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NUCLEAR
DOE to Revisit Cold Fusion
K Basins accident concerns DOE
Radiation lurks, but it's mostly harmless
FPL sees no impact to refuel from leak at Fla. nuke
EU tells Blair to open nuclear plant to inspectors
UK feared suicide nuke bombers 50 years ago
Radioactive Chickens Have British Press Clucking
Bush Puts Penalties on Nuclear Suppliers
Army agrees to pay for removal, disposal of hazardous materials
Iraq: the DU dust settles
Dying of Neglect: The State Of Iraq's Children's Hospitals
Gulf War II Syndrome?
U.S. fines 13 firms over Iran deals
Anti-Missile Plane Overruns Go On
Pentagon Wants New Generation Of Smaller Cheaper Nukes
A New Nuclear Age?
Nuclear Testing
Resources
U.S. studied nuclear war in Korea in '70s
Officials to Quit Sick Nuke Worker Program
Hanford, Wash., Plaintiffs Seek Details of Thyroid Disease, Radiation Data
Hanford downwinders' lawyers seek data from Fred Hutchinson study
MILITARY
Stryker switch
I-Team: Secret Anthrax Report
Mercenaries flock to fill vacuum
Mercenaries 'R' U.S.
Need an Army? Just Pick Up the Phone
US death toll in Iraq hits 600: Pentagon
Shia militia demolish 'debauched' Iraqi village
U.S. Vows to Find Civilians' Killers
Iraqi Cleric Condemns Mutilation of Four Slain U.S. Civilians
A Growing Unity Against Israel
Palestinians and Police Clash at Sacred Site in Jerusalem
NATO Welcomes 7 New Members
Russia defends 'paranoia' over NATO enlargement
Russia not concerned about NATO expansion: Putin
NATO fetes seven new members but Russia not in party mood
Long Live NATO
Pentagon Frees 15 Held at Guantanamo
Russia to insist on solving Kosovo issue
Legislators Seek U.S. Intelligence Director
After 2 Months, Bush's Iraq Panel Starts to Stir
Army Promises Not to Set Makua Valley Aflame
Slain US security agents once served with Navy Seals, Special Forces
Slain Contractors Were in Iraq Working Security Detail
Private U.S. Guards Take Big Risks for Right Price
Rummy's Rules for War
White House Holds Back Clinton Papers
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Role of security companies likely to become more visible
Federal Judge Orders Release of Documents of White House
Documents Related to Cheney Case Ordered Released
Afghans' opium crop may double
Government Issues Warning of Summer Bomb Plots in U.S.
U.S. Goals Solicited On Software Security
Sudan: Massive Atrocities in Darfur
British Author's Visa Ordeal Is One for the Books
U.S. Extends Fingerprinting Rule to Millions More Visitors
Prosecutors Are Said to Have Expanded Inquiry Into Leak
I saw papers that show US knew al-Qa'ida would attack cities
Jailed Muslim: bin Laden led Bali bombing
Untested Islamic Militants Emerging, U.S. Official Says
Three Nations Arrest 53 Alleged Militants
Bomb Is Found on Spanish Rail Line
ENERGY AND OTHER
Energy Task Force Data Not Private Agencies Ordered to Release Papers
Senators Fault Mercury Pollution Proposal
Afraid of Radiation? Low Doses are Good for You
White House Undermined Chemical Tests, Report Says
WASA Violated Lead Law, EPA Says
House GOP Blocks Testimony
ACTIVISTS
Russian Parliament to Ease Proposed Ban on Demonstrations
Hong Kong Protesters Say China Is Trying to Stifle Democracy
-------- NUCLEAR
DOE to Revisit Cold Fusion
By Charles Choi
April 2, 2004
United Press International
http://www.technewsworld.com/perl/story/33299.html
Where cold fusion researchers were long shunned for their investigations -- as were mainstream scientists who remained curious about the controversy -- now they are heralding the renewed interest in the mystery as potentially world-shaking.
The U.S. Department of Energy is planning to give cold fusion a warmer reception after many years of skepticism and even ridicule as the agency pursues an official review of the controversial technology.
James Decker, deputy director of DOE's Office of Science, said the review actually began last fall when he met with scientists to discuss the state of cold fusion research.
"They told me about a lot of research on cold fusion that has been done since the last review that was conducted about 15 years ago," Decker told United Press International.
He described the physicists with whom he met as possessing "excellent credentials," including Peter Hagelstein of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, David Nagel of The George Washington University in Washington, and Michael McKubre of SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif., a non-profit research institute that contracts for the government, businesses and other non-profits.
Based on their data, he said, a new review into cold fusion is warranted.
"The Office of Science will pass along the material to reviewers with appropriate expertise," Decker said.
Where cold fusion researchers were long shunned for their investigations -- as were mainstream scientists who remained curious about the controversy -- now they are heralding the renewed interest in the mystery as potentially world-shaking.
"Finally, after years of actively stopping such research on the subject, a few brave souls in the organization are starting a process that should have been undertaken years ago," said Ed Storms, a retired radiochemist from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
"At the very least, a safe and inexpensive source of energy will be created that will change society in ways that are hard to imagine. At the very least, the damage caused by pollution and the brakes on development caused by a dwindling oil supply will be problems of the past," he told UPI. Still, many scientists remain unconvinced that cold fusion's claims will bear out.
"I look over the stuff that has come out, and it looks like the same old thing," said physicist Bob Park of the University of Maryland at College Park. "Some people say they see extra energy, some say they don't. I'm not optimistic they're going to come up with more discoveries," he told UPI.
Fusion is the nuclear reaction that fuels the stars. When two atomic nuclei are fused, the result is a single, heavier nucleus. In the process, as described by Einstein's famous equation, E=mc2, part of the matter is transformed into a relatively huge amount of energy.
Incredible Heat and Pressure
Atomic nuclei strongly repel each other. Conventional theory holds that nuclei can only be fused under extraordinarily high temperature and pressure. In the sun, hydrogen atoms, bound closely together by gravity, are scorched by multi-million-degree heat, forcing them to collide with enough energy to fuse and become helium atoms.
The course of fusion research parallels fission research -- but only to a certain point. Beginning in the 1930s, scientists attempted to provoke a chain reaction of heavy uranium and plutonium atoms into lighter elements in the quest to make a terrible weapon. When they succeeded, in 1945, the result was the first atomic bomb.
More than a decade later, science was able to tame fission to produce nuclear reactors to generate electricity and power naval ships and submarines.
Fusion research produced the first hydrogen super-bomb by the United States in 1952 and in 1953 by the Soviet Union. In the decades since, however, although nations and scientists have sought to harness nuclear fusion to generate power, after billions and billions of dollars for research, they still have not succeeded in generating more electricity from fusion than the energy required to begin the reaction.
One reason for the lack of progress involves the conditions required for initiating fusion -- incredible heat and pressure, requiring massive containment vessels and enormous amounts of electricity to power the compression phase of the reaction.
For example, one facility, called the National Ignition Source, at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, focuses 192 high-energy lasers simultaneously on a target the size of a BB pellet. When the lasers fire, in bursts lasting only billionths of a second, they require about 1,000 times more power than the whole U.S. generating capacity.
More Than a Little Skepticism
So when, in 1989, electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City announced they had generated nuclear fusion reactions at only room temperatures on a tabletop, they were greeted with more than a little skepticism.
The so-called cold fusion experiment immersed electrodes of the metal palladium in heavy water, a molecule containing deuterium atoms instead of conventional hydrogen. Deuterium is a hydrogen isotope bearing an extra neutron.
When Pons and Fleischmann ran an electric current through the electrodes, they said the setup generated far more heat than could be explained through chemical reactions -- but none of the lethal radiation normally expected from fusion. Later, the scientists had trouble reproducing their claim on demand, and others who attempted the experiment reported unpredictable results.
These inconsistencies, coupled with the fact that current theories have no explanation for nuclear fusion at such relatively low temperatures and without dangerous radiation, led many scientists to dismiss cold fusion as pseudo-science.
"I was working at Los Alamos National Laboratory when Pons and Fleischmann made their announcement," Storms recalled. "The laboratory took an enthusiastic interest in the claims and many efforts were undertaken to replicate. Only three were successful, one of these being my effort. Actually seeing the effect is a powerful reason to believe it is real and caused me to continue my research after I retired."
No Special Federal Funding
Within a year after the initial announcement, a Department of Energy review decided cold fusion did not bear special federal funding.
"The Department of Energy has been the single most important impediment in the development of the cold fusion phenomenon," Storms said.
McKubre, director of SRI's Energy Research Center, told UPI he felt the original Department of Energy review was "premature and hasty, but it couldn't have been avoided. And it really was not that damning if interpreted rationally. The original panelists said they didn't see any evidence to merit special treatment. That was interpreted as a condemnation, which meant no money was made available."
In the past 15 years, researchers in universities, government, military and private labs in at least 13 countries have pursued cold fusion, according to New Energy Times. McKubre noted cold fusion results are now more reproducible.
Now, a number of prominent international researchers treat cold fusion seriously, including physics Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia, McKubre said, adding the U.S. government has provided funding for cold fusion research, albeit through military agencies, such as the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, and the Naval Research Laboratory -- not DOE.
McKubre said the new review has a target date of January 2005 for reporting its findings, although he said "it seems to be acted on in the Department of Energy at lightning speed. My guess is it could be done by the end of the academic summer."
Park had no objections to the review.
"The way the system is supposed to work is that everybody is supposed to make their point, that science is not closed," he said.
-------- accidents and safety
K Basins accident concerns DOE
Friday, April 2nd, 2004
By Annette Cary,
Tri-City Herald staff writer
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/tch/local/story/4914065p-4848607c.html
The Department of Energy is concerned that a hoist accident at the Hanford K Basins could indicate a recurring breakdown of good safety operations and management at the project.
"It was a big wake-up call," said DOE spokeswoman Colleen Clark in Richland.
In a letter to contractor Fluor Hanford, DOE's Richland manager Keith Klein listed several events over the last year that added to his concern.
Some incidents involved workers, such as a fist fight between two employees at the K Basins several weeks ago over a nonwork issue, said DOE spokeswoman Andrea Harper in Richland.
In another case, workers played "pranks" and put equipment where it did not belong, causing work delays, Harper said.
Other problems were linked to the long-delayed start of sludge removal at the K Basins. Last spring Fluor Hanford prematurely declared it was ready to start moving sludge, Harper said. The work has yet to begin.
Klein also listed "inadequate engineering processes," a reference to design issues on equipment needed for the sludge removal, Harper said.
In some cases, Fluor took action too slowly, according to the letter. That included a "recent slow response to elevated airborne contamination levels" and "delayed notification of events" to DOE.
Klein wrote the letter after a 160-pound hoist used to move heavy equipment fell from overhead tracks and crashed 6 feet below onto steel grating above the K West Basins.
The K Basins are two indoor pools of water built to hold spent nuclear fuel temporarily about 400 yards from the Columbia River. The pools, built in the '50s, have leaked.
Work is about 80 percent complete to remove 2,300 tons of fuel from them. Some of the fuel has corroded, fallen apart and collected on the bottom of the basins to form a sludge that contains uranium, plutonium and other radioactive isotopes.
No one was injured when the hoist fell on the graveyard shift shortly before midnight March 10. It landed about 8 feet away from a work area.
Klein was concerned not only that the accident occurred, but also about Fluor's delay in notifying DOE of the accident. According to the letter, there had been other incidents of delayed notification in the past year, apparently of less serious events.
After the hoist incident, a manager secured the area with caution tape but did not realize the accident should be reported, according to Fluor. DOE was not notified until the next afternoon.
The events "may indicate a recurring breakdown of formality and discipline required to safely perform operations at K Basin," Klein wrote.
Fluor responded in a five-page letter to DOE last week.
At the time of the hoist accident, officials speculated that a safety system of cogs to hold the hoist in place on the tracks might have failed because of worker sabotage.
But Fluor now believes the problem was caused by wear and tear on equipment at the end of its life cycle, possibly exacerbated by heavy loads.
The report discussed better mechanical inspections, improved maintenance procedures and more formal procedures. The hoists are now being checked each time they are used, said Fluor spokesman Geoff Tyree.
"We cannot allow informality in the nuclear business," said Donna Busche, vice president of regulatory compliance.
The contractor is continuing to take a broader look at the problem to make sure a lack of discipline in safety procedures is not occurring in other systems at the K Basins, she said.
The report also addressed problems related to high airborne radioactivity.
The cleanest fuel was removed from the basins first, but now Fluor is nearing the end of the project and removing the fuel that is crumbling and degraded. As the fuel is washed, it leaves more heavily contaminated water. When the water is disturbed in the process, radioactive particulates have been measured in the air.
Workers are protected with respirators and protective clothing. Fluor also is working to reduce the airborne contamination by using a better filtering system for the water and starting a better airborne monitoring sampling program to characterize the source of airborne radioactivity.
-----
Radiation lurks, but it's mostly harmless
4/2/2004
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/andrewkantor/2004-04-02-kantor_x.htm
This week marks the 25th anniversary of the partial meltdown of Unit 2 of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. You can find all you want to know about the incident from the Discovery Channel, but it seemed a good segue into talking about radiation.
Since the 1950s, the word "radiation" is a scary one - it brings to mind terms like "fallout" and "cancer." Radiation is invisible, it kills, and there's no way to escape from it. Radiation is bad.
But that's the problem: "Radiation" is a broad term, and most radiation isn't bad at all. Light bulbs emit radiation. So does your cell phone, microwave oven, and the candles at your dinner table. But people with agendas - whatever they are - will sometimes use the term as a scare tactic because they know the kind of visceral reaction it can get. 'Beware the electromagnetic radiation from overhead power lines!' or 'Can radiation from your cell phone cause brain damage?' Scary stuff if you don't know the details.
Bits and Pieces
First off, there are two kinds of radiation: particle and electromagnetic. And there are two kinds of particle radiation - alpha and beta particles - that are emitted by various substances like thorium, radium, and plutonium. Neither is particularly strong; they don't travel far from their source. Alpha particles are even too weak to penetrate skin, although if you ingest them they can cause a lot of damage.
When something like Three Mile Island or Chernobyl happens, the danger is that substances that emit alpha or beta particles will end up airborne and people will breathe them in. Having plutonium or cesium particles in your lungs allows the alpha or beta particles they emit to wreak havoc with your cells and their DNA.
The most common source of alpha radiation is radon, which occurs naturally all over the place. In fact, the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurement says that more than half of the average American's radiation exposure comes from radon in the soil. That's why you hear about having your home checked for the stuff. Some smoke detectors use americium, another alpha-particle emitter, which is why you're warned to dispose of your old detectors properly. (Remember, alpha particles can't penetrate skin, so standing near your smoke detector isn't dangerous. Just don't eat it.)
Beta particle-emitters like iodine-131 and strontium-90 are more common and often found in certain medical treatments. They're dangerous when you're close to them because they can penetrate skin at close range (my nephew couldn't sit on my father's lap after my dad's cancer treatment), but unless you're in the habit of playing around with abandoned industrial or medical equipment you don't have to worry. You're unlikely to bump into a major source of beta radiation just walking down the street. (Except for folks in Kiev, that is.)
Particle radiation comes from objects that emit it - bits of plutonium in the air after a nuclear meltdown, or simply radon in the soil. The other kind of radiation - electromagnetic or EM radiation - is all around us, coming from lots of different places.
Everybody Wave
A rough guide to EM radiation. The bad stuff - ionizing radiation - is towards the top.
You can break down radiation into two categories, and it's crucial you know the difference. There's ionizing radiation and non-ionizing radiation. Ionizing radiation is bad. It has enough energy to damage cells by knocking around electrons; it's that sort of stuff that can damage your DNA and cause cell mutation. Non-ionizing radiation is, with apologies to Douglas Adams, mostly harmless. (More on that in a moment.) Both alpha and beta particles, by the way, are ionizing.
Looking around your house you'll find a lot of sources of EM radiation, and most of it is non-ionizing. The light from your table lamp is EM radiation. So is what comes from your monitor or any candles you have burning. Visible light is radiation.
Your cordless phone emits EM radiation - radio waves - to talk to the base station. So does your cell phone. Your AM/FM radio is intercepting EM radiation from local stations. Even if you don't have an antenna, you're constantly bombarded by EM radiation sent by television stations and CB and shortwave radios. (All of these are often called radiofrequency or RF radiation.)
Your microwave oven uses non-ionizing radiation to vibrate molecules of water in your food to cook it. Contrary to what you might have heard, being exposed to microwaves isn't dangerous; it's not ionizing, and the worst it can do is cause a burn. We're exposed to microwaves all the time, in fact. You know MCI, the communications company? "MCI" stands for "Microwave Communications Inc.," because the company planned to use microwave towers to transmit phone calls. Now microwaves are one of several ways phone companies transmit your voice.
Most of the sources of radiation around your house are non-ionizing and safe - light bulbs, microwaves, portable phones, and so on. But you're also exposed to ionizing radiation. You can't help it.
The sunlight shining through your window is full of ionizing ultraviolet (UV) radiation. The glass of the window stops the more harmful UV rays (commonly called UV-B), but lets all the UV-A radiation in. If you're outside, you're exposed to those UV-B rays which cause sunburn and, by damaging your skin's DNA, can cause skin cancer as well. But that's a small price to pay for a nice tan! (UV-A rays won't cause sunburn, but they are ionizing and can also cause skin cancer. And you won't even get a tan out of them.) Microwave towers like this one dot the landscape, transmitting phone calls.
X-rays are also a form of ionizing EM radiation, which is why you should avoid them whenever possible. (MRIs use non-ionizing radiation and strong magnetic fields, which makes them much safer.)
I said earlier that non-ionizing radiation is "mostly harmless." The thing is, no one is willing to say for sure that long-term exposure to large doses of EM radiation is completely safe. And by "large doses" I mean the kind you'd get by sitting in front of a big TV transmitter, day in and day out, not the kind you get just from using your cell phone a lot.
What's made the news, though, are high-voltage power lines and the electromagnetic fields they generate. Are they safe? The answer is: probably. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Institutes of Health, and Department of Energy conducted a five-year study on the effects of what are called extremely low frequency electromagnetic fields (ELF-EMF) that ended in 1998. The study's report said that "the scientific evidence suggesting that ELF-EMF exposures pose any health risk is weak." (Still, I wouldn't buy a house under a power line, for no other reason than it would be that much tougher to sell the thing even if a 50-year study said they were safe.)
Getting away from it all
Radiation - ionizing radiation - is everywhere. Minerals in the soil, besides emitting alpha and beta particles, also emit some gamma rays. Getting a little farther from home, every time you take a plane flight you have less protection from the earth's atmosphere and magnetic field. That leaves you more exposed to cosmic rays, which are pretty much at the top of the ionization scale when it comes to EM radiation - they're nasty stuff. Last year, when intense solar flares were bombarding us, some long-haul flights switched to a lower altitude to protect both the planes' electronics and the passengers' DNA.
There's no way to escape radiation, ionizing or non-ionizing. There are radioactive particles in our bodies and in the food we eat. Radiation comes from the sun above and is in the ground below. Living in the wilderness and eating only the food you grow or hunt doesn't help; according to the Health Physics Society we are each exposed to six times more natural radiation than artificial.
If you're feeling paranoid, there are ways to avoid radiation. Keep out of the sun, and slather on the sunscreen when you're outside regardless of the season. Avoid medical X-rays. Don't fly, and live someplace at a low elevation. Have your home tested for radon. But even with all this, you still can't get away. In fact the government, always eager to help, offers a handy calculator for computing your own radiation exposure. Enjoy.
Andrew Kantor is a technology writer, pundit, and know-it-all living in Columbus, Ohio; he's also a former editor for PC Magazine and Internet World. Read more of his work at kantor.com. His column appears Fridays at USATODAY.com.
----
FPL sees no impact to refuel from leak at Fla. nuke
REUTERS USA:
April 2, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/24571/story.htm
NEW YORK - FPL Group Inc. (FPL.N: Quote, Profile, Research) said yesterday it did not expect a leak at the 850 megawatt Saint Lucie 1 nuclear unit in Florida to delay the plant's ongoing refueling outage.
On March 31, FPL declared an unusual event, the lowest of four levels of emergency classification used by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, following a leak of greater than 10 gallons per minute in the reactor coolant system.
The leak did not pose any danger to the health of plant workers, the public or the environment, a spokeswoman for FPL's nuclear plants said.
"The leak was fully contained by the containment system. As soon as we identified the problem, we fixed it. The event lasted less than an hour," Scott said.
At the time of the event, the unit was shut for a refueling and maintenance outage since about March 22.
"When you have an unusual event you stop whatever you are doing and fix the problem," Scott said. "We had to stop our refueling activities, but do not expect this event to impact the refueling schedule."
She could not, however, say when the company expected the unit to exit the outage, but noted that refueling outages typically last about three to four weeks.
The last time the unit, which is on an 18-month cycle, shut for a refueling outage was from Sept. 29-Oct 25, 2002.
Meanwhile, the adjacent 850 MW unit 2 continued to operate at full power.
The Saint Lucie station is located in Hutchinson Island, Florida, about 120 miles north of Miami.
The station is operated by FPL. FPL owns 100 percent of unit 1, while unit 2 is owned by FPL (85.1 percent), Florida Municipal Power Agency (8.8 percent) and Orlando Utilities Commission (6.1 percent).
-------- britain
EU tells Blair to open nuclear plant to inspectors
REUTERS FRANCE:
April 2, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/24574/story.htm
STRASBOURG, France - The European Union told Britain to clean up its controversial nuclear plant Sellafield on Tuesday or face fines, losing patience with London's refusal over decades to allow full safety inspections.
In a faint echo of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's bid to gain access to Iraq's nuclear facilities, 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 and the access of Commission inspectors to nuclear material to check the nature and quality and quantity of the material," European Commission chief spokesman Reijo Kemppinen told a news conference.
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 the Sellafield plant.
"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 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.
----
UK feared suicide nuke bombers 50 years ago
Story by Haroon Ashraf
REUTERS UK:
April 2, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/24556/story.htm
LONDON - Britain's emergency planners have faced the threat of a suicide nuclear attack on central London for more than half a century, according to declassified intelligence reports.
They showed that at the height of the Cold War, the government feared the Soviet Union would dive an airliner armed with a nuclear bomb into the heart of the capital.
If such a "decapitation attack" killed the prime minister and his cabinet, the Royal Air Force would have unleashed its nuclear arsenal against Russia.
"If enemy nuclear bombs have burst in this country and action has proved abortive...you are authorised...to order nuclear retaliation", said a memo to the air force.
But airborne nuclear Armageddon was not the only fear.
In a plot that could have come out of novelist Frederick Forsyth's Fourth Protocol, a 1950 paper codenamed "Import Research" predicted attackers bringing a dismantled nuclear bomb to Britain would reassemble and detonate it.
Another real fear was of a ship carrying a nuclear device being exploded in a big British port.
The papers go on show to the public on Friday in an exhibition at the National Archive in west London.
Curator Peter Hennessy from the University of London said today's threats were small fry compared to the Cold War era.
"A dirty radiological bomb in the middle of London is terrifying enough but it is not comparable to the eight megaton hydrogen bombs British intelligence thought would drop on London in their 1960s assessment," he told Reuters.
The September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington also reawakened some long dormant security plans.
"After 9/11...two ministers were designated alternative decision takers in case the prime minister is wiped out," Hennessy added.
If 10 hydrogen bombs were dropped on Britain, 12 million people would be killed and four million injured even before radiation clouds spread, a 1955 intelligence report said.
----
Radioactive Chickens Have British Press Clucking
Friday, April 02, 2004
Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,115910,00.html
The British press isn't sure how to handle what may or may not be an April Fool's hoax.
Britain's National Archives on Thursday released details of an old Ministry of Defense project involving live chickens and radiological weapons.
Apparently, the captured cluckers, with a bodily "heat output of the order of 1,000 BTU [British Thermal Units] per bird per day," were considered ideal for keeping plutonium land mines warm, according to the 1957 report.
British military planners were worried that the delicate mechanisms of the mines, intended to stop invading Soviet armies, would freeze in the chilly German winter.
"It's a genuine story," Robert Smith, head of press and publicity at The National Archives, told The Associated Press.
Andy Oppenheimer, co-editor of Jane's World Armies (search), an authoritative military guide, wasn't buying it.
"I have a feeling that it's an April Fool," he said, adding there were other ways to keep mines warm.
The respected Times of London treated the story with kid gloves, asking, "Is today the day to reveal the chicken-powered nuke?" while at the same time putting the story on the front page.
Tom O'Leary, head of education and interpretation at the National Archives, insisted the document was authentic.
"It's not the kind of thing the civil service does," he pointed out, "to set up an April Fool's joke."
-------- business
Bush Puts Penalties on Nuclear Suppliers
April 2, 2004
New York Times
By JUDITH MILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/02/politics/02iran.html
The Bush administration is imposing sanctions on 13 foreign companies and individuals in seven countries that it says have sold equipment or expertise that Iran could use in nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs, according to administration and congressional officials.
The sanctions will prohibit the companies and individuals from exporting goods to or receiving contracts or assistance from the United States and will prevent American companies from trading with them for two years. Officials said the sanctions were being imposed under the Iran Nonproliferation Act of 2000, which prevents sales of goods and technology that Iran could use to acquire long-range missiles and unconventional weapons.
Both the House and Senate foreign relations committees on Thursday received from the administration copies of a classified 30-page report that describes such trade and names the entities being penalized, Congressional officials confirmed.
One official called the list the largest and most varied group of entities to be hit by such sanctions, saying that it demonstrated the Bush administration's determination to use economic pressure on companies and individuals who sell goods and skills that Iran and other states hostile to the United States can use to acquire long-range missiles or unconventional weapons.
"This is about branding companies and people who make such sales as proliferators," said one official who has seen the list and followed the administration's use of sanctions.
The 13 entities include five Chinese companies as well companies in Russia, Macedonia, Belarus, Taiwan, North Korea and the United Arab Emirates. At least five have already been given sanctions at least once by the administration.
The number of companies receiving sanctions has grown under President Bush. In testimony on Tuesday before the House International Relations Committee in Washington, Under Secretary of State John R. Bolton said that the administration had imposed sanctions to punish suspected efforts to acquire illicit weapons 22 times in 2002 and 32 times in 2003, compared with the Clinton administration's average of eight times a year.
"This administration is very serious about using sanctions as a nonproliferation tool," Mr. Bolton said.
He said Iran had a "massive deception and denial campaign" aimed at preventing international inspectors from uncovering that country's "robust" biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs.
"It is clear that Iran draws from many of the same networks that supplied Libya with nuclear technology, components and materials, including the Abdul Qadeer Khan black market network," he said, referring to the network run by the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program. Mr. Bolton called destroying the network through sanctions and other steps "a priority objective of the United States."
Mr. Bolton also shed new light on the administration's view of what President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan knew about Dr. Khan's illicit nuclear sales network before his confession and about the status of Pakistan and American efforts to stop such sales.
Questioned by committee Democrats about whether there was evidence that General Musharraf was complicit in nuclear sales by Dr. Khan's network to Iran, Libya and North Korea, Mr. Bolton said that while General Musharraf might have been aware of such sales, he might have been politically unable to stop them because Dr. Khan was "an icon in Pakistan -the father of the nuclear weapons program."
Mr. Bolton said he believed that President Musharraf might finally have been emboldened by the revelations last year of Iran's illicit nuclear activities and Libya's decision to renounce weapons of mass destruction.
Mr. Bolton, bristled visibly when committee Democrats suggested that he and other administration officials were overlooking Pakistani proliferation activities because of that state's cooperation in fighting terrorism.
"If we had information about complicity of top levels of the government of Pakistan, we would act on it," Mr. Bolton said.
Mr. Bolton also disclosed Tuesday that the administration would soon penalize more companies for trading in nuclear goods and technology with Iran, but he did not identify them at the hearing.
Nonproliferation experts who have seen the new report said American officials had repeatedly complained to China and Russia about their companies' involvement in such transfers. No company, officials said, has ever challenged the sanctions in court.
Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, a nonprofit group that monitors the spread of unconventional weapons, said that while some sanctions were useful, the United States needed tougher rules and mechanisms.
"Many of these companies are repeaters and many don't even do much business with the U.S., nor we with them," he said. "Iran is trying to get the bomb under the shield of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty."
-------- depleted uranium
Army agrees to pay for removal, disposal of hazardous materials
The Associated Press
April 02, 2004
http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040402/APN/404021085
BOSTON -- The U.S. Army has agreed to pay for the removal and disposal of more than 3,700 barrels of depleted uranium from the Starmet facility in Concord, a Superfund site.
The settlement between the U.S. Army and the U.S. Department of Justice will result in the removal of low-level radioactive material and other hazardous materials from the facility, Commissioner Robert Golledge Jr. of the Department of Environmental Protection and Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly announced Friday.
"The materials contained in these drums have long been a source of concern for the local community, so with the DEP taking the lead to make sure the drums are removed, the Environmental Protection Agency can properly assess and clean up this Superfund site," Golledge said in a statement.
The DEP will select a hazardous materials packaging and transportation contractor and the removal process is expected to begin in three to four months. The process, which will be supervised by DEP staff, could take between four and six months.
Starmet, which owns the Concord site and was formerly called Nuclear Metals Inc., manufactured depleted uranium munitions for the Army from the 1970s through 1999.
The recent settlement largely resolves issues in another lawsuit filed by Massachusetts in 2002 after Starmet filed for bankruptcy the same year. The court eventually ordered Starmet to provide security at the site when the company threatened to abandon the property.
An investigation is underway to determine the extent of contamination at the site.
----
Iraq: the DU dust settles
Janes,
April 2, 2004
http://www.janes.com/defence/news/jid/jid040402_1_n.shtml
Following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the incidence of radioactive contamination on Iraqi territory is being linked to the use of depleted uranium (DU) in munitions used by Coalition forces. JID's weapons specialist reviews the continuing political fall-out for Washington and its allies.
DU has created controversy since it was used in the 1991 Gulf War. Activists and veterans' groups blame US weapons containing DU as the prime cause of 'Gulf War syndrome', an elusive combination of maladies that has affected more than 50,000 US veterans. Iraqi medical authorities also claim that increases in child cancers and birth defects were caused by DU contamination from tank battles on farmland west of Basra.
The Uranium Medical Research Center (UMRC) estimates the amount of DU used in the 2003 war at 1,700 tonnes, deployed in fighting vehicles, tanks, and aircraft. According to a UMRC research team, DU rounds used by US and British forces may have subjected parts of the country to high levels of radioactive contamination. The team's preliminary tests showed that air, soil and water samples contained 'hundreds to thousands of times' the normal levels of radiation. Tanks used in the battle for Nasiriyah examined by the UMRC team were found to be emitting several hundred times the background level of radiation.
Depleted uranium - U-238 - is a waste by-product of uranium enrichment and is 40 per cent less radioactive than natural uranium, but remains radioactive for 4.5 billion years. DU is used in munitions because its density is 1.7 times that of lead; ignites and burns on hitting a hard target, acting as a self-sharpening penetrator; and has exceptional performance against armoured targets. Its hardness also makes it ideal for use in armour plating.
----
Dying of Neglect: The State Of Iraq's Children's Hospitals And US Promises
By Justin Huggler,
April 2, 2004 The
Independent
http://www.coastalpost.com/04/04/13.htm
In Iraq's hospitals, children are dying because of shockingly poor sanitation and a shortage of medical equipment. In Baghdad's premier children's hospital, Al-Iskan, sewage drips from the roof of the premature babies' ward, leaking from waste pipes above.
In the leukaemia ward, the lavatories overflow at times, spreading filthy water across the floor that carries potentially lethal infection.
Rubbish is piled on the stairs and in the corridors: old broken bits of machinery, discarded toilet cisterns, babies' cots filled with mountains of unwanted paperwork. The fire escape is blocked with discarded razor wire.
Nearby lie blankets still black with the blood of Iraqi soldiers wounded during the war - for months, they must have been fetid breeding grounds for disease.
This is the reality of life in Iraq under American occupation. Ten months after the fall of Saddam, the invasion that was supposed to have transformed the lives of ordinary Iraqis has done little for the children in Al-Iskan Hospital.
Of the billions of dollars the US is spending in Iraq, little seems to have found its way to Al-Iskan. In a country that sits on top of the second largest proven oil reserves in the world, children are dying in hospital beds because of a shortage of such basic equipment as oxygen cylinders.
The hospital is so short-staffed that the children's mothers have to do the work of nurses: there simply aren't enough nurses to go around. There is no hospital smell at Al-Iskan, because there is no disinfectant. We found a cleaner washing the floor, sprinkling meagre drops of water from a bucket as he went. Wasn't there any disinfectant, we asked. Not even soap, he answered.
"We have our own epidemic of diarrhoea in the hospital every two to three weeks," says Dr Ali Egab, a harried young doctor who stops to give advice to nurses as he shows us from ward to ward. "In December there was a serious epidemic of bronchitis in Baghdad," says Dr Egab. "The hospital was so crowded we had three children in each bed. We had to put some of the children on the floor."
With the overcrowding, cross-infection is a serious problem. "We cannot keep different types of cases apart. All sorts of infections are put together. And often, a patient arrives with a chest infection and ends up getting a stomach infection as well," says Dr Egab.
This sort of secondary infection is the leading cause of death in many of Iraq's hospitals. According to hospital statistics, the rate of secondary infections in Iraq is a shocking 80 per cent.
And yet half of Al-Iskan hospital is a building site. Entire wards that could alleviate the overcrowding are empty shells, with puddles of rancid water gathering on the floor A programme of renovation was abandoned at the time of the American invasion, and nothing has been done since.
Al-Iskan used to be called Saddam Hussein Central Children's Hospital. It was supposed to be the premier children's hospital for all of Iraq, but the staff say it was never any better than it is now.
The Americans inherited an Iraqi health system in a nightmarish state, the product of a combination of years of crippling sanctions imposed by the West, and criminal neglect by the Saddam regime.
But the Americans have had 10 months to improve things, and at Al-Iskan children are still dying because of the dire conditions.
Mohammed Hussein is a new arrival in the leukaemia ward. The two-year-old boy is a bad case: the disease has attacked his central nervous system and his face is twitching with convulsions. But in the ward he has joined, leukaemia will not be the only threat to him.
The success rate in treating leukaemia in children is good in the Wes t. But at Al-Iskan, the leukaemia ward loses five or six patients a week, according to Dr Egab - a very high death rate. Secondary infection is even more of a risk for leukaemia patients, who have lowered immunity, and ideally should be kept in isolation. Here they are packed in six to a room.
According to Dr Egab, patients often come here to be treated for leukaemia, and end up dying of stomach infections.
That probably has something to do with the filthy toilets from which the stench is spreading across the ward. There are just three toilets for 30 patients, and they are crusted dark with filth. The ceiling tiles have gone, and a constant shower of dust falls from the exposed pipes above. Under the sink damp sandbags are slowly rotting.
"The doctors are good to us but we are suffering, especially because of the water," says Kadhimiya Murdan, watching over her 12-year-old Doa, whose toes are curled with pain. "There is only one tap, and it is broken." The staff have to send to other wards for clean water. In the corner of the ward, ten-year-old Zahra Jabar has a temperature, and her mother Henna Abbas needs to sponge her with constant supplies of water to keep her cool.
At least these are the cool winter months. The hospital's air conditioning system has been broken for months, and in the summer the staff had to battle to keep patients cool amid outside temperatures in excess of 50C.
Iraq has a high incidence of leukaemia in children and it is rising. That has been blamed on the use of depleted uranium by the US in the first Gulf War, and many of the cases at Al-Iskan came from areas that suffered heavy bombardment in 1991. But despite the high incidence, there are shortages of important equipment.
The hospital is short of intravenous sets with filters for blood transfusions, and patients often have to be sent out to buy their own on the black market. Supplies of chemotherapy drugs can be erratic. Though children patients are now given priority, sometimes the type s of drugs in stock change, and changing the drug in the middle of treatment can be damaging.
Drug shortages are a serious problem in all of Iraq's hospitals. One doctor treating adult leukaemia patients at Baghdad Teaching Hospital told us he frequently had to send patients out to buy their own drugs on the black market, where they can be charged $300 for drugs that would cost the hospital $30. When they get back, he usually discovers from the label that the drugs they have been sold were stolen from his hospital in the first place.
There are other shortages at Al-Iskan. The hospital has only one nebuliser for asthma patients, and if two children suffer a severe attack at the same time, they have to share it, which means one could die. Often, doctors have to make do with giving oxygen to asthma patients instead.
But the hospital is short of oxygen cylinders, too. You can hear the oxygen cylinders coming at Al-Iskan, an ominous metallic rolling sound. The staff have no trolleys to carry them safely, so they roll the potentially explosive cylinders along the floor, bumping as they go. "To us, this has become a routine," laughs one of the porters."No one worries about it any more."
In the premature babies' ward, says Dr Ban al-Raaby, the shortage of oxygen is so acute that they often have to turn patients away. The rate of premature births in Iraq is soaring, fuelled, say doctors, by the stress of the war and the subsequent security situation on mothers. Dr Raaby stands over 21-day-old Hussein Hadi, who has developed septicaemia, an infection of the blood. "We are trying to do what we can with the facilities we have, but the situation ... well, it's not like other places," says Dr Raaby.
Sometimes the babies get these infections inside the ward because of the poor sanitation, says the doctor, sometimes they get it from unhygienic conditions at home, or home deliveries by unqualified midwives, who cut the umbilical cord with unsterilised instruments.
Outside the hospi tals conditions are even more dire. A report by Physicians for Human Rights from southern Iraq found that at local maternity clinics, caesarean sections were being performed with unsterilised scalpels, needles were being reused, and staff did not even have clean water to wash the mother before she gave birth.
"In the hospitals, you're seeing the sickest 20 per cent of the populations," says Dr Lynn Amowitz, of Physicians for Human Rights. "But the health care for people who don't need to be hospitalised is even worse." Dr Amowitz singles out the lack of facilities for pregnant women. Local clinics are not supplied with specialised drugs used to treat complications in childbirth. The occupation authorities inherited this problem from the Saddam regime, which spent very little on women's health. But Dr Amowitz says the Americans have no plan to improve the situation.
"The problem is that there is no effort on the part of the coalition provisional authority to think about a long-term public health policy," she says. "The sort of people who have the expertise in this, the NGOs, the US Agency for International Development, have not been involved in Iraq. The US Department of Defence decided they're going to do everything and, well, they're not used to building things." As far as hospitals are concerned, Dr Amowitz says she did see a lot of improvements in some local hospitals in the south. "But it turned out it was all being done by the Shia clerics who'd come back from exile, not the coalition," she says.
Back at Al-Iskan, laundry is drying on a line in the premature babies' ward. The ward is so short of nurses that Dr Raaby and the other doctors have been teaching the mothers to carry out basic tasks. But teaching them the importance of hygiene is hard. "We cannot trust them. We try to do everything ourselves," says Dr Raaby.
"We are waiting for the Americans to do what they said they would," she says. "They made so many promises, such a long list. We are waiting for them to keep those promises."
----
Gulf War II Syndrome?
Military Equipment and "Pneumonia"
Coastal Post
April 2, 2004,
By Stan Goff
http://www.coastalpost.com/04/04/06.htm
To understand the official military response to the mysterious "pneumonia" breaking out among American troops in Iraq, we have to understand that troops are equipment.
To the unremitting vexation of Donald Rumsfeld and his "network-centric" techno-groupies, troops are articles of equipment whose preparation and maintenance prove troublesome. They have to be coaxed into "service" with Army-of-One-style Madison Avenue pitches and educational bribes, enculturated to discipline and punctuality, taught how to perform their various functions, then kept in the job through a system of economic and psychological rewards. Troops are the only part of the "tables of organization and equipment" (TO&E is the military's term to describe its units, not mine) that have to be indoctrinated.
There are a couple of troublesome aspects to this for the politicians who control the military. First, troops are not equipment. Second, indoctrination narratives are perishable as circumstances change.
I tend to harp about this, having been military for so long and now being a very politically active leftist, but no member of the armed forces is ever transformed into the unthinking, unfeeling, lethal robot that thrills the right and haunts the left. These men and women start and end as human beings exactly like all of us. They experience the same range of emotions, desire the same outlets for their creativity, seek the same human companionship, and are driven by the same intellectual curiosity. They are not computers that can be programmed. They feel loneliness, awe, pain, lust, confusion, mirth, dread, appetites, and obsessions just like every last one of us, and they exist in the same uncontrollable mix of potentially subversive facts that we do. They are the same combination of goal-directed willfulness and unmanaged acting-out as the rest of us. They are part of the same system as you and me, in which Wal-Mart workers and soldiers are both necessary and expendable. Like the rest of us, they can also get mad when they find they've been had.
They have to be given a special status, reinforced by popular media, that equates their subservience to heroism. They are dressed up in crisp uniforms so they can be properly recognized and adored, and rewarded with colorful medals and badges that hang like fetishes all over those uniforms, and convinced that they are serving some sacred purpose even when they are only slaking Wall Street and the Dollar with their blood and sweat.
Troops might be bewildered, as we all are, by ideologies of chauvinism, consumerism, gender, and so on, but they're still exposed to all that contradictory stuff that life presents them. In fact, troops are often exposed more directly to the charlatan character of official horseshit than the rest of us. As middle class white America comforts itself with the cake-and-ice-cream of 'liberation' in Iraq, for example, the troops who are the instruments of this wretched folly are confronted each day with the generalized hostility of an occupied people, and with the glaring fact that their senior officers-whom they've been told to trust as leaders-are now professional hucksters assisting with the sale of war to voters and taxpayers.
What troops often haven't had yet, and what many don't have until after their tours of duty, is the epiphany that they are equipment. Equipment with an expiration date.
The Department of Defense does not care if a soldier retires and dies three weeks later. In fact, the Veterans Administration bean counters would see that as positive. The Department of Defense does not care if a soldier who was getting out anyway, finishes his or her three or four year hitch, then comes down with mysterious and debilitating ailments, as long as that ailment can plausibly be denied as "service-connected." Note how many millions have been spent by the US government to deny that Gulf War Syndrome existed, and how hard they've fought liability for Agent Orange.
Now there is a "pneumonia" breaking out among the troops, which may very well be related to inhalation of microscopic particles of the highly toxic and radioactive depleted uranium, a heavy-metal slag used in another bit of expendable military equipment, US anti-tank ammunition.
The press, as per standing operating procedure, is collaborating with the Department of Defense in completely evading the possibility of DU as a causative agent for the respiratory malady that has already killed two perfectly healthy young men and has dozens of others hospitalized with some on ventilators. CNN's medical reporter, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, has made the claim that the morbidity rate is average for the population, a claim copied directly from the Defense Department playbook. This idiotic assertion, of course, accepts the premise that this is one of the communicable pneumonias we all know and love, in the face of clear evidence to the contrary. There are no disease clusters to indicate that an organism is responsible for the problem at all, but this doesn't stop the spin machine.
Two of the over 100 cases have shown strep, and this is boldly emphasized while the fact that ONLY two have shown strep (which could very well be coincidental or opportunistic infections) is underplayed. And the boilerplate pre-emptive argument against toxic exposure as the source of this outbreak is that there is "no evidence of toxic or chemical exposure." What is not stated is that when the most obvious etiology is deliberately overlooked, the "evidence" is unlikely to appear on its own. The military made its mind up some time ago that DU is not toxic or carcinogenic-flying directly in the face of scientific fact as effortlessly as the military's political bosses stated the bogus case of al Qaeda-Iraq connections and WMD's.
The target audience for this kind of chicanery is generally the US civilian population, but in this case it is also the troops themselves. They cannot be allowed to develop a preoccupation about the very dust they are relentlessly exposed to every day, because that might degrade their ability to perform their primary functions.
Whether or not this deadly inflammation is the result of DU or some other environmental hazard, the troops are being exposed to DU and a lot more nasty shit every day, just like the troops from Desert Storm and its aftermath, and they will likely eventually be disabled at more or less the same rates-that would be upwards of 40 percent. Troops have become a target audience for the pneumonia spin, because their expiration dates are any time after Uncle Sam can extricate himself from this tar baby he has encountered in Iraq. Until then, just to cope with this arrogant overreach, Bushfeld is offering bribes all over the world for spare troops and activating the Individual Ready Reserve-a measure normally associated with direct defense of the nation or general war.
In March the sandstorms dead-lined their helicopters. Now something is dead-lining the troops. But the troops are NOT equipment, in spite of what Donald Rumsfeld and his whole techno-fascist entourage might like. We can tell them-and I am telling them-you are being had.
(This article originally appeared in Counterpunch, www.counterpunch.org - reprinted with permission, Stan Goff)
Stan Goff is the author of "Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti" (Soft Skull Press, 2000) and of the upcoming book "Full Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003). He is a member of the BRING THEM HOME NOW! coordinating committee, a retired Special Forces master sergeant, and the father of an active duty soldier. Email for BRING THEM HOME NOW! is bthn@mfso.org.
Goff can be reached at: sherrynstan@igc.org
-------- iran
U.S. fines 13 firms over Iran deals
WASHINGTON, (UPI)
April 2
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040402-071450-4702r.htm
The United States has imposed penalties on 13 companies for providing prohibited items to Iran, the State Department said Friday.
The Iran Nonproliferation Act of 2000 forbids supplying any material to Iran that can be used for making weapons of mass destruction.
Those companies include five Chinese, two Macedonian, two Russian, and one each from Belarus, North Korea, Taiwan and the United Arab Emirates.
"There was credible information indicating that these companies had transferred to Iran ... either equipment or technology on the export control list," said deputy spokesman Adam Ereli.
These also included materials not on the list but with the potential of making a material contribution to Iran's weapons programs, Ereli said.
He said the penalties apply only to these specific companies and not to their respective governments or countries.
So far the United States has imposed such penalties on 23 companies.
Under the penalties, no U.S. government agency can have any dealing with them. They also cannot participate in any U.S. assisted program. They cannot apply for new trade licenses and their existing licenses will be suspended.
-------- missile defense
Anti-Missile Plane Overruns Go On
By Miguel Navrot
Friday, April 2, 2004
Albuquerque Journal Staff Writer
http://www.abqjournal.com/news/military/159739military04-02-04.htm
The Air Force's anti-missile airborne laser project continues to suffer cost overruns and delays, according to a congressional report released Wednesday.
Known as the Airborne Laser, the modified Boeing 747 freighter project had a $242 million cost increase in fiscal 2003, according to a Government Accounting Office in its assessment of 51 major defense programs.
In addition, delays in testing the prototype have postponed the procurement of a second aircraft.
The weapon basically involves a 747 with a missile-killing laser mounted on its nose. Flying at high altitudes, the airplane is intended to track soaring enemy missiles, target and hit them with a laser beam to destroy them.
Past plans for the $11 billion program involved fielding a seven-plane fleet by 2009. Several delays have beset the effort, whose main office sits at Kirtland Air Force Base.
The Missile Defense Agency, which is in charge of the project, told the GAO that the current design is stable, according to Wednesday's report, and changes to future models are expected.
The Bush administration is seeking $493 million next fiscal year for Airborne Laser, or "ABL," a segment of the $11.7 billion it wants for missile defense.
On Wednesday New Mexico's two senators stood by the program, for which Congress appropriated $617 million in the current fiscal year.
"The ABL program is, quite frankly, attempting to accomplish something that is technically very difficult- the first-ever directed energy missile defense system," said Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M. "The president's budget request represents a slowdown."
Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., said he believes the program research "will help us better protect our country," and is worth the investment.
Last month, Missile Defense Agency director Lt. Gen. Ron Kadish acknowledged some key milestones had been missed over the past year but urged patience.
Victoria Samson, a research analyst with the nonprofit Center for Defense Information in Washington, D.C., called the cost overruns "serious."
"Frankly, I don't even know if it's going to be around" by 2009, Samson said in a telephone interview.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Pentagon Wants New Generation Of Smaller Cheaper Nukes
by Pamela Hess
Washington (UPI)
Apr 02, 2004
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/nuclear-doctrine-04b.html
A panel of independent advisers is counseling the Pentagon to develop smaller, specialized nuclear weapons using money saved from cutting back on the number of older nuclear warheads and their attendant maintenance costs.
The Pentagon has already earmarked $500 million over the next five years for research into a "Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator," a nuclear missile that could burrow into underground bunkers to attack an enemy's nuclear or chemical missile programs.
The program is controversial: The United States has not produced a new nuclear weapon in more than a decade, and has not tested its warheads with an actual explosion since 1992. Congress put significant restriction on spending for RNEP, requiring two separate approvals before Congress before a new weapon can be built.
The Pentagon insists the weapon is needed.
"Underground facilities are proliferating throughout the world," said Linton Brooks, the director of the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration, at a meeting with reporters Thursday. "Generic dictators are only deterred by (the United States) holding what they value at risk. They tend not to value their population but their instruments of power."
Those instruments of power are likely to be hidden deep underground where a conventional military assault can't reach them.
"We want to make it absolutely clear he doesn't have any invulnerable sanctuary," Brooks said.
Brooks said the missile is intended to deter a dictator from developing his own nuclear capabilities in underground facilities. Militants are unlikely to be dissuaded from their nuclear ambitions no matter what weapons the United States has, Brooks said.
The new missile is still in the investigative stages. Under the current concept, it would be encased in an extremely hard shell and detonate a explosions to sequentially break through layers of rock or concrete and then discharge its nuclear warhead.
Because the warhead would, notionally, be buried, the radioactive fallout and collateral damage to surrounding civilian areas would be far less than a standard surface detonated nuclear weapon.
There would be some fallout, however, Brooks told PBS in a television show to be aired April 2.
"This will be a weapon that will still cause collateral damage. It will still cause fallout. It will still be a hugely serious decision. But it will be quantitatively and qualitatively different from conventional weapons," Brooks told "Now, with Bill Moyers."
He said Thursday the United States would consider the "generic dictator's" population to be hostages that must be protected in a war. Taking out the dictator's capabilities underground might be the best way to do that, he said.
"Do we want a future president to have a capability like this in his hip pocket? I don't know," Brooks said.
But the question should be investigated, he insisted.
"Let get me the money I've asked for and let me study the weapon," he said. "If we decide it is technically feasible, and the president decided to refine the design, then Congress has to approve that."
If after it is designed, the White House wants to build it, Congress also requires that it have approval power for production, he said.
Not everyone agrees the new weapon would be needed.
Retired Air Force Gen. Chuck Horner told PBS he is not convinced.
"I'm not necessarily in favor of developing a small penetrating low-yield nuclear weapon," he said, according to a transcript made available to United Press International.
Horner, who commanded the air assault during the 1991 Persian Gulf war, warned that nuclear weapons carry "political baggage."
"During the Gulf War, I said to myself, what would I use these weapons for? How would I use them? We weren't gonna do it, but I had to say to myself, if I was (going) to do it, what would I do? So I sat down with a nuclear planner. ... The only thing nuclear weapons were good for, really, was busting cities. And if we go around killing women and children in cities, we've lost the war."
The new report from the Defense Science Board says that for a bunker-busting nuclear weapon to be a dissuading factor against a dictator with nuclear ambitions, that dictator would have to be convinced the United States would be willing to use the weapon.
"We join others in judging that a credible force should include ... some nuclear weapons that cause much less collateral damage to achieve their desired effects against the highest priority targets," the report states.
According to the report, the problem with developing this capability is one of both politics and money.
"The problem is that the current plan embedded in the Stockpile Stewardship Program consumes virtually all available resources simply to sustain the aging stockpile of declining relevance," the report states.
The United States has about 7,000 strategic nuclear warheads and has agreed with Russia to draw them down to about 2,000 over a course of several years. Those weapons have to be maintained and an expensive computer modeling program run to determine whether the weapons could be safely used if they were needed.
"Changing this plan requires ... leadership from the Defense Department to state clearly and persuasively the specific requirements for a different nuclear stockpile," the report states.
Brooks report to the Congress on the size and state of the nuclear stockpile is two weeks overdue. He said it is being reviewed by the Pentagon before being sent to the White House and then will go to Capitol Hill.
Brooks also said nuclear material from old weapons currently stored at Los Alamos, N.M., would be moved to a facility in Nevada. The Los Alamos site could not be properly defended because it sits at the bottom of a canyon.
"The material couldn't be secure there," Brooks said.
One half the special nuclear material stored at Los Alamos will begin to be moved in September over an 18-month period. The Washington-based Project on Government Oversight said the move to the Device Assembly Facility at the Nevada Test Site will save the government about $30 million a year. POGO recommended the movement of the material for security reasons in October 2001.
----
A New Nuclear Age?
Nuclear Treaty History
04.02.04
PBS NOW
Bill Moyers
http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/nucleartreaties.html
The Atomic Age began for the world on August 6, 1945 with the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Many mark it as the beginning of the modern world - a world of insecurity. Journalist Edward R. Murrow remarked on the use of the new weapons, "Seldom if ever has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured." The Beginning of the Atomic Age
The dawning of the Atomic Age brought new concerns of international security to the world - who should regulate this incredibly destructive potential? In the words of atomic pioneer Albert Einstein, "The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one" - the struggle for peace.
The Cold War which followed close on the heels of the end of World War II was centered around the alarming potential for nuclear war. The public became conversant with frightening concepts like "MAD", or mutual assured destruction, which meant that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were stalemated by the ability to launch a counterattack after a first nuclear strike. "Duck and Cover" was the instruction given to civilians, and public school children as a measure against fallout from an atomic blast. Atomic defense became a key political issue. Even a former general like Eisenhower couldn't escape being painted as weak on defense. His critics made much of a "missile gap," contending that the nation had fallen behind the Soviet Union in the production of nuclear missiles.
- CNN's THE COLD WAR
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/guides/about.site/
- The Atomic Archive
http://www.atomicarchive.com/index.shtml
First Efforts: The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, 1963
International attempts to regulate nuclear technology and weapons began almost immediately after the end of World War II. Two of the Allied leaders pointed out the challenges in 1946:
It would nevertheless be wrong and imprudent to entrust the secret knowledge or experience of the atomic bomb, which the United States, Great Britain, and Canada now share, to the world organization, while it is still in its infancy. --Winston Churchill, "Iron Curtain" Speech, 1946
I believe it possible that effective means can be developed through the United Nations Organization to prohibit, outlaw, and prevent the use of atomic energy for destructive purposes. --Harry S. Truman. State of the Union Address, 1946
Indeed, nuclear weapons control was one of the first issues addressed by the new United Nations in 1946 - with several plans put forward but none implemented. The Soviet's first atomic test in 1949 raised the stakes, and heightened Cold War anxieties.
Following the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. took a tentative step in early 1963 to establish a direct communications link - the "Hot Line" between heads of state. It wasn't until late 1963 that the first substantive nuclear treaty was signed. The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the first trilateral agreement negotiated by the two superpowers and the UK, prohibited tests of nuclear devices in the atmosphere, in outer space, and underwater. It allowed nuclear testing to continue underground, so long as radioactive debris is not allowed "outside the territorial limits" of the testing state. The treaty was later signed by 116 countries. In 1992, China exploded a bomb beyond the treaty limits.
The second major international agreement was 1968's Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, designed to limit the spread of nuclear technology. The United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom promised not to provide technical information to countries seeking to join the nuclear club, and agreed to "pursue negotiations in good faith" toward ending the arms race. Non-weapon states agreed not to get nuclear arms and agreed to allow U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency to oversee their nuclear facilities. The treaty has since been signed by 187 countries and was extended indefinitely in May 1995. India, Pakistan, Israel and Cuba are the only UN members that haven't signed on. India and Pakistan tested nuclear devices in 1998, and Israel is believed to have nuclear capability.
- Text of the Test Ban Treaty http://www.state.gov/www/global/arms/treaties/ltbt1.html
- More on underground testing
http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/newnukes.html
Elimination of Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles (INF), 1987
Nuclear weapons diplomacy took a different turn in the 1970s, toward the limitation or elimination of certain classes of weapons in order to undercut the arm or missile race. In 1972 the U.S. and the U.S.S.R signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty which limited anti-missile defenses to two sites in each nation.
That same year the two signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) further limited testing and use of nuclear weapons systems.
In 1987 the first nuclear arms control agreement to actually reduce nuclear arms, rather than establish ceilings, was ratified. The Elimination of Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles (INF) required the elimination of all missiles with ranges between 625 and 3,500 miles by June 1, 1991, and all missiles with ranges between 300 and 625 miles within 18 months. In all, over 2,500 missiles were to be eliminated. Critics contend that the 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative or "Star Wars" program would have undermined these missile treaties.
- Text of the INF Treaty
http://www.state.gov/www/global/arms/treaties/inf1.html
- FRONTLINE: The Missile Wars
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/missile/etc/cron.html
From Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) to Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT)
START treaty negotiations aimed to significantly reduce the U.S. and U.S.S.R's nuclear arsenals by 30 percent. START I was followed by 1993's START II, which called for a two-thirds reduction in long-range nuclear weapons. But history soon caught up with the treaty - the break-up of the Soviet Union, left nuclear weapons in a group of newly independent states.
The current treaty at issue is the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, first opened for signatures in 1996. This multilateral agreement bans all nuclear tests above and below the Earth's surface. The treaty also established a worldwide monitoring system to check air, water and soil for signals that someone set off a nuclear explosion. While President Clinton signed the treaty, in 1999, the U.S. Senate refused to ratify it. The treaty does not fully go into effect until 44 nations that are members of the UN Conference on Disarmament have signed and ratified the agreement. The three nations among the 44 nuclear states that have neither signed nor ratified the treaty are India, Pakistan and North Korea, each of which continues to test nuclear weapons.
- START I Treaty text http://www.state.gov/www/global/arms/starthtm/start/start1.html
- The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, United Nations http://disarmament.un.org:8080/wmd/ctbt/index.html
- ONLINE NEWSHOUR: The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/congress/july-dec99/ctbt_index.html
- ONLINE NEWSHOUR Forum: Post Cold War Defense http://www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/september96/military_strategy_9-25.html
----
Nuclear Testing
A New Nuclear Age?
04.02.04
PBS NOW
Bill Moyers
http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/nucleartreaties.html
http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/newnukes.html
The United States has conducted more nuclear tests than the rest of the world, and was the first and only country to use a nuclear weapon in wartime. With the explosion of Trinity - the first nuclear bomb - in Alamagordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945, the U.S. began the "nuclear weapons age." In subsequent years, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, China and India all followed suit. In 1996, Greenpeace offered this statistic: "Since July 1945, there have been 2,044 tests worldwide, the equivalent of one test occurring somewhere in the world every nine days for the last 50 years."
Going Underground
Before 1962, all U.S. nuclear tests were atmospheric, exposed to the atmosphere either on land or in the Pacific or Atlantic oceans, and were "grand operations, involving huge numbers of people, and each often with a set of clear objectives." With the first underground test of a nuclear explosive in September 1957 at the Nevada Test Site, testing took on a different, less public, character.
The first underground test series was Operation Nougat in September 1961-April 1962. After 1962, no further atmospheric testing was conducted; from that point on, all explosive nuclear tests in the United States were underground. In accordance with the terms of the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, complete containment of all nuclear weapons tests became the rule. However, in UNDER THE CLOUD: THE DECADES OF NUCLEAR TESTING, Richard Miller writes that complete containment is a myth, since so many tests leaked, including the notorious 1970 Baneberry shot, which spewed radioactive debris 10,000 feet into the skies. Baneberry was a 10 kiloton shot, about 2/3 the size of Hiroshima, and it was detonated 900 feet down. (View a photo of the Baneberry blast.)
To accomplish underground testing, the test device is placed at the bottom of a vertically drilled hole or within a tunnel that is mined horizontally to a location deep enough to provide containment. Before tests are conducted, the Containment Evaluation Panel made up of scientists, engineers, and independent consultants must review containment design.
Underground testing often leaves visible evidence on the surface in the form of subsidence craters or "sinks" of varying dimensions.
Nevada Test Site
The Nevada Test Site (NTS) is located in Nye County in southern Nevada, northwest of Las Vegas. The site spread across 1,350 square miles of federally owned land with restricted access. It is bordered on three sides by the Nellis Air Force Range, another federally restricted area, providing a buffer zone between the test area and public lands. The main U.S. nuclear testing ground, 100 atmospheric and 828 underground tests took place there between 1951 and 1992.
Until 1951, U.S. nuclear weapons tests were conducted at distant islands in the Pacific Ocean. In the late 1940s, it was deemed more economical and practical for weapons to be tested within the continental boundaries of the U.S. A number of U.S. sites were considered on the basis of "low population density, safety, favorable year-round weather conditions, security, available labor sources, reasonable accessibility including transportation routes, and favorable geology." The NTS was originally selected to meet criteria for atmospheric tests, but subsequently was used for underground tests.
At the end of 1992, the 928 nuclear tests left the Nevada Test Site pock-marked with subsidence craters, with test areas so heavily fractured that they are practically unusable for further testing. (View images of the Nevada Test Site.)
Future Testing?
On September 23, 1992, the U.S. conducted its last nuclear explosion test and joined France and Russia in moratoriums. The Hatfield-Exon-Mitchell amendment halted U.S. testing for a limited period of time. Read more about the United States and nuclear treaties.
M. V. Ramana wrote in Pakistan's THE DAILY TIMES, 8/23/02: "Nuclear establishments around the world have tried to convince their citizens and others that these tests posed no risks to their health and the environment. However, even the limited amount of data that is available suggests that this is not the case. Testing of nuclear weapons has led to and would continue to cause damage to human health and the environment." In May of 1998, Pakistan announced that it had conducted five nuclear tests. Threats of testing elsewhere around the world still loom.
In 2000, the U.S. Department of Energy published an unparalleled history of U.S. nuclear testing, "Origins of the Nevada Test Site," in which authors acknowledge the risks associated with developing a continental testing site:
"What they did could not have been done lacking a dire threat or, equally important, a national consensus that the nation's security took precedence over personal inconvenience. What they did could not be done today. Successfully locating and using in a matter of weeks, without public knowledge and referendum, a facility whose activities would cause physical damage in nearby communities and spread a known harmful substance across vast swaths of the countryside is now simply inconceivable."
Despite the potential dangers, the Nevada Test Site has maintained a readiness to test nuclear weapons underground within 24-36 months. The Bush administration, in the Department of Energy's Fiscal Year 2004 budget request, asked for $25 million in funding to enhance test readiness to 18 months.
----
Resources
A New Nuclear Age?
04.02.04
PBS NOW
Bill Moyers
http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/nuclearresources.html
Is America on the threshold of a new nuclear arms race? In the months following 9/11, the administration issued an ambitious plan for the future of America's nuclear weapons arsenal. That plan envisions new, specialized nuclear weapons and other devices that could be used in a first strike against terrorists and rogue dictators. NOW weighs the potential impact of a renewed nuclear arms development program and examines how efficient some of these new weapons might be against a terrorist enemy. With the Bush administration asking for $500 million to fund research, the program gives viewers a look at the possibilities for America's nuclear arms future. Find out more from the sites listed below.
Documents
Nuclear Posture Review http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/policy/dod/npr.htm
The Congress directed the Defense Department to conduct a comprehensive Nuclear Posture Review to lay out the direction for American nuclear forces over the next five to ten years. In January 2002, the Department completed that review and prepared this report, which puts in motion a major change in the Defense Department's approach to the role of nuclear offensive forces and presents the blueprint for transforming the nation's strategic posture.
"National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction" http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nspd/nspd-17.html
In the George W. Bush Administration, the directives that are used to promulgate Presidential decisions on national security matters are designated National Security Presidential Directives (NSPDs). NSPD-17 / HSPD 4 is the unclassified version of the White Paper entitled "National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction." The classified version of NSPD-17, as reported by the WASHINGTON TIMES on January 31, 2003, included this controversial sentence: "The United States will continue to make clear that it reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force - including potentially nuclear weapons - to the use of [weapons of mass destruction] against the United States, our forces abroad, and friends and allies."
National Security Strategy of the United States http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html
Complete text of the White House's official security strategy.
NNSA Administrator Linton Brooks' memo to National Laboratories (PDF file) http://www.lasg.org/LintonBrooksMemoDec5-2003_0001.pdf
December 5, 2003 memo to Pete Nanos, Director the the Los Alamos National Laboratory from Linton Brooks, Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration. The subject is the repeal by the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004 of the 1994 ban on research and development of new, low-yield nuclear weapons.
HR 1588 --National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004 (PDF file) http://www.defenselink.mil/dodgc/lrs/docs/HR1588-House_passed.pdf
Complete text of legislation.
"Origins of the Nevada Test Site." (PDF file) http://www.nv.doe.gov/news%26pubs/publications/historyreports/pdfs/DOE_MA0518.pdf
This report, published by the Department of Energy provides a comprehensive illustrated history of the nation's largest nuclear testing facility.
"Low-Yield Earth-Penetrating Nuclear Weapons" http://www.fas.org/faspir/2001/v54n1/weapons.htm
Report by Robert W. Nelson in the January/February 2001 issue of THE JOURNAL OF THE FEDERATION OF AMERICAN SCIENTISTS. Robert W. Nelson, a senior fellow for science and technology at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City and a research staff member of the program on science and global security at Princeton University.
"Nuclear Bunker Busters, Mini-Nukes, and the US Nuclear Stockpile" http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-56/iss-11/p32.html
Report on the new technology published by Physics Today, the publication of the American Institute of Physics (AIP).
"Pursuing a New Nuclear Weapons Policy for the 21st Century" http://www.sandia.gov/news-center/publications/white-papers/2001-04-robinson.html
March 22, 2001, White Paper by president of the national security facility, Sandia National Laboratories, C. Paul Robinson on post Cold-War nuclear weapons policy alternatives.
Nuclear Policy Research Institute http://www.nuclearpolicy.org/
The Nuclear Policy Research Institute (NPRI) was established to educate the American public through the mass media about the greatest threats to public health, medical, environmental, political and moral consequences of perpetuating nuclear weapons, power and waste. NPRI is led by Dr. Helen Caldicott, Founding President of Physicians for Social Responsibility (1978-83) and Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament (WAND); and Charles Sheehan-Miles, founding Executive Director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, Inc. and a co-founder of Veterans for Common Sense.
Report to Congress on the Defeat of Hard and Deeply Buried Targets (PDF file) http://www.nukewatch.org/facts/nwd/HiRes_Report_to_Congress_on_the_Defeat.pdf
A July 2001 report submitted by the Secretary of Defense and Secretary of Energy investigating the practicalities of defeating "hard and deeply buried targets." Sections include a review of requirements, assessments of current plans, identification of future potential targets, research and development efforts and cost estimates.
Report by the National Academy of Sciences "Technical Issues Related to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) (2002)" http://www.nap.edu/books/0309085063/html/
This report came out of the 1999 failure of the Senate to ratify the treaty after President Clinton's signature. The committee's charge was to review the technical concerns regarding national safety, capabilities of monitoring systems, and the possibility that other countries still develop and test weapons systems which could escape detection.
More on treaties on nuclear weapons and testing. http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/nucleartreaties.html
Organizations and Agencies
Arms Control Today http://www.armscontrol.org
Founded in 1971, Arms Control Today, is a national nonpartisan membership organization dedicated to promoting public understanding of and support for effective arms control policies. The Web site offers a number of resources on defense and security measures from biological weapons to NATO treaties.
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists http://www.bullatomsci.org/
The Bulletin is published by The Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science (EFNS), a not-for-profit organization founded in 1949. The mission of the EFNS is "to educate citizens about global security issues, especially the continuing dangers posed by nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, and about the appropriate roles of nuclear technology."
Center for Security Policy http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/index.jsp?section=today
The Center is a not-for-profit, non-partisan educational corporation established in 1988, founded by Frank Gaffney, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy during the Reagan administration. The Center's motto is "Promoting Peace Through Strength." The site hosts defense-related news, commentary and analysis.
Downwinders http://www.downwinders.org/
This nonprofit group lobbies for the interests of those exposed to radiation from the U.S. nuclear testing program. The research and educational foundation established in 1978 in Salt Lake City, Utah. Downwinders takes its name from the residents living in the prevailing wind pattern surrounding the Nevada Test Site.
Los Alamos National Laboratory http://www.lanl.gov/worldview/
Web site for the research and development facility jointly run by the University of California and National Nuclear Security Administration of the US Department of Energy. The modern laboratory grew up around the home of the atomic bomb, the secret research facility built at Los Alamos during World War II. The site contains information about Los Alamos history and current research projects.
Los Alamos Study Group http://www.lasg.org/hmpgfrm_b.html
The group is a non-profit, research-oriented, nuclear disarmament organization based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which serves as a watchdog for the Department of Energy facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico.
National Nuclear Security Administration http://www.nnsa.doe.gov/
The NNSA is a division of the Department of Energy. The mission of NNSA is "to enhance United States national security through the military application of nuclear energy." The Administration is responsible for nuclear armaments design, production, testing and maintenance of the nation's nuclear arsenal.
Nevada Test Site http://www.nv.doe.gov/nts/default.htm
The Department of Energy's Web site for the 1,375 square mile site - one of the largest restricted access areas in the United States. The site has information about the uses of the site, and links to the DOE's historic and environmental documentation projects.
Union of Concerned Scientists http://www.ucsusa.org
The Union of Concerned Scientists is a nonprofit partnership of scientists and citizens combining rigorous scientific analysis, innovative policy development and effective citizen advocacy to achieve practical environmental solutions. The UCS publishes a yearly report on the use and misuse of science by the administration and Congress.
Additional defense and security sites http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/defensesites.html
--------
U.S. studied nuclear war in Korea in '70s
United Press International
April 02, 2004
http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20040402-045701-9731r.htm
-- The U.S. Defense Nuclear Agency extensively studied possible use of tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield in North Korea during the late 1970s.
The revelations appear in a study released this week to the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. "Vulnerability of North Korean Forces, Vol. I: Evaluation of Vulnerability of North Korean Divisions to Tactical Nuclear Weapons," was produced by Science Applications Inc. in March 1978.
The study concludes the use of nuclear weapons would be most effective against armored units attacking south of the DMZ, suggesting up to 30 airburst nuclear weapons could be deployed in an area only 9 miles from Seoul.
The study indicates North Koreans may have deep-seated nuclear threat perceptions that have led to Pyongyang's efforts to acquire nuclear weapons today.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Officials to Quit Sick Nuke Worker Program
By NANCY ZUCKERBROD
April 2, 2004
Associated Press
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/wire/sns-ap-energy-card,1,4359228.story?coll=sns-ap-politics-headlines
WASHINGTON (AP) - Two Bush administration officials in charge of a widely criticized program that is supposed to help sick nuclear weapons workers are leaving their jobs, the Energy Department announced Friday.
The agency announced the resignations of Undersecretary Robert Card, the department's third top official, and Assistant Secretary Beverly Cook, who reports to Card, in news releases.
The two officials took the brunt of criticism from lawmakers this week after it was disclosed that a $74 million program to aid workers sickened from on-the-job exposure to toxic chemicals had paid out a single claim, $15,000, to one worker.
``The fact of the matter is that they want to spend time with their respective families,'' Energy Department spokesman Joe Davis said of the resignations.
David Garman, the department's assistant secretary for renewable energy, was named acting undersecretary replacing Card.
Congress established the sick worker program in 2000. Its job is to collect workers' record, help them navigate state compensation systems and ultimately cover the costs of claims awarded against government contractors.
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, accused the department of overpaying its contractor, New Orleans-based Science and Engineering Associates, to run the program. Card denied Grassley's accusation at a hearing last Tuesday.
Responding to the resignations Friday, Grassley said, ``It's important that the department find people who can now move this program forward.''
Grassley and several other lawmakers had recommended moving the program to the Labor Department, which runs a separate effort for compensating weapons plant workers sick from radiation exposure.
The lawmakers have cited the massive backlog the Energy Department faces as it tries to process roughly 22,000 claims filed since the law took effect. As of Tuesday, only 372 claimants had heard whether their illnesses were job-related.
Energy officials say they can shorten the backlog if Congress agrees to changes.
A House committee this week endorsed a request from the agency to spend an extra $30 million atop the roughly $26 million being spent on the program this year.
The Energy Department also wants Congress to lift a cap on fees paid to doctors who help assess worker claims.
Most of the claims are from people who worked for contractors at Energy Department facilities in these states: Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, New Mexico, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee and Washington.
Both Card and Cook also oversaw the development of a proposed rule that the Energy Department withdrew under pressure in February. It would have let contractors at nuclear facilities pick which safety rules they should follow.
Card is no relation to White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card.
On the Net:
Energy Department's Office of Worker Advocacy:
http://tis.eh.doe.gov/advocacy/
-------- washington
Hanford, Wash., Plaintiffs Seek Details of Thyroid Disease, Radiation Data
By Karen Dorn Steele,
The Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Wash.
Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
Fri, Apr. 02, 2004
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/business/national/8344119.htm
Apr. 2 - A Seattle cancer research institute is balking at releasing data from a controversial, taxpayer-funded study of thyroid disease among Hanford downwinders.
Lawyers for 2,322 plaintiffs suing Hanford contractors over Cold War-era radiation emissions have issued a subpoena to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. They are seeking detailed information on how the 1999 study's radiation doses were calculated.
The center is fighting the November 2003 subpoena, saying the numbers it crunched to study thyroid disease among 3,440 Hanford downwinders are "proprietary."
In a March 24 memorandum to U.S. District Judge Frem Nielsen, filed in federal court in Spokane, plaintiffs' lawyers object to that stance.
U.S. taxpayers paid $22 million for the Hanford Thyroid Disease Study, and all the data should be publicly available, they say.
Fred Hutchinson researchers are trying to throw a "shroud of 'privilege' over every shred of data, to prevent those most likely to make intelligent use of it -- plaintiffs' experts," their memorandum says.
On March 25, they filed a motion to compel the Seattle center to produce the thyroid study data.
Tobacco industry scientists made similar claims of privilege to fight release of their data on the health impacts of cigarettes, but the courts rejected that stance, the Hanford lawyers say.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention contracted with the Fred Hutchinson center for the thyroid study.
Under the CDC contract, the release of much of the Hanford data isn't allowed because it would invade the privacy rights of study participants, said June Campbell, a Seattle lawyer representing the Fred Hutchinson center.
The raw data "contains personal information about the participants. Under federal law, the participants are given an assurance of confidentiality," Campbell said.
Fred Hutchinson researchers also have an exclusive right to use the data in a series of scientific papers they plan to publish, Campbell said.
"We been trying to work with the plaintiffs' attorneys to narrow the scope of their request," she added.
Judge Nielsen is presiding over the 1991 Hanford case, scheduled for trial in March 2005.
A draft "protective order" that would ensure confidentiality of individuals while the plaintiffs' experts review the thyroid data has been generated, but Nielsen hasn't yet ruled on whether the Seattle researchers should be forced to comply with the subpoena.
The plaintiffs want access to the study's "grid nodes," 36-square-mile geographic units in the inland Northwest used to locate where people lived in order to calculate individual radiation doses.
They also want the calculated doses for the study's 3,440 participants and individual files for 11 "bellwether" plaintiffs, whose cases are the first scheduled for trial next year.
Congress mandated the thyroid disease study in 1988, two years after the U.S. Department of Energy released thousands of pages of documents showing that clouds of radioactive iodine 131 and other elements had been released from Hanford starting in the 1940s during the manufacture of plutonium for nuclear weapons.
Iodine 131 lodges in the thyroid gland, where it can cause cancer and other abnormalities.
DOE initially moved to conduct its own Hanford health studies, but Washington state officials and other critics objected to the nuclear weapons agency being in charge of studying its own radiation releases.
The CDC's Hanford thyroid disease study was the first epidemiological study of radiation from a U.S. weapons plant that wasn't conducted by a weapons agency.
In a 1999 draft, the Fred Hutchinson researchers reported no verifiable link between the Hanford releases and increased thyroid disease downwind -- a finding that the researchers said was a surprise to them.
In peer review, the draft study was strongly criticized by the National Academy of Sciences, which said its statistical power was too weak to detect a radiation effect.
The final report, released in 2002, still found no association between Hanford radiation and thyroid disease.
That angered many downwinders, who said the study was dismissive of their very real health problems. The CDC told the public that the study's inconclusive findings "do not prove that Hanford radiation had no effect on the health of the area population."
Lawyers defending Hanford's Cold War-era contractors seized on the Fred Hutchinson study, saying the results would make it difficult for the downwinders to prove their case in court.
"It will be a tough hurdle for the plaintiffs to overcome," Kevin Van Wart, lead attorney for the Hanford contractors, said last year.
Plaintiffs' lawyers are zeroing in on the study's weaknesses.
In their recent memorandum, they say the thyroid study's final report was "incapable of showing true associations because it mishandled crucial data."
The plaintiffs' lawyers say they will use the Fred Hutchinson data to further demonstrate "exactly why (the study) lacks statistical power to detect anything at all."
----
Hanford downwinders' lawyers seek data from Fred Hutchinson study
The Associated Press
Saturday, April 03, 2004
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2001894085_webhutch02.html
SPOKANE - The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center is refusing to release data from a taxpayer-funded study of thyroid disease among people who lived downwind from the Hanford nuclear reservation, lawyers for plaintiffs suing Hanford contractors say.
Attorneys for the thousands of people suing the contractors over radiation releases from the former nuclear weapons production site recently issued a subpoena seeking information on how the 1999 study's radiation doses were calculated.
The Seattle cancer center is fighting the subpoena, saying the numbers it crunched to study thyroid disease among Hanford downwinders are proprietary.
In a March 24 memorandum to U.S. District Judge Frem Nielsen, filed in federal court in Spokane, lawyers for 2,322 plaintiffs objected to that stance. The judge has not ruled on the subpoena.
The trial is scheduled for March 2005.
Taxpayers paid $22 million for the Hanford Thyroid Disease Study and all the data should be public, the attorney said.
Tobacco industry scientists made similar claims of privilege to fight release of their data on the health impacts of cigarettes, but the courts rejected that stance, the Hanford lawyers said.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention contracted with the Fred Hutchinson center for the thyroid study. Under the CDC contract, the release of much of the Hanford data isn't allowed because it would invade the privacy rights of study participants, said June Campbell, a lawyer representing the Hutchinson center.
The raw data "contains personal information about the participants. Under federal law, the participants are given an assurance of confidentiality," Campbell said.
Fred Hutchinson researchers also have an exclusive right to use the data in scientific papers they plan to publish, Campbell said.
The plaintiffs want access to the study's "grid nodes," 36-square-mile geographic units in the inland Northwest used to locate where people lived in order to calculate individual radiation doses.
They also want the calculated doses for the study's 3,440 participants and individual files for 11 "bellwether" plaintiffs, whose cases are the first scheduled for trial next year.
Congress demanded the thyroid disease study in 1988, two years after the Energy Department released thousands of pages of documents showing that clouds of radioactive iodine 131 and other elements had been released from Hanford starting in the 1940s during the manufacture of plutonium for nuclear weapons.
Iodine 131 lodges in the thyroid gland, where it can cause cancer and other abnormalities.
In their study, the Hutchinson researchers reported no verifiable link between the Hanford releases and increased thyroid disease downwind, a finding that researchers said was a surprise to them.
That angered many downwinders, who said the study dismissed their health problems. The CDC told the public that the study's inconclusive findings "do not prove that Hanford radiation had no effect on the health of the area population."
Lawyers defending Hanford's Cold War-era contractors seized on the Fred Hutchinson study, saying the results would make it difficult for the downwinders to prove their case in court.
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms
Stryker switch
Inside the Ring
April 02, 2004
By Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/inring.htm
A replacement Stryker brigade is in training at Fort Polk, La., to relieve the first unit deployed in a war zone to use the Army's first transformational vehicle.
The 1st Stryker brigade has been in the theater since October, patrolling some of Iraq's meanest streets in the north. Of 310 Stryker vehicles, one has been lost. Insurgents fired two rocket-propelled grenades to destroy the Stryker, but not before its nine soldiers escaped unharmed.
The big question facing the Army is whether to leave the vehicles in place for the new brigade, or rotate in both fresh soldiers and vehicles.
The eight-wheeled Stryker is lighter than the well-armored Bradley Fighting Vehicle and is designed to bridge the gap between heavy brigades and lighter units, such as the 82nd Airborne Division.
It brings armored firepower to the fight, yet can get overseas faster.
-------- biological weapons
I-Team: Secret Anthrax Report
Are you planning on viewing the Cherry Blossoms this year?
Friday April 02, 2004
Reporter: Andrea McCarren
WJLA-TV Script
http://www.wjla.com/news/stories/0404/136845.html
Anchor:
TONIGHT, THE ABC7 I-TEAM EXAMINES AN ALARMING REPORT ABOUT THE 2001 ANTHRAX ATTACKS THAT THE GOVERNMENT FOUGHT TO KEEP UNDER WRAPS FOR TWO YEARS.
IT REVEALS THAT IN ADDITION TO THE LOSS OF LIFE, THE CLEANUP COSTS TO TAXPAYERS RAN IN THE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS.
AND AS I-TEAM REPORTER ANDREA MCCARREN TELLS US, WE STILL MAY BE ILL-PREPARED FOR ANOTHER BIOLOGICAL ATTACK.
Story:
THE ANTHRAX ATTACKS OF 2001 TEMPORARILY CRIPPLED TWO BRANCHES OF OUR FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. PARTS OF CONGRESS WERE SHUT DOWN AS WAS THE SUPREME COURT. POSTAL OPERATIONS NATIONWIDE WERE PARALYZED.
18 PEOPLE CONTRACTED ANTHRAX IN WASHINGTON, NEW YORK AND FLORIDA. FIVE OF THEM DIED.
33,000 IN THE DC AREA ALONE REQUIRED POST-EXPOSURE MEDICATION.
A REPORT JUST RELEASED ... AND ONE THAT THE GOVERNMENT DID NOT WANT YOU TO SEE ... INCLUDES SOME REVEALING INFORMATION ABOUT WHERE YOUR TAX DOLLARS WERE SPENT. AND JUST HOW ILL-PREPARED WE WERE TO HANDLE A BIOTERRORISM ATTACK.
- DIRECT COSTS TO THE US POSTAL SERVICE: AN ESTIMATED THREE-BILLION DOLLARS
- THE COST TO CLEANUP CONGRESS: MORE THAN 24-MILLION DOLLARS
SO MUCH OF THIS REPORT WAS REDACTED, WE TRACKED DOWN ITS AUTHOR TO FIND OUT WHAT WE WERE MISSING.
"The most striking findings were the ones that also were the most obvious. And that is, across the board, we were unprepared for a bioterrorist attack."
THE WEAKNESSES INCLUDED A BREAKDOWN IN COMMUNICATION BETWEEN AGENCIES.
Dr. Ivan Walks: "The first line of defense is the local government, it's the firefighters, it's the police. Those folks are not in the US government and, therefore, they need to have as much information as possible so they can be as effective in protecting us as we want them to be."
"We need to find out when someone thinks that there's anthrax or thinks that there's smallpox. Not wait until there's a diagnosis."
DR. IVAN WALKS, THE FORMER DIRECTOR OF DC'S DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH HELPED LEAD THE CITY THROUGH THE ANTHRAX ATTACKS.
Andrea McCarren, I-Team: "How well prepared are we for the next anthrax attack?"
Dr. Walks: "We are much better prepared than we were before."
WHILE EXPERTS AGREE THAT WE ARE BETTER PREPARED TODAY THAN WE WERE IN 2001, THE REPORT AND THE ADMINISTRATION'S RELUCTANCE TO SHARE IT WITH THE PUBLIC RAISE CONCERNS ABOUT JUST HOW VULNERABLE WE STILL ARE.
FOR THE I-TEAM, ANDREA MCCARREN, ABC7 NEWS.
McCarren on set:
IF YOU'D LIKE TO READ A COPY OF THAT REPORT, CLICK HERE. http://www.fas.org/irp/threat/cbw/dtra02.pdf
-------- business
Mercenaries flock to fill vacuum
April 2, 2004
The Age (Australia)
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/04/01/1080544627082.html
Private security operators now make up the third largest armed force in Iraq, Paul McGeough writes from Baghdad.
When the doors open at Level 5 of the Palestine Hotel, there's a spit-and-polished Gurkha pointing a high-powered gun into the lift.
The whole floor and another above it have been taken by Kellogg Brown & Root, the construction wing of Halliburton, one of the biggest US firms working in Iraq. And though the linguists of occupation don't allow the word "mercenary", the Gurkha is part of a 15,000-strong private security operation that is the third biggest armed force in Iraq.
Their numbers - and salaries as high as $US1000 ($A1300) a day - attest to the danger of this Arab version of Dodge City.
But when they signed up, few would have anticipated the terrible butchery of four colleagues whose bodies were dismembered and dragged through the streets of the western city of Fallujah on Wednesday.
Television footage of the scene - heavily edited before going to air worldwide - showed their corpses being kicked and stoned before being broken up with blows from steel rods.
At least two of them were strung up on a bridge and parts of the other bodies were stuck on poles and paraded around town.
The barbarity at Fallujah provoked outrage in Washington and elsewhere - but did little to change US rhetoric on the pacification of post-war Iraq.
The ranks of the private armies in Iraq are growing so rapidly that US and British defence officials are at a loss to know how to counter offers to the best of their Special Operations and SAS staff.
In the mayhem, Baghdad has been carved into a series of Western security bubbles. There is the Green Zone, American proconsul Paul Bremer's sprawling bunker for which the Pentagon is about to let a $100 million privatised security contract; foreign embassies are grouping and fortifying; and western business and the foreign media have all but withdrawn behind concrete, wire and guns.
Pity the poor Iraqis. They're outside the walls and at the other end of the guns, unprotected from bombers and criminals who have run amok, robbing and kidnapping in a security vacuum in which it is nigh on impossible for a naive new Iraqi police force to control.
And it's not just the foreigners - South Africans, who know they are breaking their country's laws on mercenary activity; skilled Gurkhas and Fijians who can't resist the dollars; or the Chileans who trained under General Pinochet - who are involved.
Beneath all of that is a dubious layer of Iraqi-run security - hundreds of local firms that have the capacity to become clan-based militias if, as some expect, security worsens after the June 30 hand-back of sovereignty to an Iraqi administration.
This is what happens: An Iraqi working with a new foreign media or business sees the opening, recruits 30 or 50 family and friends to whom he gives guns and the ubiquitous baseball cap and then he bids for the security contract.
Australia is doing its bit for the privatised army. Sydney-based AKE Asia-Pacific has teams on the ground and though Australian troops ride shotgun for Australian diplomats in Baghdad, protection for the rest of the small, non-military Australian contingent has been subcontracted to Control Risk Group, whose 1100-strong private army of former British SAS, Nepalese and Fijian soldiers, also guards 500 British civil servants working here. It's a huge drain on the reconstruction budget.
The Fallujah deaths bring the US civilian toll in Iraq to at least 33. The military toll is three short of 600. The March toll - 50 US troops and a dozen civilians of varying nationalities - made it the second worst month of the occupation.
But despite that, US spokesman Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt refused to allow his optimism to be dented by Wednesday's killings - which including the death of five US soldiers in a separate attack near Fallujah.
"Despite an uptick in localised engagements, the overall Iraqi area of operations remains relatively stable with negligible impact on the coalition's ability to continue progress in governance, economic development and restoration of essential services," he said.
We have been confronted with such appalling acts of barbarity before. Remember Mogadishu in 1993 - when Bill Clinton cut and ran from Somalia after the carnage that inspired the Hollywood block-buster Black Hawk Down? And the lynching of two Israeli soldiers by a Palestinian mob in Ramallah in September 2000?
First the Americans wanted to blame the remnants of the Saddam regime and then it was associates of al-Qaeda. But it was ordinary Iraqis wielding the steel rods at Fallujah and in broad daylight.
----
Mercenaries 'R' U.S.
Private Pentagon contractors are paying soldiers of fortune from Chile and South Africa up to $4,000 per month for stints in Iraq
Bill Berkowitz
WorkingForChange
04.02.04
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=16701
On March 31, four retired Special Operations forces employed by the private security firm Blackwater Security Consulting were ambushed, killed, and their bodies mutilated in Fallujah. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, an estimated 15,000 "private security agents" are currently operating in Iraq.
With the U.S. casualty toll ticking ever upward, and its troops stretched thin on the ground, the Bush administration is looking to mercenaries to help control Iraq. These soldiers-for-hire are veterans of some of the most repressive military forces in the world, including that of the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and South Africa's apartheid regime.
In February, Blackwater USA, a North Carolina-based Pentagon contractor, began recruiting "former commandos, other soldiers and seamen" from Chile, offering them up to $4,000 a month "to guard oil wells against attack by insurgents," the Guardian reported. The company "flew a first group of about 60 former commandos, many of who had trained under the military government of Augusto Pinochet, from Santiago to a... [large] training camp in North Carolina," wrote Jonathan Franklin, reporting from Santiago, Chile.
These recruits will eventually wind up in Iraq, where they will spend six months to a year: "We scour the ends of the earth to find professionals -- the Chilean commandos are very, very professional and they fit within the Blackwater system," Gary Jackson, the president of Blackwater USA, told the Guardian.
Michelle Bachelet, Chile's defense minister, told Franklin that she was concerned about "whether paramilitary training by Blackwater violated Chilean laws on the use of weapons by private citizens," and she "ordered an investigation." Bachelet also was troubled by stories that "people on active duty were involved." According to Franklin, "Many soldiers are said to be leaving the army to join the private companies."
While Blackwater USA is not nearly as well known as Halliburton or Bechtel -- two mega-corporations making a killing off the reconstruction of Iraq -- it nevertheless is doing quite well financially, Gary Jackson said. "We have grown 300% over each of the past three years and we are small compared to the big ones. We have a very small niche market, we work towards putting out the cream of the crop, the best."
The company was founded in 1998, and at the time, it was like playing "roulette, [it was] a crapshoot," Jackson, the former Navy seal, told Mother Jones reporter Barry Yeoman.
"Their investment paid off," Yeoman wrote. "Since the attacks of September 11, the company has seen its business boom -- enough to warrant a major expansion of its training facility this year. 'To contemplate outsourcing tactical, strategic, firearms-type training -- high-risk training -- is thinking outside the box,' Jackson said. 'Is this happening? Yes, this is happening.'"
Blackwater USA specializes in firearm, tactics and security training and is comprised of five companies; Blackwater Training Center, Blackwater Target Systems, Blackwater Security Consulting, Blackwater Canine, and Blackwater Air (AWS), and has been doing business with the Department of Defense, Department of State, and Department of Transportation, in addition to local and state entities from around the country, multi-national corporations, and countries from all over the globe.
According to an April 2003 PRWeb press release, "Blackwater's 5,200 square acre facility located in Moyock, NC... is the largest privately-owned firearms training facility in the nation and contains state of the art firearms ranges and training apparatus." Yeoman described the facilities as "a remote tactical training camp, [located] in a swamp 25 miles from the world's largest naval base."
In October 2003, the company inked an estimated $35.7 million contract "to train more than 10,000 sailors from Virginia, Texas, and California each year in 'force protection,'" Yeoman reported.
While there are always a number of high-profile events on Blackwater's schedule, this year's World SWAT Challenge & Conference -- scheduled for mid-May -- is being touted as "The One SWAT Event You Can't Afford to Miss." The conference, which will be held at the company's training facility in Moyock, is being organized by law enforcement "special ops experts who have been there themselves."
In addition to "special ops" conferences and weapons trainings, for the stay-at-home warrior the company offers a full array of gear including tee-shirts, ball caps, gym shorts, mugs, and license plates with the Blackwater logo.
According to the Web blog Spark, "In recent years, the presence of military contractors in U.S. wars and military operations has increased significantly. During the Persian Gulf War of 1991, one in every 50 people on the battlefield was an American mercenary, fighting under a contract. In Bosnia in 1996, that ratio was one in 10."
Currently there are thousands of soldiers under contract with private companies serving in Iraq. "Squads of Bosnians, Filipinos and Americans with special forces experience have been hired for tasks ranging from airport security to protecting Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority," The Guardian's Franklin reported.
Chile isn't the only country from which private companies have recruited mercenaries for Iraq. According to the South Africa newspaper, The Cape Times, "More than 1,500 South Africans are believed to be in Iraq under contract to various private military companies." The United Nations recently reported that South Africa "is already among the top three suppliers of personnel for private military companies, along with the UK and the US."
The Cape Times' Beauregard Tromp writes that "The Regulation of Foreign Military Assistance Act, passed in July 1998, prohibits South African citizens from direct participation as a combatant in armed conflict for private gain. Such engagement includes recruitment, training, or financing and applies to South Africans acting outside the country as well."
Institute for Security Studies military analyst Henri Boshoff told Tromp that it appeared most of the South Africans in Iraq were former members of the South African Defense Force and South African Police. "The guys over there are walking a thin line, close to contravening the Foreign Military Assistance Act," he added.
According to the Web site of the South African-based Democratic Alliance, the private companies appear to be working in Iraq "in contravention of South African law." South African law states that all security companies working outside the country must register with the National Conventional Arms Control Committee (NCACC), headed by Minister of Education Kader Asmal. "So far," according to Tromp, "two companies, Meteoric Tactical Solutions and Grand Lake Trading 46 (Pty) Ltd, have submitted applications to operate in Iraq."
Meteoric Tactical Solutions "is providing protection and is also training new Iraqi police and security units," while another company, Erinys, a joint South African-British company which has failed to register with the government, "has received a multimillion-dollar contract to protect Iraq's oil industry," the Cape Times reported. Earlier this year, an Erinys employee was killed when a car bomb exploded at a hotel where South Africans have been staying.
Raenette Taljaard, a member of the South African Parliament, recently wrote in YaleGlobal Online that this new "booming cottage industry" of private security companies -- which includes companies like Kroll, Armor, Control Risks, Rubicon and Global Risk -- "boast of a whole range of specializations and hail from a range of countries but, together, they provide all the services normally carried out by national military forces, including intelligence, military training, logistics and security.
"In addition to becoming an integral part of the machinery of war, they are emerging as cogs in the infrastructure of peace. US-allied military officials and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan are quickly becoming familiar with the 'brand services' provided by companies.
"But the battlefield is not merely another arena for business, and the profit motive may distort security strategy decisions. The expansion of services performed by civilian entities raises several concerns: the lack of transparency and oversight common to their operations; the performance of companies motivated by profit, not national foreign policy or security interest; and revolving-door-style nepotism and conflicts of interest. All these are concerns that grow ever more urgent as mega-corporation-style military companies diversify even further."
The high salaries and shorter terms of employment that private companies are offering mercenaries could cause the U.S. military and the militaries of other countries to face severe personnel shortages. "If they are going to outsource tasks that were once held by active-duty military and are now using private contractors, those guys [on active duty] are looking and asking, 'Where is the money?'" Gary Jackson told Franklin.
----
Need an Army? Just Pick Up the Phone
April 2, 2004
By BARRY YEOMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/02/opinion/02YEOM.html
DURHAM, N.C. - The murderous attack on four American civilians in Falluja, Iraq, brought home gruesome images of charred bodies dangling from a bridge over the Euphrates River. It also introduced Americans to a company few had heard of: Blackwater USA, which was providing security for food delivery convoys when its employees were ambushed.
Blackwater, which operates from a 5,200-acre training ground in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina, is a private military firm that provides an array of services once performed solely by military personnel. The company trains soldiers in counterterrorism and urban warfare. It also provides the American government with soldiers for hire: former Green Berets, Army Rangers and Navy Seals. In February it started training former Chilean commandos - some of whom served under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet - for future service in Iraq.
Business is booming at Blackwater, and the company is hardly alone. Private contractors are an invisible but growing part of how war is now fought. Some 10,000 of them are serving in Iraq - one private worker for every 10 soldiers - more than the number of soldiers from Britain, America's largest coalition partner. Some are supplied by well-known corporations like Halliburton. But for the most part, the private military industry is dominated by more obscure businesses with names that seem designed to tell as little as possible about what the company does.
Nor is their presence limited to Iraq. In recent years, soldiers-for-profit have served in Liberia, Pakistan, Rwanda and Bosnia. They have guarded Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, and built the military detention facilities holding Al Qaeda suspects in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They have been an essential part of the American war on drugs in Latin America. Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution, who wrote a book on the private military industry, says it brings in about $100 billion a year worldwide.
The industry rose to prominence under President George H.W. Bush - Brown and Root, a Halliburton subsidiary, received a $9 million contract to study supplementing military efforts after the Persian Gulf war. The Clinton administration sent more work to contractors, but it is under the current president, a strong believer in government privatization, that things started booming. Gary Jackson, the president of Blackwater, envisions a day when any country faced with peacekeeping duties will simply call him and place an order. "I would like to have the largest, most professional private army in the world," he told me.
This raises some obvious questions. Shouldn't war be a government function? Why rely on the private sector for our national defense, even if it is largely a supporting role? Part of the reason is practical: since the end of the cold war, the United States military has been shrinking, from 2.1 million in 1989 to 1.4 million today. Supporters of privatization argue that there simply aren't enough soldiers to provide a robust presence around the world, and that by drafting private contractors to fix helicopters, train recruits and cook dinner, the government frees up bona fide soldiers to fight the enemy. (Of course, in the field, the line between combatant and noncombatant roles grow fuzzier, particularly because many of the private soldiers are armed.) Private contractors are supposed to be cheaper, too, but their cost effectiveness has not been proved.
Low manpower and cost savings aren't the only reasons these companies appeal to the Pentagon. For one, substituting contactors for soldiers offers the government a way to avoid unpopular military forays. According to Myles Frechette, who was President Bill Clinton's ambassador to Colombia, private companies performed jobs in Latin America that would have been politically unpalatable for the armed forces. After all, if the government were shipping home soldiers' corpses from the coca fields, the public outcry would be tremendous. However, more than 20 private contractors have been killed in Colombia alone since 1998, and their deaths have barely registered.
This points to the biggest problem with the outsourcing of war: there is far less accountability to the American public and to international law than if real troops were performing the tasks. In the 1990's, several employees of one company, DynCorp, were implicated in a sex-trafficking scandal in Bosnia involving girls as young as 12. Had these men been soldiers, they would have faced court-martial proceedings. As private workers, they were simply put on the next plane back to America.
Think about it: a private military firm might decide to pack its own bags for any number of reasons, leaving American soldiers and equipment vulnerable to enemy attack. If the military really can't fight wars without contractors, it must at least come up with ironclad policies on what to do if the private soldiers break local laws or leave American forces in the lurch.
What happened in Falluja was a tragedy, no matter what uniform the slain men wore. Private contractors are viewed by Iraqis as part of the occupation, yet they lack the military and political backing of our combat troops. So far, the Pentagon has failed to prove it can take responsibility for either the actions or the safety of its private-sector soldiers.
Barry Yeoman writes frequently for Mother Jones and Discover.
-------- iraq
US death toll in Iraq hits 600: Pentagon
WASHINGTON, (AFP)
Apr 02, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040402165111.wtqkp20b.html
The US death toll in Iraq hit the 600 mark Friday with the killings of two more US soldiers in separate attacks over the past 24 hours, according to official casualty figures.
The two latest deaths were to be added to the Pentagon's official toll of dead since US forces invaded Iraq over a year ago, a Pentagon official said.
The toll includes 408 deaths from hostile fire and 192 from causes unrelated to combat, ranging from traffic accidents to suicides.
Well over half the combat deaths -- 293 -- have been inflicted since May 1 when US President George W. Bush declared an end to major combat operations.
In the latest incidents, a soldier was killed and another wounded early Friday in a roadside bombing in Baghdad's Al-Mansur district and a marine was killed in the restive Al-Anbar province west of Baghdad, the US Central Command said.
The Pentagon meanwhile identified five soldiers killed Wednesday when their armored personnel carrier was hit by an improvised explosive device in Habbaniyah, Iraq.
The soldiers were assigned to the US Armys 1st Engineer Battalion, 1st Brigade, 1st Infantry Division in Fort Riley, Kansas.
They were identified as:
-- 1st Lieutenant Doyle M. Hufstedler, 25, of Abilene, Texas;
-- Specialist Sean R. Mitchell, 24, of Youngsville, Pennsylvania;
-- Specialist Michael G. Karr Jr., 23, of San Antonio, Texas;
-- Private First Class Cleston C. Raney, 20, of Rupert, Idaho;
-- Private Brandon L. Davis, 20, of Cumberland, Maryland.
----
Shia militia demolish 'debauched' Iraqi village
By Nicolas Pelham in Kawali, Iraq
April 2 2004
Financial Times
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1079420126275&p=1012571727172
A Shia militia group loyal to radical cleric Muqtada Sadr has wiped out a village in central Iraq which refused to adhere to its puritanical creed, killing some inhabitants and forcing the rest to flee.
Hundreds of militiamen from the Mahdi's Army group besieged the town of Kawlia, 10km south of the city of Diwaniya, with mortars and smashed walls with sledgehammers three weeks ago, reducing to rubble the entire village famed for its dancers and prostitutes since the 1920s.
On Friday scavengers scoured the ruins, loading bricks from houses, a school and a mosque into pickup trucks to sell to local builders. Sayid Yahya Shubari, the 30-year-old local clerical commander of the Mahdi's Army in Diwaniya, said his militia raided the village after receiving reports that pimps had kidnapped a 12-year-old girl.
"It was a well of debauchery, drunkenness and mafia, and they were buying and selling girls," he said. He said Kawlia was flattened after the villagers shot an emissary he had sent to negotiate with them.
Hassan Ali, a director at Diwaniya's civil defence department, said at least four people were killed and 15 wounded during six hours of night-time shelling. He said the attack was quelled after Spanish and Iraqi forces intervened.
The town's destruction has raised fears that the militia, which operates under the command of Mr Sadr, and is active in Baghdad and eight southern provinces, is not just operating above the law, but defining it. Mr Shubari says his Diwaniya office operates its own Sharia (Islamic law) courts, and uses its Sharia police to apply Islamic punishments.
Militiamen say their Diwaniya brigade alone has between 800 and 1,000 men under arms. Diwaniya residents speak of a reign of terror, and say masked militiamen with Kalashnikovs are staging processions.
Hamid Alwan's back is still black with the marks of 80 lashes struck by a cleric for smelling of gin.
Mr Shubari confirmed that his office was punishing people who drank alcohol with 80 lashes.
The Spanish-led multinational force, assigned to provide security in the area, says it has made one raid on the Sharia court, after receiving orders from its military command, but is reluctant to intervene. "The problem is not the Mahdi's Army, the problem is the terrorists. It's the terrorists who make dangers for the coalition," says Major Carlos Herradon.
A local police chief says the Army is "a good force", whose Sharia courts are supreme. Journalists in the city have also been advised to respect "the sensitivity" of the news, and refrain from reporting.
In recent weeks, coalition officials say they have demolished Mr Sadr's Sharia court run from a basement in the nearby holy city of Najaf, and padlocked the main offices of Mr Sadr's newspaper in Baghdad. The occupation authorities have also reissued orders to disband the Mahdi's Army and other militias.
But analysts fear the measures will serve to provoke Shia grassroots activists into open confrontation with the occupation authorities that the coalition has so far managed to avoid. "We prefer to die rather than see the Mahdi's Army dissolved," says Mr Shubari. "Either martyrdom or victory, there is no other way." Ahead of a large Shia procession next week, black flags are draped from many Shia shrines in southern Iraq instructing followers to face the sword rather than surrender to an Islamic state.
In Diwaniya, a town where women are all but absent on the streets, many younger residents and some policemen praised the Mahdi's Army methods. "People would come from all over the south, and even Baghdad to dance with the gypsy girls," said Bassam al-Najafi, a Diwaniya restaurateur. "Women were leaving their husbands to work there. They are cleansing the town."
----
U.S. Vows to Find Civilians' Killers
Marines Move to Seal Off Fallujah; Army Steps Up Patrols in Baghdad
By Sewell Chan and Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, April 2, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43397-2004Apr1?language=printer
BAGHDAD, April 1 -- U.S. officials vowed Thursday to hunt down those responsible for the killing and mutilation of four American civilians in western Iraq and acknowledged that ordinary Iraqis, not just religious extremists, are behind some of the violence against the American-led occupation.
One day after the incident in Fallujah, in which insurgents killed four American security guards and enraged townspeople burned and hung their corpses, the effects of the ambush and its gory conclusion could be felt throughout the Iraqi capital.
The top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq vowed a forceful response by the Marines, who he said would reestablish control of Fallujah and pacify its restive population. The Marines set up traffic control points around the city, restricting vehicles from entering and leaving.
In a show of force, U.S. troops patrolled Baghdad in numbers not seen in weeks. Armored Humvees, M1-A1 Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, as well as soft-skinned troop trucks, coursed through the city while AH-64 Apache attack helicopters flew overhead.
A four-day international exposition scheduled for next week and billed as Iraq's largest postwar business gathering was canceled after diplomats said it would be impossible to protect Americans attending the event, which would have coincided with the anniversary of Baghdad's fall. Organizers of Destination Baghdad Expo said the decision to postpone the event indefinitely was "jointly made" with occupation officials.
Also Thursday, the military announced that a roadside bomb in a marketplace in Ramadi, 30 miles west of Fallujah, killed six Iraqi civilians and wounded four others. The bomb was planted in a vehicle, but it was not clear whether the bomber was among the casualties, said Air Force Lt. Col. Steve Murray, a military spokesman.
Official responses to Wednesday's attack began with indignant condemnations but ended with unanswered questions.
The U.S. administrator for Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, called the killings an act of "cowards and ghouls" and vowed to seek justice.
"Yesterday's events in Fallujah are a dramatic example of the ongoing struggle between human dignity and barbarism," Bremer said in a speech to graduates at the Baghdad Police Academy. "The acts we have seen were despicable and inexcusable. They violate the tenets of all religions, Islam included, as well as the foundations of civilized society."
He said of the victims: "Their deaths will not go unpunished."
Bremer insisted that the attacks would affect neither the planned handover of political power to an interim Iraqi government on June 30 nor the plans to reconstruct Iraq. "These murders are a painful outrage for us in the coalition, but they will not derail the march to civility and democracy in Iraq," he said.
Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the military spokesman and deputy director of operations for the joint task force in Iraq, promised that the Marines would quell the violence in Fallujah.
"We are not going to do a pell-mell rush into the city," Kimmitt said. "It's going to be deliberate, it will be precise and it will be overwhelming."
For hours on Wednesday, much of Fallujah was lawless. Shops were closed and restaurants emptied as a mob dismembered the charred corpses of the victims and dragged their remains through the streets, using a donkey-drawn cart and two automobiles.
Iraqi law enforcement officials avoided the scene. Not until 8 p.m. did members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, created under U.S. supervision, enter Fallujah to retrieve what was left of the corpses. Marines based just east of Fallujah kept out of the city nearly all of Wednesday and Thursday.
Kimmitt defended the decision to stay away following the attack. "While it was dreadful, while it was unacceptable, while it was bestial, a preemptive attack into the city could have taken a bad situation and made it even worse," he said.
He later added: "We will be back in Fallujah. It will be at a time and a place of our choosing. We will hunt down the criminals. We will kill them or we will capture them, and we will pacify Fallujah."
For at least two months, U.S. officials have blamed the continuing insurgency primarily on a loose network of religious extremists, terrorist cells and foreign troublemakers. But there was no such talk on Thursday. Instead, officials focused on the threats within -- from Iraqis who continue to battle the occupation nearly a year after the fall of former president Saddam Hussein.
"This is a cancer inside the society of Iraq that shows no indication of leaving anytime soon," Kimmitt said at a news conference. "Although small, it's a malignant cancer, and we need to take care of this together with the people of Iraq, the Iraqi security forces and the coalition forces."
Kimmitt said the military considers a wide variety of Iraqi groups as possibly involved in the attack, including Fallujah residents, former officials of the Iraqi intelligence services, "the inner circle of Saddam's privileged few" and members of Saddam's Fedayeen, a now-outlawed militia loyal to Hussein.
The military, Kimmitt added, is looking for people who took part in the desecration of the bodies, which was videotaped by the Associated Press and broadcast around the world. "We have a significant interest in finding them and talking to them," Kimmitt said.
By day's end, however, it was not clear what the victims -- who were employees of a security firm that has several U.S. government contracts -- were doing in Fallujah. Their company, Blackwater Security Consulting of Moyock, N.C., declined to identify the four employees. The company said they helped to protect food convoys in the area but would not offer any details about their work.
An overwhelming majority of Baghdad residents interviewed Thursday expressed revulsion at the spectacle in Fallujah, which was beamed by Arabic-language satellite channels into homes across the country.
Sana Mohammed Ali discussed the attacks in a dress shop with a friend. She quoted the son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad: "We all know Imam Ali's saying: 'A human being is either a brother to you in Islam or your equal in humanity.' The people who killed them are lunatics. We felt sorry when we saw the scene. We felt very bad about it."
Many Iraqis frowned and noted that the Koran specifically forbids mutilation of the dead.
"It was all very wrong," said Jasim Mohammed in the Adhamiya neighborhood, which is known for revering Hussein and resisting the occupation. "People don't approve the action yesterday. They say it was a big mistake."
But others said they understood the attack that preceded the mutilations. "I watched the TV and I disapproved," said Ahmed Mohammed, a mechanic in Adhamiya. "But the people who dragged the dead bodies probably either lost a loved one to the Americans or saw their father arrested and humiliated by soldiers who put their boots on his head."
Special correspondent Khalid Saffar contributed to this report.
--------
Iraqi Cleric Condemns Mutilation of Four Slain U.S. Civilians
April 2, 2004
New York Times
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/02/international/middleeast/02CND-IRAQ.html
FALLUJA, Iraq, April 2 - Religious leaders in this violent, restive town issued an edict today condemning the mutilation of the bodies of the four American civilians killed this week, but they stayed silent about the attack itself.
At Friday prayers, which attracted several thousands of people to Falluja's mosques, the imams said that it was "haram," the Arabic word for forbidden, for people to tear apart bodies as they had after the Americans were ambushed in downtown Falluja.
Sheik Ghazi Al Abid, a tribal leader, said he appreciated the message and that what happened was "really bad for our city and gives a bad name to the resistance."
Meanwhile, Marine Corps forces continued to circle the city, though commanders said they had no intentions of venturing in.
"Our plan right now is to stay out," said Maj. T. V. Johnson. "We don't have any active operations inside Falluja right now."
Instead, the Iraqi police were manning checkpoints inside Falluja, warily eyeing passing cars and trying to keep a lid on the simmering anger.
"Right now this place is calm," said an Iraqi civil defense sergeant, Taha Mahmoud, "but the minute the marines enter the city there will be fighting right away."
He added: "Any armed man will be attacked. The people here will see them as occupiers."
Outside Falluja, in the crumbly dirt fields that stretch west toward the Jordanian border, marine forces patrolled along the tops of berms and along dried up river banks looking for insurgents.
Many of the roads in the area are pockmarked with large craters from a recent spate of roadside bombs that have killed and wounded several marines in the past week.
Also today, the police chief of Al Kufa, a predominantly Shiite city in southern Iraq, was killed along with his driver in a roadside ambush.
In other violence, an American soldier and a marine were killed in separate incidents, the United States military said today.
The soldier, with the First Armored Division, was killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad early today and another soldier was wounded, the United States military said.
The Marine was killed in an attack west of Baghdad on Thursday. No further details were given.
Near Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, three men were killed when a bomb they were planting outside a town hall exploded prematurely, the police said.
-------- israel / palestine
A Growing Unity Against Israel
Palestinian Militant Groups, Once Rivals, Forge Alliances
By Molly Moore and John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, April 2, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43414-2004Apr1?language=printer
JERUSALEM -- Three years ago, members of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah political movement created the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades to compete with Hamas -- in effect, to see which organization's armed wing could send the most suicide bombers against Israel and win the most support among Palestinians.
Today the former rivals have forged alliances, a shift that is complicating Israeli efforts to thwart major attacks and blurring the ideological lines between nationalist and religious factions, according to Palestinian militants, analysts and senior Israeli military officials.
In addition to al-Aqsa and Hamas -- formally known as the Islamic Resistance Movement -- other militant groups have also participated in collaborative efforts, most notably Islamic Jihad. The growing trend toward cooperation emerged just over a year ago, Palestinian fighters and Israeli generals say, in a bid to combat the increasing success of Israeli forces in targeting, killing or capturing militant leaders and their operatives.
"Since they're having problems carrying out terror operations, they're cooperating" with one another, Maj. Gen. Yisrael Ziv, the Israeli military chief of operations, said in an interview at his Tel Aviv office. "One organization has the money; another has the guy that knows the area -- the best guide; the third has the best suicide bomber."
"We found we do best when we work together," said a street leader of the al-Aqsa group in the Jabaliya refugee camp north of Gaza City. The 27-year-old shop owner spoke on condition that he be identified by only his last name, Abu Mishal, because he feared being targeted by Israeli forces.
In a strike that several Israeli officials described as stunning in its audacity and planning, Hamas, al-Aqsa and Islamic Jihad attacked an Israeli military checkpoint on March 6 at the Erez border crossing between Gaza and Israel using jeeps disguised to look like Israeli military vehicles. Two Palestinian policemen, two al-Aqsa gunmen and one each from Hamas and Islamic Jihad were killed in the incident.
"This operation is part of the continuing joint operations," the three groups said in a combined communique posted on the Hamas Web site soon after the attack. "It is emphasizing the path of resistance and unity."
On March 14, Hamas and al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades asserted responsibility for the double suicide bombing that killed the two attackers and 10 Israelis at the port of Ashdod, about 20 miles north of Gaza. In a mutual communique, the two groups stressed that "joint, qualitative operations" with different factions would be the hallmark of future attacks.
Evolving Cooperation
Relations among Hamas, al-Aqsa and Islamic Jihad have become a matter of particular importance since Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suggested that Israel might withdraw Israeli troops and Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip.
Though plans for such a move are still being debated, an Israeli pullout presumably would leave Gaza under the control of the Palestinian Authority, which is led by Arafat and dominated by his Fatah movement. But Hamas is vastly more popular, and Israelis and Palestinians have expressed fears that any power struggle could be violent and ultimately disastrous. In recent weeks, clashes have erupted in the Gaza Strip between Hamas militants and members of Arafat's Palestinian security forces, even as Hamas has coordinated attacks against Israeli targets with al-Aqsa.
In the aftermath of Israel's assassination of Hamas's spiritual leader and founder, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, last month, the Palestinian factions took immediate steps that suggested they were cooperating rather than jockeying for positions of power. Hours after Yassin was killed, most of the organizations issued statements urging all groups to coordinate in attacks against Israel.
Those messages reflected how far the Palestinian groups have moved toward working together, a process that has evolved in the past year from random cooperation among members of local cells into more organized militant operations against Israel.
In 2002, responsibility for a handful of attacks was asserted by more than one group, but Israeli military officials said they believed most of those claims represented competing bids for publicity rather than actual joint operations. In 2003, the groups said they coordinated seven major attacks and a half-dozen smaller ones.
Since the start of this year, militant groups have asserted joint responsibility for three of the eight major attacks conducted against Israelis. Though the number of attacks is lower in comparison to previous years, Israeli military officials said the greater proportion of combined operations is significant and ominous.
"It's on a deep level now," said a senior Israeli military intelligence official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "It's deep, and it's going to be deeper in the future."
The first concrete confirmation of joint operations by militant groups came in a March 17, 2003, communique posted on the Hamas Web site. Hamas and a group comprising castoffs from other militant organizations in Gaza called the Popular Resistance Committees issued a combined statement asserting responsibility for a rocket-propelled grenade attack on an Israeli checkpoint in the Gaza Strip in which no deaths were reported. That was followed on April 30 by a joint claim of responsibility by Hamas and al-Aqsa for a suicide bombing at Mike's Place, a beachfront pub in Tel Aviv, that killed three Israeli residents.
A Deliberate Policy
A declaration issued in October by Hamas and Islamic Jihad indicated that cooperation had become a policy of the militant groups, rather than an occasional practice. The two groups said they would "intensify the bilateral coordination and activate the relationship between the joint committees of the two movements both inside and outside Palestine and broaden the scope of consultation and coordination with all the factions and Palestinian forces."
The agreement was signed by Khaled Meshal, who last week was named the "first head" and world leader of Hamas after Yassin's slaying, and Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, the general secretary of Islamic Jihad, both of whom are based in Damascus, Syria. Four days later, on Oct. 24, the organizations conducted a joint raid on an Israeli army base in the Jewish settlement of Netzarim in the Gaza Strip, killing three soldiers who had been asleep in their barracks.
"Hamas now is in the position to be the uniting factor for all the militant groups," said Eyad Sarraj, a psychiatrist and human rights activist in Gaza City who closely tracks political and military trends among the organizations.
The Israeli intelligence officer said the organizations -- each with different ideological origins -- have joined forces because "they need each other. It's more difficult to carry out an attack now. This enables them to carry it out in spite of the difficulties."
About 950 Israeli citizens or residents and approximately 2,800 Palestinians have been killed in the current Palestinian intifada, an uprising that began in September 2000.
The number of suicide bombings against Israelis fell to 23 in 2003 compared with 42 in 2002, the most violent year of the intifada, according to Israeli Foreign Ministry statistics. In the first three months of this year, Palestinians have carried out five suicide bombings -- about the same pace as last year. The total number of Israelis killed in all types of attacks also fell, from 451 in 2002 to 213 last year, the figures show.
Israeli officials attributed the declines to aggressive efforts by their security services to arrest, kill or intercept militants and bombers, to better intelligence collected by undercover operatives and Palestinian informants, and to the construction of a massive barrier through the West Bank that has made it more difficult for assailants to enter Israel. The Israeli military reported that it thwarted 209 would-be suicide bombers last year, compared with 171 in 2002.
"Carrying out actions has become more complex," the Israeli intelligence officer said. "It takes more time to organize and coordinate."
Palestinian analysts say cooperation among militant groups also is serving to radicalize the organizations and to blur their ideological differences.
Hamas, whose political agenda is rooted in Islam, has launched attacks inside Israel since the start of the current uprising. Arafat's essentially secular, nationalist Fatah movement initially targeted only Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza.
The tactics reflected one of the main ideological differences between the two groups: Fatah advocated a two-state solution that would remove Israeli settlements and soldiers from the Palestinian territories as they were designated after the 1967 Middle East war, while Hamas opposed the very existence of the state of Israel.
The two movements have long been fierce rivals for support among Palestinians, and as the conflict with Israel intensified, Arafat supporters became concerned that Hamas was gaining popularity because it was perceived as exacting tougher retribution.
The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades were created loosely as the armed wing of Fatah. Unlike Hamas, which is highly centralized and organized, al-Aqsa is composed of individualized groups, often with differing agendas and no central structure.
A senior al-Aqsa leader in the Balata refugee camp adjacent to the West Bank city of Nablus said of the Brigades' relationship with Arafat: "We listen to him on some things, we don't listen on others." The leader asked that he not be identified because he is one of Israel's most wanted targets.
Abu Mishal, the al-Aqsa leader in the Jabaliya camp in Gaza, was even more dismissive, saying many militants considered Arafat and the Palestinian Authority corrupt. He said his al-Aqsa cell has been spurred to conduct joint operations with Hamas for financial as well as ideological reasons.
Abu Mishal said Palestinian security agencies "want al-Aqsa to work when they say to and not work at other times, according to the political situation, and they enforce it by stopping the flow of money to us."
"When they cut it, al-Aqsa can't do anything," he continued. "We feel a military solution is the answer to our problems with Israel, so we have increased our coordination with Hamas. We share our views with each other."
Imad Falouji, a former top Hamas activist who broke away from the organization in the mid-1990s and is now an independent member of the Palestinian legislature, said cooperation among the three main groups is temporary, a view shared by many analysts and Israeli intelligence officials.
"When there are problems and pressures, you can see all the parties working together," Falouji said. "It does not mean there are no differences between them. It's a message to Israel that you can't break us."
Researcher Sufian Taha contributed to this report.
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Palestinians and Police Clash at Sacred Site in Jerusalem
April 2, 2004
By JAMES BENNET
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/02/international/middleeast/02CND-MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, April 2 - Hundreds of Israeli riot police officers clashed today with thousands of Palestinians, including stone-throwers, at a Jerusalem holy site. It was the largest eruption of violence there since the Palestinian uprising began in September 2000.
At least 20 Palestinians were hurt and 14 were arrested after Israeli forces moved in to disperse Palestinians throwing stones at Israeli police officers at the site, the man-made plateau sacred to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as the Temple Mount.
The incident came as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said in an interview published today that that he had given orders to halt all development work on Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip, in a step toward an eventual Israeli withdrawal.
Palestinian witnesses to today's violence said it began with about a dozen youths throwing stones at the police stationed on the plaza. The police said hundreds of Palestinians were throwing stones.
Wielding batons and firing rubber pellets and stun grenades, the police then drove thousands of Palestinians inside Al Aksa Mosque. A police spokesman, Supt. Gil Kleiman, said that some Palestinians had continued throwing stones from the mosque doors.
"They started using the Al Aksa mosque as a sanctuary to continue rioting," he said. He said the police then chased the remaining Palestinians inside and secured the doors for at least an hour, until Muslim authorities and the police negotiated an agreement for all those inside to leave peacefully.
Calling the situation "very volatile," Superintendent Kleiman said that the Israeli operation was successful because it had ended without serious casualties. But Palestinians accused the police of using excessive force.
The Israeli police are stationed on the plateau in order to prevent Palestinians from throwing stones down at Jewish worshipers at the Western Wall that abuts the plaza, Superintendent Kleiman said.
Israeli officials said that Mr. Sharon's interview about halting development in Gaza, one of several interviews granted to the Israeli news media in advance of the Passover holiday, was intended partly to reassure the Bush administration. Mr. Sharon also said he would not be deflected from his withdrawal plan by a corruption inquiry that could result in his indictment.
"We have to get out of Gaza, not to be responsible any more for what happens there," Mr. Sharon told the newspaper Maariv. "I advise you to take me seriously. I have the power to do this."
Mr. Sharon also repeated longstanding threats against Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, saying Mr. Arafat he had "no insurance policy."
Such threats tend to play well with the Israeli public, but they are less well received in Washington. An Israeli official said that Mr. Sharon still considered himself bound by a commitment not to harm Mr. Arafat that he gave three years ago to President Bush.
Mr. Sharon issued a similar threat against Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, the Lebanese guerrilla group.
Mr. Sharon made his comments about Gaza to Israel's largest daily, Yediot Ahronot. The newspaper also reported that Mr. Sharon had said that Israel would continue to supply electricity and water to the Palestinians after a withdrawal - but that it would weigh cutting such supplies if Palestinian attacks continued.
An Israeli official said that the government would continue to finance projects in Gaza that were "in the pipeline," and those that were deemed necessary for security, such as fences. But he said "expansion of greenhouses, and that kind of stuff, that will be halted." There was no immediate reaction from representatives of Gaza settlers.
In the interviews, Mr. Sharon repeatedly affirmed his innocence in the inquiry into whether he had accepted bribes from an Israeli developer, David Appel. "I am totally convinced that my hands are clean, and totally convinced of my innocence," he told Yediot.
Israel's state prosecutor recommended to the attorney general on Sunday that Mr. Sharon be indicted in the case. The attorney general, Menachem Mazuz, is likely to render a decision in about two months. An indictment would almost surely force Mr. Sharon's resignation.
Mr. Sharon complained about leaks to the press of the prosecutor's recommendation, telling Maariv, "This is persecution." But he added: "I am functioning normally and working from 5 o'clock in the morning. I am sure in the end that I will not be prosecuted."
Mr. Sharon gave the interviews on Thursday, the same day he met with three envoys from the Bush administration to discuss the withdrawal plan. A senior Israeli official said that the envoys had been less interested in the details of the plan than in Mr. Sharon's prospects for weathering the investigation. "President Bush is trying to understand how much it could damage him," the official said.
Mr. Sharon, who is to meet with President Bush on April 14, is seeking support for his plan to withdraw without a peace agreement from most or all of Gaza and part of the West Bank.
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NATO Welcomes 7 New Members
April 2, 2004
New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/02/international/europe/02CND-NATO.html
BRUSSELS, April 2 - NATO formally welcomed seven new members into the alliance today, stretching its security umbrella to the borders of Russia, prompting Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to reassure Moscow that it should not feel threatened.
The NATO ministers also issued a statement calling for greater coordination against terrorism, while the new members expressed enthusiastic support for deeper NATO involvement in Iraq.
"Today is the clearest demonstration that in Europe, geography no longer equals destiny," said Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the NATO secretary general.
Mr. Powell, who met with Russia's new foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, shrugged off a statement by the Russian parliament, or Duma, that criticized the enlargement of the alliance as well as concerns voiced by the government of President Vladimir V. Putin over NATO's deployment of several F-16 fighter jets to patrol over Baltic states.
"Dumas are like European legislatures; they are like my Congress; they pass resolutions," Mr. Powell said in an interview with journalists from the new member countries. "But I don't think it will fundamentally change the strategic situation. I don't sense that the Russians will find it necessary to counter this move with anything that would be either provocative or destabilizing or dangerous."
The NATO-Russia Council met this afternoon with both sides still at odds over the Conventional Forces in Europe agreement, which seeks to evenly reduce troops and military hardware on the Continent. The United States wants Russia to remove its troops from the former Soviet states of Moldova and Georgia and has refused to ratify an adapted version of the treaty until Moscow complies.
But Russia, which wanted the entrance of the Baltic states and Slovenia into NATO to be contingent on their joining the conventional forces agreement, was told to be satisfied with NATO pledges that it would not station additional troops or weapons in the new member nations.
The stand-off is a "real problem" said one NATO official, though he added that he was encouraged by the decision of Mr. Lavrov to attend the event when many officials fully expected he would not. Mr. Putin had reduced the rhetoric in recent days, he said.
"Putin realized he wasn't going to set himself up for a diplomatic defeat that he couldn't change," the NATO official said.
With a flag-raising ceremony in the morning drizzle, foreign ministers from the enlarged, 26-member alliance stood in a plastic tent and listened to martial music and the national anthems.
The accession of the new members came as a relief to the Bush administration, which had clashed bitterly with its French and German allies over the war in Iraq, prompting officials to speak dismissively of the complaints of "Old Europe." Six of the seven new members - Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Slovakia - are contributing to the war in Iraq, and all are active in the effort to rebuild Afghanistan.
Romania's foreign minister, Mircea Dan Geoana, suggested that the balance had shifted in favor of the American policy in Iraq. He said the countries that suffered under Communist rule had a moral obligation to step up for Iraq, while some saw their contribution as an attempt to prove themselves upfront.
"The time has come for nations on both sides of the Atlantic to put these divisions aside," said Mr. Geoana, whose nation has 700 troops in Iraq. "The next few weeks and months will be decisive."
But NATO, which operates by consensus, is requiring a United Nations resolution authorizing it to take on a greater role after the scheduled June 30 turnover of authority to Iraqis, leaving open the possibility for a renewed debate. Mr. Powell said today that he did not expect NATO to get involved in Iraq before that.
"We don't yet have a NATO role for Iraq, the way we have for Afghanistan," Mr. Powell said. "But it took time to get NATO to take a positive role, an alliance role, in Afghanistan. With respect to Iraq, we have not reached that point yet."
Bulgaria's foreign minister, Solomon Isaac Passy, who wept when his nation's flag was raised, noted that his country has 500 troops in Iraq. "Iraq needs our help," he said.
Such vows likely comforted Bush administration officials, who were stung by Spain's threat to pull out of the coalition unless authority over the forces is transferred from the coalition to the United Nations. Officials privately voiced worries that such a pullout would only make their efforts to field troops more difficult.
NATO, which is having difficulties getting equipment to Afghanistan, has cleared the way for the delivery of six Apache helicopters, which were donated by the Netherlands.
In their talks on terrorism, the ministers agreed to increase maritime interdiction efforts in the Mediterranean, provide security for the summer Olympics in Athens, and draw up a package of measures prior to a meeting in Istanbul in late June. They condemned the "murderous acts of terrorism" in Iraq and Uzbekistan.
Mr. Powell said that the coalition must stay the course in Iraq.
"We will defeat them," he said. "It will take time. More lives will be lost, and I regret that. But they have to be defeated."
NATO ministers emphasized that their first commitment was to widening their presence in Afghanistan, where they have 6,000 personnel deployed. They plan to send five new provincial reconstruction teams to that country by the end of June.
"It's better to succeed at one operation than to fail at two," the NATO official said.
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Russia defends 'paranoia' over NATO enlargement
BRUSSELS (AFP)
Apr 02, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040402185237.gy0eladg.html
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov lashed out Friday as NATO welcomed seven ex-communist states into its ranks in a historic enlargement that takes the military alliance up to Russia's borders.
"We didn't want this enlargement, and we will continue to maintain a negative attitude," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said after talks with NATO counterparts including US Secretary of State Colin Powell.
"It's a mistake," he told reporters, on the day that NATO held a welcome ceremony for its new members -- Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.
"The presence of American soldiers on our border has created a kind of paranoia in Russia."
For his part, Russian President Vladimir Putin toned down Lavrov's ire by saying relations were "developing positively" between Moscow and NATO.
"But the encroachment of NATO military infrastructure to our borders is being carefully studied by our specialists," Putin said after talks with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
"And we will build our military position from these conclusions."
Moscow has shown particular anger at the inclusion in NATO of the Baltic states Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which are all former Soviet republics.
Russia warned Monday that it may be forced to beef up its own defences along the Baltic border in a move reminiscent of the Soviet Union's standoff with the US-led alliance during the Cold War.
With NATO F-16s starting patrols of the Baltic trio's airspace this week, Russia went as far as to warn of a possible "military response".
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and Russia are also embroiled in a row over the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty, which limits troop numbers in eastern Europe.
The Baltic republics and Slovenia were not independent states when the CFE was signed in 1989 and Russia says the new NATO members will now have to join the treaty, and keep to its guidelines until they do.
"We have received today assurances, but we haven't received guarantees, that they will sign up to the CFE treaty," Lavrov said after meeting the NATO ministers.
NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who is due to visit Moscow on April 7-8 in a bid to clear the air, played down the sense of crisis.
"I was heartened by the discussions today... which made clear that we can all benefit from this partnership," he told reporters.
"The fact that Minister Lavrov came to Brussels was a good sign."
Powell, in an interview published Friday with newspapers from the seven new NATO members, called on Russia in turn to do more to comply with its own military obligations in Europe.
He said he had spoken with Lavrov on Wednesday to reassure him that deployment of the F-16 fighters was just "to essentially bring the new nations of NATO under NATO air cover".
"I don't sense that the Russians will find it necessary to counter this move with anything that would be either provocative or destabilizing or dangerous," he said, according to a State Department transcript of the interview.
Powell countered Lavrov's objections over the CFE by pointing to the continuing deployment of Russian troops in Georgia and Moldova, despite promises to pull out.
"They are of course very interested in seeing everyone ratify the adapted CFE treaty, but we made it clear to the Russians that we believe a pre-condition for that is for them to comply... and withdraw from Moldova and Georgia," he said.
"They're clearly linked, and this is a precondition before we can expect the other countries to ratify the adapted CFE treaty and that will remain our position."
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Russia not concerned about NATO expansion: Putin
NOVO OGARYOVO, Russia (AFP)
Apr 02, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040402183037.qqt1tyu7.html
President Vladimir Putin said Friday that Russia was not overly concerned about NATO's expansion but reserved the right to change its military policy if it perceived itself to be under threat.
Putin said relations were "developing positively" between Cold War foes NATO and Russia, during a meeting with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
"We are not expressing any concerns about NATO's expansion, but modern threats are such that with NATO's expansion, they are not going away.
"On our part, we firmly state, that we have no concerns touching Russia's security linked to NATO expansion.
"But the encroachment of NATO military infrastructure to our borders is being carefully studied by our specialists," Putin said. "And we will build our military position from these conclusions.
Putin's comments came as NATO enlisted seven ex-communist countries into its ranks, pushing the alliance to Russia's borders, and appeared to contradict earlier remarks made by Russia's foreign minister in Brussels.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov lashed out at the enlargement process following talks between NATO and Russia in Brussels earlier Friday.
"We didn't want this enlargement, and we will continue to maintain a negative attitude. It's a mistake," Lavrov told reporters.
"The presence of American soldiers on our border has created a kind of paranoia in Russia," he added.
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NATO fetes seven new members but Russia not in party mood
BRUSSELS (AFP)
Apr 02, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040402173413.p9tegjz0.html
NATO on Friday celebrated the entry of seven ex-communist countries into its ranks, but the festive mood was punctured by Russia's anger over the military alliance's newfound presence on its borders.
In the courtyard of NATO's Brussels headquarters, the flags of Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia were raised and their national anthems played by a military band.
Their foreign ministers looked proudly on from a podium, joined by representatives from the existing members -- including US Secretary of State Colin Powell -- and about 200 onlookers in a colourful array of uniforms.
The seven entrants formally joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation on Monday when they deposited their accession documents in Washington, opening a new chapter for an alliance long defined by its Cold War role.
"Together with the enlargement of the European Union, today is the clearest demonstration that in Europe, geography no longer equals destiny," NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer told the foreign ministers.
Five of the new NATO members are among 10 countries joining the EU on May 1, in another symbolic erosion of Europe's old Cold War frontiers. The other two, Bulgaria and Romania, hope to join the EU in 2007.
The arrival of the new member states comes at a critical juncture for NATO, which was created in 1949 to defend western Europe from the Soviet Union but is now remoulding itself to confront new global challenges.
In the wake of the March 11 attacks in Madrid, the NATO ministers adopted a declaration that pledged to clamp down on terrorism, notably through greater sharing of intelligence.
The alliance also endorsed plans for NATO peacekeepers to fan out from the Afghan capital Kabul to other parts of the turbulent country.
But it struggled to find common ground on Iraq, as Powell ruefully acknowledged.
France and Germany, which bitterly opposed the US-led war, have stressed that a United Nations mandate is essential before they can consent to a NATO mission being deployed in Iraq.
"The US believes the alliance should consider a new collective role after the return of sovereignty to an Iraqi government (planned for July 1)," Powell said.
"But I would think it unlikely that NATO would undertake a formal, collective alliance role before full sovereignty... has been returned to an interim Iraqi government.
"I'm also relatively confident that that government would welcome that kind of assistance from the international community," Powell added.
Individually, 18 of the 26 NATO nations already have troops in Iraq, including six of the seven new entrants.
Romanian Foreign Minister Mircea Geoana said it was high time for transatlantic divisions over the war in Iraq, which last year plunged NATO into its worst-ever crisis, to be put aside.
"All of us, the countries that have suffered under communist dictatorship, have not only a strategic necessity to stabilise Iraq for the sake of the broader region, but also a moral obligation to assist this nation," he added.
The talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov were another point of controversy blotting the festive atmosphere of NATO's biggest expansion ever.
"We didn't want this enlargement, and we will continue to maintain a negative attitude. It's a mistake," Lavrov told reporters after meeting the NATO ministers.
"The presence of American soldiers on our border has created a kind of paranoia in Russia," he added.
But Latvian Foreign Minister Rihards Piks was defiant.
"The reality of Latvia's history in the last century showed us that the existence of nations is threatened when tyranny prevails," he said at NATO headquarters.
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Long Live NATO
by Tom Barry,
April 2, 2004
Antiwar.com
http://antiwar.com/orig/barry.php?articleid=2234
The cold war is long over, but with the support of U.S. supremacists in both parties NATO lives on as America's global cop.
Seven more nations are joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and three more Central European nations have their applications pending. Although the Bush administration has set an overall course in foreign and military policy of treaty-breaking and unilateralism, it remains a strong proponent of NATO expansion. Founded in 1949 as a security buffer against the Soviet Union, NATO has not only survived the end of the cold war. It is flourishing. Despite criticism that a post-cold war NATO would unnecessarily propagate the West-East security divide that shaped international relations for the four decades of the cold war, the U.S. government has led the drive to energize and expand NATO. In 1999, after contentious debate in the U.S. Senate, the U.S. approved the accession of Poland, Czech Republic, and Hungary to NATO. Leading the NATO enlargement lobby was the neoconservative Committee to Expand NATO, which brought together several prominent neocons now serving in the Bush administration, along with conservative Democrats such as Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute and the Democratic Leadership Council.
After succeeding in advancing the first post-cold war round of enlargement, the Committee to Expand NATO (renamed U.S. Committee on NATO) launched its "Big Bang" strategy to bring ten more nations into the NATO fold. After an initial meeting of the ten new prospects in Vilnius, Lithuania, with the aid of the U.S. Committee on NATO the so-called Vilnius Group began pressuring Washington and NATO headquarters for membership.
Among the first board members of the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO were Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Peter Rodman, and Stephen Hadley, all of whom later joined the Bush administration.1 All of these neocons were associates of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Bruce Jackson sits on the five-member board of PNAC. Randy Scheunemann, who was an officer of the NATO expansion committee, is also a PNAC board member. Both Jackson and Scheunemann were cofounders of the Project on Transitional Democracies, which continues to work with the countries of New Europe to foster economic and military ties with the United States.
The U.S. Committee on NATO was not, however, purely a neocon venture. It reached out to and included Democrats such as Will Marshall, founder and president of the Progressive Policy Institute. Marshall was also a founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, another organization of "New Democrats." In 2002 Marshall also joined the advisory committee to the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a bipartisan pro-war group founded by Jackson at the urging of the Bush administration.
The U.S. Senate in May 2003 unanimously approved the accession to NATO of three Baltic nations (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) and four other countries of Central and Eastern Europe (Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, and Slovakia). In a White House ceremony on March 29, 2004, President Bush hailed the accession of seven additional nations to NATO, which will formally admit the new members at a ceremony at NATO headquarters in Brussels on April 2. Bush noted that all the new NATO members are "helping to bring lasting freedom to Afghanistan and Iraq."
Three other nations of the New Europe bloc - Croatia, Macedonia, and Albania - are next in line to receive an accession invitation from NATO. Although it was Donald Rumsfeld who is credited with first using the term "New Europe," the term has long been circulating among neoconservatives who view with deep disgust Western Europe's tendency to support diplomacy over war and its deep commitment to multilateralism and the international rule of law. As the White House began laying the groundwork for the "coalition of the willing" against Iraq, President Bush himself repeatedly used the term "New Europe" in statements about NATO enlargement. In a July 5, 2002 speech hailing the leaders of the Vilnius group, the president declared, "Our nations share a common vision of a new Europe, where free European states are united with each other, and with the United States through cooperation, partnership, and alliance."
President Bush told the newest NATO members that "all member nations must be willing, and able, to contribute to the common defense of our alliance." Many of the new members have joined NATO in the belief that it will lead to economic prosperity and shield them against any future extraterritorial ambitions of the Russian Federation. But President Bush regards the new members as enlistees in Washington's own global ambitions in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia. During the White House welcoming ceremony, President Bush noted that NATO's mission extended far beyond the perimeter of the alliance. "NATO members are reaching out to the nations of the Middle East, to strengthen our ability to fight terror, and to provide for our common security," he said. But NATO's mission extends beyond global security. "We're discussing," said Bush, "how we can support and increase the momentum of freedom in the greater Middle East."
At a time when it appears that the U.S. is becoming increasingly isolated, the Bush administration is exercising strong leadership over what the president describes as the "most successful military alliance in history." The Bush administration has lashed out at European critics of its neo-imperial policies and dismissed the dissident Western European nations as representatives of the "old Europe," but it rests secure in the knowledge that U.S. military leadership and America's military dominance are central to NATO and that NATO is the centerpiece of transatlantic relations. Given that most European nations lack strong militaries of their own and that EU still lacks a unified security infrastructure, the ever-expanding NATO operating under U.S. direction will likely remain an effective instrument of U.S. hegemony, not only in North Atlantic but also from the Gulf of Finland to the Black Sea, and from the Balkans to the Persian Gulf.
President Clinton supported the first phase of NATO enlargement, as did the internationalists of both political parties. The driving ideological force behind NATO expansion, however, has been the neocon polemicists and operatives who see an expanded NATO as one in which the power of mainland Western European nations is diminished and U.S. hegemonic power is consolidated. But it's unlikely that NATO expansion would have proceeded so quickly without the concerted backing of the U.S. military-industrial complex. For its part, the U.S. military was eager to establish U.S. military bases and forward-deployment sites in the "transitional states" of the former Soviet bloc. And U.S. military contractors had an eye on the new markets for their latest weaponry when the new NATO partners militarized to meet the compatibility requirements of the alliance. Integration into NATO requires integrating weapons systems - creating a multibillion-dollar market for jet fighters, electronics, attack helicopters, military communication networks, and all the gadgets needed by a modern fighting force.
Until 2002 Bruce Jackson was planning and strategy vice president at Lockheed Martin, where he served as the advance man for global corporate development projects. One prominent neocon described Bruce Jackson as "the nexus between the defense industry and the neoconservatives. He translates us to them, and them to us." Two other members of the U.S. Committee on NATO who had ties to Lockheed Martin were Stephen Hadley and Randy Scheunemann. Stephen Hadley, who serves in the Bush administration as deputy national security adviser to Condoleezza Rice, was a partner in the Shea & Gardner law firm, whose clients included Boeing and Lockheed Martin.2 Another link to Lockheed Martin at the U.S. Committee on NATO was Randy Scheunemann, the president of Orion Strategies, whose clients include the largest defense contractor in the United States.
NATO expansion cannot be written off as a neocon conspiracy. But neither should one assume that the neoconservatives are so dismissive of the "appeasers" in Europe and so preoccupied with the Middle East (and especially the security of Israel) that they don't have a grand strategy for a restructured Europe. "Strengthen America, Secure Europe. Defend Values. Expand NATO" was the motto of the U.S. Committee on NATO. The committee's slogan concisely summarizes the main arguments of the NATO expansion lobby in the United States.
In the estimation of John Laughland, a trustee of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group and a close observer of Jackson's proconsul operations in Eastern Europe: "Far from promoting democracy in eastern Europe, Washington is promoting a system of political and military control not unlike that once practiced by the Soviet Union. Unlike that empire, which collapsed because the center was weaker than the periphery, the new NATO is both a mechanism for extracting Danegeld [tribute levied to support Danish invaders in medieval England] from new member states for the benefit of the U.S. arms industry and an instrument for getting others to protect U.S. interests around the world, including the supply of primary resources such as oil."3
The U.S. Committee on NATO and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, both of which were organized by PNAC's Bruce Jackson, were disbanded in late 2003, apparently because its members believed that they had accomplished their mission. But the neocon camp continues working to shape the transatlantic political and military agenda. Jackson and Scheunemann continue their work in Eurasia through their Project on Transitional Democracies. Another ideological partner in the neoconservative effort to restructure the transatlantic alliance is the New Atlantic Initiative of the American Enterprise Institute, whose goal is "the admission of Europe's fledgling democracies into institutions of Atlantic defense." Like the AEI itself, the New Atlantic Initiative is dominated by neocons such as William Kristol, Samuel Huntington, Norman Podhoretz, Joshua Muravchick, Richard Perle, and Daniel Pipes. AEI's New Atlantic Initiative also includes on its advisory board military hard-liners such as Donald Rumsfeld, right-wing political figures like Newt Gingrich, and realpolitikers such as Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, as well a few Democrats such as Thomas Foley - all of whom share the neocon vision of a "New Europe."4
The cold war is long over, but with the support of U.S. supremacists in both parties NATO lives on as America's global cop. Endnotes
1. Judis, "Minister Without Portfolio, American Prospect.
2. "Stephen Hadley," Right Web Profile (Interhemispheric Resource Center, November 2003). Hadley was one of the original members of the self-identified "Vulcans" who advised then-candidate George W. Bush.
3. John Laughland, "The Prague Racket," The Guardian ( London), November 22, 2002. Other journalistic accounts of Jackson's activities include: Stephen Gowans, "War, NATO expansion, and the other rackets of Bruce P. Jackson," What's Left, November 25, 2002; Brian McGrory, "Battle Lines Forming over NATO Expansion," Boston Globe, July 5, 1997.
4. See American Enterprise Institute, New Atlantic Initiative.
-------- prisoners of war
Pentagon Frees 15 Held at Guantanamo
By Associated Press
April 2, 2004
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/sns-ap-guantanamo-bay-releases,0,5039934.story?coll=ny-nationalnews-headlines
WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon said Friday it released 15 people held as terrorism suspects at a U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, reducing the number confined there to 595.
The people who were transferred to their home countries were from Afghanistan, Turkey, Tajikistan, Sudan, Iraq, Jordan and Yemen. The Pentagon did not provide other details about the people or their release.
"The decision to transfer or release a detainee is based on many factors, including whether the detainee is of further intelligence value to the United States and whether he is believed to pose a threat to the United States," a brief Pentagon statement said.
Previously, 119 detainees were transferred for release and 12 others were transferred for continued detention (four to the Saudi Arabian government, one to the Spanish government and seven to the Russian government).
Most of the people held at Guantanamo Bay were captured in 2001 during the early months of the war in Afghanistan. Human rights group have challenged the legal basis for their detention without being charged with crimes.
-------- russia
Russia to insist on solving Kosovo issue
RBC, 02.04.2004,
Moscow
http://www.rbcnews.com/free/20040402153559.shtml
Russia will be insisting the Kosovo problem be included on April's agenda of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), head of the Russian Federal Assembly delegation in PACE Konstanin Kosachev told journalists. According to him, PACE's participation in solving the Kosovo conflict together with the efforts of the UN will ensure that new attitudes towards this issue will be elaborated on, taking into account all previous mistakes.
Kosachev mentioned that recent events in Kosovo "have proven the necessity for an efficient solution to this problem." All international forces located in the region failed to implement UN Security Council resolution 1244, the situation has simply become worse.
Kosachev believes that unless the actual conspirators of the March massacre in Kosovo come to trial, it will just give them confidence that they are untouchable and will continue their actions.
-------- spies
Legislators Seek U.S. Intelligence Director
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 2, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43208-2004Apr1.html
The Democratic members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence yesterday recommended the establishment of a director of national intelligence who would have both budgetary and operational control over the CIA and the much larger collection of Pentagon and other agencies that collect and analyze intelligence.
In offering what would be a major reorganization, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) said: "One of the major deficiencies in our intelligence community is the fact that there are 15 intelligence agencies -- operating with different rules, cultures and databases -- that do not work as one integrated intelligence community."
The suggestion that there be a single director of national intelligence, or DNI, is not a new one, having been proposed last year by the joint committee that investigated 9/11, and before that by Brent Scowcroft in his role as chairman of President Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
The DNI would replace the director of central intelligence (DCI), currently George J. Tenet, who also serves as CIA director. Although Tenet has the title and standing as the president's senior intelligence adviser, under current law he has total control only over the CIA. He has advisory status when it comes to operational and budgetary matters involving various Pentagon intelligence agencies that account for 90 percent of the $40 billion spent each year on intelligence.
Scowcroft's attempt to give the DCI what would have amounted to control over Pentagon money and personnel was blocked two years ago by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and lawmakers, particularly those on the House and Senate armed services committees who did not want to lose control of their portion of intelligence spending.
Rumsfeld, instead, created the post of undersecretary of defense for intelligence, whose occupant serves as the titular head of all Pentagon intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency, which intercepts electronic messages worldwide; the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which collects and analyzes satellite imagery; the National Reconnaissance Office, which develops, builds and operates intelligence satellites; the Defense Intelligence Agency, which analyzes military intelligence; and the intelligence arms of the military services.
The Democrats' plan would also establish a deputy director of national intelligence, who would play the role of the Rumsfeld-established undersecretary for intelligence. The plan proposes deputy directors of national intelligence for operations and resources who would develop common classification standards for sensitive information, and would establish uniform rules across the government for gaining access to intelligence.
Rep. Alcee L. Hastings (D-Fla.), a co-sponsor of the legislation, told reporters yesterday, "In some ways the intelligence community is in the position the military was before 1986: too much duplication, too much competition, not enough coordination, not enough collaboration." He and Harman compared their proposal to the Goldwater-Nichols legislation that forced better integration of the military services.
--------
INTELLIGENCE
After 2 Months, Bush's Iraq Panel Starts to Stir
April 2, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/02/politics/02INTE.html
WASHINGTON, April 1 - Nearly two months after President Bush named a bipartisan commission to look into intelligence failures on Iraq and weapons proliferation, the panel is only now beginning its work, a spokesman for the group said Thursday.
Just a handful of staff members have been appointed, and the newly designated executive director, John S. Redd, a retired vice admiral, is currently posted in Iraq as a deputy to L. Paul Bremer III, the chief civilian administrator, and will not begin work until May, the spokesman said.
The 10-member commission, headed by Laurence H. Silberman, a federal judge, and Charles S. Robb, the former senator and governor from Virginia, held its first organizational meeting in Washington on Wednesday, the spokesman, Larry McQuillan, said.
Still, Mr. McQuillan said, "the members of the commission came away with a very clear sense of direction on what they want to do."
Mr. McQuillan said the commission's general counsel would be Stewart Baker, a Washington lawyer who served as general counsel at the National Security Agency from 1992 to 1994.
After resisting the idea for weeks, Mr. Bush created the commission on Feb. 6 in response to bipartisan calls for an inquiry into the intelligence community's performance on issues related to weapons proliferation - including the assessments that Iraq possessed illicit weapons before the American invasion in March 2003. He said at the time that the commission would not be expected to deliver its findings until next March, well after the presidential elections this November.
The day after Mr. Bush made his announcement, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain announced that his government, too, would conduct an independent inquiry into the intelligence agencies' performance.
That panel, headed by Lord Butler, is expected to issue its own report this summer, and some of its members met in Washington last month with members of the American commission to discuss their mutual tasks, Mr. McQuillan said.
He said the fact that the commission had not moved more swiftly was appropriate, given the need to obtain security clearances for the members and their staff. For now, he said, the commission is working from temporary quarters in the New Executive Office Building, a White House annex, but plans next month to move into permanent office space and to appoint a staff of 60 to 75 members.
With the commission not due to report until March, Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee called Thursday for Mr. Bush to move forward immediately with a series of reforms.
"We need the very best intelligence now," the lawmakers said in a letter the president. "Time is not on our side."
They said George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, had warned in testimony to Congress last month that "a serious threat" of terrorism against the United States "will remain for the foreseeable future" whether or not Al Qaeda remains in the picture.
In the letter, the lawmakers, led by Representative Jane Harman of California, the panel's top Democrat, urged that Mr. Bush direct intelligence agencies "to scrub immediately" their estimates of illicit weapons programs around the world.
"The systemic analytic deficiencies" that plagued assessments of Iraq's program, the lawmakers said, "could also have affected other estimates, including on the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran."
The Democrats also revived a proposal to create a director of national intelligence with budgetary and statutory authority over the entire intelligence community, including agencies now under control of the Defense Department. The proposed authority would be considerably greater than that now held by Mr. Tenet.
Mr. Bush and Mr. Tenet have said it is too soon to say definitively whether intelligence agencies were wrong in their assessments of Iraq's weapons program because the search for illicit weapons is still under way.
But in their letter, the Democrats urged Mr. Bush to act now to "acknowledge the problems in prewar intelligence."
"It is difficult for the intelligence community to talk about shortcomings in intelligence if senior policy leaders still insist that there were no serious problems," they said.
"Acknowledging the problems will allow the intelligence community to move aggressively to fix them."
-------- us
Army Promises Not to Set Makua Valley Aflame
HONOLULU, Hawaii, (ENS)
April 2, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2004/2004-04-02-09.asp#anchor7
Hawaiian community group Malama Makua and the federal government have reached an agreement that will allow 100 U.S. Marines on their way to Okinawa to train in Makua Valley using live ammunition.
Live-fire training and prescribed burns have set the west Oahu valley ablaze often in the past, and the community group is determined that it should not happen again.
To protect the 45 endangered and threatened species and hundreds of acres of critical habitat present in the area, Malama Makua filed a lawsuit earlier this month seeking to limit military activities at Makua Military Reservation (MMR) pending completion of the U.S. Army's ongoing formal consultation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under the Endangered Species Act.
Under a settlement agreement approved by the court Wednesday, the military will not conduct any prescribed burns and would limit its use of mortars, rockets and other weapons posing substantial risk of starting fires until the consultation is complete.
Judge Susan Oki Mollway has decided to lift the temporary restraining order she issued on March 19, 2004, and the Marines will begin a five day live-fire exercise beginning April 5, 2004.
"I'm glad that the military has chosen to seek common ground with the community in the spirit of our 2001 agreement," said Malama Makua board member Sparky Rodrigues, citing the settlement in 2001 of a previous Malama Makua lawsuit, in which the Army agreed to limit training and prepare an environmental impact statement under the National Environmental Policy Act.
"We've said all along we prefer no training at Makua and the eventual cleanup and return of the valley to a cultural and traditional use, but, following the spirit of the 2001 agreement, just want the military to respect the community, environment, and the law," Rodrigues said.
Army spokesman Troy Griffin said in a written statement, "Although this agreement limits the ability of our soldiers to train as completely as they will fight in the global war against terrorism, the Army and Marine Corps will continue to do whatever it takes for soldiers and Marines, our nation's sons and daughters, to train for combat in Makua."
The agreement restricts use of mortars to times when the official "burn index," or fire danger rating, is in the "green" zone, defined as conditions presenting a "low" fire risk. The military may use "low" risk weapons, such as rifles and other small arms, as long as the burn index remains in the low or medium risk zone.
MMR's range control personnel will provide burn index calculations every 15 minutes - as opposed to the usual one-hour intervals - while using "medium" risk weapons. All training with these weapons must stop if range control cannot obtain a positive "green" burn index reading.
All training will stop if either a fire is observed or a mortar or rocket lands outside the firebreak road, and may not resume until safe conditions are confirmed. If a fire starts outside the firebreak road, training will cease altogether pending further consultation with the Service.
All units training at Makua will provide two firefighting helicopters on-site instead of the one usually provided, and a firefighting vehicle, and will dedicate 20 soldiers as firefighting personnel, in addition to the federal firefighters already present. The training units will also place clearly visible markers at the limits of the zone of fire to reduce the risk of misfires.
No prescribed burns will take place pending completion of the consultation.
"We appreciate that the military has again agreed to work with the community to safeguard the precious natural heritage at Makua," said Malama Makua board member Fred Dodge. "I am hopeful that the military is learning. It is not too early to increase efforts to clean up the valleys, not only for endangered species and cultural sites, but also for the community's health."
----
Slain US security agents once served with Navy Seals, Special Forces
CHICAGO (AFP)
Apr 02, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040402173107.qibo9rqg.html
A former Navy Seal and sometime movie consultant, a decorated Army veteran, and a linguist who served with an elite Army unit, were among the US security agents who died this week in an ugly ambush in Iraq, US news reports said Friday.
Family members identified Scott Helvenston, Michael Teague, and Jerry Zovko, as three of the four Americans who were killed in an ambush in Fallujah, Iraq, their bodies incinerated and dragged through the streets.
Helvenston, who joined the crack Navy Seal unit at the age of 17, wanted a taste of combat and a chance to make some good money, a friend told Florida's Sun Sentinel newspaper.
The 38-year-old went to Iraq to earn 60,000 in three months and to get a taste of combat that he had never seen in his 12 years in the Navy, Mark Divine told the daily.
The life-long athlete had recently lost a lot of money in a SEAL physical-fitness training video business he started after leaving the service.
His mother, Kathryn Helvenston-Wettengel, recalled her son as a life-long athlete, an adventurous, entrepreneurial spirit and a father who was devoted to his two children.
A world-champion pentathlon winner, a sometime actor and lately a fitness promoter, Helvenston also worked as a technical adviser on the movies "GI Jane", starring Demi Moore, and "Face Off" with John Travolta.
His mother, speaking from her home in Leesburg, Florida, told the paper she was tortured by the television images from Fallujah.
"You know what they did to him?" she asked. "You know what they did to him? I can't talk about it. What happened to him was so horrendous."
Danica and Jozo Zovko saw the scenes of mob violence before learning that their son Jerko "Jerry" Zovko was in the middle of it, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper.
The Croatian couple from Willoughby, Ohio, was planning their son's funeral Thursday.
"It's going to be a closed casket," said Danica Zovko. "But I will see my son, whatever is left of him."
Jerko Zovko, 32, a talented linguist who spoke five languages fluently, joined the army at the age of 19 and served with an elite army ranger unit before being discharged in 2001.
In Clarkesville, Tennessee, Rhonda Teague was mourning her husband Michael, a 12-year veteran of the Army who had done tours of duty in Afghanistan, Panama and Grenada.
"I, his son Brandon and his friends and family will miss him without measure," she said in a statement.
Teague served with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, an elite helicopter unit known by the nickname ''Night Stalkers'' for its ability to carry out difficult missions at night, often flying using night-vision goggles, according to the Commercial Appeal newspaper of Memphis.
The 38-year-old had been awarded the Bronze Star for his service in Afghanistan, his wife said.
----
Slain Contractors Were in Iraq Working Security Detail
By Dana Priest and Mary Pat Flaherty
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, April 2, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43364-2004Apr1?language=printer
The four men brutally slain Wednesday in Fallujah were among the most elite commandos working in Iraq to guard employees of U.S. corporations and were hired by the U.S. government to protect bureaucrats, soldiers and intelligence officers.
The men, all employees of Blackwater Security Consulting, were in the dangerous Sunni Triangle area operating under more hazardous conditions -- unarmored cars with no apparent backup -- than the U.S. military or the CIA permit.
U.S. government officials said yesterday that they suspect that the men were not victims of a random ambush but were set up as targets, which one defense official said suggested "a higher degree of organization and sophistication" among insurgents. "This is certainly cause for concern."
A Blackwater spokesman said the men were guarding a convoy on its way to deliver food to troops under a subcontract to a company named Regency Hotel and Hospitality. Three of those killed were identified by their families or a family spokesman yesterday as Jerry Zovko, 32, an Army veteran from Willoughby, Ohio; Michael Teague, 38, from Clarksville, Tenn.; and Scott Helvenston, 38. The other Blackwater employee was a former SEAL, the Navy's elite counterterrorism force.
The bodies of the four men were dragged through the streets by jubilant crowds.
Blackwater issued a statement saying it did not intend to release the victims' names. "Coalition forces and civilian contractors and administrators work side by side every day with the Iraqi people," the statement said. "Our tasks are dangerous and while we feel sadness for our fallen colleagues, we also feel pride and satisfaction that we are making a difference for the people of Iraq."
The Fallujah killings this week resonated heavily among the dozens of companies providing security services in Iraq.
"No one is retreating," said Mike Baker, chief executive of Diligence LLC, a Washington security firm with hundreds of employees in Iraq. "No one is calling saying we ought to pull our guys out. I don't think it's stopping anyone from going in. They are fully aware of the security situation."
But Baker, a former CIA case officer, added that how the military is "responding is going to be very important. If there's not a harsh, well-thought-out response, they will take that as a complete sign of weakness and they will become emboldened."
Blackwater has about 400 employees in Iraq, said one government official briefed by the company. Its armed commandos earn an average of about $1,000 a day.
Although most of their work is to act as bodyguards for corporate, humanitarian or government employees, they sometimes perform more precarious jobs that are inherently riskier -- escorting VIPs, doing reconnaissance for visits by government officials to particular locations.
Employees of security companies such as Blackwater frequently come under fire from insurgents. When they do, they fire back.
"Nobody wants to be seen as a cowboy, but the truth is that if someone pops a weapon up, you respond," Baker said. ". . . This is a very difficult environment. There is always a potential for a problem."
Blackwater, security experts said, is among the most professional of the dozens of multinational security firms in Iraq, most of them there to protect U.S. government employees, private firms, Iraqi facilities and oil pipelines.
The firm also protects officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority, including the U.S. governor in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer. It has contracts as well with the departments of Defense, State and Transportation.
The company also did work in Afghanistan during the war there, said people who have worked with company employees.
Blackwater is in Moyock, N.C., just across the Virginia border, and U.S. law enforcement and military personnel frequently use its 6,000-acre site for weapons training.
Government contracting records show Blackwater Training was paid $13 million between April 2002 and June 2003 for security training of Navy personnel.
The firm's president and training director, and Blackwater Security Consulting's director, are veteran Navy SEALs. The name Blackwater alludes to covert missions undertaken by elite divers at night.
Government officials who have been briefed by the company said Blackwater carefully vets its employees, the vast majority of whom are former military personnel, and puts them through rigorous training requiring the same skill levels as those possessed by U.S. Special Operations troops.
Blackwater Security Consulting was formed a year ago and is one of five private companies within Blackwater USA. The training center was started in 1996, and according to the company's promotional material was formed in response to "the anticipated demand for government outsourcing" of firearms and security training. In January, it reported sales of nearly $14 million.
Staff writer Jackie Spinner contributed to this report.
--------
SECURITY
Private U.S. Guards Take Big Risks for Right Price
April 2, 2004
By JAMES DAO
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/02/national/02SECU.html?pagewanted=all&position=
MOYOCK, N.C., April 1 - Nestled inconspicuously amid the pinelands and horse farms of northeastern North Carolina lies a small but increasingly important part of the nation's campaign to stabilize Iraq.
Here, at the 6,000-acre training ground of Blackwater U.S.A., scores of former military commandos, police officers and civilians are prepared each month to join the lucrative but often deadly work of providing security for corporations and governments in the toughest corners of the globe.
On Wednesday, four employees of a Blackwater unit - most of them former American military Special Operations personnel - were killed in an ambush in the central Iraqi city of Falluja, their bodies mutilated and dragged through the streets by chanting crowds.
The scene, captured in horrific detail by television and newspaper cameras, shocked the nation and outraged the tightly knit community of current and former Special Operations personnel. But it also shed new light on the rapidly growing and loosely regulated industry of private paramilitary companies like Blackwater that are replacing government troops in conflicts from South America to Africa to the Middle East.
"This is basically a new phenomenon: corporatized private military services doing the front-line work soldiers used to do," said Peter W. Singer, a national security fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington who has written a book on the industry, "Corporate Warriors" (Cornell University Press, 2003).
"And they're not out there screening passengers at the airports," Mr. Singer said. "They're taking mortar and sniper fire."
The Associated Press identified three of the victims as Jerry Zovko, 32, an Army veteran from Willoughby, Ohio; Mike Teague, a 38-year-old Army veteran from Clarksville, Tenn.; and Scott Helvenston, 38, a veteran of the Navy.
Blackwater declined to identify the dead men, but issued a statement: "We grieve today for the loss of our colleagues and we pray for their families. The graphic images of the unprovoked attack and subsequent heinous mistreatment of our friends exhibits the extraordinary conditions under which we voluntarily work to bring freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people."
Though there have been private militaries since the dawn of war, the modern corporate version got its start in the 1990's after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
At that time, many nations were sharply reducing their military forces, leaving millions of soldiers without employment. Many of them went into business doing what they knew best: providing security or training others to do the same.
The proliferation of ethnic conflicts and civil wars in places like the Balkans, Haiti and Liberia provided employment for the personnel of many new companies. Business grew rapidly after the Sept. 11 attacks prompted corporate executives and government officials to bolster their security overseas.
But it was the occupation of Iraq that brought explosive growth to the young industry, security experts said. There are now dozens, perhaps hundreds of private military concerns around the world. As many as two dozen companies, employing as many as 15,000 people, are working in Iraq.
They are providing security details for diplomats, private contractors involved in reconstruction, nonprofit organizations and journalists, security experts said. The private guards also protect oil fields, banks, residential compounds and office buildings.
Though many of the companies are American, others from Britain, South Africa and elsewhere are providing security in Iraq. Among them is Global Risks Strategies, a British company that hired Fijian troops to help protect armored shipments of the new Iraqi currency around the country.
Blackwater is typical of the new breed. Founded in 1998 by former Navy Seals, the company says it has prepared tens of thousands of security personnel to work in hot spots around the world. At its complex in North Carolina, it has shooting ranges for high-powered weapons, buildings for simulating hostage rescue missions and a bunkhouse for trainees.
The Blackwater installation is so modern and well-equipped that Navy Seals stationed at the Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base in Norfolk, Va., routinely use it, military officials said. So do police units from around the country, who come to Blackwater for specialized training.
"It's world class," said Chris Amos, a spokesman for the Norfolk Police Department.
In Iraq, Blackwater personnel guard L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the civilian administration, among their other jobs. Around Baghdad, the Blackwater guards, most in their 30's and 40's, are easily identified, with their heavily muscled upper bodies, closely cropped hair or shaven heads and wrap-around sunglasses. Some even wear Blackwater T-shirts. Like Special Operations Forces, they use walkie-talkie earpieces with curled wires disappearing beneath their collars and carry light-weight automatic weapons.
In the northern city of Mosul, where Mr. Bremer met with about 130 carefully vetted Iraqis on Thursday, Blackwater guards maintained a heavy presence, standing along the walls facing the Iraqi guests with their rifles cradled. More than once, Iraqis and Western reporters moving forward to take their seats in the hall were abruptly challenged by the guards, with warnings that they would be ejected if they resisted.
The company also received a five-year Navy contract in 2002 worth $35.7 million to train Navy personnel in force protection, shipboard security, search-and-seizure techniques, and armed sentry duties, Pentagon officials said.
The rapid growth of the private security industry has come about in part because of the shrinkage of the American military: there are simply fewer military personnel available to protect officials, diplomats and bases overseas, security experts say.
To meet the rising demand, the companies are offering yearly salaries ranging from $100,000 to nearly $200,000 to entice senior military Special Operations forces to switch careers. Assignments are paying from a few hundred dollars to as much as $1,000 a day, military officials said.
Gen. Wayne Downing, a retired chief of the United States Special Operations Command, said that on a recent trip to Baghdad he ran into several former Delta Force and Seal Team Six senior noncommissioned officers who were working for private security companies.
"It was like a reunion," General Downing said.
Sheriff Susan Johnson of Currituck County, N.C., where the entrance to Blackwater is situated, said several of her deputies had been lured away by the company to work overseas.
"It's tough to keep them when they can earn as much in one month there as they can in a year here," Sheriff Johnson said.
But critics say the rapid growth of the industry raises troubling concerns. There is little regulation of the quality of training or recruitment by private companies, they say. The result may be inexperienced, poorly prepared and weakly led units playing vital roles in combat situations. Even elite former commandos may not be well trained for every danger, those critics say.
Representative Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois, has also argued that the United States' growing use of private military companies hides the financial, personal and political costs of military operations overseas, since the concerns face little public scrutiny.
In particular, Ms. Schakowsky has objected to administration plans to increase the number of private military contractors in Colombia, where three American civilians working for a Northrup Grumman subsidiary have been held hostage by Marxist rebels for more than a year. The three were on a mission to search for cocaine laboratories and drug planes when they were captured.
"I continue to oppose the use of military contractors who are not subject to the same kind of scrutiny and accountability as U.S. soldiers," Ms. Schakowsky said last week. "When things go wrong for these contractors, they and their families have been shamefully forgotten by their American employers."
Eric Schmitt, in Washington, and John F. Burns, in Baghdad, contributed reporting for this article.
-------- propaganda wars
Rummy's Rules for War
by Paul Sperry,
April 2, 2004
Antiwar.com
http://antiwar.com/sperry/?articleid=2233
WASHINGTON - Just before Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld testified before the 9-11 Commission last week, reporters were handed his prepared statement. Unlike statements by other witnesses during the hearings, his came with an attachment - a stack of papers almost an inch thick, held together by a binder clip.
"Boy," one reporter remarked under her breath, "he must really be defensive."
In the middle of the pile was a March 2001 memo written by Rumsfeld as he settled into the top Pentagon job. It's titled, "Guidelines to be Weighed When Considering Committing U.S. Forces." His rules for war, at least at the time, called for prudent use of force.
But Rumsfeld, along with the commander and chief, have violated almost every one of those rules since they took their sharp right turn from the war on al-Qaida into Iraq. It would be funny, if it weren't so tragic.
Topping his list is making sure the U.S. has "a good reason" to go to war, let alone start one. "If people could be killed, the U.S. must have a darn good reason," Rumsfeld wrote. Well, we're still looking for one in Iraq, with no weapons of mass destruction to be found, and 600 G.I.s dead and counting, along with untold thousands of Iraqi civilians. (Yes, we got rid of ol' tinhorn Saddam Hussein, but the world would be a lot safer if we got rid of Osama bin Laden, the real threat.)
Next: "Avoid arguments of convenience," he advised. "They may be useful at the outset to gain support (for going to war), but they will be deadly later."
Oops.
Before deploying troops, Rumsfeld said three years ago, there must also be an exit strategy.
The post-combat plan should be clear, he wrote, "so we can know when we have achieved our goals and can honestly exit or turn the task over to others." The original goal in preemptively invading Iraq, according to Rumsfeld and the White House, was to disarm Hussein. We invaded only to learn that the first Gulf war had already taken care of that. Instead of exiting, we're now nation-building, which means the U.S. will likely occupy Iraq for years to come and spend hundreds of billions dollars more of American taxpayers' money in the process.
Some exit strategy.
Rumsfeld also wisely cautioned, once upon a time: Don't stretch the troops and drain military resources. "The U.S. cannot do everything everywhere at once," he warned. Too bad he didn't follow his own advice.
During the Iraq distraction, Al-Qaida regrouped, striking more Western targets than it did in the comparable period before 9-11. Why? The administration diverted troops and intelligence assets, including valuable Arabic translators, from the main terror front along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to the false front of Iraq before it had finished off al-Qaida - or the Taliban, for that matter. Now Pakistan's phlegmatic Muslim army is having to battle al-Qaida for us and hunt for its still-at-large leaders, while the U.S. client-government in Afghanistan is having to postpone its first general election over growing security threats.
Security in Iraq is even worse.
Although you wouldn't know it now, Rumsfeld at least thought back then that world opinion matters, and needed to be considered before taking unilateral military action.
"U.S. actions or inactions in one region are read around the world and contribute favorably or unfavorably to the deterrent and U.S. influence," he wrote. "We need to think through the kind of precedent a proposed action, or inaction, would establish."
Also sage advice, and also ignored.
Besides inflaming anti-American passions in the Middle East and breeding more terrorism, the military overreach in Iraq has eroded trust among even some long-time American allies. Large majorities in six of nine nations, including France and German, think America lied about the reasons for invading Iraq, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll.
Yet Rumsfeld ended his rules-for-war memo by asserting the importance of "preserving U.S. credibility." He argued: "U.S. leadership must be brutally honest with itself, the Congress, the public and coalition partners."
Uh-huh.
It's a wonder Rumsfeld was even able to find his memo for the hearing. It must have been in a circular file somewhere collecting dust, because it certainly wasn't in circulation during the administration's dishonest build-up to the Iraq invasion.
----
White House Holds Back Clinton Papers
Former President's Aide Says 9/11 Panel May Lack Full View of Anti-Terror Effort
By Dan Eggen and Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, April 2, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43329-2004Apr1?language=printer
The White House has not turned over thousands of pages of documents from the Clinton administration to a commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, even though the records are relevant to the panel's mission, one of Clinton's attorneys said yesterday.
Bruce R. Lindsey, who represents the former president on records issues, said yesterday that the Bush administration has turned over about 25 percent of the nearly 11,000 pages of Clinton records that document custodians had determined should be released to the commission investigating the terrorist attacks. Lindsey said that, as a result, the commission may not have a full picture of the Clinton administration's anti-terrorism efforts.
"I was concerned that the commission was making findings of fact based on an incomplete record," Lindsey said.
White House spokesman Sean McCormack said documents that have not been turned over are not relevant to the inquiry. "We're applying the same standards to documents from our administration and from the Clinton administration," he said.
Al Felzenberg, spokesman for the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, said the panel's executive director, Philip D. Zelikow, and staff counsel Daniel Marcus were aware of the problem and are negotiating with the White House. He said there may be a range of explanations, from duplicate records to disagreements about the relevance of some records.
"It may well be that everything has not made its way to us, but there may be a good reason or reasons," Felzenberg said.
Presidential records are sealed by law for five years after a president leaves office, but an exception was made to allow the panel access to the documents.
Lindsey's comments came on the same day the commission officially scheduled national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's public testimony before the panel for Thursday. White House attorneys had refused for weeks to allow Rice to testify publicly and under oath, but capitulated in an agreement reached Tuesday.
Rice is expected to be questioned closely about disagreements between her and Richard A. Clarke, her former aide, who told the commission on March 24 that the Bush administration did not move urgently before Sept. 11, 2001, to address warnings of a major terrorist attack and was later distracted from battling terrorism by the war in Iraq.
Zelikow said in an interview last night that he first notified the White House of the problem in February but that "we don't have answers yet." He said that although some of the documents are duplicates, many others were withheld because Bush lawyers decided they were "not responsive" to the commission's requests. He said commission staff members have identified two examples of documents from the Clinton years that were relevant to the Sept. 11 inquiry but were not turned over. Those documents did not substantively change any of the panel's conclusions so far, Zelikow said.
Also yesterday, several commission members dismissed complaints from Democratic lawmakers and family members of terrorist attack victims that two Republican commissioners spoke with the White House's chief lawyer last week on the day that Clarke testified.
Commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican New Jersey governor, said that the two GOP panel members, Fred F. Fielding and James R. Thompson, have each served as liaisons with the White House and that their roles are well-known to the rest of the 10-member bipartisan panel.
Two Democratic commissioners, former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste and former Indiana congressman Timothy J. Roemer, also said they would not be concerned about such contacts. Several commission sources said that some Democratic members have had similar contacts with lawmakers from their party.
Rep. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, complained in a letter to White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales on Wednesday that contacts between Gonzales's office and the two GOP commissioners on March 24 would be improper because "the conduct of the White House is one of the key issues being investigated by the commission." Six House Democrats from New York sent a similar letter to the White House yesterday.
The Family Steering Committee, a group of relatives of Sept. 11 victims, said in a statement yesterday that the contacts "raise the concern that the independent and nonpartisan nature of the 9/11 Commission is being compromised."
Thompson has declined to comment on any contact with the White House but said, "I ask my own questions." Fielding has not returned repeated telephone calls seeking comment.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Waxman was trying "to politicize the 9/11 commission." He said: "Our counsel's office is in regular contact with the commission to make sure they have the information they need to do their job."
The White House refused yesterday to release the full text of a speech Rice had been scheduled to give on Sept. 11, 2001, saying the speech had not been delivered. The Washington Post, quoting former officials who have seen the text, reported yesterday that the speech was designed to promote missile defense as the cornerstone of a new national security strategy, and contained no mention of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or Islamic extremist groups.
McClellan played down the significance of the speech, saying it was not a fair reflection of the full range of policy deliberations and actions on terrorism during the Bush administration's first months in office.
"We're talking about one speech here," McClellan told reporters. "Look at the actions and steps that we were taking prior to September 11. I think that's what you need to look at to measure our commitment to addressing this high priority."
Staff writer Robin Wright contributed to this report.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Role of security companies likely to become more visible
By Tom Squitieri,
USA TODAY
4/2/2004
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-04-01-security-usat_x.htm
Blackwater Security Consulting, which lost four employees in Wednesday's ambush in Iraq, is one of about 25 private security groups employed in Iraq to guard officials and installations, train Iraq's new army and police and provide other support for occupation forces.
The private companies employ about 15,000 people in Iraq, making them effectively the second-largest armed component of the coalition after the United States' 100,000 troops. Britain has more than 8,000 soldiers in the country.
The companies are likely to be even more visible after June 30. That's when sovereignty will be transferred from the U.S.-led coalition to an Iraqi government and the Bush administration will try to draw down the U.S. military presence.
Some critics say the companies - which employ retired military and intelligence officers from countries including the USA, Britain, South Africa, Nepal and Fiji - are largely unaccountable to governments, courts or the public. Others say the companies are a good way to provide safety in war zones. President Bush has called on a "coalition of the willing" to send troops to Iraq, but many nations have been reluctant to commit large numbers.
"We do have an international coalition in Iraq, a coalition of the billing," says Peter Singer, an analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington and author of Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry. "It is a multinational industry in where it operates and where they are from."
The use of such companies in U.S. military operations dates to the first President Bush. After the 1991 Gulf War, the Pentagon, headed by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, paid a Halliburton subsidiary, Brown & Root Services, nearly $9 million to study how private companies could provide support in combat zones. Cheney went on to serve as CEO of Halliburton before becoming vice president.
Blackwater, based in Moyock, N.C., was founded by two former Navy SEALS in 1996 and provides a range of training and security services, according to its Web site. Among its Iraq duties: guarding Paul Bremer, the U.S. civil administrator.
A Blackwater news release said its employees were protecting a food convoy when they were attacked Wednesday. "We grieve today for the loss of our colleagues and we pray for their families," the company said Thursday.
In February, Blackwater, through a subcontractor, began hiring former combat personnel in Chile, offering up to $4,000 a month to guard oil wells in Iraq, the company official said. Some of the Chileans worked for former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, the spokesman confirmed.
Other companies in Iraq include:
Custer Battles of Fairfax, Va., which supplies personnel to guard the Baghdad airport.
Global Risk, a British company that protects the U.S.-led civil administration.
Pilgrims, based in the Seychelles Islands, which provides security for many Western news media outlets.
DynCorp of Reston, Va., which helps train Iraqi police and also guards Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
The Steele Foundation of San Francisco, which also provided the security detail for former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Erinys, a British company with offices in the Middle East and South Africa, which guards Iraq's oil fields. The company has come under scrutiny for hiring former South African security officers involved in the apartheid government.
-------- courts
Federal Judge Orders Release of Documents of White House
April 2, 2004
New York Times
By NEIL A. LEWIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/02/politics/02RULI.html
WASHINGTON, April 1 - A federal judge ruled Thursday that the Bush administration must release thousands of pages of documents related to a White House task force that met behind closed doors to develop a national energy policy.
The ruling, by Judge Paul L. Friedman of Federal District Court here, was a victory for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental lobbying group, and Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group. The two organizations have been trying to find out whether the task force, headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, was heavily influenced by energy executives and lobbyists.
But the ruling does not necessarily mean the documents, numbering in the thousands, will be released any time soon, because the administration may appeal.
A separate lawsuit aimed at forcing the energy task force to disclose what advice it received from industry members is scheduled to be argued before the Supreme Court this month.
In that suit, Judicial Watch and some environmental groups have asserted and lower courts have agreed that the federal Advisory Committee Act requires that the records of the task force be open to the public.
The suit that Judge Friedman ruled on Thursday is based on a different law, the Freedom of Information Act, and focuses not on the task force, but on the federal agencies that lent officials to work on the task force.
Judge Friedman rejected the government's assertion that the Freedom of Information Act did not apply because the agency officials were working in the vice president's office, which is not covered by the law. Even if the records were maintained in the vice president's office, Judge Friedman ruled, they were produced by agency employees and must be disclosed by June 1.
His ruling means that even if the administration wins the Supreme Court case based on the open meetings law, it will still face a second challenge based on the Freedom of Information Act.
Sharon Buccino, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said, "The administration is not going to be off the hook no matter what happens in the Supreme Court on the other case."
It is unclear that the records sought in the two suits are the same, but most participants assume there is considerable overlap.
---
Documents Related to Cheney Case Ordered Released
REUTERS USA:
April 2, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/24568/story.htm
WASHINGTON - A federal judge ordered several government agencies to release documents related to an energy policy task force led by Vice President Dick Cheney.
In an opinion released late this week, U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman ordered seven government agencies including the Department of Energy, Department of the Interior and Bureau of Land Management to hand over pertinent documents by June 1.
He was ruling on a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch and the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC). The two groups had sued to force the various departments involved in the energy task force to release documents related to the task force and its deliberations.
In particular they had asked for the agencies to release records of the task force's executive director and those of other federal agency employees assigned to carry out the task force's day-to-day operations.
Friedman said the agencies had an obligation to release the data.
"The court's ruling is a wake-up call to the Bush administration: it's time to come clean about how it is doing the public's business," said Sharon Buccino, an NRDC senior attorney.
"Once Congress and the American people finally get the details about what happened at the task force's closed-door meetings, the administration's energy plan will be revealed for what it is - a payback to corporate polluters," Buccino added.
The Justice Department said it was reviewing the ruling.
The lawsuit is a separate one from another case involving Cheney that is now before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The high court agreed in December to hear an appeal from Cheney, who is resisting a judge's order to produce documents about White House contacts with the energy industry in 2001.
The environmental group Sierra Club and Judicial Watch sued in 2001 to find out the names and positions of members of the energy task force led by the vice president that year. They alleged that Cheney, a former energy company executive, drafted energy policy by consulting industry executives.
The task force produced a policy paper calling for more oil and gas drilling and a revived nuclear power program.
-------- drug war
Afghans' opium crop may double
April 02, 2004
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040401-115450-2689r.htm
Afghanistan's opium crop, the source of billions of dollars in illicit profits to heroin traffickers and other criminal organizations, including terrorists, could increase this year by as much as 100 percent, according to a top State Department official.
Left unchecked, the opium crop and the heroin it produces will undermine ongoing efforts to defeat terrorism and establish a democratic society in Afghanistan, Robert B. Charles, assistant secretary for the department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, warned a House subcommittee yesterday.
"Unless direct, effective and measurable action is taken immediately, we may be looking at ... a world record crop, empowering traffickers and the terrorists they feed, raising the stakes for and the vulnerability of Afghan democracy, and raising the supply of heroin in the world market," Mr. Charles told the House Government Reform subcommittee on criminal justice, drug policy and human resources.
"Even more disturbing, these reports indicate that the clock is ticking faster than many anticipated, due partly to warmer than expected weather in southern and eastern Afghanistan," he said. "As a direct result, the time for action may be shorter than anyone anticipated."
Mr. Charles, whose office conducts opium-eradication programs in Afghanistan, said 90 percent of the heroin sold in Europe is produced in that country.
He also noted that the United States and Great Britain, designated as the lead on counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan, have "worked closely" with the Afghan government and coalition partners to achieve a consensus on how best to combat the illicit-drug economy in a free Afghanistan.
Mr. Charles added, however, that although the two nations had achieved significant successes in combating the drug problem, they are not always "in complete agreement on all aspects of our eradication efforts and on ways to achieve the essential, critical and mutual goal of eradicating a measurable and significant quantity of heroin poppies."
He said the U.S. position is that the current set of eradication-targeting criteria set by the British might be overly restrictive, could hamper efforts to reach key eradication goals and will not effectively deal with the 2004 crop.
Mr. Charles said U.S. antidrug officials "firmly believe" that it is the role of the British to provide the Afghan government with a comprehensive target list, to determine based on domestic considerations and concerns what targets are suitable, and then aggressively support eradication in those areas.
"If Afghanistan's future matters, and it does, we cannot speak warmly of progress in eradication without the planning, blood, sweat and conviction that will make our words real," he said, adding that the British government should be encouraged to "revisit the issue of funding available" for eradication.
"Substantial effort must be made immediately if we are to begin genuinely deterring the expansion of opium growth," he said.
In February, Mr. Charles told the subcommittee that the State Department had begun an aggressive antidrug effort in Afghanistan, targeting opium production that had risen twentyfold in the past two years. He said opium production had risen to peak production levels under the terrorist-tied Taliban regime. Under the Taliban regime, the sale of opium and heroin by domestic warlords and international crime syndicates netted the regime $40 million a year, some of which went to Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorists. Authorities are concerned that an Afghan resurgence in heroin could mean that traffickers are looking to expand their market into the United States by undercutting the Colombians.
-------- homeland security
Government Issues Warning of Summer Bomb Plots in U.S.
April 2, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Terror-Threat.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Trains and buses in major U.S cities may be targeted this summer by terrorists using bombs hidden in bags or luggage, federal counterterrorism officials have told law enforcement and transportation officials in a nationwide bulletin.
FBI and Homeland Security Department officials said they had received uncorroborated intelligence reports about a plot by terrorists to target commercial transportation systems. The bulletin, issued late Thursday, mentioned no specific cities or dates and did not elaborate on the source of the information.
A senior federal law enforcement official, speaking Friday on condition of anonymity, said the intelligence, coupled with the deadly March 11 commuter train attacks in Madrid in which bombs went off inside backpacks, has increased the level of wariness about a similar attack in the United States.
Amtrak spokesman Dan Stessel said the company stepped up security after the Madrid bombings, including use of bomb-sniffing dogs, although the company's trains have received no specific or credible threats. ``It should not be considered unusual that the FBI should issue this kind of a bulletin in the wake of what occurred in Madrid last month,'' Amtrak said in a statement.
Homeland Security spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said information in the bulletin was being shared via the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System to ensure proper security measures are implemented around the country.
Officials said the message was sent mainly out of an abundance of caution, and the threat -- deemed ``somewhat credible'' by one official -- was not causing undue alarm throughout the government.
The nation's color-coded terror alert level remains at yellow, or elevated. It was last raised to orange, or high, on Dec. 21 amid suspicions about terror attacks using commercial aircraft. The level returned to yellow on Jan. 10.
Passengers could see changes because of the bulletin. Federal officials are encouraging local transit authorities to conduct random passenger inspections and security sweeps of stations and to increase public announcements encouraging people to report unattended baggage or suspicious behavior.
Intelligence indicates a plot might involve bombs made of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and diesel fuel, similar to the explosive concealed in a rental truck that blew up an Oklahoma City federal building in 1995. Both items are easily available around the country.
These improvised bombs would then be concealed in luggage and carry-on bags, such as backpacks or duffel bags, and detonated either aboard buses or trains or in transportation stations, according to the government warning. A viable explosive could be concealed in luggage, it says.
Al-Qaida and other terror groups have ``demonstrated the intent and capability'' of attacking public transportation systems using a variety of bombs, the bulletin says. Attacks in Israel, Greece, Turkey, Spain and elsewhere have used suicide bombers or triggered bombs with timers and cell phones.
Between 1997 and 2000, more than 195 terror attacks occurred on transit systems worldwide, according to congressional investigators.
In Spain on Friday, police found a bomb connected to a detonator with a 450-foot cable under tracks of a high-speed railway between Madrid and Seville. Disposal experts disarmed the bomb.
British authorities arrested nine people this week on suspicion of having links to a possible terror plot that involved 1,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate. It is unclear whether that alleged plot involved a public transit attack.
More than 9 billion trips are taken each year on the U.S. public transportation system, with 32 million trips every weekday -- about 16 times the number of trips taken on airlines, according to the American Public Transit Association.
The association estimates that $6 billion is needed to upgrade and modernize U.S. transit systems to meet security needs. The Transportation Security Administration dedicated only $10 million for passenger rail and public transit security in the current year's budget, according to the House Homeland Security Committee.
``Failure to invest in the security of passenger rail and public transit could leave these critical systems vulnerable to terrorist attack,'' the committee's Democrats wrote in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge. ``Making these systems as safe as they can be from terrorist attack must be a high priority.''
After the Madrid bombings, the Homeland Security Department announced a series of security initiatives, but no major new funding plans were proposed.
Associated Press writer Katherine Pfleger Shrader contributed to this story.
On the Net:
FBI: http://www.fbi.gov
Homeland Security Department: http://www.dhs.gov
--------
U.S. Goals Solicited On Software Security
Task Force Suggests Limited Regulation
By Jonathan Krim
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 2, 2004; Page E02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43356-2004Apr1?language=printer
The federal government should set goals for reducing flaws in computer software that allow attacks by hackers, and other regulations might be necessary to better protect cyberspace, an industry task force said yesterday.
Despite rising incidents of worms, viruses and identity fraud that have cost businesses and consumers as much as $10 billion a year, technology companies have fiercely resisted calls for government intervention that would require companies to provide safer software and strengthen their networks.
Many cyber-security experts have argued for years that such measures are needed in a world where an attack on one computer or network can rapidly spread to thousands or millions of others. They also cite the risk of cyber-terrorism, aimed at networks that control energy, water and other critical services. The report issued yesterday stops short of specific mandates, focusing primarily on broad, voluntary measures for both the makers of software and the network operators who use it.
But the task force, headed by representatives of software giant Microsoft Corp. and security vendor Computer Associates International Inc., suggested some rules might be needed.
"It is possible that national security or critical infrastructure protection may require a greater level of security than the market will provide," said the report.
The task force, whose members include technology and non-technology companies and some academics, is one of four such groups created in December in a partnership with the Department of Homeland Security. A year ago, the Bush administration issued several rules for federal agencies to improve computer security but directed the Department of Homeland Security to work with the private sector to develop voluntary strategies for businesses.
Other recommendations in the report include: increased funding for cyber-security research at universities; improved university certification programs that stress security training for engineers; and a Department of Homeland Security evaluation of software vulnerabilities.
"To have a secure U.S. cyber infrastructure, the supporting software must contain few, if any vulnerabilities," the report said. "The quality of software . . . is frequently not adequate to meet the needs" of computer users and network operators.
But willingness expressed in the report to consider regulation did not satisfy some critics.
"They [technology companies] told the government, 'Wait for us, we'll solve the problem,' " said Alan Paller, head of the SANS Institute in Bethesda, a computer-security research group. "What we got was not solutions, but a description of the problem." While the report calls for action at universities, "there's nothing about the companies that make billions of dollars selling this broken stuff."
Paller and other security experts have urged the federal government, as a major software buyer, to use its purchasing power to press vendors to make safer products. He praised the report's recommendations on improving the system for software vendors issuing "patches," code that is downloaded to close vulnerabilities that hackers might exploit.
"But that could be written into federal contracts," Paller said. "They didn't suggest that."
Others say companies should be required to perform security audits and to tell the government when they have been attacked to allow for better investigation and enforcement.
"We don't even know what we're dealing with," said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). "The ideologues who object to any government solution are prevailing over the sane and rational response."
Schumer recently issued a blistering critique of the administration's performance in the year since it launched its cyber-security initiative. Similarly, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) told Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge in a letter last month that, so far, the administration's efforts are "neither a plan nor a blueprint, but a plan to create a blueprint."
Scott Charney, Microsoft's chief security strategist, defended the report as a vital first step in what will be a long process.
"At the end of the day, vendors need to reduce the number of vulnerabilities in their code," Charney said, adding that one of the report's core elements is that the industry must rethink how software is created.
Microsoft, for example, is testing new software against "threat models" before it is released, he said.
"We're far from done," said Ron Moritz, Charney's task-force co-chairman and security chief at Computer Associates. Especially challenging will be to change the behavior of software makers, Moritz said, to have executives tell their engineers, "You've been doing this wrong for the past 25 years."
As for government mandates, Charney said "requiring people to do reasonable things makes a lot of sense," but that regulations must not impose specific technologies.
Amit Yoran, cyber-security director for Homeland Security, praised the report but said he had not studied it in detail.
"The vast majority of vulnerabilities could be addressed through higher-quality software," he said. But he added that computer users and network operators must also guard their systems more carefully, just as drivers must operate their cars safely.
Some technology trade associations have similarly urged that cyber-security efforts be focused on more than just software.
-------- human rights
Sudan: Massive Atrocities in Darfur
Almost One Million Civilians Forcibly Displaced in Government's Scorched-Earth Campaign
Human Rights Watch New York,
April 2, 2004
http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/04/02/sudan8389.htm
The Sudanese government is complicit in crimes against humanity committed by government-backed militias in Darfur, Human Rights Watch said today in a new report. In a scorched-earth campaign, government forces and Arab militias are killing, raping and looting African civilians that share the same ethnicities as rebel forces in this western region of Sudan.
The Khartoum government has tried to repress this rebellion with lightning speed in hope that the international community wouldn't have time to mobilize and press the government to halt its devastation of Darfur. But the Sudanese government will still have to answer for crimes against humanity that cannot be ignored.
The report, "Darfur in Flames: Atrocities in Western Sudan," describes a government strategy of forced displacement targeting civilians of the non-Arab ethnic communities from which the two main rebel groups-the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM)-are mainly drawn. Human Rights Watch found that the military is indiscriminately bombing civilians, while both government forces and militias are systematically destroying villages and conducting brutal raids against the Fur, Masaalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups.
"The Sudanese military and government-backed militias are committing massive human rights violations daily in the western region of Darfur," said Georgette Gagnon, deputy director for the Africa division of Human Rights Watch. "The government's campaign of terror has already forcibly displaced one million innocent civilians, and the numbers are increasing by the day."
Human Rights Watch called on the government of Sudan to immediately disarm and disband the militias, and allow international humanitarian groups access to provide relief to the displaced persons.
The government has recruited and armed over 20,000 militiamen of Arab descent and operates jointly with these militias, known as "janjaweed," in attacks on civilians from the Fur, Masaalit, and Zaghawa ethnic groups. In the past year, nearly one million civilians have fled their rural villages. Most are displaced into towns and camps where they continue to be murdered, raped and looted by the militias.
Although Arab and African communities in Darfur for decades have intermittently clashed over land and scarce resources, the current conflict began 14 months ago when two new rebel groups emerged. The Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) demanded that the Sudanese government stop arming the Arab groups in Darfur and address longstanding grievances over underdevelopment in the region.
In response, the government launched a massive bombing campaign which, combined with the raids of the marauding militias, have forced more than 800,000 people from their homes and sent an additional 110,000 people into neighboring Chad.
In a scorched-earth campaign, government forces and militias have killed several thousand Fur, Zaghawa and Masaalit civilians, routinely raped women and girls, abducted children, and looted tens of thousands of head of cattle and other property. In many areas of Darfur, they have deliberately burned hundreds of villages and destroyed water sources and other infrastructure, making it much harder for the former residents to return.
"The militias are not only killing individuals, they are decimating the livelihoods of tens of thousands of families," Gagnon said. "The people being targeted are the farmers of the region, and unless these abuses are stopped and people receive humanitarian relief, we could see famine in a few months' time."
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan should request the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights to immediately dispatch a mission of inquiry to investigate the situation in Darfur, Human Rights Watch said. The mission should report back to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, currently meeting in Geneva, before the end of its session on April 23. Human Rights Watch urged the U.N. Commission on Human Rights to adopt a resolution-under item 9-to appoint a special rapporteur for human rights in Sudan.
The report describes how government forces allow the janjaweed to operate with full impunity. Government forces fail to protect civilians even when these unarmed people have appealed to the military and police forces, warning that their villages were about to be attacked. Government forces and janjaweed have also obstructed the flight of civilians escaping to Chad.
"The Khartoum government has tried to repress this rebellion with lightning speed in hope that the international community wouldn't have time to mobilize and press the government to halt its devastation of Darfur," added Gagnon, "But the Sudanese government will still have to answer for crimes against humanity that cannot be ignored."
The Sudan peace talks in Kenya convened by the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), an intergovernmental body of East African countries, are limited to the two main parties to the 20-year conflict in Southern Sudan. The peace talks do not include Darfur or the Darfurian rebels. Taking advantage of the internationally regulated ceasefire in the south, the Sudanese government has shifted its attack helicopters and other heavy weapons, purchased with oil revenue from the south, to the western region of Darfur.
The government's indiscriminate bombing, scorched-earth military campaign, and denial of access to humanitarian assistance in Darfur reflects the same deadly strategy employed in the south, with yet more rapid dislocation and devastation than witnessed or experienced there.
-------- immigration / refugees
British Author's Visa Ordeal Is One for the Books
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 2, 2004; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43286-2004Apr1.html
SEATTLE, April 1 -- Halted en route to a West Coast lecture tour, Ian McEwan, an acclaimed British novelist who lunched last fall with first lady Laura Bush, was denied entry into the United States for 36 hours this week.
McEwan, who has won nearly every major British literary prize and whose best-selling novel "Atonement" won a National Book Critics Circle Award, finally landed in Seattle on Wednesday evening, just 90 minutes before he was scheduled to address 2,500 people packed into a downtown auditorium.
Looking relieved and exhausted, he began his speech by thanking the Department of Homeland Security "for protecting the American public from British novelists."
He also detailed the literary expertise that Homeland Security officials brought to the three interrogations they put him through. McEwan said one official wanted to know: "What kind of novels do you write: fiction or nonfiction?"
Later, in an interview, McEwan blamed his predicament on wariness growing out of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. During his third session on Wednesday with Homeland Security officials, after word had spread to British and U.S. newspapers about his situation, McEwan said his interrogators told him: "We still don't want to let you in, but this is attracting a lot of unfavorable publicity."
McEwan, who was asked by the British government to lunch in London last November with the first lady because she is an admirer of his work, was initially denied entry to the United States on Tuesday morning at the airport in Vancouver, B.C. That is where U.S. Customs processes foreigners flying into Seattle.
As he had on many previous occasions when traveling to the United States to give speeches, McEwan said, he presented his British passport expecting a visa waiver. The waiver has long been standard procedure for citizens from the United Kingdom and 26 other Western countries who travel in this country for business or pleasure.
When officials asked what he would be doing in the United States, he told them he would be lecturing and getting paid for it. That turned out to be the wrong answer. "They said I was coming to the U.S. to earn money to practice my lifestyle," he said.
His passport was then stamped "Refused Admittance," at which point McEwan embarked on a marathon of phone calls to influential people he hoped would be able to cancel the refusal.
A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security said that when McEwan presented his passport in the Vancouver airport he did not have the proper visa for a foreigner coming to the United States to give lectures for money.
"McEwan was inadmissible because he did not have a B-1 visa, for business purposes, or an O visa, which is specifically for journalists," said Jim Michie, the spokesman. McEwan's problem was not unique, he said, adding that business people and journalists often do not know what is required of them.
Michie said immigration officials are far more attentive to these rules than they used to be. "We have got to be vigilant so that we don't have another 9/11," he said.
With the intercession of the British Consulate in Vancouver, the State Department, an immigration lawyer in Portland, two members of Congress from Washington state and many desperate phone calls by officials from three lecture organizations in Washington, Oregon and California that had sold thousands of tickets to McEwan speeches, the writer was finally issued a business visa on Wednesday afternoon at the U.S. Consulate in Vancouver.
McEwan said he does not blame anyone for his "immensely frustrating" ordeal. But he is worried about future travel to this country.
"I now bear a kind of stigmata," he said. "I am in the computer as having been denied entry to the United States and that is really bad news. They can put things into that computer, but they never take them out."
--------
U.S. Extends Fingerprinting Rule to Millions More Visitors
April 2, 2004
By DAVID STOUT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/02/politics/02CND-TRAV.html?hp
WASHINGTON, April 2 - A program requiring many foreigners to be photographed and fingerprinted before entering the United States will be expanded to include some 13 million more visitors, the Department of Homeland Security said today.
The expansion will mean that, by Sept. 30, travelers from 27 countries who can enter the United States without visas will, for the first time, have to be photographed and fingerprinted.
The new development also makes it probable, based on experience, that Americans traveling overseas may be subjected to more scrutiny in retaliation.
Homeland Security officials said the change was decided upon after it became clear that most countries would not be able, for technological reasons, to meet the Oct. 26 deadline to develop machine-readable passports that include biometric identifiers.
Among the 27 countries whose citizens will be affected are some of America's longstanding allies, including Britain, Japan, Germany and Australia.
The Department of Homeland Security issued a statement describing the photograph-and-fingerprint procedure as "fast and easy for travelers" and something that provides "an added layer of security."
The State Department, which joined the homeland security agency in announcing the expanded program, said it has been notifying diplomats in the 27 countries. (There is no change in the status of visitors from Canada and Mexico, who may enter the United States without passports.)
A State Department spokesman, Adam Ereli, rejected any suggestion that the 27 countries might view today's announcement as "a slap in the face," as one questioner put it at a news briefing.
"If that's the way it's seen, then it's certainly not intended in that light," Mr. Ereli said. "At the same time, there are security needs, I think everybody recognizes those security needs."
The photograph-and-fingerprint procedure "is a very, very low-hassle, unintrusive way of protecting the public and protecting the United States," Mr. Ereli said.
Asa Hutchinson, undersecretary for border and transportation security in the Department of Homeland Security, said today that the Homeland Security and State Departments will ask Congress to extend the Oct. 26 deadline for machine-readable foreign passports for two years, in recognition of the technological difficulties in developing them.
Since January, visitors from countries that must have visas to enter the United States have been fingerprinted and photographed at scores of American airports and seaports. The new security level was put into effect in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The new procedures have allowed customs officials to immediately verify visitors' identities, check their criminal backgrounds and determine if they are on watch lists of suspected terrorists and other criminals.
Mr. Hutchinson said the procedures are quick and unobtrusive and have helped Homeland Security and State Department officials intercept more than 200 people suspected of criminal or immigration violations. The people have included convicted rapists, drug traffickers and individuals convicted of credit-card fraud, he said.
But since January, some American travelers have complained about the treatment they have received from immigration and customs officials in other countries, apparently in retaliation.
Travelers from the 27 countries affected in today's announcement have been allowed to enter the United States with only a passport, provided they stay no longer than 90 days. They will still be able to do that, but now their pictures and fingerprints will be taken.
The countries affected are Andorra, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brunei, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
-------- justice
Prosecutors Are Said to Have Expanded Inquiry Into Leak of C.I.A. Officer's Name
April 2, 2004
By DAVID JOHNSTON and RICHARD W. STEVENSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/02/politics/02LEAK.html
WASHINGTON, April 1 - Prosecutors investigating whether someone in the Bush administration improperly disclosed the identity of a C.I.A. officer have expanded their inquiry to examine whether White House officials lied to investigators or mishandled classified information related to the case, lawyers involved in the case and government officials say.
In looking at violations beyond the original focus of the inquiry, which centered on a rarely used statute that makes it a felony to disclose the identity of an undercover intelligence officer intentionally, prosecutors have widened the range of conduct under scrutiny and for the first time raised the possibility of bringing charges peripheral to the leak itself.
The expansion of the inquiry's scope comes at a time when prosecutors, after a hiatus of about a month, appear to be preparing to seek additional testimony before a federal grand jury, lawyers with clients in the case said. It is not clear whether the renewed grand jury activity represents a concluding session or a prelude to an indictment.
The broadened scope is a potentially significant development that represents exactly what allies of the Bush White House feared when Attorney General John Ashcroft removed himself from the case last December and turned it over to Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago.
Republican lawyers worried that the leak case, in the hands of an aggressive prosecutor, might grow into an unwieldy, time-consuming and politically charged inquiry, like the sprawling independent counsel inquiries of the 1990's, which distracted and damaged the Clinton administration.
Mr. Fitzgerald is said by lawyers involved in the case and government officials to be examining possible discrepancies between documents he has gathered and statements made by current or former White House officials during a three-month preliminary investigation last fall by the F.B.I. and the Justice Department. Some officials spoke to F.B.I. agents with their lawyers present; others met informally with agents in their offices and even at bars near the White House.
The White House took the unusual step last year of specifically denying any involvement in the leak on the part of several top administration officials, including Karl Rove, President Bush's senior adviser, and I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff. The White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, has repeatedly said no one wants to get to the bottom of the case more than Mr. Bush.
But Mr. Bush himself has said he does not know if investigators will ever be able to determine who disclosed the identity of the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame, to Robert Novak, who wrote in his syndicated column last July that Ms. Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, was a C.I.A. employee.
Mr. Wilson was a critic of the administration's Iraq policies. Democrats have accused the White House of leaking his wife's name in retaliation because Mr. Wilson, in a July 6, 2003, Op-Ed commentary in The New York Times, disputed Mr. Bush's statement in his State of the Union address that January that Iraq was trying to develop a nuclear bomb and had sought to buy uranium in Africa.
The suspicion that someone may have lied to investigators is based on contradictions between statements by various witnesses in F.B.I. interviews, the lawyers and officials said. The conflicts are said to be buttressed by documents, including memos, e-mail messages and phone records turned over by the White House.
At the same time, Mr. Fitzgerald is said to be investigating whether the disclosure of Ms. Plame's identity came after someone discovered her name among classified documents circulating at the upper echelons of the White House. It could be a crime to disclose information from such a document, although such violations are rarely prosecuted.
Mr. Bush's advisers have repeatedly urged White House employees to cooperate with the inquiry, and it is unclear whether Mr. Fitzgerald has made any decisions about whether to go forward or drop the case. On Thursday, Randall Samborn, a spokesman for Mr. Fitzgerald in Chicago, declined to discuss the case.
Mr. McClellan said the White House was fully cooperating with the investigation, but he declined to comment on the latest developments.
Mr. Fitzgerald, who has been in charge of the case for three months, has said he is nearing completion of the inquiry, the lawyers said. Some of them have suggested that he may be facing a problem if he declines to prosecute.
Prosecutors almost never make public the details of cases in which they investigate, but bring no charges. Federal law bars prosecutors from disclosing information obtained through a grand jury, the legal vehicle Mr. Fitzgerald has used to conduct his inquiry.
But in this case, being investigated in the heat of a closely fought presidential election, Democrats have been watching carefully for any sign that the prosecutor has favored the administration. Should Mr. Fitzgerald bring the case to a close with no indictments and no public explanation of his decision not to prosecute, he would almost certainly be subject to intense criticism from Democrats.
Several lawyers said Mr. Fitzgerald could ask a judge to allow him to issue a report. Or, they said, he could seek to employ a rarely used provision of the Justice Department's guidelines for prosecutors allowing grand juries to issue reports. But those sections of the prosecutor's manual appear to relate to public officials in organized crime cases.
-------- terrorism
'I saw papers that show US knew al-Qa'ida would attack cities with aeroplanes'
Whistleblower the White House wants to silence speaks to The Independent
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
02 April 2004
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=507514
A former translator for the FBI with top-secret security clearance says she has provided information to the panel investigating the 11 September attacks which proves senior officials knew of al-Qa'ida's plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the strikes happened.
She said the claim by the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that there was no such information was "an outrageous lie".
Sibel Edmonds said she spent more than three hours in a closed session with the commission's investigators providing information that was circulating within the FBI in the spring and summer of 2001 suggesting that an attack using aircraft was just months away and the terrorists were in place. The Bush administration, meanwhile, has sought to silence her and has obtained a gagging order from a court by citing the rarely used "state secrets privilege".
She told The Independent yesterday: "I gave [the commission] details of specific investigation files, the specific dates, specific target information, specific managers in charge of the investigation. I gave them everything so that they could go back and follow up. This is not hearsay. These are things that are documented. These things can be established very easily."
She added: "There was general information about the time-frame, about methods to be used but not specifically about how they would be used and about people being in place and who was ordering these sorts of terror attacks. There were other cities that were mentioned. Major cities with skyscrapers."
The accusations from Mrs Edmonds, 33, a Turkish-American who speaks Azerbaijani, Farsi, Turkish and English, will reignite the controversy over whether the administration ignored warnings about al-Qa'ida. That controversy was sparked most recently by Richard Clarke, a former counter-terrorism official, who has accused the administration of ignoring his warnings.
The issue what the administration knew and when is central to the investigation by the 9/11 Commission, which has been hearing testimony in public and private from government officials, intelligence officials and secret sources. Earlier this week, the White House made a U-turn when it said that Ms Rice would appear in public before the commission to answer questions. Mr Bush and his deputy, Dick Cheney, will also be questioned in a closed-door session.
Mrs Edmonds, 33, says she gave her evidence to the commission in a specially constructed "secure" room at its offices in Washington on 11 February. She was hired as a translator for the FBI's Washington field office on 13 September 2001, just two days after the al-Qa'ida attacks. Her job was to translate documents and recordings from FBI wire-taps.
She said said it was clear there was sufficient information during the spring and summer of 2001 to indicate terrorists were planning an attack. "Most of what I told the commission 90 per cent of it related to the investigations that I was involved in or just from working in the department. Two hundred translators side by side, you get to see and hear a lot of other things as well."
"President Bush said they had no specific information about 11 September and that is accurate but only because he said 11 September," she said. There was, however, general information about the use of airplanes and that an attack was just months away.
To try to refute Mr Clarke's accusations, Ms Rice said the administration did take steps to counter al-Qa'ida. But in an opinion piece in The Washington Post on 22 March, Ms Rice wrote: "Despite what some have suggested, we received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles, though some analysts speculated that terrorists might hijack planes to try and free US-held terrorists."
Mrs Edmonds said that by using the word "we", Ms Rice told an "outrageous lie". She said: "Rice says 'we' not 'I'. That would include all people from the FBI, the CIA and DIA [Defence Intelligence Agency]. I am saying that is impossible."
It is impossible at this stage to verify Mrs Edmonds' claims. However, some senior US senators testified to her credibility in 2002 when she went public with separate allegations relating to alleged incompetence and corruption within the FBI's translation department.
----
Jailed Muslim: bin Laden led Bali bombing
Malaysia, April 2
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040402-070800-4125r.htm
KUALA LUMPUR - A Muslim extremist jailed in Indonesia for the Bali and Jakarta bombings says his leaders got their orders from Osama bin Laden, the BBC reported Friday.
In a television interview broadcast in Malaysia, Mohamed Nasir Abbas said bin Laden's orders were distributed by Islamic cleric Abu Bakar Ba'asyir whom he called the "emir" of the Jemaah Islamiah group.
Bashir, due to leave jail in Indonesia this month, denied leading JI or any other involvement in terrorism.
Abbas said bin Laden ordered the bombings to avenge U.S. "persecution" of Muslims.
Another imprisoned interviewee said he had helped provide explosives for the Christmas 2000 church attacks across Indonesia.
----
Untested Islamic Militants Emerging, U.S. Official Says
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 2, 2004; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43330-2004Apr1.html
A new cadre of untested Islamic militants is emerging to take the place of leaders in Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, which is now under "catastrophic stress" as a result of international operations over the past 30 months, the senior State Department counterterrorism official told a House International Relations subcommittee yesterday.
At least 70 percent of al Qaeda's senior leadership has been detained or killed since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks triggered a worldwide offensive against the network, and the remaining 30 percent is largely on the run, State Department counterterrorism coordinator J. Cofer Black testified. The movement has been "deeply wounded" by the elimination or arrest of more than 3,400 lower-level members and allies, forcing it "to evolve in ways not entirely by its own choosing," he said.
As a result, several newer and smaller groups, made up predominantly of Sunni Muslims, are moving in to take the lead in the jihadist holy war agenda against the United States and its allies, which has complicated the task of stamping out the threat from Islamic militants, said Black, a former CIA counterterrorism official.
"As al Qaeda's known senior leadership, planners, facilitators and operators are brought to justice, a new cadre of leaders is being forced to step up. These individuals are increasingly no longer drawn from the old guard, no longer the seasoned veteran al Qaeda trainers from Afghanistan's camps or close associates of al Qaeda's founding members," Black told the House subcommittee. "These relatively untested terrorists are assuming far greater responsibilities."
In another ominous sign, Black said, al Qaeda's ideology and its virulent anti-U.S. rhetoric are also spreading well beyond traditional strongholds, inspiring scores of Muslim groups. They include Ansar al-Islam in Iraq, the network of cells created by Jordanian Abu Musab Zarqawi; the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan; the Salafist Group for Call and Combat in North Africa; and the Salifia Jihadia in Morocco, which claimed credit for the 2003 bombings in Casablanca.
"Identifying and acting against the leadership, capabilities and operational plans of these groups poses a serious challenge now and for years to come," Black said.
Beyond the groups is the further problem represented by thousands of militants -- from conflicts such as Chechnya, Kashmir and Kosovo -- who migrate to other conflicts, Black told the subcommittee. The jihadists are a "ready source of recruits" for al Qaeda and its affiliates. And Iraq is a "focal point" for jihadists who are linking up with Sunnis opposed to the occupation.
But crackdowns by the United States and others have had an extensive impact on the al Qaeda network, disrupting the leadership, hampering coordination, isolating cells and eliminating potential sanctuaries or training bases, including facilities in Afghanistan where members were working on chemical and biological weapons programs, he said.
As a result, he said, al Qaeda and its allies have been forced to delay operations and have made mistakes, such as the 2003 attack in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, at a housing complex for foreigners who turned out to be mainly Muslims. "The decisionmaking process, the ability to process operational activity is increasingly difficult for them," Black said. "It is a challenge for them to conduct this type of [major] attack."
--------
Three Nations Arrest 53 Alleged Militants
Associated Press
Friday, April 2, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43580-2004Apr1.html
ANKARA, Turkey, April 1 -- Turkey, Italy and Belgium arrested 53 militants in a coordinated crackdown Thursday on a Turkish Marxist group considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. government, Turkey's Interior Ministry said.
Police in Istanbul arrested 37 suspected members of the Revolutionary People's Liberation Army-Front, or DHKP-C, while security forces in Italy and Belgium detained 16, an Interior Ministry official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Turkish and German police have been preparing for the crackdown for a year, while the Italian police became involved more recently, the official said.
--------
Bomb Is Found on Spanish Rail Line
April 2, 2004
By DALE FUCHS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/02/international/europe/02CND-SPAI.html?hp
MADRID, April 3 - Less than a month after the commuter train terror bombings here, a package containing explosives was found today on the high-speed rail line linking Madrid and Seville, Spanish officials said.
At a news conference today, the acting interior minister, Ángel Acebes, did not speculate on who might be responsible for planting the explosives.
After the terror attacks that left 191 dead in Madrid on March 11, Mr. Acebes insisted that the Basque separatist group ETA was the main suspect, even as evidence pointed to militant groups linked to Al Qaeda. This week he confirmed that the investigation pointed to the Morocco-based Islamic Combatant Group, which authorities have linked to the suicide attacks last year in Casablanca, Morocco.
The discovery of the explosives comes on the first day of the usual mass exodus from the Spanish capital for Holy Week celebrations. Those held in Seville are the country's most popular.
It also coincided with the start of the new legislative session, in which the prime minister-elect, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, will lead the Parliament. Mr. Acebes' Popular Party suffered a surprise defeat in elections that came three days after the bombings.
The bag found today contained a 446-foot cable, a detonator and from 22 to 26 pounds of explosives, apparently dynamite, Mr. Acebes said. The explosives were similar to those used in the March 11 attacks, the newspaper El Pais reported today, quoting unidentified investigators. The package was found on the tracks near the town of Mocejón, Toledo.
High-speed train service has been temporarily canceled while the police inspect the entire line, Mr. Acebes added.
Passengers boarding the AVE fast train that links the two cities must already pass their baggage through metal detectors. The commuter train lines did not have such screening in place when the March 11 bombings occurred.
This is not the first bomb scare since the March 11 terror attacks. On Thursday, the Interior Ministry announced that three letters containing explosive powder were sent to the directors of conservative Spanish news media, including the newspaper Razón and the Antena 3 television station. The letters were de-activated without injuries, the government statement said.
Mr. Acebes said today that they were most likely the work of "anarchist groups," but that the investigation would proceed "with caution." He said no group had been ruled out.
Mr. Acebes also announced today that French and Spanish officers in southern France had arrested the man believed to be the leader of ETA's military arm, Félix Ignacio Esparza Luri. The Basque separatist group is blamed for more than 800 deaths in its three-decade armed fight for an independent state in parts of northern Spain and southern France.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- energy
Energy Task Force Data Not Private Agencies Ordered to Release Papers
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 2, 2004; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43150-2004Apr1.html
A federal judge yesterday ordered several federal government agencies to release documents concerning their work on Vice President Cheney's energy task force or provide a legal reason for withholding them.
U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman rejected arguments by Bush administration lawyers that employees from the Department of the Interior and Department of Energy can claim special confidentiality privileges for the period when they worked for the task force, which held private meetings with energy industry representatives as it crafted a national energy policy.
Ruling that those employees were not engaged in a deliberative process and were not temporary employees of the White House, Friedman said the agencies must search for and produce records of their employees' task force assignments.
The judge's order, which requires release of documents by June 1, could potentially open a new window into the workings of Cheney's task force. In a related 2001 case, the Justice Department has four times appealed federal court rulings that the vice president release task force records. That case, in which Cheney claims his office has executive privilege, is now pending before the Supreme Court.
In this case, however, Friedman's decision means that the records of even the task force's director, Energy Department employee Andrew Lundquist, should generally be made public.
The National Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, and Judicial Watch, a government watchdog organization, have been trying for three years to obtain the records. The organizations claim the documents will show the extent to which the task force staff met secretly with industry executives to craft the Bush administration's energy policies, such as drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and weakening power plant pollution regulations.
Justice Department officials did not respond yesterday to inquiries about whether they will appeal Friedman's orders.
"The court's ruling is a wake-up call to the Bush administration: It's time to come clean about how it is doing the public's business," said NRDC senior attorney Sharon Buccino. "Once Congress and the American people finally get the details about what happened at the task force's closed-door meetings, the administration's energy plan will be revealed for what it is -- a payback to corporate polluters."
Friedman held a six-hour hearing on Jan. 26 on the issue of whether agency documents could be withheld after consolidating three lawsuits filed by NRDC and Judicial Watch that sought task force records.
After an order from the same federal court in 2002, the administration turned over tens of thousands of records. However, the administration had cited several privileges to avoid releasing the records of Lundquist and other federal agency employees who worked at the task force under him.
Buccino said the White House opposition is based on political considerations. "These records are going to show the top of the food chain -- who had direct access to the task force and what different industry representatives were asking the Bush administration for."
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton called the judge's order "a brushback to the government. . . . I read it to mean we will finally get documents from the heart of the energy task force."
-------- environment
Senators Fault Mercury Pollution Proposal
April 2, 2004
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/02/politics/02EMIT.html
WASHINGTON, April 1 - Forty-five senators and 10 state attorneys general asked the Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday to withdraw its proposal on how to regulate mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants and replace it with a more stringent proposal.
The agency said in December that it would abandon a Clinton administration plan in favor of a market system that would let plants buy and sell the rights to emit mercury.
In separate letters to the agency, the senators and the attorneys general said the new proposal would not do enough to protect children's health and would violate the Clean Air Act. Cynthia Bergman, the E.P.A. spokeswoman, responded with a statement that said, "The final rule will be defined by the availability of technology that has been adequately tested and available for industrywide deployment."
The letters underscore growing concern over whether the administration has adequately balanced the needs of the energy industry with the requirements of the act.
The 45 senators included 7 Republicans: John McCain of Arizona, Susan Collins and Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, Judd Gregg and John E. Sununu of New Hampshire, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.
The attorneys general were from Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania and Vermont.
-------- health
Afraid of Radiation? Low Doses are Good for You
by Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD,
April 2, 2004
LewRockwell.com
http://www.lewrockwell.com/miller/miller12.html
Fearful of the harm that radiation can do, the citizens of Sacramento, in a public referendum, had the city shut down its Rando Seco nuclear power plant. The Sacramento Municipal Utility District put up windmills instead, which on a windy day produces 1 percent of the power the nuclear plant did, and built a photovoltaic solar plant that generates one-third of one percent of that power. Eight nuclear power plants have been decommissioned in the U.S. since 1990. None ordered after 1974 were completed, and no orders have been placed for any since 1978. The 103 nuclear reactors in the U.S. that remain operational produce 7.6 percent of the nation's energy, as electricity. There are 442 nuclear power plants worldwide, with 35 under construction - 24 of them in Asia.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NCR), two federal entities charged with addressing radiation safety, hold the view that exposure to any amount of ionizing radiation, no matter how small, is harmful. No amount of radioactivity can be proclaimed safe. Accordingly, the EPA and the NCR have set extremely stringent regulatory limits for public exposure to radiation - 15 and 100 mrem (millirem)/year respectively. This is the level of cleanup radioactive sites have to achieve, for example, before they can be released for public use. The initial limit for radiation exposure was 36 rem (36,000 mrem). With the advent of nuclear-powered ships, where sailors would be in close proximity to nuclear reactors for extended periods of time, it was though prudent to reduce it to15 rem, even though no deaths or injuries were documented under the 36-rem protection limit. (For practical purposes, rad, rem, Sievert, and Grey are interchangeable measures of radiation, where 1 rad = 1 rem, 1 Sievert = 1 Grey, and 100 rad or rem = 1 Sievert or Grey. A millirem - mrem - is 1/1000th of a rem.)
Along with the EPA and NRC, elected government officials, newspaper science writers, TV reporters and journalists, and, consequently, most Americans believe that low doses of radiation are harmful. People have "radiophobia" - the fear that any level of ionizing radiation, no matter how small, is dangerous. Why? For one thing, the news media fosters it because fear sells. Scary stories about the dangers of radiation keep people tuned in. Another reason, which lies deeper in the collective psyche, is that this phobia expresses the deep-seated sense of revulsion that Americans feel over the devastation and loss of life caused by the atomic bombs that its country dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. A third, more correctable reason is that the relationship between radiation dose and its biological effects is believed to conform to the "Linear (No-Threshold) Hypothesis," or "model." Regulators use this model to predict the number of cancer deaths that low doses of radiation are assumed to cause and then cite these predictions to justify their draconian radiation safety standards.
This is how the linear hypothesis works: After America developed the atom bomb, tested it, and dropped two on Japan investigators learned that 600 rem - 600,000 mrem - of radiation constitutes a lethal dose (it is 100 percent fatal), and 50 percent of people exposed to 400 rem will die of radiation sickness. Signs and symptoms of radiation sickness - such as vomiting, diarrhea, bleeding, sore mouth, weakness, and hair loss - begin to appear when a person receives 75 to 100 rem. This hypothesis assumes that there is no threshold beneath which the deleterious effects of radiation cease to appear. Even very small doses will cause cancer in some people, if a large enough group is exposed. It predicts, for example, (in a simplified form) that 0.00625 percent of people exposed to a 500 mrem dose will die from radiation-induced cancer, a rate extrapolated in a linear fashion from the mortality rate observed at higher doses. Although this is a very low rate for a dose of this amount, when applied to a large group of people it gets scarier. For a population of one million people who are exposed to 500 mrem of ionizing radiation, the linear model predicts that 6,250 people will die from radiation-induced cancer. If 10 million people, in a city like New York, are exposed to this dose, 62,500 deaths are assumed to occur.
Regulators acknowledge that a prediction like "there will be 62,500 deaths in 10 million people exposed to 500 mrem of radiation" is an assumed risk. It is based on the assumption that "any exposure to ionizing radiation carries with it some risk," as the ALARA (As Low As Reasonably Achievable) regulation puts it. Known and documented health-damaging effects of radiation - radiation sickness, leukemia, and death - are only seen with doses greater than 100 rem. The risk of doses less than 100 rem is a black box into which regulators extend "extrapolated data." There are no valid epidemiologic or experimental data to support linearly extrapolated predictions of cancer resulting from low doses of radiation. (Proponents argue that some studies support this model, but they "capriciously misrepresent" the data in those studies and apply the linear hypothesis in an a priori fashion to make the data fit, ignoring data that does not.)
Contrary to what is perceived to be true, the actual truth is that ionizing radiation in low doses does not cause cancer (or genetic defects). It, in fact, has a beneficial effect on one's health. There are epidemiological studies and scientific data on health effects from low to moderate doses of ionizing radiation that show it decreases the risk of cancer. Government authorities and regulators - including the news media - ignore this data.
Americans are exposed to an average 200 mrem of natural and medical radiation per year. Natural background radiation comes from cosmic rays, isotopes of uranium and thorium in the bricks, plaster, and concrete of buildings, and radioactive potassium. Radioactive potassium in our bodies generates about 25 mrem of radiation per year - more than the EPA safety limit. It comes from potassium-40, a naturally occurring radioactive isotope of potassium. People that suffer from radiophobia and think that they would be better off without that source of radioactivity in their bodies can take comfort in knowing that organisms grown in the laboratory consuming only non-radioactive potassium-39, with no potassium-40 in their diet, develop severe growth defects. The radiation that potassium-40 in our cells provides is vital for our health.
People who live in Ramsar, Iran, a resort on the Caspian Sea, are exposed to natural background radiation of 79,000 mrem per year, 5,266 times more than what the EPA's 15-mrem/year radiation safety standard allows. The local river and its streams have a high concentration of radium, which is 15 times more radioactive than plutonium. Its 2,000 residents do not have an increased incidence of cancer, as the linear hypothesis would predict, and their life span is the same as that of other Iranians. Fortunately, for that resort, EPA regulations don't apply there, or to people in Guarapari, Brazil, who get 17,500 mrem of radiation per year with no ill effects.
One place with high background radiation where EPA regulations do apply is a park in Santa Fe, Fountainhead Rock Place. It has radioactive rock of volcanic origin that emits 760 mrem of gamma radiation, 14 times the allowed amount. Regulators, however, have chosen to make an exception here and have not closed the park off to the public.
A process known as radiation hormesis mediates its beneficial effect on health. Investigators have found that small doses of radiation have a stimulating and protective effect on cellular function. It stimulates immune system defenses, prevents oxidative DNA damage, and suppresses cancer.
Accordingly, atom bomb survivors in Nagasaki who received 1,000 to 19,000 mrem of radiation have had a lower incidence of cancer, especially with regard to leukemia and colon cancer, than the non-irradiated control population. And it is turning out that Japan's atom bomb survivors are living longer. They have a death rate after the age of 55 that is lower than matched Japanese people not exposed to radiation. (Don't expect to hear this on the evening news.)
Image: 30-Year Cancer Mortality in People Exposed to Radiation from Thermonuclear Test Explosions in the Former Soviet Union [ http://www.lewrockwell.com/miller/cancer-ratio.gif ]
Another important epidemiological study has tracked the cancer mortality in people exposed to radiation from a thermonuclear explosion in 1957 in the former Soviet Union (in the Eastern Urals). Investigators followed 8,000 people who lived in the area for the next 30 years. The group exposed to 12,000 mrem (120 mSv) had a substantially lower cancer mortality compared with a non-irradiated control group, exposed only to a normal 100 mrem of natural background radiation. The group that received a considerably higher dose of 50,000 mrem (500mSv) had a not quite as good but still statistically significant decrease in cancer mortality. The same thing is seen with shipyard workers. Those that work on nuclear powered ships have a lower mortality than non-nuclear workers. Investigators matched 29,000 nuclear workers (many received more than 5,000 mrem of radiation) with 33,000 non-nuclear workers. The linear hypothesis predicts that the non-nuclear workers will live longer. The hormesis model predicts, correctly, that just the opposite would happen.
The radiation hormesis model explains why residents of radon spa areas (in Japan, Germany, and central Europe) and people who live in homes that have high radon levels also have a decreased incidence of cancer. But perhaps the most impressive study that shows just how good low dose radiation can be for you is one just published in the (Spring 2004) Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.
[ http://www.lewrockwell.com/miller/cancer-radiation.gif ]
In Taiwan (in the early 1980s), 180 apartment buildings were built with recycled steel that was accidentally contaminated with Colbalt-60. The buildings' occupants, 4,000 people, lived in them for more than 10 years before their radioactive state was discovered. The amount of radiation they received ranged up to more than 1,500 mrem per year. (Colbalt-60 has a half-life of 5.3 years.) The cancer mortality, over a 20-year period, in the radiated occupants was 97 percent less (3.5 deaths per 100,000 person years) than that of the general population of Taiwan (116 deaths per 100,000 person years). Even the incidence of congenital heart malformations in the children they bore was reduced. This carefully done study shows, as its authors put it, that "chronic radiation [far above EPA limits] is an effective prophylaxis against cancer."
"Two of the leading scientists in this field who study radiation hormesis and have been instrumental in disproving the linear hypothesis, are Bernard Cohen, Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of Pittsburgh and Myron Pollycove, Emeritus Professor of Nuclear Medicine, University of California at San Francisco. I first learned about radiation hormesis from talks they gave at meetings of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (the doctors in this group include Ph.D. physicists, other Ph.D.s, and M.D.s). Their work stimulated me to study this subject. Most physicians, unfortunately, know little or nothing about radiation hormesis.
The EPA and NRC radiation regulations, in addition to their negative health benefit and the huge regulatory costs they incur, aid terrorists. If a terrorist detonates a "dirty bomb" - a conventional bomb wrapped with radioactive material - it will give off radiation that exceeds EPA and NRC public-exposure limits. But even the most potent dirty bomb wrapped with cobalt-60 will deliver only a few hundred mrem of radiation within a one-half mile radius of its detonation, an amount equivalent to the yearly dose those apartment dwellers in Taiwan got, which kept them from getting cancer - and in that park in Santa Fe. If federal authorities follow the EPA's 15 mrem/yr radiation limit, they will make people evacuate the city where the bomb goes off and shut the city down. That will be completely unnecessary, instill radiophobic hysteria, and serve only to further the terrorists' aims.
The citizens of Sacramento need to know that low to moderate doses of radiation are not harmful - and that there is even good evidence it improves health. People who are afraid of nuclear power plants need to know that nuclear power is in fact the safest and cleanest form of energy on the planet for producing electricity. That will be the subject of another article.
Donald Miller ( mailto:dwm@u.washington.edu%20 ) is a cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle and a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety of subjects for LewRockwell.com, including bioterrorism. His web site is http://www.donaldmiller.com.
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White House Undermined Chemical Tests, Report Says
April 2, 2004
New York Times
By ELIZABETH BECKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/02/business/02chemical.html
WASHINGTON, April 1 - A report released by a House committee on Thursday describes how the Bush administration worked with the United States chemical industry to undermine a European plan that would require all manufacturers to test industrial chemicals for their effect on public health before they were sold in Europe.
The administration had said publicly that the proposal last year would threaten the $20 billion in chemicals that the United States exports to Europe each year because the cost of testing would be prohibitive. Five years in the making, the proposal, which was revised and is still under consideration, would shift the burden to prove the safety of chemicals onto manufacturers instead of governments.
Behind the scenes, the administration was working with the chemical industry to devise a plan to undermine the proposal, according to e-mail messages and documents released in the report.
The Bush administration said the proposal was unsound science and an abuse of regulatory authority, a similar accusation leveled against Europe for its demand that genetically modified food be labeled as such before it is marketed.
European officials said the testing plan was necessary because of an increase in health problems like allergies and male infertility. The costs of cleaning up damage from chemicals like asbestos is already in the billions of dollars, they said.
The office of the United States trade representative asked the industry to develop themes the administration could use to discourage the European Union from adopting the new testing program, according to an e-mail message dated April 4, 2003, and obtained by the House investigator.
Catherine Novelli, the assistant United States trade representative for Europe, was cited in the e-mail message, which read: "At the last meeting, Cathy had tasked the industries to come up with 'themes' for their concerns about the proposed legislation. The chemical industry had done a list of themes dealing with the E.U. process."
Other e-mail messages describe the role of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, top Commerce Department officials and officials from the Environmental Protection Agency in lobbying European countries, singling out several countries, especially Sweden and Finland.
One e-mail message from the trade officials urged the chemical industry to "get to the Swedes and Finns and neutralize their environmental arguments."
Richard Mills, the spokesman for the United States trade representative, said Thursday that the administration estimated that "one million jobs are on the line - you're darned right we raised our concerns with the European Union."
"The regulations would not help the environment because they were unworkable," Mr. Mills said. "We want regulations that protect the environment and don't stifle U.S. jobs and economic growth."
The report, requested by Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, says that American environmental groups and the general public were kept out of the administration's closed discussions and strategy sessions.
"We were frozen out," said Joseph Digangi of the Environmental Health Fund, an advocacy group cited in the report. "The administration went directly to the U.S. chemical industry and adopted their position whole cloth."
Anthony Gooch, the spokesman for the European Commission in the United States, said of the report: "There would seem to be an inordinate weight given to only one side of a complex argument. Significant concerns about the environment and public health seem to be totally absent from their policy."
The lobbying efforts of the United States appear to have succeeded. The European Union revised the proposal, known as Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals, or Reach.
Five months after trade officials sent e-mail messages discussing how to persuade senior European officials to demand new cost-benefit analyses, France, Germany and Britain wrote to the president of the European Commission requesting a new assessment of the effects that the program would have on the industry.
The American Chemistry Council, a trade group, noted in its 2003 annual report that it had "rallied opposition to the draft proposal, including a major intervention by the U.S. government."
"The questions the U.S. government is raising about the global impact of Reach are perfectly sensible," said Greg Lebedev, the president and chief executive of the American Chemistry Council. "American companies have a stake in Europe as investors, manufacturers and suppliers."
Under current rules, about 99 percent of the total volume of chemicals sold on the markets have not been subjected to testing requirements.
One subject of the lobbying proposal was Margot Wallstrom, commissioner for the environment at the European Union. In an April e-mail message, an official of the trade representative said: "But who will take on Wallstrom - the answer is only other ministers or heads of state. The U.S.G. plans to send in our ambassadors to member states and commission to make our case."
Ms. Wallstrom said that the reform proposal was necessary because "there is no control whatsoever of the 400 million tons of chemicals sold in the European Union each year."
Mr. Powell sent several cables on the issue. In one, he warned that $8.8 billion in products were at risk of being banned or severely restricted under Europe's proposed system, a figure from a study by the chemistry council. His cables were sent to trading partners in Latin America and Asia as well as Europe to oppose the proposal.
The main chemical regulation in the United States is the 1976 Toxic Substance Control Act, which has been widely criticized for being weak and too deferential to industry. The vast majority of nonpesticide chemicals are not subject to any required screening before introduction here.
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WASA Violated Lead Law, EPA Says
Public Alert, Testing Called Inadequate
By David Nakamura and Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, April 2, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43246-2004Apr1.html
The D.C. Water and Sewer Authority violated federal law by failing to properly notify city residents of high lead levels in the drinking water and to adequately protect public health, regulators at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said yesterday.
In a letter to WASA General Manager Jerry N. Johnson, the EPA alleged that the agency failed to follow six requirements of the federal Lead and Copper Rule, which governs lead in drinking water.
The EPA cited WASA's failure to use federally mandated language in brochures and public service announcements and to undertake more water tests at homes where lead service pipes were replaced last year.
The EPA's letter represents the first official declaration by the federal government that local officials acted improperly. Jon M. Capacasa, water protection director in the EPA's Region III office in Philadelphia, which oversees the District, said the letter represents the initial findings of an audit the EPA started when the lead problem was revealed two months ago.
Capacasa sent a second letter to Johnson requesting additional documents and information. WASA, which can contest the findings, was given 21 days to respond. The EPA also threatened to fine WASA as much as $32,000 a day if the agency fails to produce the documents.
After reviewing WASA's response, the EPA will decide what action to take and could order the utility to improve communication, distribute more water filters and meet specific deadlines to address the lead problem, Capacasa said.
WASA spokeswoman Pat Wheeler said that the agency was reviewing the EPA correspondence and that officials were not ready to comment.
In the past two months, city and congressional leaders, as well as WASA officials, have argued over which agencies were responsible for not fully disclosing the lead problem. Although some officials have been critical of the way WASA and the D.C. Department of Health reacted to the discovery of the elevated lead contamination, those agencies have maintained that they followed EPA guidelines.
"I'm glad the EPA made this ruling," D.C. Council member Adrian M. Fenty (D-Ward 4) said. "It's further proof WASA was not following the law and looking out for the health of the citizens."
Paul Schwartz, a policy coordinator for Clean Water Action, said the findings were alarming.
"WASA was very well aware of the problem and purposely looked to obscure the public health problem," he said. "The biggest part of the problem is the coverup, and this is why we now have a lack of trust."
But the EPA's action was criticized yesterday by some city leaders, who said the federal agency has primary oversight of WASA and took too long to notice the violations, some of which took place in 2002.
"Where were you, EPA?" D.C. Council member Carol Schwartz (R-At Large) said yesterday at an oversight hearing attended by EPA officials. "Two years later you are like, 'Bad, bad, bad!' [But] are you going to cite yourselves for violations now?"
Thomas C. Voltaggio, Region III's deputy administrator, acknowledged at the hearing that "few people here wear a white hat."
WASA is a quasi-independent agency run by a board of directors made up of six D.C. representatives appointed by Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) and five chosen from Montgomery, Prince George's and Fairfax counties.
WASA officials first learned of lead problems during the 2001-02 testing period when about half of 53 houses showed water with lead levels that exceeded the federal limit of 15 parts per billion, which under the law required WASA to take action. Since then, tests on more than 5,000 additional homes have found water with excessive lead.
As required by federal law, WASA mailed notices to customers and made public service announcements about the lead problems. But in both cases, the agency failed to use federally mandated language, Capacasa said.
In a brochure sent in August 2003, WASA failed to say that the lead was found "in your drinking water" and that the levels were "significant," Capacasa said. In public service announcements in October 2002 and April and October 2003, WASA failed to call the lead "unhealthy" and to say how much it would cost for a water test. The agency also failed to make one of the required public service announcements, he said.
The EPA also said WASA failed to properly conduct follow-up water tests at some of the 398 houses where the agency had done partial replacements of lead service lines last year. Although WASA in many cases provided water testing kits to the residents, it did not follow up when the residents failed to send test samples back, Capacasa said. Research has shown that in many cases, lead levels rise if only a portion of the lead service line is replaced.
Of the 130,000 service lines in the city, about 23,000 are lead and the rest copper or brass, according to officials.
Internal records from EPA's Region III office show that some staff members appeared to believe that their agency had signed off on WASA's brochure. In an e-mail to colleagues Feb. 24, three weeks after the elevated lead levels became widely known, EPA outreach coordinator Larry Teller wrote that: "EPA must face the fact that WASA's inadequate outreach has been judged here as complying with agency regulations. How can this be?"
Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) said the EPA was missing "when we needed you most."
When an agency "knows of a violation and enforces the law only after the damage is done, you don't know whether to laugh or to cry," she said.
Tony Bullock, the mayor's spokesman, said the EPA's action was hypocritical. "Had they been enforcing the provisions of the law back in the fall of 2002, we would be that much farther along in solving this serious problem now," Bullock said.
But Capacasa stressed that WASA "has the responsibility to meet the regulations. People looking to us are missing that point."
Last month, the EPA ordered WASA to take several steps to help protect residents. For example, the EPA called on WASA to send water filters to all of the estimated 23,000 homes with lead service lines. WASA is complying.
But city leaders and environmentalists called on EPA to do more, such as requiring more water tests and extending a health advisory until the lead problem has abated.
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House GOP Blocks Testimony
Associated Press
Friday, April 2, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43284-2004Apr1.html
Republicans rejected Democratic efforts yesterday to force a White House adviser and the former Medicare chief to testify about their roles in keeping estimates of the cost of Medicare legislation from lawmakers.
Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee had sought to question the officials to learn whether the Bush administration intentionally withheld higher estimates of the bill's cost, fearing that the larger figure would sink the Medicare overhaul.
In party-line votes, the committee defeated proposals to subpoena Doug Badger, an economic adviser to President Bush, and Thomas A. Scully, who until December headed the federal agency that runs the Medicare program.
The White House, citing executive privilege, declined the committee's invitation to have Badger testify at a hearing yesterday. Scully declined in a letter to testify.
Republicans said Democrats were continuing an election-year assault on the Medicare prescription drug law.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Russian Parliament to Ease Proposed Ban on Demonstrations
April 2, 2004
By ERIN E. ARVEDLUND
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/02/international/europe/02CND-MOSC.html
MOSCOW, April 2 - After harsh criticism from civil rights and free-speech advocates, Russia's Parliament agreed today to amend a proposed law that would have banned demonstrations in most public places.
In its second reading of the bill, Russia's lower house will remove language from the initial version, which banned demonstrations outside government buildings, embassies and the offices of international organizations, as well as along main roads, railways and pipelines.
Boris Gryzlov, the leader of the pro-Kremlin party, United Russia, backed off of supporting the bill, which his party voted for on Wednesday.
Mr. Gryzlov, who is also a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin, said amendments would be introduced before the bill comes up for a second reading in the Parliament, or Duma. "The bill requires significant further work," he said on national television. "It will be amended before the second reading."
United Russia has controlled the Duma since elections last fall returned the legislative body to a one-party majority.
The International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights swiftly condemned the bill.
"This draft law represents a crude attempt to stifle public dissent," Dr. Aaron Rhodes, executive director of the federation, said in a statement issued Friday.
Mr. Gryzlov said, "The hottest public debate concerned the list of venues where demonstrations and pickets are banned, including outside government offices." He added that his party had "formally offered amendments excluding some venues from the list" and said a United Russia member of Parliament, Pavel Krasheninnikov, put forward an amendment on Thursday to change the original bill.
He pledged amendments that would no longer restrict any public events held outside buildings belonging to most executive buildings, except for the president's residence.
Alexander Yakovlev, the godfather of perestroika and former aide to Mikhail Gorbachev, said that "if that bill had passed as it was, we could say goodbye to democracy."
The initial bill was opposed by deputies from the Communist Party and two nationalist parties.
In Russia, legislative bills require at least three readings in Parliament before they can be passed into law, as well as the president's signature.
Russian authorities already required political gatherings and protests to obtain permits and advance permission, and police are generally quick to disperse unsanctioned demonstrations.
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Hong Kong Protesters Say China Is Trying to Stifle Democracy
April 2, 2004
By KEITH BRADSHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/02/international/asia/02HONG.html
HONG KONG, Friday, April 2 - Dressed mostly in black and holding white candles, a couple of thousand people held a vigil here Thursday night to protest Beijing's plans to restrict Hong Kong's movement toward greater democracy.
A series of speakers called for the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, China's Communist Party-controlled Parliament, not to proceed with its announced intention of reviewing and officially interpreting Hong Kong's laws on how residents here can choose their chief executive and lawmakers. The committee is scheduled to meet from Friday until Tuesday, and could issue its interpretation at any time during the meeting.
After the vigil, a crowd of mostly young protesters marched to the headquarters of Hong Kong's government and began a demonstration that, by police estimates, quickly grew to about 400 people. More than a dozen students entered an inner compound before being surrounded by police officers.
Joyce Ho, a student activist, said in an interview at the gate that the students only wanted to enter the compound to present a petition to Tung Chee-hwa, the chief executive.
But the police issued a statement just before midnight accusing some of the youths of having "forcibly" entered the compound. A police spokeswoman said Friday morning that the protesters were removed at dawn and two were arrested for assaulting police officers.
The confrontation was highly unusual by Hong Kong's placid standards, and it was another reminder that China faces simmering pressures for democracy along its periphery, including Taiwan.
Beijing used fairly gentle language toward Taiwan before and after presidential elections there on March 20, after sharp criticisms proved counterproductive in the past. But Beijing has taken a much tougher stand in recent weeks toward Hong Kong, which under the terms of its transfer from British to Chinese rule in 1997 was to enjoy a high degree of autonomy for 50 years. Chinese officials have questioned democracy advocates' patriotism toward China, while dismissing them as clowns, idiots and even traitors.
Organizers estimated that 3,000 people attended the vigil, but the crowd appeared smaller. The police said they had prepared an estimate but did not issue it.
Organizers and participants said bad weather might have depressed the turnout. The prospect of protesting against Beijing, not just the local government, may also have deterred many from joining the day's events.
Richard Tsoi, a pro-democracy candidate for Hong Kong's legislature, said he noticed that people would drop money into the organizers' donation box and then quickly leave, apparently leery of being identified.
Protesters against the Hong Kong government have been happy to give their names in marches drawing up to 500,000 people, but the vigil participants refused to do so, citing uncertainty about the future.
"It's so sad," said a man who identified himself as a retired electrical systems manager. "The freedom of speech gets narrower and narrower, day by day."
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