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NUCLEAR
Radioactive material in I-75 wreck had low levels of radiation
Nuclear Experts Form International Safety Group
UK Given 60 Days to Expedite Nuclear Waste Inspection
Government told to clean up Sellafield
Brussels gives Sellafield ultimatum
Records Show British Fear of Nuke Attack
DEPLETED URANIUM - Nellis ponders range cleanup
Pakistan policy sends dangerous signal
Pakistan government cleared in selling of nuclear material
Bush to notify Congress on MNNA status soon
Britain, France, Germany condemn Iran's work on nuclear fuel cycle
France, UK, Germany Criticize Iran Nuclear Plant
Diplomats: New Data Suggests Secret Iran Atomic Plan
Iraqis living around nuclear site fear radiation contamination
Weapons Inspector Testifies on Hill
Iraq Arms Inspector Says Search Is a Tangle
South Korea says North Korea must clarify nuclear freeze offer
Pyongyang unlikely to go the Libyan way on nukes
N.Korea slams planned US air defence deployment as preparation for war
New Russian Weapon Called 'Revolutionary'
'Suitcase Nuke' Fears Present A Stern Test For Defense Experts
Hopes of Building Nation's First New Nuclear Plant in Decades
Consortium Seeks Nuclear Plant License
Consortium to Seek Nuclear Plant License
INEEL cleanup prep work reveals broken drum
Utah Lawmaker Apologizes for Remark
Reason to Run? Nader Argues He Has Plenty
Is Fix in at 9/11 Commission?
The Defector
The Dogs That Didn't Bark
MILITARY
Pakistan police recover large cache of weapons near Afghan border
Cambodia destroys anti-aircraft missiles in fiery display
Never mind the torture and political prisoners, he's Bush's man
Two Dozen Killed in Wave Of Violence in Uzbekistan
3rd Day of Violence Claims 23 Lives in Uzbekistan
Cost of Iraq war leaves Forces facing cuts
Navy building unmanned warfare research facility in Panhandle
Moving Electrolux jobs to Hungary could help Sweden land fighter jet deal
Boeing snags 189 million Pentagon space contract
Fear of Terrorism Inspired Scheme to Bilk Area Malls
A majority of Norwegians want to bring troops home from Iraq: poll
Enraged Mob in Falluja Kills 4 American Contractors
Iraqis training for defense role worry about lack of time or money
Jewish Settlers Spark Clash in Arab Area
Sharon, Facing Criticism, Plans Vote on Gaza Pullout
Philippines foils Islamic bomb plot
US creeping towards weapons in space
U.N. tackles link between war and environment at global forum
Pentagon Drops Plan To Test Internet Voting
Military Sex Assault Likened to 'Friendly Fire'
Radiation claims power to frighten
A Clash on Classified Documents
Publicist Hired to Tell Iraqis of Democracy
US newspaper ban plays into cleric's hands
10-Year Term for a Serb in War Crimes Called Light
Serbia Votes to Pay Milosevic During His War Crimes Trial
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
President to Let Rice Testify About 9/11
When Goals Meet Reality: Bush's Reversal on 9/11 Testimony
Commissioners Eager to Question Rice
Court Hears Cases on Agents' Actions Abroad
Supreme Court upholds tank searches at border
Court considers foreigners' right to sue
U.N. Court Orders U.S. to Review Cases of Mexicans
Airports' Security Level Lowered
China Rebuts U.S. Criticism on Rights
U.S. Warns Against Attacks on Commercial Vessels
OTHER
EPA Faulted on Clean-Water Violations
ACTIVISTS
Liberal Voices Get New Home on Radio Dial
U.K.'s one-man band weathers 3-year protest
Police attempting to move Brian Haw
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Radioactive material in I-75 wreck had low levels of radiation
By CHRISTIAN CZERWINSKI
Englewood Sun Herald Staff Writer
03/31/04
http://www.sun-herald.com/NewsArchive2/033104/tp8ew13.htm?date=033104&story=tp8ew13.htm
A Charlotte County Sheriff's Office deputy was one of the first people to arrive at Monday afternoon's fatal wreck on Interstate 75.
The deputy found Justin Thomas Bare, 24, of Tamarac, didn't have a pulse, according to a report. The deputy started performing CPR and an off-duty emergency medical technician went to the patrol car to get a breathing mask.
Their efforts were unsuccessful and Bare died.
Bare was in a pick-up truck with Matthew Gonzalez, 22, of Plantation, who was driving south on I-75 when he lost control and hit a tree about 4:55 p.m.
Gonzalez was removed from the torn shell of the truck and flown to Lee Memorial Hospital in Fort Myers where he died, according to a Florida Highway Patrol report.
Sgt. Conner Cardwell, of the Florida Highway Patrol, said the truck was traveling southbound, when it apparently veered left, and "over-corrected," and slammed into a tree about 40 feet to the right of the road.
The wreck closed the southbound lanes of the highway for about three hours because the truck was carrying radioactive material used in surveying to test the density of asphalt and stone.
The Charlotte County Fire & EMS Special Operations Team responded to the crash as a matter of routine since there was a hazardous material involved.
No radiation leaks were found in the lead case which held the surveying equipment. The case was ripped from the rear of the truck during the crash and was still wrapped in a chain which kept it from easily opening.
Lindsey Weaver, regional manager of Universal Engineering in Punta Gorda, said a nuclear density moisture meter is a piece of equipment that tests soil and asphalt density with very low levels of radioactive sources.
Weaver said the box-like machine has a probe that reaches into the ground, which emits the radiation. He said the machine is common in that type of work and operators need a state-issued license to operate it.
"It gives off really low levels of radiation and it's all encapsulated within the box. The source is the size of a thumbnail," Weaver said.
"The box has several different fail-safes. When the probe is in the machine, it's probably shielded by three different things."
According an official, almost anything radioactive can travel on the interstate, just as long as it's packaged right.
Maj. Ken Carr, of the Florida Department of Transportation, said transporters must abide by federal hazardous materials regulations.
There are some limits on materials that can be transported, Carr said.
For example, he said it's permissible for trucks to transport nuclear fuel rods and plutonium-234 -- commonly used in nuclear weapons -- provided the regulations are met.
"Generally speaking, the packaging, markings and labeling must be right and the requirements met," Carr said.
"Most radioactive materials have such high regulations, it's not likely to pose a problem," he said, "You see other things transported like pharmaceutics and medical devices, and those things present a low risk."
Carr said forbidden materials range from electrical devices that create sparks and high levels of heat and mixed materials that form poisonous gases.
"The primary mission is to ensure that it's transported safely without being released or causing danger to the environment," he added.
FHP investigators continue to try to determine the cause of the crash. No other vehicles were involved.
You can e-mail Christian Czerwinski at cczerwinski@sun-herald.com.
----
Nuclear Experts Form International Safety Group
VIENNA, Austria, (ENS)
March 31, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2004/2004-03-31-03.asp
Experts from 15 countries have joined to form a new International Nuclear Safety Group to provide authoritative advice and guidance on safety approaches, policies and principles at nuclear power plants and other nuclear facilities. Dr. Richard Meserve, chairman of the group, announced its existence Friday at a press briefing in Vienna.
Dr. Richard Meserve of the United States (Photo courtesy Carnegie Institution) "The evolution of nuclear safety is increasingly international," said Meserve, who formerly chaired the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and now heads the Carnegie Institution. He said the new group will work to "identify major safety issues and recommend ways and means to resolve them."
Members of the group are from Brazil, Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Japan, the Russian Federation, Spain, the United Kingdom, United States, South Africa, South Korea,Spain, United Kingdom, United States, and the Nuclear Energy Agency of the Organization for Econmic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Meserve says the group will be focused on serving the United Nations's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), as well as the nuclear community, and the public.
The IAEA will serve as the group's secretariat, under the office of Ken Brockman, director of the IAEA Division of Nuclear Installation Safety.
Meserve says the experts have high professional competence in fields of safety working in regulatory organizations, research and academic institutions, and the nuclear industry.
They will focus on fundamental safety issues, and current and emerging matters relevant to the safety of nuclear power plants, research reactors, and other nuclear fuel cycle facilities.
Issues of nuclear security will be addressed insofar as they relate to safety at these installations.
The group was newly formed at the request of IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei. Its first meeting took place at the IAEA in late October 2003, and additional meetings were held in Vienna last week. Meetings are planned twice a year, with the next scheduled in Vienna this November.
Two conferences are set for this year that are expected to foster an exchange of information among countries with civilian nuclear capability.
"Fifty Years of Nuclear Power - the Next Fifty Years" wil be held in Moscow from June 27 to July 2. It marks two 50th year anniversaries - the first production of electricity by nuclear power for a national grid, which took place in Obninsk, Russia in June 1954. In the United States the first large nuclear power plant went online at Shippingport, Pennsylvania in 1958.
The second milestone is the 50th anniversary of the UN General Assembly resolution that called for international co-operation in developing the peaceful uses of atomic energy, expressing "the hope that the International Atomic Energy Agency will be established without delay" and declaring "the interest and concern of the General Assembly in helping in every feasible way to promote the peaceful applications of atomic energy."
Fifty years later, the administration of Russia's atomic energy program is undergoing fundamental changes. Twelve years of public protests have resulted in the deconstruction of the ministry that lobbied for the interests of the nuclear industry.
The Ministry of Atomic Power of Russia (Minatom) has been disbanded by newly elected President Vladimir Putin, and replaced by the Federal Agency of Atomic Power under the Ministry for Industry and Energy. It will be headed by Alexandr Rumyantsev, former Minatom minister, and will be responsible for non-weapons issues, such as construction and decommissioning of reactors, the nuclear fuel cycle, and science.
Nuclear weapons issues will be handled by the Russian Ministry of Defense headed by Sergey Ivanov and controlled by President Putin directly.
In October, safety at civilian nuclear plants will be the subject of an international conference in Beijing."Topical Issues in Nuclear Installation Safety: Continuous Improvement of Nuclear Safety in a Changing World," is scheduled from October 18 - 22.
The conference will develop an international consensus on the basic approaches for dealing with nuclear safety, and will propose recommendations for future activities for the IAEA, nuclear utilities and regulatory authorities, and emerging issues with international implications.
------- britain
UK Given 60 Days to Expedite Nuclear Waste Inspection
BRUSSELS, Belgium, (ENS)
March 31, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2004/2004-03-31-02.asp
The European Commission has ordered British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. to clean up an old nuclear waste pond at its Sellafield facility to a standard that will allow international inspectors to see whether or not any of the radioactive material has been diverted to make bombs.
The EU executive Tuesday gave the state-owned company that operates Sellafield until June 1 to present an overall plan that ensures adequate accounting for the nuclear material in question, as well as physical access to the Cumbrian nuclear processing plant or face fines.
Loyola de Palacio, the EU Vice-President responsible for Energy and Transport, said the UK must comply with the provisions of the Euratom Treaty and permit the inspections.
"This problem has been known for a long time, but no concrete initiative has been taken by the operator to rectify it," said the vice president. "The situation had therefore become untenable for the Commission. It calls into question the credibility of our safeguards, which our team of inspectors has been carrying out for 50 years in accordance with very high standards."
An open air spent nuclear fuel storage pool at Sellafield (Photo courtesy U. Wales, Aberystwyth) The nuclear material in question is held underwater in a concrete pond known as B30. Built in 1959 to store and unpack uranium fuel rods used to power Britain's first generation of military and civil reactors, B30 was phased out in the 1970s after some fuel started to corrode, and it was closed down in 1992.
The open air pond contains uranium, plutonium, and other radioactive wastes such as caesium and strontium.
In accounting terms, the Commission said Tuesday, "it is impossible to determine accurately the quantities of material stored, and on-the-spot inspections cannot take place because of the high level of radiation and poor visibility in the part of the facility concerned."
Estimates for uranium in the pond range between 300 and 450 metric tons, and there may be as much as 1.3 tons of plutonium but it is impossible to tell because pond visibility is restricted by algae.
Confidential British Nuclear Fuel (BNFL) documents leaked to the London "Sunday Herald" last July indicate that the company does not know precisely how much radioactive material is in the pond.
BNFL documents published by the newspaper and dated 1999 give a glimpse of what corrosion and decay have done to the underwater waste. "Individual elements have also fallen from various process operations," the company wrote. "Poor pond visibility and accumulated sludge in the pond make it difficult to retrieve spilt fuel and undertake visual inspections."
BNFL's Sellafield nuclear facility on the Cumbrian coast (Photo courtesy BNFL) For years, the Commission said, its inspection service has warned BNFL that the nuclear material held in B30 could not be inspected properly, in contravention of the Euratom Treaty.
Recognizing that technical difficulties prevented an immediate solution, the Commission has regularly requested BNFL, the last time in March 2003, to submit an overall plan detailing the measures needed to put an end to the situation.
In the past, BNFL has made commitments to remedy the problem, but has so far failed to come up with a formal action plan or adopt the measures needed to put an end to the infringement once and for all.
Now the EU executive has lost patience with the delay and is demanding an action plan within 60 days.
In addition, the UK authorities are required to submit to the Commission every six months a report on progress towards implementing the plan.
Greenpeace says it supports the European Commission's move to force BNFL to clean up the B30 spent nuclear fuel pond at Sellafield but it is a move that should have been made years ago.
Greenpeace nuclear campaigner Jean McSorley said, "The UK Government and BNFL have prevaricated for years about this waste, despite the fact that they knew there was a huge problem. The Commission has also failed to act on this for the past 14 years, and during that time has repeatedly told the European Parliament and the Council that the situation at Sellafield was fine."
----
Government told to clean up Sellafield
Wed 31 March, 2004
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=485850§ion=news
STRASBOURG, France - The European Union has told Britain to clean up Sellafield nuclear plant or face fines, losing patience with London's long refusal to allow full safety inspections.
The EU executive said Britain had failed to allow EU inspections to make sure nuclear material did not end up in nuclear weapons.
"The UK operator British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) has failed to comply with the... rules concerning accounting for nuclear material," European Commission chief spokesman Reijo Kemppinen told a news conference on Tuesday.
BNFL had also not allowed full access to "Commission inspectors to nuclear material to check the nature and quality and quantity of the material," Kemppinen said.
The Commission, which polices nuclear safety across the 15-nation bloc, has asked Britain to devise a plan to clean up Sellafield by June 1, extending London's deadline by an extra month than originally planned.
The problem centres on B30, a series of reinforced concrete ponds that store radioactive waste under water at Sellafield.
"It is impossible to determine accurately the quantities of material stored and on the spot inspections cannot take place because of the high level of radiation and poor visibility in the part of the facility concerned," the Commission said in a statement.
If state-owned BNFL does not comply with the decision, the Commission could fine the company.
Greenpeace welcomed the decision, saying the 50-year old B30 ponds contained 1.3 million tonnes of plutonium, posing a major risk for workers and people living nearby.
"The UK Government and BNFL have prevaricated for years despite the fact that they knew there was a huge problem," said Greenpeace nuclear campaigner Jean McSorley, adding that the Commission should have acted 14 years earlier.
----
Brussels gives Sellafield ultimatum
Ian Black in Brussels
Wednesday March 31, 2004
The Guardian
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/green/story/0,9061,1182616,00.html
Britain has been given until June 1 to come up with a detailed plan to clean up spent nuclear fuel stored at BNFL's Sellafield plant in Cumbria.
The European commission said yesterday that safety checks would have to be carried out under the Euratom treaty and six-monthly reports submitted.
Brussels objects to Britain's failure to say exactly how much plutonium waste is stored in an outdoor "pond" known as B30. Radioactivity levels are so high that workers can only safely spend an hour a day there.
The ponds have existed since the 50s, when no proper records were kept, and the commission has been asking for improvements since 1986. Britain admitted last year that "conditions in B30 mean the safeguard verification activities that can be carried out are limited".
But officials suggested the commission's decision may be politically motivated and rejected the implication that radioactive material may be vulnerable to smuggling.
Ireland has long complained about pollution from the plant.
Greenpeace said the threat to punish BNFL smacked of political opportunism. "The UK government and BNFL have prevaricated for years despite the fact that they knew there was a huge problem, and the commission has also failed to act until now," said the environmental group.
Failure to comply with the deadline may lead to penalties for BNFL.
--------
Records Show British Fear of Nuke Attack
March 31, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Britain-Nuclear-Attack.html
LONDON (AP) -- British officials feared 12 million people would be killed instantly and four million seriously injured if the Soviets launched a nuclear attack during the Cold War, according to government documents from the 1950s and 1960s released to the public Wednesday.
Papers written to advise the Cabinet assumed Britain could be facing a massive nuclear attack which would have annihilated around a quarter of the population.
Military officials made detailed plans to govern Britain from a series of fortified bunkers and formulated a campaign of retaliatory action in the event of the prime minister's death, according to the papers, which form part of the ``State Secret'' exhibition which opens at the National Archives at Kew in southwest London on Friday.
Many of the plans were so sensitive that even Cabinet ministers would have been shown details on a need-to-know basis.
The scale of casualties in a worst-case scenario attack was predicted by civil servant Sir William Strath in a 1955 report passed to the Cabinet.
He wrote: ``Life and population would be obliterated by blasts and fire on a vast scale. An attack of the size assumed would unleash an explosive force equivalent to 100 million tons of TNT.
``This is 45 times as great as the total tonnage of bombs delivered by all the Allies over Germany, Italy and occupied France throughout the whole of the last war,'' Strath added.
``A single megaton bomb could destroy any of our cities (exception Greater London) and all or nearly all its inhabitants.
``While much could be done to reduce the number of casualties, loss of life on a massive scale would be unavoidable. No part of the country would be free from the risk of radioactive contamination.''
Peter Hennessy, who put together the exhibition, described the document as ``the most chilling the document ever prepared for British Cabinet ministers.''
The exhibition also details how 210 senior Whitehall staff and ministers would have been evacuated to a secret bunker, believed to be situated at Corsham Quarry west of London.
The rest of the country would have been governed from a series of regional centers housing a total of 350 officials, the papers show.
-------- depleted uranium
DEPLETED URANIUM - Nellis ponders range cleanup
By MARK WAITE PVT,
Nellis Air Force Base,
March 31, 2004
http://www.pahrumpvalleytimes.com/2004/03/31/news/uranium.html
The plans to dump 77,000 tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain aren't all that's glowing in the desert not far from Pahrump.
A sparse crowd attending an open house at the Pahrump Community Center Thursday evening heard U.S. Air Force representatives talk about 68,000 pounds of depleted uranium that have accumulated in 130 tanks used at a test range near Indian Springs by pilots training at Nellis Air Force Base.
Air force officials are conducting an environmental assessment at the request of the State of Nevada to determine how to dispose of the depleted uranium.
The depleted uranium - so-called because it's 40 percent less radioactive than normal uranium - is touted for its strength, being twice as dense as lead. However the radioactivity is weak enough it can't pass through paper or skin, according to a fact sheet provided at the open house.
Nellis AFB spokesman Mike Estrada said depleted uranium was first introduced by the Air Force in 1975.
"A tank killer is what it's originally designed for," Estrada said. "We think it'll be used in the force another 20 years. It was scheduled to be retired after the first Iraq war."
The famous television footage of the "Highway of Death" leading out of Kuwait after the Gulf War in 1991 showed tanks destroyed by rounds of depleted uranium fired from A-10 aircraft, he said.
"We stopped testing it for several years at the request of the Fish and Wildlife Service because there just wasn't a lot of studies out there. We resumed testing a few years ago," Estrada said.
"We think there's about 68,000 pounds of depleted uranium out there. Each round is about six-tenths of a pound," he said.
The U.S. Air Force fact sheet on depleted uranium notes a study conducted by the Air Force from 1994-2001 showed there was no detectable migration of depleted uranium in the soil after the rain; the particles remained concentrated in the target strike zone.
U.S. Air Force Capt. Tony Dao said the first environmental assessment limited the Air Force to firing 7,900 rounds of depleted uranium per year. He said the hazards of heavy metals like lead and tungsten are probably more hazardous than the uranium.
Depleted uranium is also used in the armor plating in tanks, X-ray shielding and drill bits, Dao said.
Jim Campe, program manager for Nellis AFB compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act, said contractors clean the projectiles on the ground. Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas will be in charge of disposing of the depleted uranium in a licensed facility, he said. One of the options for a disposal site is at the Nevada Test Site, which already accepts low level nuclear waste.
There were published news reports veterans in the Gulf War were suffering health effects from the depleted uranium.
"There hasn't been a direct relation between exposure to DU and what they call Gulf War Syndrome," U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Mike Flynn said. But he added, "People exposed to friendly fire incidents are being monitored." "That's been studied, there's lots of studies by the Department of Defense," Estrada said when asked the same question. "To my knowledge there haven't been any health effects."
The training range, target 63-10, is located past the Point Bravo entrance to Nellis AFB off U.S. Highway 95, about 12 miles southeast of Indian Springs, Flynn said. Cameras focus on the site to see if pilots hit the tank targets, which take up the size of two football fields, he said.
Flynn said with only 7,900 rounds permitted per year, only a small number of sorties carry the depleted uranium payloads. "That's more than 24 trigger pulls on an A-10," he said.
If a plane crashes, Flynn said the first question that is asked is if the pilot is OK, the second question is what was on the aircraft.
"For the most part, every airplane that leaves we know what's on it," Flynn said. When asked if the depleted uranium was in a safe storage container in case of a crash, he said, "For the most part it's all self-contained."
The environmental assessment is due out in June. The fact sheet handed out at the hearing noted the Nevada Test and Training Range is the only air-to-ground gunnery range in the U.S. cleared to use depleted uranium munitions. The air force is debating whether to cut out the uranium from the tanks, dispose of the contaminated tanks entirely or take no action at all.
Written comments may be addressed to Mike Estrada, Air Warfare Center/Public Affairs Office, 4370 N. Washington Blvd. Suite 223, Nellis AFB 89191. The comment deadline is April 20.
----
Pakistan policy sends dangerous signal
By Matt Schroeder and Rachel Stohl
March 31, 2004
Baltimore Sun
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.pakistan31mar31,0,6862051.story?coll=bal-oped-headlines
WASHINGTON - The United States has rewarded Pakistan yet again for its support of the U.S. war on terror with increased access to U.S. weapons and technology even though the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, admitted supplying nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya.
The reward is the U.S. designation of Pakistan as a "major non-NATO ally," or MNNA. Pakistan thus joins an exclusive club that includes Australia, Japan, Egypt, Kuwait, South Korea, Argentina, New Zealand, Israel and the Philippines.
MNNA allies don't receive the same mutual defense guarantees as NATO countries. But they do enjoy priority delivery of excess defense items, stockpiling of U.S. defense gear, purchase of depleted uranium antitank rounds and participation in cooperative research and development programs.
MNNA status is the latest in a series of dramatic changes to U.S. policies on arms exports to Pakistan. In the late 1990s, the Clinton administration banned all arms sales to Pakistan following its 1998 nuclear weapons tests and the 1999 military coup that brought its current leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, to power.
Sanctions remained in place until after Sept. 11, 2001, when the United States suddenly found itself in need of Pakistan's cooperation in the war against al-Qaida. Overnight, Pakistan went from being an outcast to an indispensable ally. It has received $596.3 million in weapons and military aid since 9/11. In the most recent budget request, the Bush administration has called for an additional $300 million to underwrite future arms sales to the South Asian country, which borders Afghanistan.
Compared with other recent changes in U.S.-Pakistani relations, designation as an MNNA country is not the most worrisome. Pakistan will not automatically receive the F-16 fighter aircraft it has sought for so long, and barriers to other particularly sensitive military technology will not suddenly disappear.
What is truly remarkable and troubling about this announcement is that it comes only weeks after international inspectors confirmed the existence of a global proliferation network that peddled Pakistani military technology to rogue regimes, and the pardoning of its ringleader, Mr. Khan.
Despite the potentially catastrophic consequences of his malfeasance, Mr. Khan's punishment hardly even qualifies as a slap on the wrist. In 2001, he was forced to step down as the director of A. Q. Khan Laboratories. No prison time, no fines - not even a trial. The decision to proceed with the MNNA designation despite these developments speaks to a disturbing trend in post-9/11 U.S. policy: Regardless of past (or even current) behavior, if a country is on the right side of the war on terror, sins will be forgiven.
In light of General Musharraf's precarious domestic political position, it is understandable that he would want to go easy on a national icon. And in light of his cooperation in the war on terrorism, it is understandable that the United States would want to go easy on him.
But by appearing to increase the amount of U.S. weapons and equipment made available to Pakistan so soon after such a grave discovery, Washington is sending a message that, in the case of a strategically important country, it will wink at that country's inability to maintain control over its military technology and stockpiles.
Even so, providing General Musharraf with new multimillion-dollar military aid packages and special access to U.S. military aid programs might be more palatable if they came with guarantees that the holes in Pakistan's leaky arsenals have all been plugged.
But U.S. officials are in no position to offer such assurances. The U.S. investigation into Mr. Khan's network has just begun, and until it is complete and corrective action is taken, the risk is real that U.S.-made weapons and military technology will find their way out of Pakistan and into the hands of America's enemies.
Maintaining good relations with, and shoring up, General Musharraf's moderate regime is not merely desirable, it is crucial. But there are real costs to providing more U.S. weapons to a regime whose ability to keep them secure is questionable.
By adding Pakistan to its short list of weapons recipients despite unresolved proliferation concerns - and then showering it with money to buy those weapons - the Bush administration is sending a very dangerous message to other importers of U.S. arms and to the rest of the world.
Matt Schroeder is a research associate at the Federation of American Scientists' Arms Sales Monitoring Project. Rachel Stohl is a senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information.
-------- india / pakistan
Pakistan government cleared in selling of nuclear material
March 31, 2004
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040330-105345-9821r.htm
A Pakistani network that covertly sold nuclear goods used government aircraft but the Islamabad government was not involved in the transactions, a senior State Department official told Congress yesterday.
John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control, said the network led by A.Q. Khan sold nuclear material to Iran, North Korea, Libya and other states. The group, which helped rogue states obtain centrifuges used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons, is still being investigated.
"Based on the information we have now, we believe that the proliferation activities that Mister Khan confessed to recently, his activities in Libya, in Iran and North Korea, and perhaps elsewhere, were activities that he was carrying on without the approval of the top levels of the government of Pakistan," Mr. Bolton said in testimony before the House International Relations Committee. "That is the position that President [Pervez] Musharraf has taken, and we have no evidence to the contrary."
Mr. Bolton said, however, that officials working for the Pakistani government at the Khan Research Laboratories and probably in the military participated in the network's covert sales.
The officials "probably enriched themselves just as Khan himself did," he said.
The activities were carried out independent of state sponsorship or approval and yet the "black market in weapons of mass destruction" was "extraordinary successful," he said.
Asked by Rep. Gary L. Ackerman, New York Democrat, about reports that Pakistani military aircraft ferried nuclear goods from Pakistan to North Korea, Mr. Bolton said the aircraft may have been operated outside official military control.
"The understanding we have is that Khan Research Laboratories had extraordinary autonomy and quite likely could use military aircraft for purposes that others in the military would not necessarily know the purpose of because of compartmentation of the information," Mr. Bolton said.
Mr. Bolton said that if information surfaced linking the Pakistani government to the transfers, "we would act on it" and impose sanctions.
Mr. Musharraf fired Mr. Khan, the father of the Pakistani nuclear weapons program, as head of the nuclear laboratory in 2000 and pardoned him last month after he confessed to the nuclear black market extending from Southeast Asia, to the Middle East to Europe.
The pardon is conditional on the scientist halting the nuclear transfers and fully cooperating in revealing the extent of the nuclear proliferation, Mr. Bolton said. "We believe those conditions are currently being met," he said.
On North Korea, Mr. Bolton said the administration is negotiating with Pyongyang to end its nuclear arms programs, including a plutonium-based bomb program and a covert uranium-based program.
Mr. Bolton also said steps have been taken to cut off North Korea's funding sources for its nuclear arms program, and its missile programs.
On Iran, Mr. Bolton said scrutiny by the International Atomic Energy Agency, has not led to an end of Tehran's nuclear arms program.
"The recent discovery of Iran's development and testing of uranium enrichment centrifuges of an advanced design is a clear indicator that Iran continues its quest for nuclear weapons," Mr. Bolton said.
Iran's nuclear and missile programs are "one of the most serious proliferation challenges we face today," he said, noting that Tehran is engaged in a "massive denial and deception program" designed to fool the world.
----
Bush to notify Congress on MNNA status soon
March 31 2004
Hi Pakistan
http://www.hipakistan.com/en/detail.php?newsId=en59363&F_catID=&f_type=source
ISLAMABAD: US President George W. Bush will soon notify the Congress about his decision to grant Pakistan a 'major non-Nato ally (MNNA)' status, US embassy spokesman told Dawn here on Tuesday.
"Congress is to be informed shortly," the spokesman said in reply to a question as to when the relevant presidential notification would be sent to the Congress. To a related query, he said under the US law the MNNA status becomes effective 30 days after the Congress is informed.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell had made the announcement about the Bush administration's decision to confer the MNNA status on Pakistan during his visit here on March 18.
The MNNA status increases military-to-military cooperation and eases access to armaments and defence articles. Major non-Nato allies are eligible for: priority delivery of excess defence articles, stockpiling of US defence articles, purchase of depleted uranium anti-tank rounds, participation in cooperative research and development programmes, and participation in the defence export loan guarantee programme which backs up private loans for commercial defence exports.
Referring to Pakistan's efforts as an ally in the global war on terror, the spokesman said President Bush had pledged to address Islamabad's 'legitimate defence needs'.
He made it clear that 'there has been no decision at any level of the US government to provide F-16s' to Pakistan. The spokesman did not completely rule out the possibility either.
Acknowledging Pakistan as a full partner in the war on terror, he said: "President Musharraf and his government work actively to stop terrorist funding, shut down terrorist groups, and conduct military, police and intelligence operations to fight terrorist groups on Pakistani soil and bring terrorists to justice".
The spokesman underlined the US commitment 'to a positive, long-term relationship' with Pakistan. He recounted the US president's promise to work with the Congress on a $3 billion multi-year assistance package designed to improve Pakistan's economic prosperity, help address health and education needs and to enhance border security.
On last week's announcement about the waiver of coup-related sanctions on Pakistan, he said the US president had waived the sanctions for one year under the authority given to him by the Congress.
"A waiver is important to the US efforts to respond to, deter, or prevent acts of international terrorism, and will facilitate transition to the democratic rule in Pakistan," he asserted.
"The FY 2004 bilateral democracy assistance will allow us to continue to help Pakistan reform and strengthen its democratic institutions at all levels, including the legislature, political parties, advocacy groups, and the independent media," explained the US embassy spokesman.
-------- iran
Britain, France, Germany condemn Iran's work on nuclear fuel cycle
LONDON (AFP)
Mar 31, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040331170546.n2sxta82.html
Britain, France and Germany united Wednesday to condemn Iran's decision to resume work on a key nuclear programme in apparent breach of a deal with the United Nation's nuclear watchdog.
Their criticism came after Iran's atomic energy chief Gholam Reza Aghazadeh said Sunday that work had resumed at the Isfahan installation in the centre of the country.
"This announcement sends the wrong signal about Iranian willingness to implement a suspension of nuclear enrichment-related activities," said a Foreign Office spokesman in London.
"It will make it more difficult for Iran to re-establish international confidence in her undertakings," he said, in a statement identical to ones issued in Paris and Berlin.
In a deal with the International Atomic Enegy Agency (IAEA) brokered by Britain, France and Germany last year, Tehran agreed to suspend uranium enrichment and related activities while UN inspectors delved into suspicions Iran was using atomic energy as a cover for developing nuclear weapons.
Iran, under massive international pressure to maintain the suspension, has consistently emphasised its right under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to produce nuclear fuel for what it insists are strictly peaceful purposes.
"The uranium processing plant in Isfahan will produce all raw materials for the fuel cycle," Aghazadeh said on Sunday.
Britain, France and Germany have for the past seven months been working together in an effort to resolve international concerns about Iran's nuclear programme.
Foreign ministers from the three countries visited Tehran last October.
"Iran must explain her statement and her intentions," the Foreign Office statement said. "We reaffirm our firm support for the IAEA's ongoing work on this matter."
IAEA inspectors arrived in Iran on Saturday for a visit which Tehran had delayed earlier this month after the body condemned Iran for failing to report that it had designs for sophisticated P2 centrifuges for enriching uranium to levels that could be weapon-grade.
The IAEA has been investigating since February 2003 whether Iran's nuclear programme is peaceful, or devoted to secretly developing atomic weapons, as the United States alleges.
The body is to report its findings at a meeting in Vienna in June.
An IAEA ruling that Iran is in non-compliance with the NPT would send the issue to the UN Security Council, which could then impose sanctions on the Islamic republic.
--------
France, UK, Germany Criticize Iran Nuclear Plant
March 31, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-iran-criticism.html
BERLIN (Reuters) - France, Britain and Germany toughened their stance on Iran Wednesday by criticizing its decision to start a uranium conversion plant and demanding Tehran explain itself.
In a strongly worded statement, Europe's ``Big Three'' powers said Iran's announcement that it was starting up the plant near its central city of Esfahan sent the wrong signal and would make it harder for the country to regain international confidence.
The United States says Iran's nuclear program is a front for building an atom bomb, while Britain, Germany and France defied Washington in September by offering to share technology with Tehran if it stopped its nuclear fuel enrichment program.
Wednesday's statement reflected the Big Three's frustration with Iran, which has repeatedly violated its obligation to inform the United Nations of its nuclear activities.
EU diplomats have privately complained that they have been far too soft on Iran. Tehran insists its nuclear program is solely for the peaceful generation of electricity.
``This announcement sends the wrong signal regarding Iran's readiness to implement a suspension of its activities relating to uranium enrichment,'' the German Foreign Ministry said, adding that France and Britain had issued the same statement.
``It will make it more difficult for Iran to restore international confidence in its activities. Iran must explain its announcement and its intentions.''
GROWING CONCERN
Iran pledged to suspend activities related to uranium enrichment in October as a goodwill gesture while under intense U.S. pressure to prove it was not seeking nuclear weapons.
Last month Iran promised to suspend all ``remaining enrichment activities'' after Tehran sparked a row by interpreting the suspension in the narrowest possible sense.
Uranium conversion plants are key to the enrichment process. They convert uranium oxide concentrate into uranium hexafluoride gas, which is placed in centrifuges, the machines that enrich uranium. The element can then be used to make fuel or weapons.
The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said Saturday there was nothing controversial about the plant.
But an internal IAEA report obtained by Reuters said some inspections in Iran had been ``managed'' by the Iranians, who refused to let inspectors take pictures with U.N. cameras or use their own electronic devices.
A group of Western diplomats who follow the IAEA said recent intelligence had provoked suspicion that Tehran had not stopped enriching uranium but moved enrichment activities to smaller sites that are part of a parallel program U.N. inspectors have not uncovered.
Iran's ambassador to the United Nations in Vienna, Pirooz Hosseini, told Reuters the charges that smaller plants were continuing enrichment were ``baseless'' and ``an attempt to destroy the fruitful cooperation between the IAEA and Iran.''
--------
Diplomats: New Data Suggests Secret Iran Atomic Plan
March 31, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-iran.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - New intelligence on Iran has fueled suspicions the Islamic Republic has a secret uranium- enrichment program, possibly aimed at producing fuel for an atom bomb program, Western diplomats say.
The U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has been investigating Iran's atomic program ever since an exiled opposition group reported in August 2002 that Tehran was hiding a massive enrichment plant at Natanz.
Under fire over U.S. suspicions that its nuclear power program is a front for building atomic weapons -- a charge Iran denies -- Tehran agreed last year to submit to tougher IAEA inspections and suspend all enrichment-related activities.
But a group of Western diplomats who follow the IAEA said recent intelligence has provoked suspicion that Tehran moved enrichment activities away from Natanz to smaller sites that are part of a parallel program U.N. inspectors have not uncovered.
``We've got lot of intelligence about small enrichment plants (in Iran) for some months, going back to the November (IAEA) board meeting,'' one Western diplomat told Reuters on condition of anonymity. The diplomat gave no details about the form of this intelligence.
Iran's ambassador to the United Nations in Vienna, Pirooz Hosseini, told Reuters in a telephone interview that the latest charges were ``baseless'' and ``an attempt to destroy the fruitful cooperation between the IAEA and Iran.''
An IAEA spokeswoman declined to comment.
``HIDE-AND-SEEK''
Allegations that Tehran, which says its nuclear program is peaceful, may be hiding facilities from the IAEA are nothing new. However, the specific allegation that Tehran had shifted enrichment activities away from Natanz to smaller sites was first made publicly by an Iranian exile last month.
Alireza Jafarzadeh, formerly a spokesman for the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and now president of the Washington-based Strategic Policy Consulting, Inc., told Reuters on March 9 about a ``recent meeting'' of top Iranian officials who decided to shift enrichment activities to small, secret plants.
He said the group, which included Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had also decided to ``speed up the nuclear weapons program'' to get a bomb by the end of 2005 and that Tehran ``would pursue a deliberate game of hide and seek with the IAEA.''
Washington lists the NCRI as a terrorist organization and shut down its offices last year.
However, the NCRI has a good track record on Iran's atomic program. Jafarzadeh said his latest information came from the same ``well-informed sources inside Iran'' that told him about Natanz and a heavy-water production facility at Arak in 2002.
Jafarzadeh's allegations appeared to receive support from a recent intelligence report, an analysis of which was obtained last week by the Los Angeles Times. This analysis, seen by Reuters, said Iran had set up a committee last year whose task was to hide activities from the IAEA's nuclear sleuths.
Among the allegedly hidden sites are some 300 plants making parts for centrifuges, which spin at supersonic speeds to purify uranium for use as fuel for power plants or in bombs.
Iran had suspended IAEA inspections on March 12, ostensibly in retaliation against an IAEA resolution that ``deplores'' Iran's failure to inform the U.N. of sensitive research on items like ``P2'' centrifuges capable of producing bomb-grade material.
Two weeks later Tehran let the inspectors return, though several Western diplomats said the retaliation may have been an excuse to buy more time to hide activities from the IAEA.
One Western diplomat said that the intelligence could not be considered the ``silver bullet'' that proved these allegations about a parallel enrichment program beyond any doubt.
``Intelligence gives you well-founded suspicions,'' said the diplomat, who is convinced the suspicions about Iran's secret enrichment sites ``are well-founded.''
All the diplomats said that if Tehran had decided to hide enrichment facilities from the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the IAEA would have great difficulty finding them without specific leads.
``An enrichment facility can be the least visible part of the fuel cycle. It looks like any other industrial site,'' one said.
-------- iraq
Iraqis living around nuclear site fear radiation contamination
AL-TUWAYTHA, Iraq (AFP)
Mar 31, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040331063626.8mx1d9sn.html
Hundreds of Iraqis living near the country's largest nuclear plant fear for their lives as dozens of radioactive barrels from the site looted at the end of the war a year ago remain there.
Residents of Al-Tuwaytha compound, south of Baghdad, are reporting strange ailments and doctors say the number of children suffering from blood-related diseases is on the rise.
"There are people who are losing their hair, others find spots on their skin and the colour of the face is changing," said Mohammad Abbas, a tailor.
"One of my clients knows an entire family who gets sick at nightfall. They only get better when the sun rises," he added.
Fuad Obeid, 27, has no doubts that these people "came into contact with radioactive barrels" from Al-Tuwaytha.
Looters ransacked the nuclear station at the end of the 20-day US-led war that ousted former leader Saddam Hussein.
Thieves broke into Al-Tuwaytha, emptied the barrels of their contents and then washed them in the Tigris River before selling them for a profit.
The environmental group Greenpeace sounded the alarm at the end of the war and launched a campaign to retrieve the toxic barrels, which many residents had begun to use to store water and food.
"More than 2,000 came into contact with these containers. It was a disaster for our health and the environment," said Hatem Karim, an optician who also sits on the municipal council.
"Children have been stricken with blood diseases and brain tumors and new cases are coming in regularly," he added.
Karim said he had begun investigating the pollution affecting the area along the Diyala river which is home to 125,000 people, and has piles of documents to press his case.
"Most of the people here are poor and ignorant. They are totally unaware of the danger or the repercussions of radioactivity. These people don't even have sewers," he said.
According to Karim some of the barrels from Al-Tuwaytha have never been found while others surfaced in Mosul, in northern Iraq.
Last summer residents of Al-Tuwaytha staged a protest in Baghdad during a visit of a team from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) who came to Iraq to probe reports of radioactive material.
"Ever since no one has worried about us. We need technicians to measure the level of radioactivity," said Karim.
At the Diyala out-patient clinic, Doctor Rabih al-Assadi recalls that a Greenpeace team which visited the region measured the level of radioactivity but Karim complains that the results have not been made public.
--------
Weapons Inspector Testifies on Hill
Suspected Iraqi Bid To Produce Arms on Short Notice Noted
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 31, 2004; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36066-2004Mar30.html
The new chief U.S. weapons inspector for Iraq told Congress yesterday that no breakthrough has been made in the search for chemical or biological weapons but said new information supports a theory that Saddam Hussein may have been developing an ability to produce them on short notice.
In his first appearances since replacing weapons inspector David Kay in January, Charles A. Duelfer told two Senate committees meeting in closed session that he has refocused the work of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) to determine Hussein's intentions. Duelfer said this has included trying to discover what the former Iraqi leader had ordered, whether weapons were hidden and whether there was a plan "for a breakout production capacity," according to an unclassified statement Duelfer released to reporters.
Making that task more difficult, Duelfer's statement said, was that "some of these decisions may not have been recorded in traditional ways," and that they "may have been orally transmitted or conveyed to only a select group, a trusted inner circle."
While interrogation of top Hussein aides continues, he said, "obtaining clear, truthful information from the senior Iraqi leadership has been problematic even at this point in time." Recently, senior administration officials reported that Hussein has been uncooperative with his questioners and continues to deny that he kept a weapons program after 1991.
"The ISG has developed new information regarding Iraq's dual-use facilities and ongoing research suitable for a capability to produce biological or chemical agents on short notice," Duelfer said in the statement. The statement provided little information to back up that position.
After a morning session with the Senate Armed Services Committee, ranking Democrat Carl M. Levin (Mich.) said that the publicly released document left out information in Duelfer's classified testimony that "would lead one to doubt" what he described as Duelfer's "suspicions as to Iraq's activities."
Levin called on the CIA to declassify, "to the extent possible, the whole report so the public can reach their own conclusions." Duelfer testified privately in the afternoon before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Duelfer's predecessor, Kay, testified before Congress in January, around the time of his resignation, deepening the controversy over whether the Bush administration exaggerated the Iraq threat before the war. Kay went to Iraq expecting to find weapons of mass destruction, but he said in January that he had concluded that U.S. prewar intelligence was wrong and that there were no stockpiles.
Duelfer has characterized his mission differently, saying he is seeking a full explanation for what happened to Hussein's weapons programs.
Duelfer, who in the early 1990s served as deputy director of the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM), the first Iraq inspection group, said in his statement yesterday that a major problem he is facing is "the most extreme reluctance of Iraqi managers, scientists and engineers to speak freely." He said they fear prosecution for actions under the former government or retribution from die-hard Hussein supporters, if they cooperate with the United States
While ISG interrogators have interviewed hundreds of Iraqi scientists, they have been unable to find individuals who may have been running the key prohibited programs. He said that one former nuclear scientist he found was managing the crash construction of chemical plants "capable of making a variety of chemicals" within a year, but that the chemicals specified in the Iraqi program were for "conventional commercial" purposes.
Duelfer said, as Kay did before him, "it is clear that Iraq was in violation of U.N. resolutions." But the examples he used were previously mentioned missile programs, purchases of prohibited military equipment and the hiding of plans that could lead to the making of barred weapons, rather than the weapons themselves or stocks of agents such as VX nerve gas or anthrax spores.
The examination of sites previously suspected of holding weapons or such agents has uncovered nothing, he said, but he noted that the ISG continues to receive "quite intriguing and credible [information] about concealed caches."
In the nuclear field, which Kay had described as involving only rudimentary efforts, Duelfer reported finding scientists working on diagnostic techniques "applicable for nuclear weapons development," but not directly leading to such a program. He also said the search for a definitive finding on Iraq's prewar purchase of high-tolerance aluminum tubes -- and whether those were meant for nuclear centrifuges or antiaircraft rockets -- continues.
He emphasized that he had been in Iraq only six weeks and that it is too early to say how long it will take to reach some final judgments. "I do not believe we have sufficient information and insight to make final judgments with confidence at this time," his statement said.
--------
Iraq Arms Inspector Says Search Is a Tangle
March 31, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/31/politics/31WEAP.html
WASHINGTON, March 30 - The new chief weapons inspector in Iraq told Congress on Tuesday that a lack of cooperation from ousted Iraqi officials was thwarting American efforts to untangle the many remaining mysteries surrounding Iraq's suspected illicit weapons program.
In the public version of testimony delivered behind closed doors to two Senate committees on Tuesday, the inspector, Charles A. Duelfer, acknowledged that American inspectors had still not found any evidence of an illicit arsenal. But he seemed less inclined than his predecessor, David Kay, to close the door on the possibility that such weapons might yet be found, saying that inspectors were continuing to pursue leads - "some quite intriguing and credible" - about concealed caches.
A top Democratic senator, Carl Levin of Michigan, later complained that the public version of Mr. Duelfer's testimony had omitted information contained in the classified version that would have raised further doubts about whether Iraq possessed illicit weapons at all.
Through a spokesman, Mr. Duelfer responded by saying that the two versions of his testimony "mirror each other, consistent with the protection of sources, methods and other classified intelligence information."
Senator Levin, who serves on both panels that Mr. Duelfer addressed in closed session, asked the Central Intelligence Agency to declassify the entire report, to the fullest extent possible, "so the public can reach their own conclusions."
Mr. Duelfer, who took charge of the search in January, said at a news conference on Capitol Hill that the picture of Iraq's suspicious activities "is much more complicated than I anticipated going in." He said he could not predict how much more time he might need before he reached final conclusions about what illicit weapons, if any, Iraq possessed at the time of the American invasion last March.
"The people we need to speak to have spent their entire professional lives being trained not to speak" about illicit weapons, Mr. Duelfer said in a public version of his testimony. He said that Iraqi scientists and engineers were keeping silent both out of fear of prosecution or arrest by American officials, and out of fear of retribution from supporters of the former government of Saddam Hussein.
Mr. Duelfer took over from Mr. Kay, who at the time of his resignation in January said that American officials were "almost all wrong, probably" in assessing before the war that Mr. Hussein's government possessed illicit weapons.
Mr. Duelfer said Monday that inspectors had uncovered new information that Iraq had in place before the war at least the technical ability to use civilian facilities to quickly produce the biological and chemical agents needed for weapons.
Still, Mr. Duelfer said: "We do not know whether Saddam was concealing W.M.D. in the final years or planning to resume production once more sanctions were lifted. We do not know what he ordered his senior ministers to undertake. We do not know how the disparate activities we have identified link together."
The status report issued by Mr. Duelfer was the first such update since October, and it came nearly 10 months after Mr. Kay and his Iraq Survey Group began their hunt last June.
The failure of American inspectors to find illicit weapons in Iraq has prompted Democrats, including Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the party's presumptive presidential candidate, to press the Bush administration to acknowledge having been wrong in the prewar assessments in which senior officials described Iraq's weapons program as a principal reason for going to war.
In urging patience, however, Mr. Duelfer was echoing the calls made by President Bush and by George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, to whom he reports as a special adviser.
Two Republican senators, Pat Roberts of Kansas, who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, and John W. Warner of Virginia, who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee, both joined Monday in asking for more time before any final judgments are reached.
Mr. Duelfer expressed a particular frustration about what he described as "the extreme reluctance of Iraqi managers, scientists and engineers to speak freely."
Even a year after the American invasion, he said, "obtaining clear, truthful information from the senior Iraqi leadership has been problematic even at this point in time." While officials of the Iraq Survey Group had met with "hundreds of scientists," he said, it had yet to identify who in any particular program had played the most critical roles.
"Many people have yet to be found or questioned, and many of those we have found are not giving us complete answers," he said. And while American investigators had recovered millions of documents, he said, millions more were destroyed, while a shortage of people who can translate Arabic meant that only a "tiny fraction" of the whole had yet been fully translated.
Among former Iraqi officials willing to talk, he said, "they oftentimes are the ones we know were not in the inner circle."
-------- korea
South Korea says North Korea must clarify nuclear freeze offer
31 March 2004
AFP
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_asiapacific/view/77954/1/.html
SEOUL: South Korea's Foreign Minister Ban Ki-Moon said a North Korean proposal for a nuclear freeze would be unacceptable unless the hermit state shuttered all its nuclear facilities.
Speaking after returning from visit Beijing where he met with his Chinese counterpart Ban said, "The North should clarify its position on what it means exactly when it talks about a freeze and the extent of such a freeze."
North Korea has offered to freeze its nuclear facilities in return for concessions from the United States including its removal from the US blacklist of terrorism-sponsoring nations.
However, Ban said the offer would be "unacceptable" if North Korea's nuclear freeze means simply going back to a 1994 deal under which it agreed to mothball its facilities that could be used to produce nuclear weapons based on plutonium.
"It must be something more than the 1994 deal in Geneva. All nuclear-related facilities must be frozen," Ban said.
The 1994 Agreed Framework between the United States and North Korea unravelled after October 2002 when Washington presented North Korea with evidence that it was running a clandestine nuclear programme based on enriched uranium.
Ban returned home Tuesday after a three-day visit to Beijing where he was briefed by his Chinese counterpart Li Zhaoxing, following Li's return from Pyongyang where the Chinese diplomat held a rare 90-minute meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il.
Two rounds of six-nation talks bringing together the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States have failed to narrow differences over a key US demand for the complete dismantling of Pyongyang's nuclear programs.
At the last meeting in February in Beijing, participants agreed to set up working groups ahead of new six-way talks scheduled to take place before the end of June.
Ban said the North Koreans had told Li that they would take part in planned working groups.
"North Korea's position is that the process for resolving the nuclear issue through six-nation talks should continue," Ban said, citing Li's briefing.
"North Korea is willing to take part in the working groups' meeting and wants the meeting to deal with its demand for rewards in return for a freeze," Ban said.
North Korea has made no proposal on when the working groups should meet, Ban said.
But Ban said he and Li were in agreement that the momentum of dialogue to resolve the nuclear impasse should be kept alive by ensuring that a third-round of six-way talks take place by the end of June as previously agreed.
----
Pyongyang unlikely to go the Libyan way on nukes
By MICHAEL RICHARDSON
THE STRAITS TIMES,
March 31, 2004
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/commentary/story/0,4386,243135,00.html
IT WOULD be comforting to think that North Korea will emulate Libya, which announced in December that it would dismantle all programmes to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
Tripoli promised to do this under international supervision and, so far, it has done what it pledged to do. Now, it is starting to reap the rewards.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair sealed Libya's return to the international fold last Thursday when he shook hands with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in a bedouin tent outside Tripoli. It was the first visit to the North African country by a British leader since 1943 and marked the symbolic mending of a bilateral relationship broken by Libyan involvement in terrorism aimed at Britain.
Two days before Mr Blair met Colonel Gaddafi, the United States Assistant Secretary of State William Burns sat down with the Libyan leader to discuss normalising Libya-US relations, ruptured since the 1980s for the same reasons as those with Britain.
Libya needs foreign investment to rehabilitate and upgrade its oil and natural gas fields, to expand exports and boost a languishing economy hit hard by international sanctions. On the day of the Blair-Gaddafi meeting, Shell, the British-Dutch petroleum giant, signed a deal with Libya's state oil company to explore for oil and gas.
British officials said that Britain would help Libya improve its conventional defences and would, in time, push for a European Union arms embargo to be lifted.
The Bush administration has said that it will move step by step to improve relations with Tripoli as Libya proves by its actions that it has given up weapons of mass destruction (WMD), renounced terrorism and actively supported the campaign against the Al-Qaeda network.
So far, the US has lifted travel restrictions to Libya by American citizens and allowed US firms, including oil and gas companies, with assets in the country, to begin negotiating agreements to return.
North Korea wants the same kind of rewards being given to Libya in exchange for giving up WMD and connections with terrorism: US recognition, security guarantees and aid for its ailing economy, not to mention re-integration with the world without a change of regime, or even domestic political reform as a precondition.
But there are some important differences between Libya and North Korea that suggest Pyongyang won't follow Tripoli down the road to international acceptance any time soon.
First, North Korea, unlike Libya, isn't coming clean on the full extent of its nuclear programme. Pyongyang has offered to 'freeze' only the plutonium part of its programme in exchange for the benefits it wants.
It refuses to acknowledge or discuss the second part of its programme - using highly enriched uranium to make nuclear bombs. Indeed, just last Saturday, Pyongyang rejected a complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantling of all its nuclear programmes, calling the main US demand at the six-party talks on North Korea hosted by China a plot that would result in subjugation.
Yet, Libyan disclosures about its sources of supply helped uncover the nuclear black market masterminded by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan and provided more evidence that North Korea seeks a uranium enrichment route, in addition to a plutonium path, to bomb-making. Second, North Korea is likely to have hidden away at least a couple of crude nuclear weapons made from plutonium, according to the US Central Intelligence Agency. And it may be amassing the plutonium to make more bombs.
By contrast, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency and other experts say Libya was at least several years away from producing a nuclear weapon. North Korea is also developing ballistic missiles with a much longer range than those it supplied to Libya.
The US bombed Libya in 1986 for supporting terrorism, and could have done so again using modern precision-strike conventional weapons to destroy WMD facilities in the desert nation. But the US does not know where in North Korea's mountainous terrain any nukes are stored. The mountains are reportedly riddled with rock tunnels and caves dug for military purposes.
America would need a new generation of burrowing, bunker-busting small nuclear weapons to be sure of destroying North Korean nuclear arms and facilities hidden deep underground if they could be accurately located.
The US is years away from developing these weapons. And such a strike would almost certainly trigger a devastating North Korean reprisal, if not against America then against South Korea and Japan as allied substitutes.
Libya concluded that it was likely to be more secure and have a stronger economy without WMD, than with them. Impoverished and reclusive North Korea, which has no big oil and gas reserves, seems convinced that the only real assurance of regime survival is to have nuclear weapons and the long-range missiles to fire them as the ultimate checkmate.
The writer is a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of South-east Asian Studies in Singapore. This is a personal comment.
----
N.Korea slams planned US air defence deployment as preparation for war
SEOUL (AFP)
Mar 31, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040331191916.2uk7cpfv.html
North Korea condemned Wednesday a US plan to deploy a destroyer equipped with the high-tech Aegis air defence system off the Korean coast this year as a preparation for war.
North Korea will boost its nuclear deterrent force to protect itself against war, a foreign ministry spokesman said in an official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) report.
The US plan "is the most outright hostile act against the DPRK (North Korea) as it is a system to wage a war against the DPRK and, furthermore, a part of its unchallenged attempt to dominate the Asia-Pacific region," the spokesman said.
"The DPRK will increase its nuclear deterrent force in every way and take a decisive counter-measure for self-defence when necessary in order to avert a war and defend peace in the Korean peninsula and the rest of northeast Asia," he said.
The planned deployment and US and Japan military exercises "indicate that they are stepping up the preparations for the second Korean war in real earnest behind the scene of dialogue and this has already gone beyond the danger line," he said.
The US plan to deploy the destroyer equipped with the Aegis radar-combat system in the Sea of Japan (East Sea) in September has been welcomed by Japan as a deterrent against ballistic missiles.
Japan has been conducting joint research with the United States on developing a sophisticated missile defence system since 1999, a year after North Korea launched a ballistic missile over the Japanese islands and into the Pacific.
The United States has demanded that North Korea completely and verifiably dismantle its nuclear programmes. Two rounds of six-nation talks on the impasse have made little progress.
-------- russia
New Russian Weapon Called 'Revolutionary'
Globe And Mail.com
3-31-4
(AP)
http://www.rense.com/general50/newrussianweapon.htm
Moscow - Russia has designed a "revolutionary" weapon that would make the prospective American missile defence useless, Russian news agencies reported Monday, quoting a senior Defence Ministry official.
The official, who was not identified by name, said tests conducted during last month's military manoeuvres would dramatically change the philosophy behind development of Russia's nuclear forces, the Interfax and ITAR-Tass news agencies reported.
If deployed, the new weapon would take the value of any U.S. missile shield to "zero," the news agencies quoted the official as saying.
The official said the new weapon would be inexpensive, providing an "asymmetric answer" to U.S. missile defences, which are proving extremely costly to develop.
Russia, meanwhile, also has continued research in prospective missile defences and has an edge in some areas compared to other countries, the official said.
The statement reported Monday was in line with claims by President Vladimir Putin's that experiments performed during last month's manoeuvres proved that Russia could soon build strategic weapons that could puncture any missile-defence system.
At the time, Col-Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, the first deputy chief of the General Staff of the Russian armed forces, explained that the military tested a "hypersonic flying vehicle" that was able to manoeuvre between space and the earth's atmosphere.
Military analysts said that the mysterious new weapons could be a manoeuvrable ballistic missile warhead or a hypersonic cruise missile.
While Mr. Putin said the development of such new weapons wasn't aimed against the United States, most observers viewed the move as Moscow's retaliation to the U.S. missile defence plans.
After years of vociferous protests, Russia reacted calmly when Washington withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 in order to develop of a countrywide missile shield. But U.S.-Russian relations have soured again lately, and Moscow has complained about Washington's plans to build new low-yield nuclear weapons.
-------- terrorism
'Suitcase Nuke' Fears Present A Stern Test For Defense Experts
BY DOUG TSURUOKA
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Internet & Technology
Wednesday, March 31, 2004
http://www.investors.com/editorial/tech.asp?v=3/31
Homeland security officials are rushing defense labs to make sensors that can detect small nuclear weapons that some authorities fear terrorists might use to devastate a U.S. city.
A March 22 Australian TV report highlighted the need. The story claimed the al-Qaida terror group has bought nuclear "briefcase bombs" on the black market in Central Asia.
Use of the word 'briefcase' sent a shudder through security authorities everywhere. It would mark a huge threat if nuclear bombs that small were developed, let alone in dangerous hands. Almost all experts doubt briefcase bombs exist.
But suitcase bombs do exist. The Soviets developed such trunk-sized nuclear bombs during the Cold War. Moscow has always maintained that no suitcase bombs have escaped its close watch, but reports pop up from time to time that rogue Soviet scientists have helped develop suitcase - and now briefcase - nuclear bombs for the black market.
Such a threat is almost unimaginable. But experts are forced to use the word "almost."
So Far, No 'Breakthroughs'
A big problem is most nuclear experts say the government is far from developing sensors that reliably detect such weapons despite the urgency sparked by 9-11.
"The detection problem is a hard nut to crack," said Richard Lanza, a senior scientist and nuclear engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "I don't think there have been any breakthroughs."
Pinpointing bomb-grade nuclear material is difficult, says Kyle Olson, a former Senate terrorism prober. Many items give off as much radiation as a nuclear bomb, which itself actually emits little radiation.
"Any detector compact and sensitive enough to pick up trace levels of radiation from (suitcase bombs) is also readily spooked by natural environmental or industrial radiation," said Olson.
There are promising products, though. One is called an active detector, says Tom Cochrane, director of the nuclear program for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental policy group.
It's being developed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, says Cochrane, a nuclear physicist and former arms control monitor.
The device shines a stream of photons or neutrons through an object that might carry a small nuclear weapon, like a shipping container or suitcase. It would produce gamma rays if it hit any nuclear material, which would show up on the device's display screen.
Ivan Oelrich, a nuclear physicist at the Federation of American Scientists, a policy group in Washington, D.C., has another approach.
"You can shoot neutrons through a shipping container. If the pattern of neutrons coming out the other side is different, it would suggest there's a bomb inside," said Oelrich, who directs the federation's strategic security project.
The methods mentioned by Cochrane and Oelrich take an active approach to sensing nukes by creating tiny atomic reactions that can be detected. But neither device has been built, and many glitches could still surface, Cochrane concedes. One big glitch could be the cost, which could reach the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Homeland Security officials, meanwhile, have put stop-gap detectors in place.
In October 2001, President Bush ordered that hundreds of nuclear sensor devices be installed at major U.S. ports, border posts and key public buildings. He did this after officials got a report that terrorists planned to smuggle a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon into New York City. (The A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima carried 15 kilotons.)
The report proved false. But some estimated such a bomb, detonated in an area like Manhattan, could kill 100,000 to 500,000 people.
These stop-gap sensors, called gamma ray and neutron flux devices, sense radioactive materials or generate images of bombs inside luggage, crates or vehicles.
But the devices aren't that reliable, says Cochrane.
He says both types of detectors can be beaten by breaking a suitcase bomb into small parts and rearranging them to avoid detection.
He says the gamma-ray devices can't detect radiation emissions from some bomb materials, including uranium.
The government also is using older products such as Geiger counters, which can pick up radiation.
But such radiation sensors can be foiled by lead shielding. And suitcase bombs that use highly refined plutonium emit little radiation, making them harder to detect.
"If it's a well-designed, military-style weapon, the radiation signatures are tiny," said Oelrich of the science policy group.
Death Deepened Mystery
Besides being reliable, an effective sensor must work fast at ports, airports and other checkpoints. As a practical matter, screenings must be selective, Cochrane says.
Said Oelrich, "The process can't take more than a minute or so because the U.S. moves millions of shipping containers a year."
There's another big challenge, says MIT's Lanza. Terrorists might find ways to booby-trap nukes to explode if detected. "We're not dealing with stupid people," he said.
This is scary stuff. Most experts don't know if terrorist groups have anything close to an atomic bomb. One bright spot is there might be no briefcase-sized nukes.
"It still isn't possible for the U.S. or the Russians or anyone to build a nuclear device as small as a briefcase," Oelrich said. As for Russia's suitcase bombs, "We don't have any evidence that any are missing."
Still the only major reference to missing suitcase bombs remains a 1997 U.S. TV interview with former Russian National Security Adviser Alexander Lebed.
He said Russia's military had lost track of over 100 suitcase-sized nuclear bombs.
He later recanted. His assertion was never proved, and Lebed, a rival to Russia's current leadership, died in a helicopter crash in April 2002 that some authorities considered suspicious.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Hopes of Building Nation's First New Nuclear Plant in Decades
By MATTHEW L. WALD
NY TIMES
March 31, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/31/politics/31NUKE.html
WASHINGTON, March 30 - In an effort to revive the nuclear reactor construction industry, seven major companies plan to announce on Wednesday that they will apply for a license to build a new commercial power plant. The last time a plant was ordered but not later canceled was 1973.
The companies, including the two largest nuclear plant owners in the United States and two reactor manufacturers, have not specified what they would build or where. In fact, they have not made a committment to build at all. But they have agreed to spend tens of millions of dollars to get permission to build, and they anticipate tens of millions from the federal government, which requested such proposals in November. The money would go to finish design work useful for a new generation of reactors and to develop a firm estimate of what such plants would cost.
"In order to keep the nuclear option open for the future, we've got to take this next step," said Gary J. Taylor, president and chief executive of Entergy Nuclear, a participant.
The industry successfully operates existing plants, Mr. Taylor said, but it must build more to sustain itself. "Without a future, there's an inability to attract new talent," he said.
"It can't be just any one company," Mr. Taylor added. "Entergy believes it's going to have to be some sort of consortium."
Other executives said the consortium would help the industry. "Somebody needs to take the responsibility to advance the momentum, or there won't be an option," said an executive at another company who asked not to be more closely identifie d before the announcement. "There haven't been any orders since Three Mile Island, we've got an aging fleet, and at some point they won't be there any more."
The Three Mile Island accident occurred 25 years ago this month. The last orders were placed nine months later, in December 1979, but every one after 1973 was canceled, mostly because of soaring costs. There are 103 commercial reactors now operating; those in service the longest began operation in 1969.
The consortium's other goal is to test a simplified licensing system created by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission 12 years ago to help the industry go from reactor order to electricity production in 5 years, as opposed to the 10 or 12 years it took under the previous system.
Industry executives say the prospects for new reactor construction are encouraging because of problems facing competing fuels: natural gas prices are persistently high and coal power stations face stiff environmental requirements. Some executives said they hoped their companies would be compensated for making power without emitting gases that contribute to global warming.
The generating companies announcing the consortium on Wednesday are Exelon Nuclear, a unit of the Exelon Corporation that owns 17 reactors and is the nation's largest operator; Entergy Nuclear, a unit of the Entergy Corporation that owns 9 reactors, manages a 10th under contract and is the second-largest operator; Constellation Energy; the Southern Company; and EDF International North America, a subsidiary of Électricité de France, which owns shares in reactors in this country. As for manufacturers, the Westinghouse Electric Company, a BNFL subsidiary that has a design in the late stages of review by the N.R.C., and General Electric, which has a design under preliminary review, are also partners.
Whether investors will take the risk depends on estimates of future fuel and electricity prices at the time of approval, participants said. They said that they hoped to submit an application in 2008, and that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission might rule by 2010. By then, the fate of the government's plan to bury nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, near Las Vegas, might also be clear. The lack of a site for waste disposal is another barrier to new reactor construction.
---
Consortium Seeks Nuclear Plant License
By REUTERS
March 31, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-utilities-nuclear.html
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Two separate groups of companies have formed recently with an eye toward applying for licenses that could allow the first new U.S. nuclear power plant to be built in more than 25 years.
The two consortiums intend to work with the U.S. Department of Energy to test a new process from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for obtaining a license for an advanced nuclear power reactor.
There is no plan at this time to actually build a new nuclear reactor, members of both groups emphasized. No company has followed through with plans to build a new nuclear plant since the worst nuclear disaster in U.S. history, at the Three Mile Island plant 25 years ago.
Dominion Resources said the first group of four companies submitted a proposal a week and a half ago for a license for Dominion's North Anna site in Virginia. The proposal is a precursor to the actual application.
The application process is expected to take six years and cost about $500 million, said David Christian, senior vice president of nuclear operations at Dominion Resources, which is part of the consortium.
Dominion's group also includes AECL Technologies Inc., a subsidiary of Canada's nuclear power reactor developer and designer AECL; Hitachi America, a subsidiary of Japanese conglomerate Hitachi Ltd.; and privately held engineering company Bechtel.
A second consortium of seven companies on Wednesday said it plans to submit its own proposal ``in the next few weeks,'' said Marilyn Kray, vice president of project development at Exelon Nuclear, a division of Exelon Corp.
Exelon Corp. is a member of the second group, which has yet to decide on a potential site.
The energy companies in the second consortium are Exelon and Entergy Corp., the No. 1 and 2 U.S. operators of nuclear plants; Constellation Energy Group; Southern Co.; and France's state-owned electric company Electricite de France.
It also includes two nuclear reactor vendors: Westinghouse Electric Co., a unit of British state-owned nuclear company BNFL Plc; and General Electric Co.
Both groups want to take advantage of a cost-sharing initiative where the Department of Energy would pay for half the application cost and the companies the other half.
Should the DOE agree to pick up half the cost of its proposal, Dominion said it would pay no more than $61 million over the six-year application process.
For the other consortium, each of the five energy companies will contribute a total of $35 million, or $1 million a year in cash plus other services for seven years. The amount the two vendors contribute will depend on the project's cost.
That consortium plans to complete its application and submit it in 2008. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is expected to make a decision on the application by late 2010, after which any of the consortium's members could build a plant under the license.
As for the projected cost of a plant, a spokesman for Exelon Nuclear said: ``Nobody really knows. In fact, one of the outcomes of the application will be a much better understanding of what one of these plants will actually cost.''
Soaring construction costs and safety concerns after the partial reactor meltdown at the Three Mile Island power plant in 1979 have kept U.S. utilities from building new nuclear plants. Environmental groups also argue that subsidies handed out to nuclear plants are expensive for taxpayers.
``After you massively subsidize these plants, what you get is a dangerous reactor that generates highly radioactive waste,'' said Anna Aurilio, legislative director for U.S. PIRG, a consumer and environmental advocacy group. ``This energy source is simply too expensive and too dangerous for America.''
But because of a growing shortage of natural gas in the United States and concerns over emissions from older coal-fired plants, utilities are looking at the nuclear option again.
The planned applications come at the behest of the Department of Energy. The DOE last November asked energy companies to test the licensing process the Nuclear Regulatory Commission established in 1992 in a bid at streamlining. The new process has never been tested.
``I believe nuclear energy in this country is on the verge of a renaissance,'' said Senate Energy Committee Chairman Pete Domenici. ``But now, nuclear power is so much cheaper than natural gas that the steep cost of licensing a new reactor is suddenly doable.''
--------
Consortium to Seek Nuclear Plant License
March 31, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Nuclear-Plant-Application.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Seven companies have agreed to jointly apply for a license to build a new commercial nuclear power plant, the first new reactor application to be filed in three decades, the companies announced Wednesday.
The five energy companies and two reactor vendors emphasized that none of the companies have made a commitment to actually build a new plant, but are taking the move to test the government's streamlined licensing process.
The companies intend to commit $7 million a year to the effort under a cost-sharing program with the Energy Department. The goal is to get license approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by 2010.
While three utilities previously have submitted applications for early site approval for reactors, this represents the first time the industry has actually said it would seek construction and operating approval for a new nuclear power plant since 1973.
Interest in new reactors faded after the nuclear accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania in 1979. Many projects were canceled after the accident, although 51 reactors in the pipeline were completed.
The consortium includes four of the country's largest electricity generating companies: Chicago-based Exelon Corp., which owns 17 reactors; Entergy Nuclear, a unit of New Orleans-based Entergy Corp., operator of 10 reactors; Baltimore-based Constellation Energy; and Atlanta-based Southern Co.
Also in the group are EDF International North America Inc., a subsidiary of Electricite deFrance, which owns interest in a number of U.S. reactors, and two reactor vendors, General Electric and Westinghouse Electric Co. Westinghouse is a subsidiary of the British nuclear company, BNFL.
Both vendors have designs for next-generation reactors before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
In the announcement, the participants emphasized that the decision to submit a license application is aimed at testing the government's new approach to licensing, which for the first time would have the NRC approve a generic reactor design and consider in one process both a construction permit and operating license.
Such a test is considered a major step in the gradual move toward building new reactors. The consortium gave no indication when or where a plant actually might be built. The announcement said neither the consortium nor its members ``are making a commitment to build a new nuclear unit at this time.''
Any decision on a future plant would be left to the individual participants in the consortium, the announcement said.
``We must keep the nuclear energy option open for the future,'' said Chris Crane, president and chief nuclear officer at Exelon.
Michael Wallace, president of Constellation Energy Group, said while his company ``has no immediate plans'' for building a new reactor ``our decision to join this consortium is indicative of our strong desire to see the process by which new plants are sited streamlined to support efficient construction in the future.''
The consortium hopes to complete the application process by 2008 and get a decision from the NRC by 2010. After that, any company or combination of participants can use the permit to proceed with a construction plan.
-------- idaho
INEEL cleanup prep work reveals broken drum
Wednesday, March 31, 2004
The Times-News and The Associated Press
http://www.magicvalley.com/news/localstate/index.asp?StoryID=9106
IDAHO FALLS -- The federal government is digging again at the nuclear waste burial ground at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory.
The Pit 4 project was agreed on within the past few months by the state and federal agencies to remove waste with high concentrations of contaminants, officials said Tuesday. Removal of topsoil already has begun on a half-acre of Pit 4, but the final planning document has not been released or been available for public comment. The U.S. Department of Energy said it did not have a solid cost estimate yet. The plan will be issued May 3 for a 30-day public comment period.
Tim Jackson, an INEEL spokesman, said the Superfund law allows INEEL to take measures on the ground to prepare for the project before it must finish all of the documentation and public comment requirements. Actual waste retrieval has not begun.
But topsoil removal has been temporarily stalled after workers discovered a broken waste drum buried only 4 feet below the surface. A crew had been working on preparing a portion of the site for two days when an excavator uncovered the broken drum on March 20, officials said.
The 88-acre radioactive landfill used until 1970 sits above the Eastern Snake River Plain Aquifer, which supplies water to much of southern Idaho including the Magic Valley. Officials say contaminants that have reached the aquifer haven't migrated off INEEL borders.
Pit 4 follows the quick success seen this year in the small Pit 9 test project. Retrieval at Pit 9 went fast once it got started in December after years of delays.
"I think the Pit 9 success is enabling Pit 4 to move ahead in a more simplified and common-sense approach," said Kathleen Trever, director of the state's INEEL monitoring program.
The Pit 9 removal technique created by contractor Bechtel BWXT Idaho cost about $80 million and removed only about 78 cubic yards of debris. Officials said it was too expensive to use across the rest of the landfill.
The Pit 4 project includes removal of waste where disposal records show high concentrations of plutonium, other radioactive wastes and volatile chemicals used as solvents and degreasers. Officials described targeting Pit 4 as getting "more bang for their buck." Pit 4 contains waste from nuclear weapons production at Rocky Flats in Colorado.
Digging at Pit 4 stopped when the barrel was discovered, Department of Energy Project Manager Jeff Perry said.
"We want to look at what went wrong and what could happen next," he said.
It was no surprise that the drum was broken, Jackson said. Many of the waste containers buried in the area are broken or decomposing.
Tests done of the area with ground-penetrating radar, geomagnetic and probing surveys and reviews of historical records indicated the drums were covered with at least 6 feet of soil, Perry said.
"We were going to leave about 2 feet of soil over the drums until we built the containment structure over that section of the pit," Jackson said. "Now we're re-evaluating exactly how to prepare that section of pit before we build the containment structure."
Inside the tent, employees would work in specially designed backhoes and forklifts to remove the drums and dirt and package the radioactive waste for shipment out of Idaho.
The worker who discovered the shallow drum was not exposed to anything dangerous, Jackson said. The crew covered the drum back up with clean soil. The temporary halt is expected to last through Tuesday, and it will not delay the waste retrieval project, Jackson added.
There still is a dispute between the state and federal government over whether the Energy Department must remove all of the buried waste.
-------- utah
Utah Lawmaker Apologizes for Remark
Associated Press
03/31/04
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/nation/8321134.htm
SALT LAKE CITY - A Utah lawmaker apologized for an insult that prompted nuclear waste activists to call for his resignation.
In a letter to the Healthy Environmental Alliance of Utah, state Sen. Curt Bramble said he regretted saying that the group's acronym, HEAL, stood for "Help Educate Anal Liberals."
"I apologize," the Republican lawmaker wrote in a letter dated Monday. "Those of you who have scrutinized the issue know the context in which my remarks were given, and that no harm was intended."
Bramble made the remark on March 5 at a rally supporting Envirocare, which operates a landfill in Utah that is one of just three in the nation that accepts low-level radioactive waste.
Bramble co-chairs the Legislature's Hazardous Waste Regulation and Tax Policy Task Force, which is to make recommendations next year on whether Envirocare should be allowed to accept hotter radioactive wastes than its current state and federal licenses allow.
HEAL activists had called for Bramble's resignation, expressing concern he could not remain neutral on the issue.
Bramble promised the group he would act fairly, but HEAL Director Jason Groenwold said he was not sure what to make of the apology.
"It does nothing to resolve his bias toward Envirocare," Groenwold said.
-------- us politics
Reason to Run? Nader Argues He Has Plenty
March 31, 2004
By TODD S. PURDUM
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/31/politics/campaign/31NADE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, March 30 - Ralph Nader knows all the arguments against him. He can recite, word for importuning word, the letters from old friends urging him not to run for president - "all individually written, all stunningly similar" - and he does so with the theatrical relish of a man whose public life has been one long, unyielding argument with the world.
"Here's how it started," he said, his soft voice taking on mock oratorical tones over dinner with a group of aides in Charlotte, N.C., last week: "For years, I've thought of you as one of our heroes." He rolled his eyes. "The achievements you've attained are monumental, in consumer, environmental, etc., etc." He paused for effect. "But this time, I must express my profound disappointment at indications that you are going to run."
"And the more I got of these," Mr. Nader said, "the more I realized that we are confronting a virus, a liberal virus. And the characteristic of a virus is when it takes hold of the individual, it's the same virus, individual letters all written in uncannily the same sequence. Here's another characteristic of the virus: Not one I can recall ever said, 'What are your arguments for running?' "
So ask him already. He is bursting with answers.
No, he says, he is neither a nut nor a narcissist. Yes, he agrees with his sharpest Democratic critics that defeating President Bush is essential. In the end, he believes, out-of-power Democrats will rally around John Kerry, and Mr. Nader will take votes from disaffected Republicans and independents. He is running as an independent, but might accept the endorsement of the Green Party, which nominated him four years ago, though not if doing so means refraining from campaigning in swing states, as some in the party insist.
His goal is to raise $15 million to $20 million ("Very tough to do," he said, noting, "We had $8 million last time.") He aspires to get on the ballot in all 50 states, a daunting task demanding tens of thousands of signatures in each state. He vows to conduct a creative campaign, "opening up new areas in August, September and October as the two parties zero in on five issues and beat them to a vapid pulp." He has asked for a meeting with Mr. Kerry next month to make his case that he can offer fresh ideas "field-tested by a second front," and Kerry aides say a session is being arranged.
"We are going to focus on defeating George Bush and showing the Democrats, if they're smart enough to pick up on it, how to take apart George Bush," Mr. Nader told a rally of a couple of hundred students at North Carolina State University in Raleigh last Thursday, his shoulders no more slumped and his chest no less concave at 70 than when he began addressing another generation almost 40 years ago. "Things have gotten so bad in this country, you look back at Richard Nixon with nostalgia."
But even some of Mr. Nader's admirers remain skeptical of most or all of those arguments. They remember how his presence in the razor-close 2000 election helped deprive Al Gore of victory in states like New Hampshire and Florida, and they worry about some early polls that showed Mr. Kerry leading Mr. Bush in a two-way race, but trailing if Mr. Nader is added as an option.
"He's made his decision, and now all of us have to live with it," said Mark Green, the former New York City public advocate and co-chairman of Mr. Kerry's campaign in New York who was one of dozens of old friends urging Mr. Nader not to run. "I'm hopeful that we who admire Ralph and are ardent Kerry supporters are all vindicated in the end. First, that his numbers shrink to under 1 percent, because Kerry is such a strong progressive, and second that Ralph does not make the margin of difference in any swing state that he manages to get on the ballot of."
"Ralph can bring a lot to a campaign," Mr. Green said. "But it's still, in my mind, not worth the risk."
Mr. Nader countered, as he has since 2000, that Democrats "know who beat Gore: it was Gore." He added: "The reason why I'm convinced I'm going to get more votes away from Bush than the Democrats is the wholesale abandonment of our campaign by the big donors in 2000 and our prominent liberal supporters: Michael Moore, Phil Donohue, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, I could keep going. They're out of here. And I keep saying to our new adherents, `It's a big country out there.' And it's proving true."
Public Citizen, the consumer and political advocacy group that Mr. Nader founded in 1971, lost about 20 percent of its members and roughly $1 million in support in apparent protest after his 2000 campaign, even though he has not held any post with the organization since 1980. The group has posted statements on its Web site this year, noting that it has no involvement with Mr. Nader's campaign, and no influence over his decision to run.
"We've worked really hard," the group's president, Joan Claybrook, said, "and we've almost come back up, but you never recover the funds you lost. I'd really hate to see our missions compromised. This year, I can't tell you the effect yet. We did get about 600 e-mails in the week or two after Ralph announced his candidacy, and 200 letters. It's hard to tell whether that's going to translate into money. I don't know. We're not doing as well as we were last year at this time."
Favorable public opinion about Mr. Nader has sharply declined since 2000, while the percentage of Americans who view him unfavorably has increased, according to the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey. Four years ago, Republicans were the most negative, with 33 percent viewing Mr. Nader unfavorably; now that figure is 42 percent.
And Mr. Nader's argument that he can draw more support from Mr. Bush than from Mr. Kerry has yet to be proved. A New York Times/CBS News poll earlier this month found that when voters were asked to choose between Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry, 46 percent chose the president and 43 percent Mr. Kerry. When Mr. Nader was added to the mix, Mr. Bush's support stayed at 46 percent, Mr. Kerry's dropped to 38 percent and Mr. Nader drew 7 percent. More than half of Nader supporters preferred Mr. Kerry in a two-way race.
"Conservatives for Nader," the comic Jon Stewart mused recently. "Not a large group. About the same size as 'Retarded Death Row Texans for Bush.' "
But Mr. Nader insisted in an interview: "There's a lot of disgruntlement among conservatives and Republicans out there. I mean, we're talking on the margins here," and on "Crossfire" on CNN on Tuesday, he urged: "Don't prejudge it. Just wait and see how it develops."
Mr. Nader acknowledged that four years ago he seemed to be tougher on Mr. Gore and Bill Clinton than he was on Mr. Bush. But he said that was partly because the Democrats were the incumbents then, with a record to defend, just as Mr. Bush is now. He also made it clear that his own relationship with Mr. Gore, once friendly, had soured over lack of access to Mr. Gore in the second Clinton term and the Clinton administration's lack of interest in Mr. Nader's ideas.
"He changed," Mr. Nader said quietly of Mr. Gore. "I don't know why he changed."
Mr. Nader does not dispute that there are real differences between Republicans and Democrats on social issues like abortion and gay rights, and over judicial appointments. But he said that both parties' exaggerated rhetoric tended to mask the reality that conservatives did not have the votes in Congress to pass constitutional amendments banning abortion or gay marriage and that Democrats failed to block judicial conservatives from the bench, even when they controlled the Senate.
He maintained that big breakthroughs in American politics, from women's suffrage to industrial regulation, have always begun outside the mainstream - and he challenged his student audience in Raleigh to think about what that meant in terms that suggested how he must sometimes feel. "How would you have liked," he asked, "to be an abolitionist in North or South Carolina in the 1830's?"
--------
Is Fix in at 9/11 Commission?
by Paul Sperry,
March 31, 2004
http://antiwar.com/sperry/?articleid=2209
In finally accepting the 9/11 Commission's request for public testimony under oath from National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, the White House was not the one that flinched. It was the 9/11 Commission.
The fine print of the deal takes the chance of the commission taking sworn public testimony from any other White House official - including Rice's deputy Stephen Hadley, Bush's political adviser Karl Rove, President Bush himself or Vice President Dick Cheney - completely off the table. It also precludes the panel from having the option of calling Rice, who's made media statements contradicting evidence and sworn statements by other officials, back to testify.
It's a one-shot deal. And it stinks.
Even under oath, Rice can dodge tough questions by claiming her answers would jeopardize national security or the war on terror. "I'm sorry, Mr. Chairman, but again, that's a classified area, and I just can't get into it," she could say. Or she could come down with Washington amnesia - "I have no recollection of that." And she and everyone else in the White House could skate. The commission has no recourse at that point.
Other compromises are curious. Why did the panel, which has subpoena power and could compel Rice to testify, originally bow to White House demands not to even tape-record the statements they were "allowed" to take from her in private? Why will it let Bush tag-team with Cheney in a joint Q&A in the White House without oaths or even tape recorders? Why has it agreed to let just four panel officials lay eyes on a key intelligence briefing Bush got a month before the 9/11 attacks?
Why is the commission bending over backwards to please the White House when it's supposed to be fiercely independent and bipartisan, made up of five Republicans and five Democrats?
The answer may lie in the little-known fact that the White House has a friend on the inside. And not just any friend, either.
His name is Philip D. Zelikow, the executive director of the commission. Though he has no vote, the former Texas lawyer arguably has more sway than any member, including the chairman. Zelikow picks the areas of investigation, the briefing materials, the topics for hearings, the witnesses, and the lines of questioning for witnesses. He also picks which fights are worth fighting, legally, with the White House, and was involved in the latest round of capitulations - er, negotiations - over Rice's testimony. And the commissioners for the most part follow his recommendations. In effect, he sets the agenda and runs the investigation.
He also carries with him a downright obnoxious conflict-of-interest odor, one that somehow went undetected by the lawyers who vetted him for one of the most important investigative positions in U.S. history. There's a raft of evidence to suggest that Zelikow has personal, professional and political reasons not to see the commission hold Rice and other Bush officials accountable for pre-9/11 failings, and may be the de facto swing vote for Republicans on the panel. Here are just a few of them:
Philip D. Zelikow
- He and Rice worked closely together in the first Bush White House as aides to former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft. Zelikow was director of European security affairs, and Rice was senior director of Soviet and East European affairs, as well as special assistant to the president. Rice reportedly hired Zelikow. Both started in 1989 and left in 1991.
- A few years after leaving the White House, Zelikow and Rice wrote a book together called, "Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft."
- The two associated again when Zelikow directed the Aspen Strategy Group, a foreign-policy strategy body co-chaired by Rice's mentor Scowcroft. Rice, along with Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, were members.
- Zelikow also directed the Markle Foundation's Task Force on National Security in the Information Age under co-chairman James Barksdale, a Bush adviser and major Bush-Cheney donor. A 9/11 commissioner, Republican Sen. Slade Gorton, also served with Zelikow on the task force. (Interestingly, the pair serves together on yet another panel - The National Commission on Federal Election Reform - with Gorton acting as vice-chairman and Zelikow as executive director.)
- After the 2000 election, Zelikow and Rice were reunited when George W. Bush named him to his transition team for the National Security Council. Rice reportedly asked Zelikow to help organize the NSC under the Scowcroft model, which was insular and steeped in Cold War worldview.
- Former White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke says he briefed not only Rice and Hadley, but also Zelikow about the growing al-Qaida threat during the transition period. Zelikow sat in on the briefings, he says.
- A month after the 9/11 al-Qaida attacks, President Bush appointed Zelikow to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which is chaired by Scowcroft.
- Zelikow's regular job, the one he'll return to after the commission releases it final report in late July, is director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. The center is dedicated to the study of the presidency, and maintains contact with the Bush White House, which fought the creation of the commission.
Kristen Breitweiser, a 9/11 widow, insists Zelikow has a "clear conflict of interest." And she suspects he is in touch with Bush's political adviser, Rove, which she says would explain why the White House granted him, along with just one other commission official, the greatest access to the intelligence briefing Bush got a month before the 9/11 suicide hijackings.
The two-page memo in question mentions "al-Qaida" and "hijackings," that much we know. What we don't know is if it gets any more specific about the threat. And the White House won't let us find out. It refuses to declassify any of the August memo (or any of the other briefings Bush got before 9/11, for that matter), and it won't even let most commissioners review it.
Bush and his top security adviser insist they have nothing to hide.
Rice pal Zelikow, for his part, says he's recused himself from any part of the probe that deals with the roughly one-month period after the election when he worked with Rice on the transition, as if any potential conflicts he might have would end there. Commission spokesman Al Felzenberg doesn't understand the fuss over Zelikow. "He has not served in the Bush administration," he argues more technically than convincingly.
The fuss, Mr. Felzenberg, is that 9/11 relatives like the wife of the late Ronald Breitweiser want to know they are getting an honest investigation into what their government did to protect their loved ones from a foreign-ordered attack on American soil.
But the way key pre-9/11 documents and sworn testimony from top officials are being denied the public, it looks like the fix is in.
To be sure, Zelikow could be a remarkably objective fellow and not let his close ties to the Bush administration influence his final report in any way.
But with the commission still refusing to subpoena the documents and caving to White House ground rules on testimony, the stench of political bias has become too strong, and Zelikow should nonetheless step down, immediately, for the sake of the families, many of whom are demanding his resignation. And the commission should vote to further extend its deadline while it finds a more politically detached replacement for him and redoubles its efforts to deliver the "full and complete" and "independent" investigation it originally promised the country.
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The Defector
by Patrick J. Buchanan,
March 31, 2004
CREATORS SYNDICATE
http://antiwar.com/pat/?articleid=2210
Both the ferocity of the White House attacks and his lionization by the liberal press testify: Richard Clarke has drawn blood.
The former counter-terrorism chief seeks to dynamite the central pillar of the Bush presidency: that the president has bravely and brilliantly led us in the War on Terror and that the war on Iraq made us more secure.
According to Clarke, the White House, especially Condi Rice, was diffident if not indolent in coping with the threat of Al Qaeda prior to 9-11. And the obsession with Iraq blinded the White House to the real threat.
As Clarke tells it, at a meeting of sub-Cabinet officers he called in April 2001 to discuss Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, Paul Wolfowitz dismissed the "little terrorist" in Afghanistan and sought to refocus the meeting on Iraq.
On 9-11 itself, Clarke was stunned to hear Donald Rumsfeld call for bombing Iraq -- not Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda was -- because there were better "targets" in Iraq, though Baghdad had had nothing to do with the atrocities.
On Sept. 12, Clarke was enraged as he watched Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz try to steer the president's wrath away from Al Qaeda and Afghanistan, toward Iraq and Saddam. Clarke contends the eventual invasion of Iraq was a disaster for the war on terror.
First, it diverted vital resources, such as U.S. Special Forces, away from the hunt for Osama when we might have caught and killed him. In the two years since bin Laden escaped, the cancer cells he created have multiplied. Now we face Al Qaeda clones all over the world.
Second, the Iraqi invasion played into bin Laden's hand. He had long predicted the United States would invade an oil-rich Islamic nation to seize its resources, and in the eyes of the Arab and Islamic world, we have done exactly that.
Third, the pandemic hatred of the United States, as seen in the recent Pew polls, is, Clarke believes, a direct consequence of our invasion.
Fourth, we ignited a war of national resistance in Iraq that has given the Islamic young a cause in which to believe and for which to fight -- i.e., to expel imperialist-infidel America from Baghdad, which for 500 years was the seat of the caliphate.
Bush's grand strategy is the Bush Doctrine. By it, the United States asserts a right to launch pre-emptive strikes and preventive wars on rogue nations to deny them weapons of mass destruction. After 9-11, said Bush, we cannot risk a rogue nation giving a biological or nuclear weapon to Al Qaeda. To prevent it, we take down rogue regimes and disarm them, before they strike.
Under the Bush Doctrine we invaded Iraq. Yet, we now know that Saddam had no links to 9-11, no ties to Al Qaeda, no weapons of mass destruction, no plans to attack us.
The White House has fallen back on the argument that Saddam and his Baathist regime constituted a terrorist state with a horrific record on human rights that would forever be a threat if ever it did acquire the weapons for which it still had plans, if not programs.
Moreover, our long-term policy for ending the terrorist threat is to use our resources to advance a "world democratic revolution." When all Islamic states are free and democratic, the threat of terror will pass away.
The test case is Iraq, but only the early returns are in.
What do they show? Clearly, the Iraqi people are glad to be rid of the tyrant and his regime. And while no roses were strewn in the path of U.S. troops, the Iraqis are not all hostile. The Libyans have come around, and the Iranians want to talk. Progress is being made.
Yet, the price in U.S. and Iraqi dead and wounded is high, and the cost in resources, $150 billion and counting, is prohibitive of any new war on Iran or North Korea, whose arsenals are far more advanced. Much of our Army is tied down. Our alliances are strained. The cancer of terrorism appears to have metastasized. The Islamic world appears to be against us.
By our old standards -- America does not attack nations that do not attack us -- Iraq was not a war of necessity, but a war of choice. Was it wise? Bush says yes, Clarke no.
The verdict of history is not yet in. But if Iraq collapses in chaos or civil war to become a spawning ground of Islamic terror, Bush will be a failed president and America will need a new foreign policy.
However, by then, the architects of the Iraq war could still be in power. We are headed for interesting times, made more interesting by Richard Clarke.
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The Dogs That Didn't Bark
Why Colin Powell and George Tenet aren't bashing Richard Clarke.
By Fred Kaplan
Wednesday, March 31, 2004
http://slate.msn.com/id/2098067/fr/rss/
In the short story "Silver Blaze," Sherlock Holmes solves the mystery of a stolen racehorse by observing that the stable's guard dog didn't bark-hence, the intruder was not a stranger.
The mystery of whether Richard Clarke is telling the truth about President Bush's counterterrorism policies might be solved the same way: Which dogs aren't barking? Amid all the administration officials bombarding the airwaves with denunciations, who has stayed mum?
The answer: Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA Director George Tenet, and their silence speaks loudly.
Tenet is central to Clarke's case that Bush was negligent on terrorism. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and others have said many times-in what they present as a defense against Clarke's charges-that Bush received an intelligence briefing from Tenet every morning and was therefore well aware of the threat from al-Qaida. But Clarke's point is that Bush didn't take Tenet's warnings seriously. Here's a key passage from Clarke's book, Against All Enemies (Page 235):
[Tenet] and I regularly commiserated that al Qaeda was not being addressed more seriously by the new administration. Sometimes I would walk into my office and find the Director of Central Intelligence sitting at my desk or the desk of my assistant, Beverly Roundtree, waiting to vent his frustration. We agreed that Tenet would ensure that the president's daily briefings would continue to be replete with threat information on al Qaeda.
This is where the famous "swatting flies" story appears.
President Bush, reading the intelligence every day and noticing that there was a lot about al Qaeda, asked Condi Rice why it was that we couldn't stop "swatting flies" and eliminate al Qaeda. Rice told me about the conversation and asked how the plan to get al Qaeda was coming in the Deputies Committee. "It can be presented to the Principals [the Cabinet secretaries] in two days, whenever we can get a meeting," I pressed. Rice promised to get to it soon. Time passed.
If Clarke is spewing nonsense-if the president and his national security adviser really did consider al-Qaida an urgent matter-Tenet is the man to say so. It's hard to imagine that the White House hasn't tried to recruit him to do so. Yet so far he hasn't.
Tenet is not the only quiet dog. One of the hounds that the White House did unleash-Secretary of State Powell-not only declined to growl, but practically purred like a kitten. Interviewed on Jim Lehrer's NewsHour, Powell said: "I know Mr. Clarke. I have known him for many, many years. He's a very smart guy. He served his nation very, very well. He's an expert in these matters." His book "is not the complete story," but, Powell added, "I'm not attributing any bad motives to it."
Asked if he had been recruited to join the campaign against Clarke, Powell replied, "I'm not aware of any campaign against Mr. Clarke, and I am not a member."
His choice of words here is fascinating. Note: He did not say "There is no campaign," but rather "I'm not aware of any campaign." As has been widely observed, Powell truly is out of the loop in this administration; it's conceivable he is unaware. He then went on to say, "[A]nd I am not a member"-suggesting there might be a campaign, but he's not part of it.
It may be a stretch to parse these words so closely. This was an interview, after all, not a written statement. Then again, Powell must have given some careful thought to what he would say. In any case, his answer doesn't exactly amount to a denial of an anti-Clarke campaign. In fact, it's a textbook case of the "non-denial denial."
Powell also circled around an answer when Lehrer asked if Clarke was right in saying the Bush administration did not give "urgent priority" to fighting al-Qaida. He replied:
We knew that al-Qaeda was a threat to our country. We knew that the Clinton Administration understood this and was working against al-Qaeda. We did not ignore al-Qaeda. We spent a lot of time thinking about terrorism, what should we do about it. ... We were working on terrorism and trying to understand it.
You don't need to be a literary critic to realize that this is an amazing statement. In a few sentences, Powell tells us that Clinton "understood" and "was working against" al-Qaida-while the Bush administration "did not ignore" al-Qaida (not quite the same thing) and "spent a lot of time thinking" about it and "trying to understand it."
In the middle of all this, Powell managed to throw in the following: "I met with Mr. Clarke four days after I was named to be the Secretary of State." Clarke has said, in his book and in many interviews, that he didn't get a chance to brief Bush's Cabinet secretaries on al-Qaida until one week before 9/11. In this context, Powell is telling Jim Lehrer that he met with Clarke even before the administration got underway.
Powell's implicit support of Clarke is significa