Research Group (MaryPIRG).
The group's report "Renewables Work: Job Growth from Renewable Energy Development in the Mid-Atlantic," shows that increasing renewable energy in Maryland and the Mid-Atlantic Region would create thousands of jobs and increase economic activity in the state.
The research group has found that choosing wind power over a comparable amount of power generated by natural gas would create more than twice as many jobs.
"The potential for renewable energy to boost Maryland's economy is enormous," said Gigi Kellett, advocate with the MaryPIRG Foundation, which issued the report on Thursday.
"At a time when the state is scrambling for ways to bolster the state's business climate, promoting renewable energy is an easy choice - more renewable energy equals more jobs for our state and, ultimately lower and more stable energy bills for consumers and businesses."
MaryPIRG cites estimates by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), showing that the Mid-Atlantic region has enough natural wind resources to generate over 52 million megawatts per year, over 17 percent of current demand. This does not include potential from offshore wind power.
By developing the currently feasible sites, the Mid-Atlantic region would see over 11,000 new year long jobs in manufacturing, with a payroll of $334 million; 740 permanent jobs in wind farm operation and maintenance, with a yearly payroll of $30 million; and 12,700 year-long jobs and 850 permanent jobs indirectly supported by the wind industry.
At least $23 million in royalties paid to rural landowners who lease land for wind generation.
"Maryland has good wind resources that can bring local jobs, tax revenues, and investment to Maryland's rural counties," said Kevin Rackstraw of Clippper Windpower, Inc.
"Renewable energy programs provide a signal to the markets that there will be long-term demand for renewables, which in turn gives investors and power buyers the confidence to sign the long-term power deals that are necessary to bring substantial amounts of clean power to Maryland consumers."
"Wind energy in particular has the potential to be the cheapest and cleanest new power source available in the coming years to consumers in Maryland and the region," Rackstraw continued.
The group has great hopes for the future of solar power, noting that NREL predicts that at least 10 percent of U.S. power generation capacity will be solar photovoltaic cells by 2030.
Currently, Maryland does offer an incentive for installation of solar power. An individual or a corporation may claim a state income tax credit of 15 percent of the total installed cost of a solar water heating or photovoltaic system. The maximum credit is $2,000 for a PV system and $1,000 for a for solar water heating system.
Installing a two kilowatt photovoltaic system on just one out of 10 homes in the Mid-Atlantic region would create 5,710 year long local jobs in installation, operation, and maintenance and 8,080 year long manufacturing jobs, the group estimates.
"As this report shows, clearly Maryland will only benefit from increased clean energy development. Wind and solar not only reduce air pollution and nuclear waste, prevent natural gas price spikes, and increase reliability, but clean energy also benefits our workforce and the economy," said Kellett.
In New Jersey, the report was promoted by the New Jersey Public Interest Research Group, joined today by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 269 and the wind company Community Energy.
The report was released the day after the Board of Public Utilities finalized new requirements on power companies to provide more clean energy to New Jersey homes and businesses. The new rules will increase the use of solar power in New Jersey more than tenfold, and require that four percent of the state's electricity come from clean renewable sources, all by the year 2008. The solar requirement within the rules has resulted in dozens of new solar companies flocking to the state.
"Renewable energy like solar and wind have enormous potential to create jobs and boost New Jersey's economy. NJPIRG strongly supports the McGreevey administration's actions to increase clean energy in New Jersey," said energy advocated Emily Rusch.
----
World wind power to grow, but boom days over
REUTERS DENMARK:
March 22, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/24376/story.htm
COPENHAGEN - The huge growth in the global wind power market will lose a lot of its pace in the next five years but will still expand at an average of 10.4 percent a year, independent Danish windpower consultancy BTM said in an annual industry survey.
Wind power accounts for around one percent of global energy supply, but the sector is growing fast as part of the struggle to bring down greenhouse gas emissions, which many scientists say cause global warming.
The expected average growth for the next five-year period is less than half the average growth of 26.3 percent seen in the five years to 2003. It is also lower than the previous five year 2003-2007 forecast for 11.2 percent growth.
This year, installation of wind power is expected to decline four percent from last year's installed 8,344 megawatts (MW).
Looking beyond 2008, BTM said it expected wind power to grow by 25,000 MW per year, bringing the total industry to 194,000 MW.
"Offshore development in Europe will take off in large scale from 2007, particularly in Germany and Britain. The U.S. forecast is uncertain and dependent on the extension of the Production Tax Credit as well as other drivers," BTW said in a statement.
BTM said a record 8,344 MW were installed worldwide in 2003, taking the total wind power past 40,000 MW, enough to power more than 16 million average European homes.
Europe is still the driving force in the wind power industry accounting for 66.5 percent of global installed MW in 2003. Germany remained the single largest market in the world, although growth dropped to 17 percent from 37.4 percent last year.
The U.S. market grew slightly more than expected to 1,687 MW after a slow 2002. Its growth has been held back due to the uncertain status of the wind energy production tax credit (PTC), a key federal tax incentive to promote wind power.
The world's five biggest wind turbine makers account for 76 percent of the global market, according to 2003 data.
Denmark's Vestas (VWS.CO: Quote, Profile, Research) lost half a percentage point of the world market but remained No. 1 with a share of 21.7 percent, while GE Wind, a part of General Electric (GE.N: Quote, Profile, Research) , boomed to 18 percent from 8.8 percent.
Germany's privately owned Enercon lost market shares to hold 14.6 percent, as did Denmark's NEG Micon (NEG.CO: Quote, Profile, Research) , coming in fifth with 10.2 percent.
Spanish Gamesa (GAM.MC: Quote, Profile, Research) remained the world number four wind turbine maker with a market share of 11.5 percent, largely unchanged from 2002.
-------- energy
The Oil Future
From: "DW03" <dogwatch03@yahoo.se>
Mon Mar 22, 2004
http://www.wolfatthedoor.org.uk
The Oil Futures
At some point in the future, the world will wake up to the danger of oil depletion and try to do something about it. The key question is when?
The Optimistic Future
In the optimistic view, the world becomes aware suddenly and soon, rather in the same way that climate change, so long ignored, was on everyone's tongue almost overnight in the 1990s. It only takes one influential politician or scientist to set the snowball rolling and it will gather momentum on its own. Once people are aware of the problem, governments will have the licence to bring in energy conservation laws, and treaties will be signed between the oil consuming countries and producers to prevent resource-grabbing wars.
Populations reduction strategies will have to be introduced to lessen the demand on food and energy, overriding religious sensibilities on contraception and abortion. Our whole way of life will have to change (see chart F1) but the threat will be so grave that we will be forced to do so. Eventually, a smaller and more stable human population will emerge (estimated at about two billion).
F1. Transport Efficiency
The Pessimistic Future
Alternatively, the world continues with its blind, prodigal ways, ignoring the signs until the decline is well underway and impossible to ignore. Then there will be panic and desperate attempts by countries to secure the remaining oil for themselves, a national rather than a global survival strategy. Wars will break out between enemies, and trade barriers between 'friends', as societies try to avoid the inevitable change and try to keep the existing world going as long as possible.
Wars, famines, droughts and mass migrations destroy our intricate industrial society until we eventually end up with a greatly reduced population, maybe two billion or less, existing in a Medieval (or worse) society.
My View of the Near Future (next 50 years)
I personally am pessimistic and find it hard to believe that governments will take the necessary actions in time. Consider how much awareness and evidence there is of climate change (which is a relatively long term phenomenon) and the inability of the world to make significant alterations to our lifestyles for that. Yet oil depletion will hit much sooner and harder, and the changes that we will need to make will be much harsher and more expensive,
As an example, there are two simple little actions (one for the USA, one for the UK) which would make a tiny step forward to survival. Neither is particularly painful - indeed, the UK action would actually be beneficial. But could you imagine either action taking place unless we were already in dire straits?
In the USA, the tax on petrol/gasoline is doubled. Since fuel tax is already very low (by European standards), it would not be that harsh but it might make people think twice about buying cars with inefficient engines.
In the UK, the speed limits on motorways could be reduced to 55 mph, thereby saving fuel with benefits for both the country and the individual. (It would probably also reduce deaths and decrease congestion).
Could you imagine a US president or British prime minister taking these actions, especially with the complete lack of awareness of oil depletion? In actual fact, the Conservative party in their manifesto recently stated:
...we will look to improve the traffic flow on motorways by increasing the speed limit to 80 mph where it is safe to do so, and enforcing this speed limit rigorously.
There is little sign that governments are aware of and/or setting about facing the problems of oil depletion. The UK government has proposed plans to expand airports with wild predictions that demand for air travel would triple to 500 million passenger journeys each year by 2030. By then, oil production would have probably dropped to half of present day values. These expensive, environmentally damaging airports are more likely to be sitting empty or filled with mothballed aircraft too expensive to fly.
In 2003, the Labour government made a U-turn on transport and decided to build and widen more roads instead of committing money to public transport. From the signs, an observer might believe that governments are expecting there to be a surplus of oil, rather than a deficit. Until the costs of oil begin to soar and we become very aware of the problems, we are unlikely to do anything. And then it will be too late.
I believe that it will require the emergence of an effective leader with a personality forceful enough to convince the governments and public of the danger, or a Great Stink
The Four Stages of the Breakdown
When considering what to do about the upcoming collapse of modern society, we have to be aware of what will happen. There are four different stages to come which can be defined by the difference in the factors of energy source, interdependence and security.
1. Awareness
This is the stage we are at now. We are using hydrocarbons as our principle energy source and we are at a high sense of interdependence - that is, everybody has a specific job and we all rely on others to do their own jobs. As an example, the farmer grows corn, the driver takes it to the factories, the factory workers convert it to bread, other drivers take it to shops, shop keepers sell the bread. If any one group of people fail to do their job, the process fails. The farmer cannot turn his corn into bread and the shopkeeper cannot grow his own corn to sell.
We also have a high security level meaning that the government, authorities, police and military generally maintain organisation and the rule of law so that individuals do not need to worry too much about these things themselves.
Awareness is low at the moment and the Stage will not end until just about all of the world's educated population knows of this problem (there will always be some who do not learn oil depletion in the same way as there are many now, especially in the developing world, who are unaware of climate change.) But as awareness will tend to rely on signs of oil depletion, this stage overlaps with the next.
2. Transition
This is the actual long period when we switch from our modern, hydrocarbon-based society to whatever comes afterwards. It begins with price rises, recessions and blackouts, and ends with riots, wars and famines. Transition can be subdivided into two further phases: Ordered and Anarchic.
2a. Ordered Transition
Initially, the three factors are still dominant, especially security. The deprivations can be mollified somewhat by welfare, and the health and emergency services. Governments still retain control so blackouts do not collapse into looting and food shortages do not lead to riots.
2b. Anarchic Transition
As the Transition continues and oil becomes more scarce, order breaks down. The threatened lootings and riots of the Ordered Transition become fact. Our interdependence becomes a danger as certain stages of processes become weakened or unavailable (what happens with our corn-to-bread line when the lorries cannot obtain the diesel to transport the goods?) The authorities find it harder and harder to keep control so that are increasingly forced to look after ourselves, growing our own food and protecting our homes against the poor and starving.
--------
House GOP prods Senate on energy
By Brian DeBose
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 22, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040321-115652-4280r.htm
The House Republican leadership wants the Senate to "stop making excuses" and pass the energy bill that has been stalled since last year.
Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, Illinois Republican, released a statement last week urging the Senate to move forward on the bill, saying it could produce jobs and stave off a looming energy crisis.
"There are storm clouds on the horizon, especially when it comes to higher energy prices. Gas prices are approaching two dollars a gallon. Natural gas prices are skyrocketing. And the electric grid needs serious work. All of these factors could derail our economy and cost jobs," Mr. Hastert said.
The House and Senate energy committees last fall approved a comprehensive $31 billion spending bill, which includes research funding for alternative fuel sources, corporate tax incentives for pollution abatement and liability protection for producers of the MTBE fuel additive.
The bill has languished in the Senate over politics and bruised egos. Senate Democrats felt snubbed after Sen. Pete V. Domenici, New Mexico Republican and chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, locked them out of conference negotiations with members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Democrats want to pass portions of the more than 1,000-page bill to clear the way for debate on the more contentious language.
"Congress can accomplish a lot by legislating our nation's energy problems in smaller bites, rather than trying to swallow whole a supersized energy bill," said Sen. Jeff Bingaman, New Mexico Democrat and ranking member of the energy committee.
The bill has failed to pass twice. Mr. Domenici, Minority Leader Tom Daschle, South Dakota Democrat, and Majority Leader Bill Frist, Tennessee Republican, worked out a stripped-down version of the bill last month, intending to get the $14 billion proposal to the floor for debate with as few amendments as possible. But that plan also was stymied.
"We have not had any discussions in the last couple of days. Our expectation is that when we come back from the next state work period that we will schedule the energy bill," Mr. Daschle said before the Senate went into recess last week. It reconvenes today.
Part of the delay on the energy bill is Mr. Daschle's need to get the ethanol provisions passed in an election year. The provisions would please the thousands of corn growers in his home state and other Midwestern states.
The other part is a provision granting liability immunity on MTBE, or methy tertiary-butyl ether, a fuel additive that has been the target of civil lawsuits by environmentalists. Democrats view the provision as a corporate giveaway.
House Republicans say the bill will not pass without the MTBE language.
"This is a matter of a very delicate compromise with [provisions for] ethanol and MTBE liability. If Mr. Daschle wants to talk about ethanol, he need to pass this bill," said a House Republican staffer.
Mr. Daschle is scrambling for two critical votes to get the bill to the floor.
"I think that we ... made a major step forward in taking out all the MTBE liability immunity. I think that was by far the biggest stumbling block," he said.
A spokesman for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Texas Republican, said the negotiating has gone on long enough and blamed the delay on special-interest politics.
"He should be able to rustle up a couple of colleagues so we can get this to the president's desk," spokesman Jonathan Grella said.
"Democrats are looking for excuses to oppose this bill so they don't irritate their special interests in an election year," he said.
Mr. Hastert made it clear that time is running out. "It is time for the Senate Democratic minority, led by Senator Daschle and Senator Kerry, to halt their procedural gamesmanship and allow this bill to get a clean up or down vote," he said.
-------- environment
Buffalo Kill To Control Disease Questioned
Environmental Groups Dispute Risk to Cattle
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 26, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A25031-2004Mar25?language=printer
For most Americans, buffaloes are icons of an era when much of America was wild and unspoiled.
But to state and federal park officials around Yellowstone National Park, the bison also represent the threat of brucellosis, a disease that causes both buffaloes and cattle to spontaneously abort their young. In an effort to protect susceptible cows on ranches bordering the park, park rangers have been shooting a growing number of the buffaloes that each winter wander out of the park in search of food.
So far this year, National Park Service and Montana Department of Livestock employees have shot 278 of the roughly 4,200 wild buffaloes that roam the park's confines. The program -- a boon to neighboring cattle owners and a bane to environmentalists -- has been in place for nearly a decade. But as the number of dead bison mount, criticism of the practice has grown.
"If people knew what's going on in Montana they would be appalled," said Buffalo Field Campaign spokesman Ted Fellman, whose group that has documented the roundup in an effort to halt it.
Fellman and other buffalo advocates note that there has never been a documented case of brucellosis transmission from buffaloes to cattle in the wild.
The current roundup is part of a bison management plan established in 2000 under an agreement among five agencies: the National Park Service; the Department of Agriculture's Forest Service and its Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service; the Montana Department of Livestock; and the state Fish, Wildlife and Parks division. The plan calls for protecting privately held cattle without inflicting excessive damage.
Once rangers spot a significant herd of buffaloes leaving the park, they swoop down on them in helicopters, snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles. While park officials initially try to herd them back into the park, when they cannot do that they steer them into pens for brucellosis testing and the kill.
The fact that 4,200 buffaloes now reside in Yellowstone is a kind of victory in itself: While roughly 35 million bison roamed the United States in the mid-1800s, the number dwindled to 23 by 1902. There are herds elsewhere in the country, but they are privately held and are not purebred.
"The resurgence of buffalo is one of the great conservation victories of our history," said Charles Clusen, director of the national parks for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "But that doesn't excuse the indefensible slaughter of buffalo today."
The conflict between bison and local farmers arises each winter, when buffaloes leave the park in search of food. According to Clusen, there are about 180 cows in areas immediately adjoining the north side of Yellowstone and an additional 100 to the west. But Karen R. Cooper, a spokeswoman for the Montana Department of Livestock, said a much grater number are at risk. She said there are 170,000 cattle in the three counties that border Yellowstone, which is located in the northwest corner of Wyoming, and that Montana, unlike Wyoming, has so far remained free of brucellosis.
Steve Pilcher, executive vice president of the Montana Stockgrowers Association, noted that cattle -- at 2.5 million, they are more numerous than people in the state -- are "very important to the state of Montana's economy."
"It's probably the best of a bad situation," Pilcher said of the buffalo kill.
Cooper said the agents try first to bring the buffaloes back into the park, before rounding them up for brucellosis testing. But at times the buffaloes refuse to go back, she said, and must be herded into pens.
"It's absolutely crucial to be brucellosis free for the cattle industry," she said.
Estimates for the cost of the operation vary: environmentalists peg it at $3 million a year, while Cooper said Montana officials had set aside $800,000 for the operation this year.
Federal and state officials give the meat and hides of the slain buffaloes to area tribes, but some are now refusing the gifts, said Fred DuBray , executive director of the InterTribal Bison Cooperative.
"When they're killing the buffalo in Yellowstone, a lot of tribal people feel they're killing part of us," DuBray said. "We've discouraged our membership from accepting that; we felt we were being used."
Several academics and environmentalists said elk pose the same or greater risk of transmitting brucellosis to cattle, but do not attract the same attention from authorities.
University of Florida professor Paul L. Nicoletti said outbreaks in cattle in Idaho and Wyoming were traced to elk, not buffaloes.
"The elk are more a risk of transmission than bison," Nicoletti said. "There has never been a conclusive case of brucellosis in cattle that was transmitted by the Yellowstone bison."
Cooper did not dispute that claim, but she noted that a buffalo did infect a cow in an experiment at Texas A&M University. Buffaloes also represent a much greater risk, she said, because 40 to 50 percent of buffaloes test positive for brucellosis, compared with just 1 to 3 percent of the elk herd.
Both sides predict that more bison will be rounded up and killed before the season is over, but if some lawmakers have their way, it could be the last time. In Congress, Reps. Maurice D. Hinchey (D-N.Y.) and Charles Bass (R-N.H.) have authored legislation that would impose a three-year moratorium on the buffalo kill and carry out a $43 million land exchange in the northern section of the park. That would provide the buffaloes with a larger area to roam, keeping them away from cattle.
----
60 Bottlenose Dolphins Dead in Florida Panhandle
REUTERS USA:
March 22, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/24374/story.htm
MIAMI - More than 60 bottlenose dolphins have died in the waters of the Florida Panhandle in the past nine days under mysterious circumstances, U.S. marine researchers said.
The National Marine Fisheries Service said its preliminary tests found no evidence of red tide, a harmful alga that has been blamed in the past for massive die-offs of endangered manatees, in the waters of St. Joseph's Bay, where most of the dead dolphins have been found. Researchers discovered traces of another harmful alga and a toxin associated with red tide in the water, where dead fish and jellyfish had also been found. They could not say whether the alga or toxin contributed to the deaths.
Florida banned shellfish harvesting in the vicinity of St. Joseph's Bay in November because of toxins in the water. The bay is about 30 miles southeast of Panama City, Florida.
Red tide was blamed for the deaths of 60 endangered manatees over a two-month period early last year. In 1996, a similar algae bloom killed 149 manatees.
Scientists say red tide algae contain a toxin that is released into the water when the algae die. Manatees can ingest the toxin when they eat or inhale it when they surface to breathe.
-------- health
Focusing on the Bottom Line
Handling of Lead Issue Reflects WASA Chief's Rigid Political Style
By David Nakamura
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 22, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13572-2004Mar21.html
D.C. government task force members were behind closed doors last month discussing ways to manage the burgeoning lead contamination crisis when Jerry N. Johnson spoke up. What was on his mind, though, had little to do with public health, politics or policy.
The D.C. Water and Sewer Authority's general manager complained about rising costs. His agency, he said, was paying for thousands of new water tests and had reassigned senior managers to answer phones on the lead hotline, according to two officials at the meeting.
City Administrator Robert C. Bobb cut Johnson off, curtly telling him that WASA would be expected to assume most of the financial burdens.
The meeting illustrates how Johnson, 56, has defined his tenure as WASA's first and only general manager. Charged with remaking an agency plagued by decaying infrastructure and a bloated staff, he has focused on the bottom line since his arrival in 1997, shortly after the utility was spun off from the rest of the D.C. government. Johnson has raised rates and pared payroll, established an online customer service center and replaced outmoded meters. He has won the confidence of the financial community and helped secure an AA-minus bond rating that will affect the underwriting of a 10-year, $1.6 billion capital improvement plan.
Confident, driven and rarely flustered, Johnson has come to regard the new WASA as largely his creation and his legacy. It means that he has little patience for second-guessing and criticism.
"When WASA is criticized, he regards it very much as his baby," said Glenn S. Gerstell, chairman of WASA's board of directors, who said that at the task force meeting, Johnson merely wanted to convey that the quasi-independent agency has strict budget constraints and could not "willy-nilly" agree to pay. Johnson would not comment on the session.
With the discovery over the past 11/2 years that more than 5,000 D.C. homes have water with excessive levels of lead, Johnson faces a torrent of denunciation and an unprecedented challenge to his credibility. Critics say the agency failed to fully inform residents and city officials of the lead problem and the potential health risks even after the contamination was disclosed by the media.
Since the elevated levels were made public in late January, WASA has received more than 30,000 phone calls and 5,000 e-mails about the problem. As of Friday, 14,000 residents had requested water testing kits. A class-action lawsuit has been filed on behalf of residents, an independent investigation has been launched by former U.S. assistant attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. and some city leaders have called for Johnson's resignation. One bond-rating firm has put WASA on a negative watch.
"A forward-thinking authority gets out and informs people that there's a real serious problem and solicits everyone's input," said Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth, an environmental group. "Even if WASA came up with a miracle solution tomorrow, it would not redeem them for the fact that people were consuming high levels of lead in water without knowing about it at a time when the agency did know. That's major misconduct."
In the face of such criticism, Johnson, who is paid $185,000 a year, has remained stoic, folding his arms defiantly at public hearings and adopting the catchphrase "facts over fear." It is intended to suggest that the lead problem has been exaggerated by politicians and the media.
"It was a management decision, and I take full responsibility for it," Johnson said of the limited public notification last fall. "It would have been irresponsible to put out incomplete information."
As a result, some D.C. leaders, including council members Adrian M. Fenty (D-Ward 4) and Harold Brazil (D-At Large), have called for Johnson to be fired. Others, including Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) and Bobb, a longtime friend of Johnson's, have been less critical.
Michael C. Rogers, who was chairman of the WASA board that hired Johnson, gave his former employee high marks for his overall performance but acknowledged that Johnson will have to reckon with mounting public distrust. "Whether WASA's management believes they acted wrong or not, there's a perception that there was a screw-up," Rogers said. "When the public perceives a screw-up, they expect those involved to be held accountable."
A 'No-Nonsense' Leader
Johnson is tall and lean, with wire-rim glasses and a neat goatee. He dresses in double-breasted suits, with monogrammed shirt-sleeves and shiny gold cuff links that match his watch. In public, he exudes confidence, coolness, with a touch of agitation visible when he disagrees with someone.
He arrived at WASA after 17 years in Richmond, where he began as the city's director of facilities in 1980 and was later promoted to run the water and gas utilities. By the mid-1990s, he was deputy to Richmond's city manager, at the time Bobb.
In Richmond, Bobb and Johnson were part of a group of young African American public administrators who were rising to prominence in a city long divided by racial politics. Manuel Deese, Richmond's first black city manager, hired Johnson and recalls Johnson leading the effort to privatize the city's arenas and coliseum.
"He's no-nonsense," Deese said. "There were some people there who were hard-core, who had been there a long time, and he was very strong in dealing with them. He gave a person a chance, but if you didn't make it, he would say you have to go."
Such training came in handy when Johnson took over the District's water and sewer authority.
The agency delivers drinking water to the District, Arlington and Falls Church and provides wastewater services to the city and several suburbs, including Montgomery, Prince George's and Fairfax counties.
But during the early 1990s, when the utility was under the control of mayors Marion Barry and Sharon Pratt Kelly, roughly $80 million in revenue raised by the agency was diverted to other city needs. At the urging of the suburbs, officials created WASA, managed by an 11-member board, six appointed by the D.C. mayor and the rest from the suburbs.
To Johnson, the challenge was enormous. WASA had no human resources or technology departments. Its credit rating was so limited, Johnson said, that he had to solicit a bank in Cleveland for a $20 million loan because no D.C. bank would hear him out.
"I had friends tell me I was insane to go to D.C.," he said. But the job was irresistible, he added. "I viewed WASA as the ultimate challenge. Not many people get the chance to put the first ink on the page," Johnson said, speaking passionately.
Johnson and his chief financial officer, Paul L. Bender, whom he brought with him from Richmond, set to work. Johnson recalls reviewing the budget until 3 a.m. with Bender and chief engineer Michael S. Marcotte, who came from Dallas. Johnson said he had to strike out $40 million because he knew revenue would not match projections.
"I had no confidence in the numbers. To me, that was a telltale sign of what the organization was capable of delivering," he said.
After that, Bender reorganized his office so thoroughly that some employees were fired and escorted off the Blue Plains campus in Southwest by security guards, according to WASA employees. The new management team, according to WASA documents and interviews, eliminated hundreds of positions, contracted out projects and consolidated the various unions. Overall, WASA has reduced staff from roughly 1,500 employees to just over 1,100 on Johnson's watch.
Water rates, which had not been raised in years, began to climb -- 42 percent in one year, to the chagrin of some customers. A massive meter replacement program increased revenue because the new meters, read by satellites, were more accurate.
Wall Street noticed. Joe Mason, a director in Fitch Ratings' McLean office, said Johnson and his team "run a tight ship, and they get financial results."
Complaints of Cronyism
But others who dealt with Johnson were left bruised.
Just one month into his tenure, Johnson blasted a union report that claimed management was still mired in cronyism. He called the report "a volume of accusations, innuendos, gossip and unverifiable conclusions."
Christopher Hawthorne, head of WASA's water workers' union, said Johnson and his team eliminated many pay-step increases and have not retrained employees, preferring to eliminate their positions after installing new technology. "We're tired of the hostile environment," Hawthorne said.
In 2000, Johnson took on D.C. Inspector General Charles C. Maddox, who was investigating reports of safety violations at Blue Plains. In his findings, Maddox called WASA's managers "defensive and non-responsive" and said they intimidated employees into refusing to cooperate with investigators. Maddox listed several alleged safety violations and questioned bonuses Johnson gave himself, Bender and Marcotte.
Johnson responded with a blustery seven-page letter challenging many of Maddox's conclusions. At the time, Johnson said that he was "irritated and disturbed" and that Maddox's report bordered on "unethical."
Johnson stood by those comments last week. "You have to respond. You have to get your perspective out there," he said.
Environmentalists, who have been engaged in a four-year battle with WASA, complained that WASA had taken on the defensive personality of its boss. Their dispute with the agency began as an effort to negotiate a long-term plan to control wastewater overflow into rivers. But the activists became outraged at what they saw as WASA's resistance. They sued in federal court.
"It's a bunker mentality over there that I thought was unnecessary," said Marchant Wentworth, a Sierra Club member.
In a court settlement last summer, WASA agreed to a five-year plan, which addressed major issues raised by the environmentalists, at an estimated cost of $140 million. Johnson wonders what all the fuss was about. He said he was not stalling but simply believed that regional officials needed to think in a more "holistic" way and develop a multi-jurisdictional plan.
The lawsuit was "unnecessary and unwarranted," Johnson said last week.
Too Much Independence?
The question is whether Johnson's desire to impress Wall Street, his aversion to criticism and resistance to working with outside groups created an atmosphere in which managers strategically played down the lead contamination problems.
After Marcotte learned of high lead levels in summer 2002, he reported them to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. But at a March 5, 2003, hearing before a D.C. Council committee, Johnson did not mention the contamination in a statement. To the contrary, Johnson boasted that "WASA has met all EPA drinking-water quality requirements for the 77th consecutive month."
Critics say that Johnson, Bender and Marcotte have grown too insular, too eager to believe they can manage all problems without help from other city agencies. Frazier Walton, head of the Kingman Park Civic Association, said he believes that the agency might be too independent.
Walton said that when he hears them testify before the D.C. Council, "it's like they are saying, 'You can't do anything to me. You don't control me.' "
Johnson makes no apologies for the agency he has shaped.
"I don't think one can be an effective leader by being a shrinking violet," he said. "If you're going to lead, you have to lead. With the condition [WASA] was in, I don't think a weak leader could have come in and managed."
-------- ACTIVISTS
Immigration Issue Sparks Battle at Sierra Club
Groups Vie to Reshape Nonprofit's Board
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 22, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13539-2004Mar21?language=printer
The Southern Poverty Law Center is known for fighting hate groups but is not usually a player in environmental politics. Neither is the neo-Nazi group White Politics Inc. But in the Sierra Club's current board elections, they are just two of a potpourri of groups seeking to influence the outcome of a contest that could radically reshape the 112-year-old organization.
On one level, the battle for control of the Sierra Club board is a dispute over the impact on ecological concerns of population pressures fueled by immigration. More broadly, however, it is a tale of how the organization, buoyed by a rich treasury and a savvy grass-roots outreach effort, has become enmeshed in a bitter fight over how to best leverage the nonprofit's influence in national politics.
The stakes are high: Bolstered by anonymous gifts totaling more than $100 million, the group founded by John Muir, himself an immigrant from Scotland, now boasts an annual budget of $83 million and a membership of 750,000.
"The Sierra Club is the most prominent and influential group in America in terms of environmentalism," said Mark Potok, editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report, who said the center got involved because it discovered hate groups were urging followers to vote in the board election. "That's why it's seen as a prize. The aim is to hijack the credibility, the reputation, the membership and the finances of a very important political player."
Other environmental groups attest to the Sierra Club's influence. "They have tremendous clout, and they're hugely important allies in our environmental battles," said Greg Wetstone, director of advocacy for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Potok is just one of many activists weighing in on the election, which is taking place by mail over the next month. The controversy centers on three insurgent candidates, including former Colorado governor Richard Lamm (D), who are intent on curbing immigration to the United States in the name of environmentalism.
"I feel very strongly population and immigration is an environmental issue," Lamm said in an interview. "Sierra Club has avoided this issue for too long."
The battle has spawned at least three lawsuits, a flurry of mailings to members, as well as two outside groups devoted solely to shaping the future of the Sierra Club. The battle intensified last week when the Internet-based liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org urged its members to help defeat the three insurgent candidates, triggering the latest in a series of complaints from both sides about the involvement of outside groups.
"I'm outraged that MoveOn.org would get involved in the Sierra Club elections and others are as well," said Marcia Hanscom, who is allied with the anti-immigration cohort.
The Sierra Club has confronted the immigration question before: In 1998, members voted 60 to 40 to remain neutral on the issue. In 2001, they rejected a proposal to promote "regional and national population stabilization" as part of the club's agenda.
One of the new groups, Groundswell Sierra, represents members of the club's old guard bitterly opposed to the anti-immigration drive. Immigration opponents "have a right to express their views and try and win like everybody else," said Groundswell's campaign manager, Clayton Daughenbaugh. "What they don't have a right to do is to bring in candidates with no experience in the Sierra Club as part of an effort to overthrow a membership-voted position."
In a private talk to the board of directors in late February, the club's executive director, Carl Pope, described the anti-immigrant advocates as "a virus" that threatened to infect the organization.
"It's hate," Pope said, according to a transcript of his speech. "It was a very sad moment for me when I had to recognize that hate wasn't just something out there in American society that the Sierra Club had to fight, but that hate had gotten dangerously close to the club itself."
The anti-immigration candidates accuse Pope of using smear tactics to damage their candidacies. They sued Pope along with board President Larry Fahn and the club for unfair election practices in February; they later dropped the suit, but the defendants countersued to recover their attorney's fees. That case is still pending.
Frank Morris, the former executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, who with entomologist David Pimentel of Cornell University is on the insurgents' ticket with Lamm, said he suspects a group of anonymous donors who gave more than $100 million in 2001 and 2002 is behind the countersuit.
"We've never been able to figure out the intensity of the attack," Morris said. "The issue might be those who had given large donations want to control the agenda of the Sierra Club."
Fahn and Pope deny that claim and note that the money went to the Sierra Club Foundation, an affiliated but independent entity that makes grants of about $15 million a year for club projects. John DeCock, who heads the foundation, said he has never discussed immigration with the dozen anonymous donors who made the gifts.
For an election in which candidates cannot spend more than $2,000 each, the costs are spiraling. Daughenbaugh said his group spent more than $100,000 on a mailing urging members to reject Lamm and his allies.
Rep. Hilda L. Solis (D-Calif.) said in an interview that "the credibility in terms of the Latino community is going to be lost. This is very disturbing."
The outcome of the election remains in doubt: Ballots went out to members at the beginning of the month, and it is unclear how many will vote. In the past, about 10 percent have cast ballots, but the controversy swirling around this year's election makes it likely that more will take part.
Meanwhile, many Sierra Club stalwarts worry the battle will undermine the group's effectiveness on its core issues.
"This whole episode is a regrettable distraction from our mission to educate the public as to how the Bush-Cheney administration has been dismantling 40 years of environmental progress," Fahn said.
--------
After Gentler Tactics, a Peaceful Antiwar Protest
March 22, 2004
By SHAILA K. DEWAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/22/nyregion/22protest.html
By any measure, Saturday's antiwar march and rally went smoothly. Only four protesters were arrested - three of whom were not even on the march route, the police said. No officers were reported injured. The rally ended an hour ahead of schedule.
But the organizers of the event and the Police Department had different ideas about what made the day so orderly.
The police said it depended on directing the flow of people in to the march, a job they took upon themselves by posting directions to the rally on the department's Web site. "The key was having the correct information out 24 hours in advance," said Paul J. Browne, the deputy commissioner for public information.
The organizers said there was so little conflict because the police were under scrutiny after vigorous complaints about the Police Department's handling of an antiwar rally organized by the same group, United for Peace and Justice, in February 2003.
That rally resulted in more than 200 arrests and drew heated criticism of the crowd-control methods that kept thousands of people from reaching the demonstration.
This time, the police significantly modified their use of interlocking metal barricades to control pedestrian traffic. Instead of enclosing people in four-sided pens to keep them from blocking intersections, they left one side open, and allowed some midblock access.
Leslie Cagan, the national coordinator for United for Peace and Justice, said a campaign of phone calls and faxes to Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had pressured the police to make the change. But while the group objects to the use of metal barricades at all, Ms. Cagan said, "We thought that the dynamics of the police were fine yesterday."
Both sides had said the march through Midtown, followed by a rally on Madison Avenue, would be a sort of test for the anticipated protests at the Republican National Convention this summer, and each side was keeping a close eye on the other.
Despite the success of the day, however, each reserved the right to have reservations.
William Dobbs, a spokesman for United for Peace and Justice, said the police were less aggressive about arresting lingerers, pointing out that they actually escorted a small group that continued to march downtown, without a permit, after the event.
"The signals from the brass are the key thing," he said on Sunday. "They were on their best behavior yesterday, but that doesn't mean they'll be on their best behavior at the R.N.C."
After a march last March, organizers complained that the police moved too quickly to disperse a crowd in Washington Square after the event, arresting 91 people. "Some of them make it seem as if we created problems on March 22 - and that was nearly flawless," Mr. Dobbs said.
Some protesters complained of being photographed and videotaped at the march on Saturday by members of the Police Department's Technical Assistance and Response Unit.
Mr. Browne said that the police videotaped the march from a distance so that they could monitor it for signs of trouble, and that the technical assistance officers were there only to document any arrests or violence in order to protect the police from false accusations.
"No one was being videotaped for participating in the march," he said. "We're not using it for building dossiers." He said the department did not keep the videotapes and photographs.
But Ms. Cagan said the videotaping of peaceful protesters amounted to what she called "the criminalization of dissent."
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INTERNATIONAL SPACE CONFERENCE SET FOR PORTLAND, ME.
From: "Global Network" <globalnet@mindspring.com>
Mon Mar 22, 2004
For Immediate Release
Contact: Bruce Gagnon (207) 729-0517 (o) (207) 319-2017 (cell)
In the midst of Bush administration efforts to wage war around the world, hundreds of activists from more than 12 countries will gather at the Woodfords Congregational Church in Portland on April 23-25 for the 12th Annual International Space Organizing Conference sponsored by the Maine-based Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space (GN).
Events will begin with a protest rally on Friday, April 23 at Waterfront Park in Bath at 2:00 pm. Following the rally the assembled will march to Bath Ironworks at the time of a worker shift change. The Aegis destroyer, now being built at BIW, will be outfitted with new Theatre Missile Defense (TMD) systems and forward deployed in the Asian Pacific region surrounding China. These deployments are not intended to protect the American people but instead will provoke China to build more nuclear missiles. Today China has 20 nuclear missiles capable of hitting the continental U.S., while the U.S. has 7,500 nuclear weapons.
On Saturday, April 24 at the Woodfords Congregational Church (202 Woodford Street) the GN will hold its day long conference entitled Resisting Empire: Understanding the Role of Space in U.S. Global Domination featuring plenary sessions and educational workshops. Featured as the keynote speakers at the conference will be Dr. Helen Caldicott founder of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute and Dr. Craig Eisendrath, Senior Fellow, Center for International Policy. Dr. Caldicott, a long time leader in the anti-nuclear movement, years ago founded the Physicians for Social Responsibility. Dr. Eisendrath helped write the 1967 Outer Space Treaty that outlaws the placement of weapons in space.
"George W. Bush is now building the costly and destabilizing Star Wars system, that once deployed, will throw the door wide open to a new arms race," said Global Network Convener Dave Webb from Leeds, England. "We are told that Star Wars is supposed to make the U.S. and its allies more secure but we know that turning space into a battlefield can only lead to greater threats. The only people to benefit from the weaponization of space will be the aerospace corporations and their congressional friends."
The Bush administration is embarking on the controversial deployment of yet proven "missile defense" systems in Alaska and California before the next election. The U.S. had to withdraw from the 1972 ABM Treaty in order to carry out these deployments.
The Global Network was founded in 1992 to stop the nuclearization and weaponization of space and today has 185 affiliate groups all over the world. Each year the GN meets in a different part of the world. Participants are urged to register in advance. For more information about the conference visit: www.space4peace.org
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652 Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 729-0517 (207) 319-2017 (Cell phone)
http://www.space4peace.org
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Iraq war based on "lies and misinterpretations": former US president Carter
LONDON (AFP)
Mar 22, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040322085210.e43i3va6.html
The war in Iraq was based on a campaign of "lies and misinterpretations" by Washington and London which falsely linked Iraq's deposed dictator Saddam Hussein to the September 11 attacks in the United States, former US president Jimmy Carter was quoted as saying Monday. "There was no reason for us to become involved in Iraq recently," Carter told Britain's daily The Independent. "That was a war based on lies and misinterpretations from London and from Washington, claiming falsely that Saddam Hussein was responsible for (the) 9/11 attacks, claiming falsely that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
"And I think that President (George W) Bush and Prime Minister (Tony) Blair probably knew that many of the allegations were based on uncertain intelligence ... a decision was made to go to war (then people said) 'let's find a reason to do so'."
The 2002 No[b]el peace prize winner said he believed that Bush was the prime instigator of the war and Blair let himself be convinced that it was justified.
"I think the basic reason was made not in London but in Washington," he said. "I think that Bush Jr was inclined to finish a war that his father had precipitated against Iraq.
"I think it was that commitment of Bush that prevailed over, I think, the better judgement of Tony Blair and Tony Blair became an enthusiastic supporter of the Bush policy".
Carter's criticism came amid efforts by the White House to downplay accusations by a former top Bush terrorism advisor who accused the current administration of doing a "terrible job" of defending the country against terrorism.
Richard Clarke, who worked at the National Security Council for three US administrations, made the charges in his book "Against All Enemies," which goes on sale Monday, and in an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes" program.
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DU conference now on audio download
Mon Mar 22, 2004
From: davey garland <thunderelf@yahoo.co.uk>
Media Advisory
March 22, 2004
The World Depleted Uranium/Uranium Weapons Conference, held in Hamburg, Oct 16-19, is now available for audio download and replay/airplay at http://www.traprockpeace.org/depleted_uranium_hamburg03.html
You may also pre-order the Conference Reader through this link.
More than 200 participants represented 21 nations, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Australia, Japan, Canada, Sweden, Ireland, France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Algeria, Cuba, and Malta, UK and the US.
Over 35 speakers including scientists, medical professionals, Iraqi medical and environmental professionals, independent researchers, international legal experts, military professionals, a nuclear weapons lab whistleblower, a prosecutor for the International War Crimes Tribunal for Afghanistan, veterans and their families, civilians, NGO, and peace and anti-globalization activists presented their most recent findings and issues about the effects of these illegal weapons. Iraqi scientist, Dr. Souad Al-Azzawi, received the internationally recognized Nuclear Free Future Award and prize of 10,000 Euros on October 12, just prior to the Conference. She presented her findings on environmental studies of DU contamination of air, soil and water in southern Iraq from the 1991 Gulf War. For information on the speakers, see http://www.uraniumweaponsconference.de/speakers.htm
The evidence coming from the scientists, health professionals and legal experts at this Conference is clear: "DU is causing significant health effects worldwide, and it illegal under existing international law and convention," concluded conference planner Marion Küpker, co-coordinator of the German anti-weapons group Gewaltfreie Aktion Atomwaffen Abschaffen (GAAA). "Now it's up to the activist community to force rogue governments like the US and Britain to observe international law the same way they preach it to other nations."
The Index at http://www.traprockpeace.org/depleted_uranium_hamburg03.html is primarily audio, with links to 34 mp3 format files of presentations and interviews that are downloadable. They may be copied for non-profit use, replayed on computers, or burned to CD audio format for replay on CD players or by radio stations. We encourage distribution to radio programs which are free to use the material. In the few cases where audio was not available, we have provided the text of presentations or other pertinent resources. In addition, you will find select conference reports and a conference photo-album.
The audio index, with related resources, was a collaborative effort of the Conference and Traprock Peace Center.
For information on the conference, with conference reports and resolutions, see http://www.uraniumweaponsconference.de/
Charles Jenks, attorney at law President of the Core Group Traprock Peace Center 103A Keets Road Deerfield, MA 01342 413-773-1633; Fax 413-773-7507 charles@m... http://traprockpeace.org
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Antiwar Voices:
Father of Soldier Killed in Iraq and Aunt of War Resister Speak Out Against Iraq Invasion
Monday, March 22nd, 2004
Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/22/1536221
We speak with Fernando Suarez, whose son, Marine Lance Cpl Jesus Suarez, was one of the first U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq on March 27, 2003 and we hear a speech by Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia's aunt Norma Castillo speaking at a demonstration at Fort Bragg this weekend. Mejia surrendered to U.S. military police last week after being on the run for five months for refusing to go back to Iraq to fight. [includes rush transcript] One year into the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, more than 570 American soldiers have been killed with many thousands more wounded.
Marine Lance Cpl Jesus Suarez was one of the first U.S. servicemen killed in the war on March 27, 2003. His father, Fernando Suarez del Solar has become a leading antiwar voice and was one of the speakers in the antiwar demonstrations in New York City this weekend.
- Fernando Suarez del Solar, father of Marine Lance Cpl Jesus Suarez who was killed in Iraq on March 27, 2003.
- Norma Castillo, aunt of Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia speaking in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Mejia surrendered to U.S. military police after being on the run for five months for refusing to go back to Iraq to fight. Special thanks to Brandon Jourdan at NYC IMC Video.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
AMY GOODMAN: Fernando Suarez. Welcome to Democracy Now!.
FERNANDO SUAREZ: Thank you. Thank you for your invitation.
AMY GOODMAN: Tell us what you told the crowd. Tell us what you told the protesters.
FERNANDO SUAREZ: For the last protest here in New York, I feel in this beautiful city of thousands and thousands of people in New York and a million people around the world say, "Stop. No more war. No more blood." But at the same time I feel very bad because when everybody is here saying, "Stop the war," more boys in Iraq are dying. More children, Iraqis, are dying, only because Mr. Bush lied.
AMY GOODMAN: How did your son die? In Iraq, how did he die?
FERNANDO SUAREZ: Jesus died in Iraq on March 27, but the Bush [Administration] lied to me again and told me that Jesus died when he received a shot in the head.
AMY GOODMAN: You are saying that the Bush Administration lied when they told you that he received a shot in the head. -- You're saying that the Bush Administration lied to you?
FERNANDO SUAREZ: Yes. About the -- about what happens to my son in Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN: What happened?
FERNANDO SUAREZ: According to Bush, the administration, my son died when he received a shot in the head in combat fighting the enemy. But the truth is very different. The truth is Jesus stepped on an American cluster bomb and waited almost two hours for medical help. My question is why did the administration lie to me? To cover the negligence? I understand why.
AMY GOODMAN: How did you learn how he really died?
FERNANDO SUAREZ: I made my trip to Iraq last December. I go to the Governor and the members of the one television in U.S.A. who was with my son when it happened, and he had the whole truth about this story and showed me his story.
AMY GOODMAN: You're now going around the country, especially speaking to young people, people who might consider joining the military. What are you telling them?
FERNANDO SUAREZ: I go to the high schools and I say to the boys, "I am not coming here for saying 'no enter the military system,' no. I come here and am going to say what is the other face of the military system? Recruiters don't lie, but the recruiters must say the whole truth. There's a difference." I explain what is the difference about the money for school, for example. The recruiters claim it's the same money, salary, for all of the boys, et cetera, et cetera, and I tell a little bit of my son's story. When I finish, I say, "We don't need the recruiting inside the schools." Somebody enters the military, goes out of the school, cross the street, go to the office and sign opinion. But the school is for students and not for military. Be careful. In the school, you serve your country, in the military, you service one person.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Fernando Suarez del Solar. You were in New York. There were many people outside of fort Bragg and perhaps the largest protest there since the Vietnam War. People like people like you, who lost loved ones in Iraq, people, also, whose sons and daughters are questioning what they are doing there, and we wanted to play an excerpt of one of those protests for you.
NORMA CASTILLO: On behalf of my nephew, Staff Sergeant Mejia, who has been restricted to his base, Camilo, has been to war as a soldier. When he was in Iraq, he saw no weapons of mass destruction. He saw no chemical weapons. He saw no reconstruction. What he saw was innocent people being killed. Destruction in a nation being humiliated. He wanted me to read this to you: "I would like to thank everyone for coming here today. I cannot get tired of saying that what I have done and what you people are doing today is something that goes far beyond one man, or even one nation. We are asking for an end to a war that represents a crime against all mankind. We are doing this for the soldiers and their families who are victims of this war. We are doing this for the people of Iraq, who are being oppressed for the oil. We are doing this for humanity, which has already paid a high price for this in every war. Thank you for uniting with me with this cause, which is the cause of peace. Pray with me to put an end to this and every war." Now I want to invite you to pray with me something that my nephew used to pray every night before he went to sleep in Iraq, if he could go to sleep. This is what he prayed. I want to invite the people outside to pray with me. "Dear lord, thank you for allowing me to live one more day. Forgive me for all of my sins, for all of the things that I should have said and done but did not. I ask you to soften the hearts of our leaders and to soften the hearts of those who attack us. Let there be no more war, and put an end to all violence. Protect my comrades and protect all of those who are affected by this war. Give comfort to the families of the dead and wounded. Give them the wisdom to accept your decision. Put peace in their hearts. Should you decide to take me from this world, I will accept your will. Give strength to my family, and protect my little girl. Let there be peace in all the world. Thank you, God. Sincerely and deeply yours, Camilo."
AMY GOODMAN: That was the aunt of Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia, Norma Castillo speaking at Fort Bragg this weekend. Staff Sergeant Mejia of the Florida National Guard surrendered to the U.S. Military Police last Monday. He had been on the run five months after he refused to return to Iraq. As we wrap up this segment, Fernando Suarez, you were originally born in Mexico. So many of the soldiers in Iraq are men and women of color. Your response:
FERNANDO SUAREZ: Oh, yes. There's hundreds and hundreds of people are from Latino America only with green cards like Camilo. He serves in the army but does not have any guarantee for nothing. It's the same problem de Camilo, the father is in Nicaragua, the mother is here, and they have families without papers, and he can't help the families. It is ridiculous. You are working for the Air Force. You need American status to enter, you need American status to enter the military. Everybody is welcome.
AMY GOODMAN: Fernando Suarez, thank you for being with us.
To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 (800) 881-2359.
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