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NUCLEAR
THIS NUCLEAR AGE
Five dead in huge Ukraine arms depot blaze
Meltdown in Iraq
Indian army orders action against officers for faked battlefield valour
Iran Must Come Clean on Atomic Plans - UN Nuke Chief
Iran and IAEA Agree on Action Plan;
Iran Wants European, Russian Help to Enrich Uranium
Don't Just Trust, Verify - Dismantling North Korea's Nuclear Program
Israeli - U.S. Laser Downs Long - Range Missile in Test
Laser Downs Large Rocket Over N.M. Desert
FORMER GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS CALL MISSILE DEFENSE DEPLOYMENT "SHAM"
US lawmakers do not trust Iran, call on Russia
Russia vows to cooperate with Iran despite US call
Ukraine Arms Dump Blasts Hurl Shrapnel, Five Dead
Curb Nuclear Weapons Excess
Coddling the Nuclear Weapons Complex
New Security Weighed for Nuclear Sites
Statement of POGO on DOE's Nuclear Security Announcement
Feds prepare to boost nuclear sites' security
Radioactivity slipping past lab monitors
Livermore Lab safety problems reported
Udall letter wins some Rocky Flats document access
SRS to cut 140 jobs, fewer than expected
Jobs are key issue in Aiken County
Air monitors being added at Hanford waste plant
Health fears have workers at Hanford seeking answers
Provision Would Change Nuclear Waste Law
MILITARY
Six Soldiers Wounded in Afghan Taliban Attack
Thousands of Muslims Flee Nigeria Town After Attack
Sudan Blamed in 'Cleansing'
UN Finds Sudan's Darfur Region Scorched by Terror
Soviet arsenals a ticking time bomb: analysts
Pentagon Memo Warned on Army Contractors
Security Clearance Backlog Threatens U.S.
Navy Demos Future Warfare Strategy
Lockheed Martin Wins $5 Billion Joint Common Missile Deal
Lockheed Martin Offeres Two Open Architecture Capabilities For Aegis
Lockheed Martin Completes Major Milestone On AEHF Milstar
Gamble Brings Old Uniforms Back Into Style
'Real date for Iraq handover is January now'
U.S. Forces Take Key Building in Shiite Holy City
U.S. Troops in Heavy Fighting Around 2 Shiite Holy Cities
U.S. Forces Move on Outskirts of Najaf, Installing a Governor
Iraq Sunnis Host Sadr Followers in Show of Support
Chemical agent found in Iraq shell
Talks With Palestinian Officials to Resume
Saudi firms to dig 46 oil wells in southern Iraq
India-Pakistan ties showing marked improvement: Powell
Photos of Dead May Indicate Graver Abuse
Timeline of the Abuse Controversy
Israeli lessons for the US in Iraq
Briton Named to Top Spy Post Gave Disputed Iraq Arms Data
A Tangled Web: A History of CIA Complicity
Contractors in Sensitive Roles, Unchecked
Group: Whistle - Blowers Have Protections
Un-American activities
The Face of War
NATO posts ads warning war crimes suspects the noose is tightening
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Okla. Witness Places McVeigh With Others
Red Cross Says That for Months It Complained of Iraq Prison Abuses
Two Guards Disciplined at Guantanamo
Moussaoui Attorneys Seek Ruling By Full Court
Abuse Suit Focuses on a Guard Involved in Earlier Scandal
POLITICS
Lawmakers to Insist on Oversight of Iraq Money
Controllers' 9/11 Tape Destroyed, Report Says
Tape of Air Traffic Controllers Made on 9/11 Was Destroyed
Abuse sets off bitter review on Iraq
U.S. Faces Lasting Damage Abroad Moral High Ground Lost
Negroponte, Torture in Iraq, and PMCs
Bush Apologizes, Calls Abuse 'Stain' on Nation
Bush Apologizes for Abuse of Prisoners
Kerry Says Rumsfeld Must Go
ENERGY
Air Force Laboratory Selects Uni-Solar Ovonic For Solar Cells
OTHER
Reservoir to trim flow of acidic waste into Sacramento River
New Interpretation Of Satellite Data Supports Global Warming
Plastic Debris Found in Oceans
ACTIVISTS
Protesters Shout 'Fire Rumsfeld' During Committee Hearings
CODEPINK disrupts Rumsfeld hearing...FIRE HIM!
Rice Speaks to Mich. Grads Amid Protests
-------- NUCLEAR
THIS NUCLEAR AGE
Part 3: Iran, North Korea and proliferation
By Ritt Goldstein,
May 7, 2004
Asia Times
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FE07Ak05.html
In early February, the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, admitted that he was instrumental in the sale of nuclear weapons technology to Iran and Libya. America's top arms control official, John Bolton, outlined that the Pakistani network sold "technology for enriching uranium as well as warhead designs to Iran, North Korea and Libya", according to the San Francisco Chronicle. And concerns exist that the warhead blueprints may have gone considerably further.
Notably, the US Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports that Pakistani nuclear weapons cooperation with North Korea "accelerated in the 1990s". But in an amazing example of Bush administration spin, Bolton described the February revelations of the Pakistani operation as "a great intelligence success", arguing that the incident represented "an enormous victory", the Chronicle reported. And while the Bush administration has accepted Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf's assertions that Khan acted independently, a Washington coverup is widely understood.
US security and defense expert John Pike of Global Security observed for Asia Times Online: "Pakistan has been an extremely good partner to the US in the war on terrorism, because the US, to include the president of the US, has been prepared to lie publicly about their nuclear proliferation activities ... it was an established government [of Pakistan] policy."
A CRS report from March 11 notes that one account of events "states generals Musharraf, [Jehangir] Karamat and [Abdul ] Waheed knew of aid to North Korea when they were chiefs of the army staff". And two former Pakistani prime ministers' political parties have expressed concerns that Khan - who was immediately granted a pardon on his "confession" - is merely a handy scapegoat.
The CRS notes that Pakistan and North Korea have had a long cooperation on missile technology. CRS also questions whether a 1996 Pakistani foreign-currency crisis led the government to swap nuclear weapons technology, doing so in lieu of missile payments then allegedly due to Pyongyang. Moreover, while North Korea has never tested a nuclear device, the CRS cites "some reports" that in 1998 Pakistan tested a plutonium bomb for them.
Pike also spoke to this issue, noting that the detonation in question took place far from the site of Pakistan's first nuclear test, and that "sniffer planes" detected plutonium traces - the material North Korean weapons are said to use - and not the uranium with which Pakistani weapons are built. But cutting to what many perceive as the heart of such nuclear efforts, Pike noted: "Historically, states which have felt existential threats, states which feel they have a well-founded fear of regime change, have wanted to get the bomb." And the reasons for this are widely acknowledged.
US nuclear weapons and policy expert Joseph Cirincione, director for non-proliferation with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Asia Times Online: "Nuclear weapons are the only weapons in the world that could deter the US." Highlighting the validity of Cirincione's assertion, nuclear hawk C Paul Robinson, director of the US nuclear weapons complex of Sandia National Laboratories, told the National Journal: "Some people draw the lesson that the United States can be deterred by nuclear weapons, but not by chemical or biological ones. I can't argue with that conclusion."
In the same August 2003 National Journal interview, Robinson also said: "I disagree with people who infer that the NPT [nuclear non-proliferation treaty] is a real arms control treaty. It's not." By contrast, numerous US figures, including former president Jimmy Carter, are on record as both strongly endorsing the NPT and expressing strong concern regarding its future.
Between the US's "pressures" on one hand, and its treaty abrogation and avoidance on the other, administration critics believe the international structures which have limited nuclear proliferation are effectively being pulled apart.
In a now established pattern highlighting the Bush administration's commitment to its treaty obligations, it appears to have rescinded the NPT's so-called "negative assurance" to non-nuclear states, a guarantee that they would never face nuclear attack as long as they continued to renounce nuclear weaponry. And with Washington's Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) initiating the pursuit of new nuclear weapons, the US has clearly violated article six of the accord - its treaty obligation to continually move towards nuclear disarmament.
As early as 2001, the Observer from Britain christened international acts in this genre as "Big dog diplomacy". But the "big dog" has even been chewing up things at home.
Notably, in a reflection of the reasons underpinning the dangerously destabilizing erosion of US international credibility, the administration appears to have both substantively misled Congress and violated domestic legislation, with a recent CRS update even citing it for this.
But prior to the CRS findings, a sharply critical January letter to the agency responsible for nuclear weapons research and production - the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) - by the chairman and ranking member of the House of Representatives sub-committee overseeing their efforts - the sub-committee on energy and water development - charged that a drive to "charge forward with unrestricted efforts on advanced nuclear weapons concepts" is ongoing, despite Congressional limitations.
The NNSA's "bunker-busting" mini-nuke project, "RNEP", then spawned subsequent and very considerable CRS attention, with a April 9 CRS update highlighting quite wide Congressional concerns. "For many members [of Congress], the five-year cost of RNEP as presented in the FY2005 budget document came as a surprise not only in the amount, but also in what appeared to be an intent contrary to legislation," the CRS wrote. Demonstrating the Congress' level of reservation, in addition to House members, both Republican and Democratic senators' concerns were quoted by CRS.
In addressing his reservations with energy secretary Spencer Abraham, CRS quoted Senator Ted Kennedy as charging: "... you're rushing ahead with the nuclear weapons, including mini-nukes and the nuclear bunker busters. I'll give you a chance to be able to explain how this program [RNEP], which was $45 million two years ago is now up to almost $.5 billion." Other legislators voiced equally strong reservations, particularly regarding the manner in which the administration has pursued the nuclear "flexibility" advocated by the NPR.
As the BBC reported in August 2003, bunker-busting bombs "would fit well with President George W Bush's preference for a preemptive strike capability". But the price of such programs includes considerably more than dollars.
Numerous international security experts have warned of the potential for a new and global nuclear arms race. The Carnegie Endowment's Cirincione warned that if "the most powerful military nation in the world says it needs nuclear weapons for its national security, why don't other countries". He warned that not only America's "enemies", but its friends would be prompted to enter the nuclear race.
Emphasizing such concerns, Brazil recently made international headlines for refusing International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors access to a new facility for uranium enrichment. Notably, during his successful campaign for office, Brazil's widely respected and much acclaimed president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, pointedly noted: "If someone asks me to disarm and keep a slingshot while he comes at me with a cannon, what good does that do?" And while Brazil is not currently suspected of having a weapons program, the implications of the Bush administration's nuclear posture appear profound.
As regards Russia, executive director Daryl Kimball of the Washington-based Arms Control Association told Asia Times Online that "the US-Russian arms reduction process has, for all intents and purposes, halted". And a recent article in Izvestia quoted the deputy chief of the Russian general staff, Colonel General Yuri Baluyevsky, as warning: "We will be compelled to modify the development of our own strategic nuclear forces depending on Washington's plans."
Cirincione saw the administration's plans in terms of expanding militarism, saying: "They place their faith in maximizing US military strength, not in establishing international law or international norms", noting this was despite US interests lying in the firm establishment of both. Spain's new premier, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, had previously emphasized the same point, saying: "Terrorism is combated by the state of law ... That's what I think Europe and the international community have to debate." But some experts believe another kind of debate may be on the administration's agenda.
On April 6, the Wall Street Journal editorialized: "If warnings to Tehran from Washington don't impress them, perhaps some cruise missiles aimed at the Busheir nuclear site will." Concerns that Iran may have acquired the plans for a nuclear device appear to provide the true rationale behind such headlines, particularly as Iran is building a large uranium enrichment plant before it has reactors which could utilize that plant's nuclear fuel.
IAEA inspectors are reported to have questioned this sequence. And speculation exists that a US or Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear-related targets is possible in an effort to delay Iran's potential acquisition of sufficient fissile material for a weapon's construction. But Global Security's Pike noted that the difficulty in striking the most significant extent of any clandestine program would make such an effort ill advised. And the substantive political implications also argue against such a precipitous move; yet, some analysts have expressed concern.
Though a number of observers believe Iran may well be in the process of going nuclear, the majority believe any Iranian weapon would be for defensive purposes. "Clearly Iran's motivation is not to obliterate Israel, but to limit the ability of the US, or any foreign power, from coercing them," nuclear expert Christopher Paine of the Natural Resources Defense Council told Asia Times Online. But even defensive weapons could have implications.
Saudi Arabia is said to have helped fund Pakistan's nuclear program through discounts on its oil shipments. And according to Pike, "probably every even-numbered Pakistani bomb has a little sticker on it saying 'property of Saudi Arabia'," with the less than jocular implication being that should Iran go nuclear, the Saudis would do so simultaneously, long-standing differences between the two states spawning the move. Pike pointedly mentioned that Egypt would then want to join "the club", and a deadly regional nuclear arms race would be on. Pike noted that a similar situation exists in Asia, with North Korean weapons providing the seeds for an equally disturbing scenario there.
While it is widely acknowledged that US "pressures" have precipitated the current global volatility, many observers look to the November US elections, hoping for American "regime change" as the best avenue for renewed world stability.
Ritt Goldstein is an American investigative political journalist based in Stockholm. His work has appeared in broadsheets such as Australia's Sydney Morning Herald, Spain's El Mundo and Denmark's Politiken, as well as with the Inter Press Service (IPS), a global news agency.
Part 1: US neo-cons and war - May 5, 2004 http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FE05Aa01.html
Part 2: Preemption and an arms race with itself - May 6, 2004 http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FE06Aa01.html
-------- accidents and safety
Five dead in huge Ukraine arms depot blaze
(AFP)
May 07, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040507145036.zook5973.html
MELITOPOL, Ukraine At least five people died and nine were injured Friday when a fire at a Ukrainian military base set off a series of huge explosions that underscored the woeful state of the country's armed forces.
The fire hit a munitions depot storing various rockets that began to explode. Police evacuated at least 6,000 people from a 70 kilometer (42 mile) radius around the base in southeastern Ukraine.
Officials said they were unable to approach the site because of the explosions and the blaze could continue to burn for days. The blasts blew out windows and destroyed walls in surrounding villages and littered them with debris from various armaments.
"Such a fire cannot be put out just like that," said Defense Minister Evhen Marchuk.
He added neighbouring Russia was sending a specialist team to help and the United States, which is a major aid contributor to Ukraine, had also offered to help.
Medical officials in the region of Melitopol, the town near where the blasts occurred Thursday, said three of the dead were elderly people who had suffered heart failure after hearing the blasts.
The situation appeared to be turning more dire Friday when Grad installations that fire missiles with a range of 20 kilometers (12 miles) began to explode.
Even heavier missiles at site were not yet affected by the fire, officials said.
Officials stressed that the Zaporozhye nuclear plant several dozen kilometers away was safe.
Ukraine's head of the army chief of staff, Alexander Zatynaiko, said security services and the public prosecutor would launch an inquiry into the exact causes of the incident, amid speculation that the fire was set off by human error.
He added on UT-1 public television that no military personnel had died in the explosions. The defence ministry had earlier said a guard at the base had been killed.
The authorities said they had closed the railway line linking Moscow to the Crimea via Zaporozhye and halted road traffic through the area.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine inherited a total of 184 military arms depots from the Red Army. Most of the munitions were moved to a military base in Zaporijia, southeastern Ukraine.
In recent years, the Ukrainian armed forces have been hit by a series of accidents and mishaps which demonstrate the shoddy state of its military.
On October 10 last year, several thousand people were evacuated from their homes after a series of explosions ripped through a munitions dump at Artyomovsky in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.
The explosions, also caused by a fire, shattered the windows of several apartment blocks and scattered debris as far as four kilometres (2.5 miles) away but caused no casualties.
In another tragic accident, 78 people died when a combat jet crashed during landing at summer air show, ramming into a crowd of people.
A year earlier during military excercises, a Ukrainian missile accidentally shut down a Russian airliner flying from Israel over the Black Sea, killing all 78 people on board.
Ukrainian military analyst Sehei Zhurets estimated that Ukraine now has two million tonnes of munitions it inherited from the Soviet era, "a part of which are no longer in working condition and waiting to be destroyed.
But that is not happening because the military had no funds to do so, he said.
Ukraine has expressed an interest in joining NATO as it tries to move out of the sphere of influence of neighboring Russia, with which it has at-times uneasy relations.
But the Brussels-based alliance says Ukraine must first invest massive funds into reforming the military and updating its equipment to NATO standards.
NATO is also concerned about Ukraine's human rights record, and media rights.
-------- depleted uranium
Meltdown in Iraq
by George Hunsinger, Ph.D.
Hazel Thompson McCord Chair of Systematic Theology Princeton University
http://baltimorechronicle.com/050704Meltdown.shtml
What kind of people have we become? What will shake us from our culpable ignorance? MAY 6, 2004--One year after "Mission Accomplished" was proclaimed by President Bush, America may have lost the war in Iraq. Insurgency, instability and social chaos, the familiar problems dogging the occupation, were exacerbated in April by mutiny, collapsing authority and military deadlock. Then came the devastating revelations of atrocity--first in the brutal siege of Fallujah, then in the unspeakable photographs of torture from the Abu Ghraib prison. The occupation has reached the point of meltdown.
"We have failed," stated retired Gen. William E. Odom, currently director of the Hudson Institute, a pro-administration think-tank. In an interview which rocked the foreign policy establishment, Odom told the Wall Street Journal he had abandoned all hope for success in Iraq. Predicting a radical Islamist regime hostile to the West, one prepared to fund terrorist organizations, he called for the swift withdrawal of US forces. Otherwise Iraqis will be radicalized even further, he warned, risking the destabilization of the entire region.
"The issue is how high a price we're going to pay," Odom insisted, "less, by getting out sooner, or more, by getting out later." Any "continued US troop presence is a losing proposition. Once you've done a stupid thing, you don't fix it by keeping doing it. Our troops are exposed; we're going to take more casualties without any capacity of destroying the enemy. That's a losing proposition." Odom made his remarks before the Abu Ghraib photos were released.
The electrical system in Iraq has still not been repaired. Contrary to President Bush, electricity is not more widely available than before the war. Without the provision of electricity, clean water and sewage treatment also suffer. The New York Times reports that the hospitals are in ruins: "At Baghdad's Central Teaching Hospital for Children, gallons of raw sewage wash across the floors. The drinking water is contaminated. According to doctors, 80 percent of patients leave with infections they did not have when they arrived." In Baghdad the streets remain unsafe. Bombings, drive-by shootings, hostage-takings and a wave of assassinations continue. Other cities are safer, often at the price of theocratic rule. Meanwhile, the effects of depleted uranium throughout Iraq--the "silent genocide"--go unnoticed in America and undiscussed.
The guerillas are winning the war, in part because no segment of the population has turned against them. They have seized control of the roads, and disrupted the supply lines. "The main problem in Iraq today," writes military critic Carton Meyer, "is the massive logistics effort required to sustain U.S. Forces at over a hundred dispersed camps." Supplies arrive by ship, with the closest major seaport being in Kuwait. "This means everything must be hauled hundreds of miles over war-torn roads among hostile natives." Most convoys are attacked, supplies run short, ammunition is rationed, and the Army is stretched to the limit.
Fallujah is the graveyard of Americans! At the end of March this slogan was chanted by jubilant residents. It accompanied the charred corpses of four "foreign contractors" (highly paid mercenaries) that were dragged through the streets before being hanged from a bridge over the river Euphrates. By the end of April the slogan had grimly assumed a double aspect. For Fallujah, which will perhaps be remembered as the battle where, politically, America lost the war, also became a graveyard for hundreds of civilians killed in the retaliatory siege, which President Bush had personally ordered.
Although the coalition military denies any targeting of noncombatants, numerous eyewitness reports say otherwise. A young man named Ahmed is quoted by UPI: "The Americans have snuck snipers all over Fallujah and everyone can be hit any time. I have seen their snipers kill women and children. The hospital is full of their bodies, all shot in the heart or the head."
The Christian Science Monitor told of a mother who tried to run from an attacking U.S. Apache helicopter: "My children tried to run away and the helicopters chased them. Families were running through the streets....Windows were broken and many, many people were dead." Writing in the respected Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Orit Shoat summed up:
"During the first two weeks of [April], the American army committed war crimes in Fallujah on a scale unprecedented for this war....Some 600 Iraqis were killed during these two weeks [estimates are now at 800--G.H.], among them some 450 elderly people, women and children....According to the organization Doctors Without Borders, U.S. Marines even occupied the hospitals and prevented hundreds of the wounded from receiving medical treatment. Snipers fired from the rooftops at anyone who tried to approach."
Five-hundred-pound bombs were dropped on the city from US AC-130 gunships. So many dead needed to be buried that the soccer field became a makeshift graveyard, completely filled. Under the Geneva conventions, collective punishment is a war crime, as is the deliberate targeting of civilians.
The iconic image of the torture victim standing on a box, pointed black hood on his head, dangling high-voltage wires attached to his outstretched, Christ-like arms--this image, and the others equally horrifying, will be the pictures that lost the war. "Is it realistic," asks the University of Michigan's Juan Cole, "after the bloody siege of Fallujah and the Shiite uprising of early April, and in the wake of these revelations, to think that the US can still win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi Arab republic?"
Anyone who thinks that the U.S. military has never perpetrated or condoned torture on an administrative basis--in places like Vietnam, Latin and Central America, Iran under the Shah, or Afghanistan today--has not been paying attention (to say nothing of Guantanamo under our very noses).
"Our extensive research in Iraq suggests that this is not an isolated incident," writes Amnesty International of the Abu Ghraib revelations. "It is not enough for the U.S.A. to react only once images have hit the television screens." Nor is it enough to blame these unspeakable crimes on isolated individuals. In the New Yorker Seymour Hersh cites a lengthy internal army report on the prison. It found a pattern of "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses."
What kind of people have we become? What will shake us from our culpable ignorance? Will we continue to live in a fantasy land where our country is always inherently good, where people elsewhere have no reason to hate us, and where victory will be achieved only through military means?
"What the world expects of Christians" wrote Albert Camus, "is that Christians should speak out loud and clear--in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest human being. They should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today. The grouping that we need is a grouping of persons resolved to speak out clearly and pay up personally." May God help us before it is too late. George Hunsinger teaches at Princeton Theological Seminary. He once worked on the staff of the Riverside Church Disarmanent Program in NYC. He holds the Hazel Thompson McCord Professor of Systematic Theology. Dr. Hunsinger received a Ph.D. from Yale University. From 1997 to 2001, he directed Princeton Seminary's Center for Barth Studies. An ordained Presbyterian minister, he is particularly interested in the theology of Karl Barth, and is the author of Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth and How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology.
-------- india / pakistan
Indian army orders action against officers for faked battlefield valour
(AFP)
May 07, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040507152252.pbegrpco.html
NEW DELHI The Indian army has ordered action against officers of an elite regiment for faking acts of gallantry to grab military awards while deployed at a Kashmir troublespot last year, the defence ministry said Friday.
The ministry said an inquiry following a complaint in December had established that the Gurkha Rifles had invented acts of valour during their deployment last year atop the Siachen glacier.
"The inquiry blamed Major Surinder Singh for having faked killings of enemy personnel and destruction of enemy bunkers. Accordingly, disciplinary action was ordered to be initiated against Major Singh," the statement said.
It added that administrative action had also been ordered against the major's number two, Rohit Lama, and their battalion commander Colonel K.D. Singh. It did not elaborate.
The Hindustan Times newspaper Friday named Major Singh as the whistleblower, saying he had admitted that he and other Gurkha officers at Siachen staged fake battles, blew up self-built bunkers and made "enemy kills" allegedly on orders of Colonel Singh.
Major Singh said the commanding officer had told them to show "imagination and initiative in carrying out the acts", it said.
"A third of 50 claimed 'kills' on the glacier last year could be fakes," the newspaper said, adding that Major Singh videotaped one of his soldiers after he was ordered to pose as a dead Pakistani to add authenticity to the claims.
The paper said at one point Colonel Singh ordered the major to ensure out-of-focus video of the mock kills to back up claims of success.
It said Major Singh, who was injured in the destruction of a bogus Pakistani bunker, blew the whistle on the fake kills in December last year after a disagreement with his commanding officer.
The incidents occurred before rivals India and Pakistan enforced a border ceasefire in disputed Kashmir last November, including the heavily-militarised Siachen glacier.
Defence analysts said the scandal could put all military awards earned by soldiers during the three wars India fought with Pakistan and one with China since 1947 under the microscope.
But the defence ministry rejected the assertions.
"The system of awards and citations is absolutely foolproof and above board and there is no question of anyone receiving awards and citations on false claims and in this case ... as soon as the complaint was received, appropriate action was immediately initiated," the ministry statement said.
Armed forces sources said the ministry appeared to be trying to confine the blame to the whistleblower, who recently secured a stay from court on a move by the army to reassign him to a different unit as punishment.
"This looks like a terribly amateur attempt to bury a can of worms as some reports suggest that Major Singh was the whistleblower and not the culprit," one top-ranking source told AFP.
Indian and Pakistani forces face each other across the 6,300-metre (20,700-foot) high glacier and until the ceasefire the rival armies regularly fought or pounded each other's posts with rockets, mortar and artillery.
-------- iran / inspections
Iran Must Come Clean on Atomic Plans - UN Nuke Chief
Story by Joelle Diderich
REUTERS FRANCE:
May 7, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/25022/story.htm
PARIS - The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog warned Iran on Thursday the world would not wait forever for the Islamic republic to divulge the full extent and nature of its nuclear program.
"People have to be a little bit patient, but Iran also has to understand that the world is not going to wait forever for them to come clean," International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei told a foreign relations committee of French parliament.
Western diplomats who follow the IAEA have said the number of questions about Tehran's nuclear program was increasing.
"There is suspicion that things are not completely right," a European Union diplomat in Brussels told Reuters.
Iran says its nuclear program is intended solely for the peaceful generation of electricity.
But the United States says it is a front for building an atomic bomb and has called for the IAEA Board of Governors to report Iran to the U.N. Security Council for violating the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Such a move could result in sanctions.
France has joined forces with Germany and Britain in an initiative intended to avoid U.S.-style confrontations while encouraging Tehran to scrap its uranium enrichment program in exchange for a promise of peaceful nuclear technology.
Iran agreed to suspend its enrichment operations, which could be used to purify uranium for bombs, but says it will eventually restart the program.
In October, Iran gave the IAEA what it said was a full declaration of its atomic operations. But it omitted a number of research projects that could relate to a weapons program, such as advanced "P2" centrifuges that can make arms-grade uranium.
"I'm pretty confident there will be more revelations down the line," another diplomat said.
ElBaradei has called the P2 revelation a "setback" in Iran's cooperation with the agency, but used softer language in describing Iran's cooperation to French parliamentarians.
"There are still some hiccups in the cooperation, but overall I think we are moving in the right direction," he said.
A MONTH AWAY FROM THE BOMB
The IAEA has been investigating Iran's atomic program ever since a group of Iranian exiles broke the news in August 2002 that Tehran was hiding a massive uranium enrichment plant and a heavy-water plant. Iran later declared these to the IAEA.
ElBaradei has been calling for a change in NPT rules to prevent countries like Iran from developing the know-how to produce weapons-useable plutonium or highly enriched uranium.
"A country which has plutonium or highly enriched uranium is probably one month away in terms of capability of developing a nuclear weapon, should they decide to do that," ElBaradei said.
A French foreign ministry spokesman said ElBaradei would meet Foreign Minister Michel Barnier to discuss proliferation.
Iran, Libya and North Korea all shopped on a recently- uncovered black market run by the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, that skirted sanctions to supply sensitive atomic technology to interested buyers.
"We are running against the clock because we know that there's a lot of interest in nuclear and radioactive sources by extremist groups," ElBaradei said.
Diplomats and nuclear experts told Reuters that some members of the administration of President Bush believe they have strong evidence Syria has operating enrichment centrifuges, which it would have gotten from Khan's network.
(Additional reporting by Paul Hughes in Tehran, Paul Taylor in Brussels and Mark John in Paris)
----
Iran and IAEA Agree on Action Plan;
U.S., Europeans Not Satisfied
Paul Kerr,
May 7, 2004
Arms Control Association
http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_05/IranIAEA.asp
Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reached agreement in early April on an action plan to complete the agency's investigation of Iran's nuclear program. As a critical IAEA meeting approaches, however, Tehran's simultaneous decision to move forward with two nuclear projects seems likely to perpetuate international suspicions that Tehran is pursuing a nuclear weapons capability.
After meeting with senior Iranian officials in Tehran April 6, IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei reached an "agreement on a joint action plan with a timetable to deal with outstanding issues regarding the verification of Iran's nuclear program," according to an IAEA press release. ElBaradei suggested April 6 that the plan "will hopefully pave the way for progress." Among other steps, the plan calls for Iran to provide the IAEA with information about its centrifuge program by the end of April.
In May, ElBaradei is to present a report on Iran's progress. The IAEA Board of Governors will consider the results in June during what is widely seen as a crucial meeting.
The agreement marked the latest attempt to put a satisfactory end to a nearly two-year-old investigation into Iran's effort to acquire a nuclear fuel cycle. Last October, after months of hesitant cooperation, Iran struck a deal with Germany, France, and the United Kingdom in which it promised to cooperate with the IAEA's investigation, sign an additional protocol to its existing safeguards agreement with the IAEA, and suspend uranium-enrichment work. That same month, Iran provided the agency with what was supposed to be a complete declaration of all its nuclear activities.
Both Iran's declaration and the agency's investigation provided enough information for the board to adopt a resolution the following month condemning Iran's pursuit of undeclared nuclear activities in violation of its IAEA safeguards agreement. Such agreements commit states-parties to the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) to provide sufficient transparency in their nuclear activities to assure other member states that they are not diverting civilian nuclear activities to military purposes.
Moreover, a February report from ElBaradei said Iran omitted several nuclear activities from its October declaration. Prodded by this report, the board's March resolution called on Iran "to resolve all outstanding [nuclear] issues."
In particular, the resolution called on Iran to answer questions regarding traces of uranium found at two facilities associated with Iran's gas centrifuge-based uranium-enrichment program; Iran's experiments with a possible nuclear-weapon trigger; and the scope of Iran's uranium-enrichment programs. (See ACT, March 2004.)
As part of the April action plan, Iran has agreed to provide the agency with "detailed information regarding aspects of its centrifuge program" by the end of April. Gas centrifuges can be used to produce highly enriched uranium for use in nuclear weapons, as well as low-enriched uranium for use in civilian nuclear reactors. NPT states-parties are permitted to own uranium-enrichment facilities without restraint, but they are only supposed to operate these facilities under a safeguards agreement with the IAEA, which monitors the use of the equipment. The board already condemned Iran in November 2003 for secretly testing centrifuges with nuclear material-a violation of its safeguards agreement.
In a step designed to ease these concerns, Iran agreed in April to further comply with a key provision in its October pledge to the Europeans: suspending its uranium-enrichment activities. Mohammad Saeedi, an official from Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, told Reuters April 12 that Iran had stopped making centrifuge components 30 days before, thereby fulfilling a February pledge to the IAEA. ElBaradei's February report stated that Iran had suspended work on its centrifuge facilities but had continued to assemble some individual centrifuges and manufacture related components.
This month, Iran is also set to provide the IAEA with a fuller declaration of its nuclear-related activities. This declaration will be Tehran's first under its additional protocol to its IAEA safeguards agreement. The protocol requires Iran to declare significantly more nuclear-related activities than it would under its original safeguards agreement and provides the IAEA with more freedom to investigate any questions or inconsistencies. Since agreeing to conclude the protocol as part of its October deal with the Europeans, Iran has signed the agreement and has pledged to act as if it were in force until it is approved by the Majlis, Iran's parliament. (See ACT, January/February 2004.)
Upcoming Controversy Likely
Iranian Vice President Gholamreza Aghazadeh, head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, told reporters April 6 that "Iran strongly expects" its outstanding issues with the IAEA to be settled at the June board meeting. However, several recent Iranian actions seem likely to perpetuate controversy over its nuclear programs.
In particular, Iran's March decision to postpone for about two weeks an IAEA inspection scheduled for that month may impede the board's ability to render a definitive judgment about Iran's programs. A Department of State official told Arms Control Today April 20 that the postponement not only led to a two-week delay in agency inspections of civilian nuclear-related sites but also caused a significant delay in inspections of military facilities. As a consequence, the official said, samples taken from these sites may not be ready in time for the June board meeting. IAEA spokesperson Melissa Fleming confirmed the next day that samples "taken during recent inspections might not be available" in time for the report.
Inspecting military sites is important to the IAEA's investigation because seven of the 13 Iranian "workshops" involved in producing centrifuge components are located on military sites, according to a March 30 agency document. IAEA inspectors visited one military facility in January, agency officials said.
Two other decisions from Tehran also seem certain to raise questions about its nuclear intentions. The State Department official said that Iran announced it will start construction on a heavy-water nuclear reactor in June, terming the decision a "deeply troubling move." Tehran had previously announced its plans to construct the reactor sometime in 2004 at Arak. (See ACT, December 2003.) U.S. officials fear the reactor might be part of a nuclear weapons program because it is too small to contribute significantly to a civilian energy program but could generate plutonium for reprocessing into fissile material. Iran claims the reactor is for producing isotopes for civilian purposes and that its size is appropriate for that purpose.
Tehran also caused a stir when, according to Agence France Presse, Aghazadeh announced March 28 on state television that Iran would begin "experimental production" in April at its uranium-conversion facility at Isfahan. The facility can convert uranium oxide into uranium hexafluoride-the feedstock for centrifuges. Iran announced the facility's completion in March 2003.
This is not the first time that the Isfahan facility has been the subject of controversy. The IAEA board said in its November resolution that Iran violated its safeguards agreement by failing to report nuclear experiments at the facility, in much the same way it failed to report similar activity related to its uranium-enrichment program.
An Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson told reporters April 5 that Tehran only intends to produce uranium tetrafluoride-an intermediate step for producing uranium hexafluoride-at the facility, which IAEA inspectors visited in March. IAEA officials said that Iran had given prior notice to the agency that it would begin uranium conversion in March, adding that these "conversion activities" do not violate Iran's October agreement to suspend its enrichment activities.
The State Department official said, however, that Washington believes Iran should be proscribed from conducting any conversion activities related to uranium hexafluoride production, including producing uranium tetrafluoride.
Iran's European interlocutors also expressed their irritation at Tehran's decision. On March 31, the British, French, and German governments stated that the "announcement sends the wrong signal about Iranian willingness to implement a suspension of nuclear enrichment-related activities."
According to Agence France Presse, French President Jacques Chirac emphasized during an April 21 meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi that Tehran should continue to cooperate with the IAEA. A French Foreign Ministry spokesperson stressed April 20 that Iran needs to provide "confidence" that it is complying with its NPT obligations in order to receive cooperation on civilian nuclear power-another component of the October agreement.
U.S. officials have been dismissive of Tehran's claims of cooperation and have argued that Iran is likely trying to hide aspects of its centrifuge and other nuclear programs, a charge Tehran has repeatedly denied.
"The delay in allowing inspectors into the country, the announcement about Isfahan, I think are further indications that Iran has still not made a strategic determination to surrender its nuclear program," said Mitchell Reiss, State Department director of policy planning, in an April 9 interview with Arms Control Today. "What we appear to be seeing are tactical maneuvers to do as little as possible to avoid censure."
Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton went so far as to say that "Iran is lying" at an annual meeting of NPT states-parties in New York.
"It is clear that the primary role of Iran's 'nuclear power' program is to serve as a cover and a pretext for the import of nuclear technology and expertise that can be used to support nuclear weapons development," Bolton said April 27.
Still, the June meeting appears unlikely to produce either Washington's or Tehran's preferred outcomes. Although Iran may not get the clean bill of health it desires, the United States may also be unable to provide sufficient proof to convince other countries to find Iran in noncompliance with its obligations under the NPT. Such a finding requires the board to refer the matter to the UN Security Council.
A State Department official argued June 20 that the lack of full sampling results from the military sites will make it more difficult for Washington to push the board to take "the strongest possible response" at the June meeting, adding that U.S. leverage will largely depend on the "tone and substance" of ElBaradei's report. Washington may encourage the IAEA board to say it "cannot verify" Iran's suspension of its centrifuge program because of the country's demonstrated ability to manufacture relevant components at various locations throughout the country, the official said.
Whether Washington will push for the board to find Iran in noncompliance is unclear. The United States not only failed to persuade the board to adopt such a stance in its November resolution, it did not even attempt to do so during the debate over the March resolution.
----
Iran Wants European, Russian Help to Enrich Uranium
May 7, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-iran.html
TEHRAN, Iran (Reuters) - Iran wants to team up with European states and Russia to produce enriched uranium, hoping that by involving them it can remove fears that it is developing nuclear arms, a senior official was quoted as saying Friday.
``Europeans are concerned about Iran's uranium enrichment program and feel distrustful toward it,'' Hossein Mousavian, secretary of the foreign policy committee of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, told Russia's Itar-Tass news agency.
Iran says it wants to produce enriched uranium as fuel for nuclear power reactors. But many Western countries fear Iran could use the technology to make bomb-grade material and the United States says it has a secret atomic weapons program.
Iran and Europe ``should jointly build trustful relations, including joint uranium enrichment programs,'' Mousavian said, adding that he planned to raise the idea with Britain, Germany and France in the next two to three weeks.
``We could, for example, start talking about setting up a consortium, which would include European countries and Russia, to work together on this program.''
An official at Russia's Atomic Energy Agency, who declined to be named, was skeptical about the proposal. ``Of course this is not necessarily just political chit-chat by the Iranian side at a time when their nuclear program is under so much scrutiny,'' he said.'' But we see it as something rather unlikely to happen, at least in the near future.''
Under intense international pressure after revelations it has hidden sensitive nuclear research from the world for 18 years, Iran last year agreed to allow snap inspections of its nuclear plants and suspend uranium enrichment activities.
But Tehran insists it will not abandon its enrichment program and plans to restart it once doubts about its nuclear plans have been cleared up.
IRAN CONFIDENT ABOUT IAEA MEETING
The Foreign Ministry said Iran was confident of escaping censure at next month's U.N. nuclear watchdog board meeting.
``I am optimistic about the results of the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) next meeting,'' the official IRNA news agency quoted spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi as saying.
``Iran will definitely not be condemned in the next meeting, because Iran has been cooperating with the agency transparently.''
But several Western diplomats in Vienna said they expected IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei to say Tehran had not been cooperating fully with the agency in the June report on Iran.
``This would require a strong resolution by the IAEA board,'' one diplomat said.
ElBaradei warned Iran Thursday the world would not wait forever for the Islamic republic to divulge the full extent and nature of its nuclear program.
Doubts remain about Iran's assurances of peaceful intentions, but diplomats privately acknowledge they have not found any ``smoking gun'' proving Iran wants atomic weapons.
``We have suspicions but no evidence and we're running out of leads to follow up,'' one said.
Another diplomat said even Washington acknowledged there was no prospect of the IAEA board sending Iran's case to the U.N. Security Council in June for possible sanctions.
-------- korea
Don't Just Trust, Verify - Dismantling North Korea's Nuclear Program
Lew Kwang-chul,
May 7, 2004
Arms Control Association
http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_05/Lew.asp
February's second round of six-party talks in Beijing aimed at ending North Korea's nuclear program produced considerable progress on establishing a process and framework for future talks. However, no gains were made in narrowing the substantive differences that still divide Pyongyang from the other participants, most notably the United States.
The participants adopted a Chinese-drafted Chairman's Statement and agreed to hold the next round of talks no later than the end of June and to form a working group to prepare for the plenary. If implemented, this would constitute an important step toward the institutionalization and continuation of the six-party negotiations process. The parties also agreed upon key principles such as the need for a nuclear-weapon-free Korean Peninsula and for peaceful coexistence on the peninsula. Since a nuclear-weapon-free Korean Peninsula would be conditioned upon the denuclearization of North Korea, the inclusion of this principle conveys North Korea's willingness to continue dialogue on the ways and means of dismantling its nuclear weapons program. Meanwhile, the term "peaceful coexistence" implies that the United States could be willing to provide the security assurances that the North has been persistently pursuing.
Although the meeting proceeded in a serious and cool-minded manner without the tension of the prior meetings, no agreement was reached in any substantive area. In particular, South Korea made a seemingly reasonable proposal for freezing and later dismantling the North's nuclear program in exchange for energy aid. However, this proposal neither persuaded North Korea to admit its possession of a uranium-enrichment program-a key U.S. concern-nor discouraged Pyongyang from insisting on the retention of a peaceful nuclear program for the purpose of generating electricity.
As has been stated countless times from all sides, the ultimate goal of any nuclear settlement should be for North Korea to dismantle the entirety of its nuclear program in a "complete, irreversible, and verifiable"[1] manner. Of these three catchwords, "verifiable" is the most important and the most contentious term because the United States and other nations will have no confidence in any unverifiable agreement or process that claims to dismantle Pyongyang's nuclear program completely and irreversibly.
Yet, the development of a successful verification regime will be a formidable balancing act testing all of the parties' political and diplomatic skills. Given the sensitive nature of the verification activities, the North will be reluctant to agree on many measures deemed necessary to achieve an effective verification system. The process of demystifying the nuclear puzzle of North Korea and deterring any chance of recurrence of the issue while securing general acceptance by the North Korean side will require a high degree of political sensitivity as well as technical sophistication.
Verifying disarmament and nonproliferation agreements has never been easy. Such efforts include the failures of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to detect Iran's and Libya's nuclear programs and the mixed record of UN inspections in Iraq (although that is looking more impressive by the day).[2] Nonetheless, verification is an important and indispensable process. Had the IAEA not been allowed to conduct an initial inspection in North Korea in 1992, the North Korean nuclear program would not have been revealed at that time. In the case of South Africa, the willingness of the South African authorities to cooperate fully with IAEA inspectors resulted in a verification success story. From these experiences, we have learned that levels of voluntary cooperation and willingness to provide transparency on the part of the government in question often determine whether the general course of verification will be rough or smooth, controversial or successful.
When it comes to the verification of the North Korean nuclear program, the primary problem lies in the fact that the rest of the world is no longer willing to trust North Korea. Pyongyang has already twice cheated the international community and the IAEA. It prompted the first North Korean nuclear crisis a decade ago when IAEA inspections revealed that it had secretly extracted plutonium from the spent fuel in a experimental 5-megawatt reactor. Its second act of cheating-a secret program to develop highly enriched uranium (HEU)-was undertaken in an even more brazen manner. Despite the North's solemn commitment under the 1994 Agreed Framework with the United States to relinquish its nuclear program in return for the two light-water reactors (LWRs), North Korea has since clandestinely pursued the HEU program. In fact, the North is believed to have begun its HEU program in 1998, which implies that it must have been steadily and stealthily developing this capability throughout the first ever summit meeting between the two Koreas in 2001 and the acts of apparent cooperation that followed.
Objectives and Scope of Verification
The two primary objectives of verification are to confirm beyond a doubt the dismantling of all of North Korea's nuclear weapons development programs and to verify the correctness and completeness of North Korea's declarations of its nuclear materials, facilities, and activities. For these purposes, a credible verification system must be constructed on the basis of such concepts as intrusiveness, unconditional and unrestricted access, and continuity, inter alia. Verification will require that the whole spectrum of issues related to the nuclear weapons development program be addressed, including enrichment and reprocessing activities, weapons and weaponization capabilities, and undeclared nuclear facilities, in addition to the normal fuel-cycle-related nuclear activities, materials, and facilities that were largely contained in the initial declaration provided by the North.[3]
Underscoring the concept of inspections "any time, any place,"[4] the crux of the Additional Protocol to the IAEA safeguards system, the inspections in North Korea should be virtually unlimited in terms of place and time. Moreover, there should be no limits made on the duration and number of inspections. Realistically speaking, some compromises will be unavoidable, particularly with respect to the visits to sensitive areas and facilities. Such compromises, however, cannot be made at the expense of the verification objectives themselves.
Moreover, unimpeded access to all nuclear programs, facilities, activities, and materials in North Korea must be guaranteed. Unlimited access would encompass on-site inspections and environmental sampling as well as the use of already established measures such as the accounting of nuclear materials, the installation of surveillance cameras, and the placing of seals. Furthermore, effective verification will require a full compilation and analysis of the information gathered through international and national technical means, including human intelligence and satellite information.[5] Thus, the right to unimpeded access should be a prerequisite of an efficient system of verification.
In order to ensure the irreversibility of the dismantled nuclear program and to prevent its redevelopment, there should be a guarantee that allows for the continuation of inspections whenever suspicions arise about the renewal of the nuclear program until a final and complete settlement has been reached.
From a technical perspective, positive verification is significantly less difficult to attain than negative verification. Although it should be relatively less complicated to verify positively the correctness of the North's declaration on nuclear facilities, materials, and activities, it will prove much more difficult to verify negatively the completeness of its declaration by determining that no additional facilities, materials, and activities have gone undeclared. Thus, it will likely be the results of the negative verification in North Korea that determine the success of the verification on the whole.
Ultimately, though, it will be the outcome rather than the architecture of the verification process that will matter. A well-constructed verification system that produces only half-satisfactory results is not preferable to a less well-organized verification system under which more satisfactory results are attained.[6]
Modality of Verification
The question of who should perform the verification activities in North Korea is a matter of great sensitivity. It is not yet certain whether the modality of verification will be determined at the six-party talks or if a separate negotiation will be necessary. Because verification is a two-way process between the inspectors and the inspected, a successful and efficient verification cannot be achieved without the voluntary cooperation and transparency of the inspected nation. Therefore, the creation of a verification regime that is likely to ensure the North's cooperation and transparency is no less important an issue than determining what must be verified.
It can hardly be expected that North Korea will grant the members of the verification regime its unconditional good faith. The deeply embedded distrust between North Korea and the international community, particularly the United States, will likely be a stumbling block in the initial phase of the verification process. In addition, the North has largely regarded the IAEA as representing the interests of the United States and other Western countries.[7] Thus, various types of verification regimes are being considered, each with its own advantages and disadvantages.
First, bilateral verification under U.S. leadership exists as a practical option and has been suggested by knowledgeable experts such as former U.S. negotiator Charles L. "Jack" Pritchard.[8] Based on the exercise undertaken in Kumchangri in May 1999, quick and effective verification is with the full cooperation of North Korean authorities. On the other hand, if the insufficient cooperation of the North were to collide with the intrusiveness of U.S. inspections, the whole process of verification could fall into a stalemate and increase mistrust. There is also the possibility that friction during inspections could snowball unnecessarily due to the intrusion of domestic politics into the matter. Furthermore, the exclusion of the IAEA from the verification process would weaken the objectivity and credibility of the verification outcome and set a bad precedent for the international nonproliferation regime.
Second, another option is a trilateral verification group composed of the United States, South Korea, and Japan or a multilateral verification group that could also include China and Russia or the European Union. Allowing for the mediation of China and Russia or the EU should problems arise, such a system would help make the implementation of the agreement more smoother and less troublesome. In particular, China, having already played an important role in the process of establishing the multilateral dialogue, may be in a position to assume a similarly pivotal role during the verification process.
Moreover, it would make sense to have all members of the six-party talks participate in verification. Many believe that the more nations that are engaged in the process of verification, the more that the objectivity and credibility of the verification results will be enhanced. On the other hand, an augmented number of participants could slow preparation, implementation, analysis, and decision-making. In particular, the verification process would bear the additional burden of coordination of viewpoints on important questions.
Ideally, the IAEA, as the international nuclear verification organization, should play a central role in the verification process in order to enhance the objectivity and credibility of the process. Indeed, given its unique global role in verification it might be expected to carry out such inspections independently. This course might not be possible, however, given that the relationship between Pyongyang and the IAEA has generally been characterized by distrust and animosity.
Those relations first deteriorated when IAEA inspectors in 1992 discovered discrepancies between the North's declaration of its nuclear material and facilities and the IAEA's own measurements. The crisis, which escalated to the point in 1994 where North Korea threatened withdrawal from the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), was ultimately defused by the Agreed Framework. Under that accord, the IAEA conducted 17 technical consultations with North Korea on issues related to monitoring of the frozen nuclear facilities and activities and the continued implementation of its IAEA safeguards agreement. However, the consultations did not lead to any serious movement toward allowing IAEA inspectors access to nuclear material that would help resolve the discrepancies, and the full implementation of the safeguards agreement was largely postponed. Additionally, after a new nuclear crisis erupted in October 2002, North Korea ejected IAEA inspectors from its territory and later announced its withdrawal from the NPT.
Still, there are several ways in which the IAEA can play its due role in the verification process in North Korea, particularly in concert with interested countries. If the verification were to involve bilateral, trilateral, or multilateral inspections, different tasks could be divided between the IAEA and other participants. Still, given the lingering distrust between the IAEA and North Korea, the international agency would first require the full implementation of the Safeguards Agreement and the conclusion of an additional protocol. Before returning to North Korea, the IAEA would certainly demand that a clear-cut mandate be spelled out and that it be granted free access to information, relevant personnel, and appropriate sites.
Some experts have proposed a new regional verification institution, that would include the IAEA and all members of the six-party talks, including North Korea. John Olsen of Sandia National Laboratories has suggested the establishment of a verification institution with the participation of the seven relevant parties concerned. Such an institution could prove useful, Olson wrote, assuming that any agreement on ending North Korea's nuclear program came as part of a broader "Grand Bargain" that also addresses U.S. and allied concerns about chemical, missile, and conventional force issues and offers Pyongyang security guarantees and substantial economic aid.[9]
Conclusion
The key to successful verification of the dismantlement of the North Korean nuclear program depends primarily on determining how best to construct an effective and intrusive verification system that would achieve the goal of complete, accurate, and credible verification. Undoubtedly, many difficulties are likely to emerge when detailed discussions take place about the objects of inspection, the scope and frequency of access to the facilities, the formation and operation of the inspection teams, the use of inspection equipment, and the settlement of disputes. It will be possible to resolve some of these difficulties through compromise, but compromises can only be made if they do not impinge upon the fundamental objectives of verification.
With regard to the mode of verification, a parallel approach that utilizes both the IAEA and bilateral, trilateral, or multilateral inspections teams seems to be the most realistic. The North Korean nuclear issue is comprised of regional and global characteristics. Not only has North Korea defied the global regimes through its violation of the terms of the NPT and IAEA safeguards agreements, but it has refused to comply with its regional obligations under the Agreed Framework and the Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Therefore, it would be logical to mobilize both regional and global resources and expertise in order to complete the process of verification in North Korea.
A regional approach through mutual agreement and consent can often be a powerful and effective instrument for attaining the goal of denuclearization and nonproliferation through an established verification system as long as the political environment remains favorable. By contrast, an international approach in which multiple players operate under a more elaborate decision-making process could become less effective and more intrusive if it tends to seek compromises to mediate disagreements.[10]
Still, the IAEA, in addition to the fulfillment of its obligations as a global verification organization, can play an important role even in bilateral and regional verification activities, as seen in its involvement in the Brazilian-Argentine Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials (ABACC), several nuclear-weapon-free-zone agreements11 and the voluntary dismantlement of nuclear weapons in South Africa in 1993.
A similar division of labor for verification activities might make sense in North Korea given the shifting nature of the "North Korean nuclear problem." One of the primary objectives of the Agreed Framework was to confirm the North's past nuclear activities. Since then, however, the nuclear issue has become increasingly diversified, grave, and urgent. A logical sharing of responsibilities might have the IAEA perform those verification tasks that already fall under its NPT mandate, while the bilateral, trilateral, or multilateral verification teams could be tasked with the verification activities that extend beyond the NPT mandate. Furthermore, the verification tasks could be divided in accordance with the time frame of the nuclear issue.
Arguably, verifying the North's past nuclear activities should be the IAEA's primary domain because most of the relevant tasks fall under the obligations of the safeguards agreement. The IAEA was in pursuit of this same goal until the second nuclear crisis broke out in October 2002 and brought the entire process to a halt. Presumably, this task has become much more difficult as the records of the operating history and the relevant information on the flow of fissile materials have been mooted by the reopening of the 5-megawatt reactor and the reactivation of the radiochemical laboratory. If such a path is chosen, consideration should be given to a new UN Security Council resolution giving the IAEA a broader mandate than its previously limited authority.
On the other hand, the verification of the new elements, including the HEU program, will likely require a different set of expertise and technical skill and should thus be addressed from a different angle. Against this backdrop, it may be practical to task the bilateral or multilateral teams with the verification of the elements that emerged after October 2002 and to leave the verification of past activities and other matters to the IAEA.
No matter who carries out inspections, however, the verification of the North Korean nuclear program must not become a game of Iraq-style hide and seek. The verification process should be practical and reasonable and must proceed with clear-cut goals and instructions. The large stakes here dictate that any manageable disputes must not be allowed to disrupt the process and, as a result, destabilize the Korean Peninsula as well as all of Northeast Asia. It is crucial that the issue be resolved in a clear, straightforward, and timely manner.
NOTES
1. Key countries such as the United States, the Republic of Korea, and Japan seem to be in line with their demands for a "complete, irreversible, and verifiable" dismantlement of North Korea's nuclear program as a prerequisite for the resolution of the nuclear issue.
2. As David Kay recently stated in an interview, the Iraqis greatly feared inspections and monitoring. He went on to say that "we were looking at the difficulty that the inspectors had in operating, whereas the Iraqis were looking at the effectiveness the inspectors were achieving even with those limitations." With regard to the issue of incomplete truth about the weapons of mass destruction, Kay finds fault with the Iraqis' consistent and widespread lying, arguing that it was not due to any fault of UNSCOM or UNMOVIC. "Searching for The Truth About Iraq's WMD: An Interview With David Kay," Arms Control Today, April 2004.
3. Kenneth Boutin, "North Korea: the challenge of verifying a moving target," in Verification Yearbook 2003, Vertic, p.71.
4. The Additional Protocol regime provides the IAEA with complementary or pre-approved access to any location specified by the agency. By accepting the Additional Protocol, states guarantee the IAEA access on short notice to all of their declared and undeclared facilities. In addition, the agency's ability to conduct short-notice inspections has increased through facilitation of the visa process for inspectors.
5. See Ephraim Asculai, Verification Revisited: The Nuclear Case (Washington, DC: Institute for Science and International Security, 2002), p. 74.
6. Ibid., p. 59.
7. Kenneth Boutin, ibid., p.76.
8. See "Former Negotiator Warns Bush: Last Chance For Diplomacy With North Korea," Arms Control Today, Nov. 2003.
9. See John Olsen, "Regional Verification of a Denuclearized Korean Peninsula: A Strategy for Success After the Current Impasse Is Overcome," CMC Paper, September 2003, p. 1.
10. Asculai, Verification Revisited, p. 55.
11. Under the Quadripartite Agreement between Brazil, Argentina, the IAEA and the Brazilian-Argentine Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials, Brazil and Argentina agreed to accept international safeguards for all nuclear materials and all nuclear activities in order to ensure that these materials were not used in nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices. ABACC and the IAEA work together when compatible safeguards criteria are issued by both agencies. Similarly, the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) safeguards are coordinated with those safeguards applied by the IAEA under tripartite agreements concluded between the Member States, the Community and the IAEA. The EU is the only regional group with a regional safeguards system (under which the Euratom Safeguards Agency controls all nuclear materials and the IAEA only verifies the Euratom inspections).
Verification Priorities for Disarming North Korea
Verification will mean more than freezing and eventually dismantling North Korea's active nuclear weapons program. It will also mean finally accounting for its past nuclear activities. Further, since October 2002, more and more elements have been added to the already vexing list of objects that require inspection. The following constitute the prioritized list for the process of verification, throughout which emphasis should be given to those facilities with a higher risk of proliferation and those activities more closely related to weapons development.
1) Nuclear Weapons Possession & Development
If North Korea already possesses nuclear weapons and a weapons development program, the foremost task would be to verify its dismantlement and to take the necessary measures to prevent the use of any fissile material to produce nuclear weapons.
2) Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) Program
The HEU program, which was revealed in October 2002 and ignited the recent nuclear crisis, must be completely dismantled and verified. The HEU program was the most controversial and significant issue discussed at the second round of six-party talks. Although Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan's confession regarding the transfer of centrifuge equipment and technology to North Korea1 has provided the international community with more concrete evidence about its existence, Pyongyang is still denying its possession of such a program. Although the Agreed Framework was basically an exchange of the North's plutonium program for LWRs, any new framework emerging from the six-party talks is expected to be largely a trade-off of the HEU program for energy assistance. Thus, until North Korea admits to possessing the HEU program, no progress can be made in the negotiations.
By nature, uranium-enrichment facilities are relatively easy to conceal and difficult to detect. A cascade of 8,000 gas centrifuges, which can produce enough HEU for four nuclear bombs annually, can be installed in a space as small as 60 meters by 60 meters.2 It is thus difficult to detect enrichment through satellites without accurate intelligence. Even if on-site inspections are permitted, it would still be difficult to detect all enrichment facilities without the full and honest cooperation of North Korea. Therefore, until trust is re-established on both sides, it will not be possible to conduct a satisfactory and complete verification. However, the recent findings on HEU cooperation between Pakistan and North Korea may be able to help the inspectors fulfill their verification activities in broader terms while working against North Korea's attempts to conceal a part or whole of the HEU program. The recent verification experiences concerning HEU programs in Libya and Iran will also be helpful to the inspection team both in political and technical aspects of the verification process.
There is an indisputable need to confirm HEU production thus far and, if confirmed, to take all necessary measures to dispose of the material, including the shipment of any such material out of North Korea. In addition, it will be imperative for the international community to determine exactly how Pyongyang obtained the components and equipment used in the construction of centrifuges.
3) Reprocessing Facility and 8,000 Spent Fuel Rods
It is of paramount importance to trace the whereabouts of the spent fuel rods that were stored under the pool of the 5-megawatt reactor. The unofficial U.S. delegation that visited the storage site in Yongbyon in January reported that all 8,000 spent fuel rods have been removed.3 However, it is not yet clear to where the spent fuel rods have been moved and whether all of them have been reprocessed. Therefore, it is imperative to inspect the radiochemical laboratory that serves as a reprocessing facility; to identify the whereabouts of the spent fuel rods; and to determine whether any plutonium has been produced through the reprocessing of spent fuel and, if confirmed, to take all necessary measures to dispose of the material, including the shipment of any such material out of North Korea.
4) Five-Megawatt Reactor
There is a need to inspect the 5-megawatt reactor that began operating again as of January 2003, in order to check the current status and the degree of the burning of its fuel rods.
5) Past Nuclear Development
There is a need to confirm the amount of plutonium that is presumed to have been produced before 1992 and, when confirmed, to take all necessary measures to dispose of the material, including the shipment of any such material out of North Korea.
6) Freezing Nuclear Facilities
As was the case in the Agreed Framework, it will be important to freeze the above-mentioned key nuclear facilities, including additional 50-megawatt and 200-megawatt reactors that have been under construction at Yongbyon, as well as certain other facilities such as the fuel fabrication plant, pending their permanent shutdown or dismantling.
7) Maintaining the Monitoring System
It will be no less important to maintain the monitoring system for a considerable period of time following the complete and thorough dismantlement of the nuclear program and its successful verification in order to ensure that the reconstruction or re-opening of nuclear facilities does not occur.
NOTES
1. See Karen Yourish, "Father of Pakistani Bomb Sold Nuclear Secrets," Arms Control Today, March 2004, p. 22.
2. See Chun Yung-woo, "North Korean Nuclear Issue: Current Status and a Roadmap for a Solution," Korean Observations on Foreign Relations, April 2003.
3. See Paul Kerr, "U.S. Delegation Visits North Korea; Questions Remain Over Pyongyang's Weapons Claims," Arms Control Today, March 2004, p. 35.
Lew Kwang-chul is a Counsellor at the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Korea to the United Nations responsible for disarmament issues. Mission speechwriter Leslie Hough also contributed to the article. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Government of the Republic of Korea.
-------- missile defense
Israeli - U.S. Laser Downs Long - Range Missile in Test
May 7, 2004
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-mideast-laser.html
http://news.myway.com/top/article/id/401978|top|05-07-2004::08:06|reuters.html
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A laser beam under joint Israeli-U.S. development destroyed a long-range rocket for the first time in a test in the skies over the American Southwest, Israel's Defense Ministry said on Friday.
Israel has sought an effective defense against ballistic missiles since 1991 when Iraq launched Scuds into the Jewish state during the first Gulf War. It has since developed the Arrow anti-ballistic missile with U.S. funding.
``This is a significant step forward,'' a ministry spokesman said of the test on May 4 of the ``Nautilus'' Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser (MTHEL) held at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
Israel sees the Nautilus as another potential countermeasure to possible ballistic attack by enemies, which would include most Arab states and Iran. In turn, they see Israel's undeclared nuclear arsenal as the biggest strategic threat to the region.
The Nautilus laser is being developed mainly by U.S. aerospace giant Northrop Grumman Corp with the help of several Israeli high-tech firms specializing in optics and military hardware.
``The (Nautilus) project has the potential to fill an important operational need for Israel,'' said Shmuel Keren, the Israeli military's director of weapons systems and infrastructure development.
``The (Nautilus) system can answer our need for a system which can intercept missiles and cruise missiles for which currently there is no effective solution.''
The Defense Ministry declined to elaborate on the test or the exact range of the intercepted missile.
In earlier tests the MTHEL laser had successfully eliminated 28 short-range Katyusha rockets and five artillery shells in flight as well as several ``hostile objects'' on the ground.
----
Laser Downs Large Rocket Over N.M. Desert
May 7, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Israel-Laser-Gun.html
WHITE SANDS MISSILE RANGE, N.M. (AP) -- A U.S.-Israeli laser designed to protect northern Israel from missile attacks downed its largest rocket to date during a test over the southern New Mexico desert, the Army said Friday.
The ground-based Tactical High Energy Laser, or THEL, locked on and destroyed the 11-foot-long, 6-inch-diameter rocket in flight over White Sands Missile Range on Tuesday, said Pam Rogers, a U.S. Army spokeswoman in Huntsville, Ala.
The stationary test version of THEL has shot down smaller Katyusha rockets and artillery shells in the past, she said.
The system, which eventually would be mobile, uses an advanced radar to spot and track incoming rockets and then fires a deuterium fluoride chemical laser to destroy them.
THEL, being developed by Northrop-Grumman Corp., has passed tests at White Sands since 2000, said Bob Bishop, a company spokesman in Redondo Beach, Calif.
The company could deliver a mobile prototype by 2007 or 2008 if it gets a contract this summer, he said.
The project appears in the U.S. defense budget for fiscal 2004 with a $56 million allocation, he said.
----
ON EVE OF KEY DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION VOTE, 31 FORMER GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS CALL MISSILE DEFENSE DEPLOYMENT "SHAM"
[Center for Defense Information]
May 7, 2004
http://tinyurl.com/2rums
http://www.cdi.org/program/document.cfm?DocumentID=2203&StartRow=1&ListRows=10&appendURL=&Orderby=D.DateLastUpdated&ProgramID=6&from_page=index.cfm
Washington, D.C. . . .Thirty-one former government officials today urged the Bush Administration to delay the national missile defense deployment scheduled for later this year.
The release comes the day that the Senate Armed Services Committee is expected to release the results of its mark-up on the annual Defense Authorization bill. While the Committee is likely to approve the Administration's $10.2 billion missile defense request, Senators Levin (D-MI) and Reed (D-RI) are expected to offer amendments on the Senate floor the week of May 17 to cut funds and require additional testing.
These officials -- who worked for Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Clinton -- argued that the missile defense system planned for rollout by September "will provide no real defense" and labeled it a "sham."
The officials worked at the Pentagon, Department of State, National Security Council, Office of Management and Budget, and Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
The letter accused the Administration of "rushing a program into the field that is largely untested and missing major components."
"This is like rolling out a new automobile that is missing tires, steering wheel and brakes and hasn't been tested on the open road," said Philip E. Coyle, a former chief of operational test and evaluation at the Pentagon. "No sound business would launch a product missing major components and without testing to see if it could work without those components."
The letter pointed to problems with the booster rocket, the ground-based X-band radar, the sea-based X-band radar and the satellite tracking system.
It argued: "Without adequate systems testing, the ground-based missile defense program lacks a sound scientific and technical basis for cost-effective development, let alone deployment."
# # #
Complete text of letter below:
May 7, 2004
Dear Mr. President,
The initial deployment of a ground-based strategic missile defense system later this year is rushing a program into the field that is largely untested and missing major components. This rapidly approaching deadline is forcing the Missile Defense Agency to skip or delay the very tests that are needed to determine whether the system can be operationally effective when called upon.
The interceptors being put into the ground in Alaska and California are still in the early phases of their developmental test programs. Accordingly, all the tests to date have occurred in highly scripted, unrealistic test environments. The interceptors have not yet demonstrated a capacity to hit a target under real world conditions.
In part because there has been such pressure to get interceptors into the ground before October 2004, the flight test program schedule has slipped again and again. Additionally, four of the six intercept tests originally planned to be held by October 2004 have been cancelled since your deployment announcement in December 2002.
But even with a more rigorous testing program of the interceptor, the initial deployment will not be just bare-bones: it will be incomplete: The booster rocket needed for the ground-based missile defense program has suffered many development problems. A ground-based X-band radar, which the Missile Defense Agency has stated is essential to the system, is no longer under development. The sea-based X-band radar, which is needed to enhance satellite tracking, is not scheduled to be fielded until 2005 at the earliest and, at any rate, is intended mainly for testing purposes. An infrared satellite system capable of tracking incoming missiles and helping to guide the interceptor will not be in place for many years.
In fact, this system will provide no real defense. Without adequate systems testing the ground-based missile defense program lacks a sound scientific and technical basis for cost-effective development, let alone deployment. Do not allow the American public to be deceived. The "initial defensive capability" being advertised by the Missile Defense Agency is a sham. We strongly urge that you drop the 2004 deployment, and commit instead to a sensible research and development schedule.
Sincerely,
Gordon Adams, Professor of the Practice of International Affairs and Director, Security Policy Studies, Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University
George Bunn, fomer US Ambassador to the Geneva Disarmament Conference, now Consulting Professor at Stanford Institute for International Studies
Anne Cahn, former DOD and ACDA official, Scholar-in-Residence at American University
Joseph Cirincione, Director for Non-Proliferation, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Hon. Philip E. Coyle, III, Senior Advisor, Center for Defense Information, and former Assistant Secretary of Defense and Director of Operational Test & Evaluation at the Pentagon
Jonathan Dean, adviser on Global Security issues to Union of Concerned Scientists, former State Department arms control negotiator
Paul Doty, Harvard University@
Ambassador Ralph Earle II, former deputy director, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
Steve Fetter, Professor, School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland, College Park
Ambassador Peter Galbraith, fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non- Proliferation and former U.S. Ambassador to Croatia and Professor of National Security Strategy at the National War College
Nancy Gallagher, Former - Executive Director, Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Task Force; Current - Research Director, Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland
Ambassador James E. Goodby, former chief US negotiator for cooperative threat reduction
Ambassador Robert Grey, Jr., Director, Bipartisan Security Group
Morton H. Halperin, former Director of the Policy Planning Staff at the Department of State (1998-2001) and held senior positions at the Department of Defense and the National Security Council in the Johnson, Clinton, and Nixon administrations
John D. Holum, former Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security and former Director, U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
Lawrence J. Korb, former Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration
Terri S. Lodge, Coordinator, Arms Control Advocacy Collaborative, former State Department official and Senior Congressional Advisor for Arms Control and International Security, 1991-2002.
Katherine Magraw, Former Special Assistant to the Under Secretary of State for International Security Policy
Jack Mendelsohn, former State Department official and member US SALT I and START II Delegation. Adjunct Professor, Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University
John Newhouse, Center for Defense Information Senior Fellow, and former assistant director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency with responsibility for East-West matters, including Strategic Arms Limitation Talks
George Rathjens, professor emeritus, MIT; formerly chief scientist and deputy director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, Department of Defense; and formerly director of the Weapons Systems Evaluation Division of the Institute Analyses.
Stanley Resor, Secretary of the Army in the Johnson and Nixon Administrations and former Chairman of the Arms Control Association John B. Rhinelander, former Legal Adviser, US SALT I delegation
Jack Ruina; Prof. Emeritus of Elelectrical Engineering , MIT; former director of the Defense Advanced Research Agency
Sarah Sewall former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Harvard University
Ivo Spalatin, Former Director, Office of Congressional Affairs, Senior Policy Advisor and Director of Policy Planning, U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
A. Gregory Thielmann, former director of the Strategic, Proliferation, and Military Affairs office in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
Jane Wales, former Associate Director, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, former Senior Director of the National Security Council
Cindy Williams, Assistant Director for National Security, Congressional Budget Office (1994-1997); currently Principal Research Scientist, Security Studies Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology@
Winslow Wheeler, Visiting Senior Fellow, Center for Defense Information, former national security adviser to four US Senators and staff co-author of 1983 law establishing DoD's office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation"
Herbert York, co-founder of Pentagon's DARPA, first, Director, Operational Test & Evaluation at the Pentagon, former member and vice chair of the President's Science Advisory Committee in Eisenhower, Kennedy and LBJ administrations
@ Affiliations for identification only
-------- russia
US lawmakers do not trust Iran, call on Russia
2004-05-07
Pravda
http://newsfromrussia.com/world/2004/05/07/53791.html
US House of Representatives at its session Thursday afternoon called on Russia to suspend nuclear cooperation with Iran.
The overwhelming majority of the House (376 against 3) supported the draft resolution on Iran saying, among other things, that the US Congress "deplores any efforts by any country to provide any assistance to Iran in the nuclear sector".
The US Congress "calls on Russia to suspend its nuclear cooperation with Iran and refrain from making an agreement on supply of nuclear fuel to the reactor in Bushehr" until the Iranian side halts "finally and verifiably all activities designed to ensure creation of own nuclear arsenal, including a complete termination of the uranium enrichment project and construction of the plutonium reprocessing plant," the resolution points out.
An appeal to Russia is part of a package of measures aimed at enhancing the international control over Iranian nuclear programs and ensuring that Iran fully meet its commitments to the IAEA.
Republican Henry Hyde, Chairman of the House's Foreign Affairs Committee, and Democrat Tom Lantos, an influential Committee member, co-authored the draft resolution.
Russian specialists have been constructing a nuclear power plant in Bushehr (a town in the north of Iran's Persian Gulf coastline) since early 1990s. Previously, under the Shah's regime, the project had been awarded to a German company, but after the 1979 Islamic Revolution the Germans, under a strong US pressure, had to abandon all work on the site. Before 1979, the Shah was the main US ally in the Middle East and South East Asia and the United States had no objections against the its satellite's nuclear program. Now the situation has changed: the USA appears to have permanently ranked Tehran among the states of `the axis of evil`, and in this context any cooperation with the `rogue nation` must be forbidden. For its part, Moscow believes that its assistance to Iran in development of the Iranian own nuclear power industry is in full compliance with all relevant international treaties, including the basic treaty on non-proliferation of nuclear weapons (Tehran, in contrast to Israel, is a party to that treaty). Moreover, in order to eliminate the international community's concerns, Moscow and Tehran agreed to sign a special protocol on mandatory export of all spent nuclear fuel to Russia.
----
Russia vows to cooperate with Iran despite US call
MOSCOW (AFP)
May 07, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040507120056.yvvuvryh.html
Russia's atomic energy agency Friday rejected a call by the US House of Representatives for it to interrupt its nuclear ties with Iran until Tehran drops its alleged nuclear arms ambitions.
"We see no reason why we should end our nuclear energy cooperation with Iran," ITAR-TASS quoted top atomic energy agency spokesman Nikolai Shingrayov as saying.
"Moscow will fulfill its obligations to Tehran to the end," he said, adding that a top Iranian delegation will visit Moscow to discuss the ongoing project Wednesday.
US lawmakers Thursday accused Iran of "deception" and of hiding its nuclear arms program, calling on the European Union and Russia to drop its ties with a nation once labeled as part of an "axis of evil" by US President George W. Bush.
Russia has faced intense pressure over its construction of the Bushehr reactor -- the Islamic state's first nuclear reactor that Washington fears will help Iran develop a nuclear bomb.
Iran in December signed up to an agreement with the IAEA providing for surprise UN inspections of its nuclear sites to fend off US accusations that it is preparing a nuclear weapons program.
-------- ukraine
Ukraine Arms Dump Blasts Hurl Shrapnel, Five Dead
May 7, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-ukraine-fire.html
MELITOPOL, Ukraine (Reuters) - Explosions at an arms dump in southern Ukraine showered the area with shrapnel for a second day on Friday, hurling debris 40 km (25 miles) -- two-thirds of the way to a nuclear power plant.
Five people died, one from a shrapnel blow to the head and four during the evacuation of more than 7,000 people after the blasts, officials said.
The explosions first tore through the warehouse complex on Thursday where about 4,500 rail carriages of artillery ammunition were stored in Novobohdanivka village in industrial Zaporizhya region.
The blasts were started by a fire at the military warehouses, just 60 km (37 miles) from one of Europe's largest nuclear power stations, the Zaporizhska plant.
Officials at the plant said there was no immediate danger to the nuclear reactor.
``Our data showed that one person died from a shrapnel blow to his head, while four others died in the process of evacuation,'' said Emergency Ministry spokesman Oleh Oleksandriv. ``They were elderly people.''
A pall of thick, gray smoke towered over the blast site on Friday, but some of the fires were extinguished as heavy rain helped hundreds of firefighters working on the site, a Reuters reporter at the scene said. Sporadic blasts continued.
Witnesses and officials said the explosions blasted metal fragments and other debris 40 km away, causing more fires in nearby villages and panic among the population.
Some villagers had to walk several kilometers in driving rain early on Friday in order to reach safety after spending a night in cellars for protection.
Local media reported that the explosions had destroyed many buildings within a three km (two mile) radius including a local railway station. A minor gas pipeline was also damaged.
Rail traffic has been blocked on the main line linking Ukraine's Crimea resort to the Russian capital, Moscow. Roads were closed. Reporters saw several live missiles and mines lying around the area.
A state of emergency was declared in Melitopol, the nearest big town, about 600 km south-east of Ukraine's capital Kiev. Authorities told people to stay indoors.
Some evacuees wept as they searched for children and loved ones. Local officials said hundreds of people were left homeless.
President Leonid Kuchma has ordered a criminal investigation into the incident.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Curb Nuclear Weapons Excess
Daryl G. Kimball
Christopher Paine,
March 7, 2004
Arms Control Association
http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_05/Focus.asp
More than a decade has passed since the end of the Cold War and President George H. W. Bush's 1992 decision to end the production of new nuclear weapons. Today, U.S. military might is unrivaled. By far, its greatest security challenge is stopping the spread of nuclear weapons and reducing the likelihood that they are someday used.
Yet, as the current Bush administration rightly calls on others to forswear nuclear weapons, it continues to pursue a costly and counterproductive campaign to research and develop new, more "usable" nuclear weapons. It also wants to significantly expand U.S. capabilities to build nuclear warheads. These moves run counter to accepted international norms of nonproliferation behavior and trends in military strategy that de-emphasize nuclear weapons.
The administration's fiscal year 2005 budget proposes $27 million for ongoing research to modify existing types of high-yield nuclear weapons to destroy deeply buried and hardened targets (the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator). It seeks another $9 million for unspecified research on "advanced" concepts, including new types of low-yield nuclear bombs.
The rationale for the new weapons is based on flawed assumptions and ignores physics. According to a March report from the Departments of State, Energy, and Defense to Congress on the subject, the United States' concern for minimizing collateral damage in war diminishes the credibility of its capability and will to respond to "aggression" with nuclear weapons. By enhancing earth-penetrating capabilities and reducing yields, the argument goes, adversaries may believe than an American president might actually be willing to use nuclear weapons to take out leadership and weapons targets.
However, the notion that nuclear weapons can be developed to destroy targets with little collateral damage is highly misleading and dangerous. To contain the fallout of a relatively small, five-kiloton nuclear bomb, it would have to be detonated about 350 feet underground-nearly 10 times the depth that existing materials and force capabilities allow. Even if smaller weapons were used against suspected chemical or biological weapons sites, errors in intelligence and targeting could disperse rather than destroy deadly material.
The proposed Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator is far larger, with a yield likely more than 100 kilotons. A 1962 nuclear test blast of the same size, detonated 635 feet below the surface, ejected 12 million tons of earth and formed a crater 320 feet deep and 1,280 feet wide.
Nuclear weapons should not be seen as simply another weapon in the vast U.S. arsenal. So long as nuclear weapons exist, their role should be limited to deterring the use of nuclear weapons by others-a mission that hardly requires a new generation of weapons.
Last year, in an effort to win support from wavering members of Congress, the administration claimed that it was only seeking money and authority to research new and modified weapons. Congress was persuaded, but decided that further work would require its explicit authorization. Assurances aside, the administration's intention to go further is now clear. In February, the Energy Department's five-year budget outlined a plan for further research and, if Congress allows, development of the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator at a cost exceeding $485 million.
As a part of its multibillion-dollar plan to modernize the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, the administration also wants a "Modern Pit Facility" to remanufacture (and possibly produce new) plutonium cores for warheads. It could cost up to $4 billion to build and $200-300 million a year to operate. Plans call for annual production levels of 125-450 plutonium pits. However, if the United States stays on track to reduce its nuclear stockpile to 3,000 warheads or less, such an enormous production capacity is unnecessary.
Although the administration claims new weapons and production capabilities are needed to reinforce the believability of U.S. nuclear threats and its ability to respond to threats, it claims this will only "slightly complicate" nonproliferation efforts. The reality is that these projects invite similar activity from former adversaries and proliferators.
Referring to the United States, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Feb. 18, "As other countries increase the number and quality of their arms and military potential, then Russia will also need to ensure it has new-generation arms and technology." We can expect that hard-liners in Pyongyang, Tehran, Islamabad, and New Delhi will also use new U.S. nuclear weapons work as a cynical excuse to develop or improve their own nuclear strike capabilities.
In order to curb the spread of nuclear weapons, it is vital that Congress and the president exercise greater leadership in diminishing the allure of nuclear weapons and the myth of their utility. They can start by curbing their own nuclear weapons excesses.
----
Coddling the Nuclear Weapons Complex
Christopher Paine,
March 7, 2004
Arms Control Association
http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_05/Paine.asp
At the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), it is as if the Cold War never ended. Despite the reduced likelihood of a major nuclear conflict, massive cuts in the deployed U.S. arsenal, and a long-standing moratorium on U.S. nuclear testing, the budget of the Department of Energy's nuclear weapons agency has steadily grown during the last decade. The Energy Department now spends 35 percent more on the U.S. nuclear arsenal each year than it did on average during the standoff with the U.S.S.R. between 1948 and 1991 (when it spent the equivalent of $4.2 billion annually in current dollars). In addition, if the White House prevails with its fiscal year 2005 budget request and stays on the track outlined in its "Five-Year Nuclear Security Program," the growth in spending for nuclear weapons will continue without respite.
In fact, if President George W. Bush's request of $6.6 billion is approved, U.S. spending on "weapons activities"-nuclear weapons research, development, testing, and production, as well as administration of the nuclear weapons stockpile-will have virtually doubled over the past decade. If the administration has its way, the trend is not about to end. The NNSA has told Congress that it plans to increase spending on the U.S. arsenal to $7.76 billion by 2009.
Indulging the Weaponeers
U.S. nuclear spending has soared since a 1995 decision to adopt a complex, simulation-based "virtual testing-virtual prototyping" strategy as the paradigm for "stewardship" of the U.S. nuclear stockpile. Since then, the Energy Department has spent tens of billions of dollars on new and upgraded experimental facilities, computers, networks, code development, and computer-controlled production equipment. It remains largely unable to implement this grandiose and technologically aggressive strategy, however, as key experimental capabilities remain unfinished, mired in technical difficulties and huge cost overruns.
The intellectual premise behind this massive expenditure was that absent nuclear test explosions, confidence in the performance of new or modified nuclear weapons could only be gained from building costly new experimental facilities to generate data that would inform three-dimensional computer simulations of the entire nuclear explosion sequence, beginning with the detonation of chemical explosive and ending with the combined thermonuclear burn and fissioning of the weapon's secondary stage. Moreover, DOE officials insisted that these simulations could be relied upon to predict the performance of stockpiled 'war reserve' weapons only if they had first been "validated" by successfully predicting the results of similarly complex integrated experiments conducted in the new "science-based stockpile stewardship" facilities. Examples of such code-validating tests include inertial fusion capsule gain experiments and primary stage implosions, diagnosed with highly-penetrating, three-dimensional, time-resolved radiographic imaging.
Critics at the time charged that the entire "virtual testing" strategy was needlessly complex and costly for the relatively simple task at hand: sustaining confidence in the safety and reliability of a modest but sufficient, enduring stockpile of nuclear weapons, for as long as needed. Detailed studies also noted that the large unclassified research component of the effort to model fundamental physical processes involved in generating nuclear explosions could well exacerbate proliferation of nuclear weapons knowledge.[1] Subsequent events have proven many of these criticisms well founded.
Indeed, because of technical flaws and delays in its more ambitious efforts, the NNSA is slowly reverting to an alternative method put forward a decade ago by its critics: "engineering-based" stewardship. This approach seeks to assure the ability to produce and replace non-nuclear components and subsystems that can be thoroughly tested while attempting to minimize changes to primary- and secondary-stage nuclear components that cannot be tested to nearly the same extent. In this more conservative approach, confidence in the performance of these nuclear explosive components is maintained, not through elaborate computer simulations of uncertain fidelity but through careful engineering efforts that ensure maintenance and remanufacture of weapons at current (or improved) quality levels.
These efforts rely on tried and true techniques for ascertaining that the primary's high-explosive driven plutonium shell continues to hit the performance benchmarks required for the onset of nuclear fission and subsequent ignition of fusion reactions in heavy-hydrogen "boost gas," which is confined and heated within the imploding core. The flood of extra neutrons released by fusion "boosts" fission of the plutonium to a level that ensures a superabundance of radiation for imploding and igniting the secondary stage, which typically accounts for the vast bulk of the total energy released in a large nuclear explosion. Very little uncertainty attends the detonation of a proven secondary design in the presence of a minimally adequate primary yield, so under a prolonged test moratorium the major uncertainties tend to focus on the continued performance of the primary stage.
As for sustaining the ability to forecast the ultimate force of an explosion with high confidence, the strict nuclear explosive performance criteria used in the Cold War are no longer as relevant as they once were. Even for those who subscribed to the oddly detached moral psychology and doctrines of nuclear war-fighting deterrence, worry about how unexpected degradations in nuclear explosive yield ("unreliability") might affect "kill probabilities" against hardened "counterforce" targets, such as missile silos and command centers, no longer seems to be of vital importance. Even the Pentagon's own Defense Science Board has come round to the view that there is no need to rebuild large numbers of high yield "legacy" nuclear weapons to support a credible and effective deterrence policy.[2]
For post-Cold War deterrence, it matters little (except perhaps to the population of the targeted nation) whether or not a nuclear weapon detonates at its full thermonuclear yield (typically tens to hundreds of kilotons of TNT equivalent). Even if the secondary stage fails to ignite, the weapon would still achieve yields in the low kiloton range, sufficient to deter nuclear use by "rogue" states.
All this means that using computer simulations to guarantee that a nuclear blast will reliably yield the greatest possible explosive power is no longer vital for deterrence. Moreover, the vast improvements in guidance technology provided by global positioning system-aided systems can be expected to make up for losses in lethality against most targets from less-than-expected yields. The only exception might be when striking very deeply buried targets, which can only be destroyed by weapons with yields of several hundred kilotons or more. Yet, using such a high-fallout weapon against a non-nuclear-power would be both monstrous and implausible. And its use against a nuclear-weapon state such as Russia or China would be indistinguishable from all-out nuclear warfare, and thus confers no deterrent advantages.
Costly Campaigns
Given the reduced relevance of large-scale nuclear capabilities to countering today's U.S. security challenges-it is inexcusable that more has not been done to reduce the scale of the size and scale of the nuclear complex. On the contrary, Bush's budget calls for a series of so-called campaigns bent on resurrecting a modern, highly automated, and networked version of the old Cold War nuclear weapons complex. These plans would cost $1.9 billion in fiscal year 2005 and more than $12 billion over the next five years. That is nearly 50 percent more than the Energy Department will spend on the nuts-and-bolts costs of the U.S. arsenal: the warhead development, refurbishment, and stockpile maintenance tasks that have been agreed upon with the Department of Defense.
A look inside these various NNSA "campaigns" reveals an astonishing world of unaccountable spending, gross mismanagement, and technological excess by a laboratory elite that confuses its own narrow "weapons science" interests with those of the nation and its taxpayers.
Science Campaign
At the base of the stewardship pyramid one finds the so-called Science Campaign, which is really a wide array of applied science and technology projects to improve U.S. capabilities for predicting the performance of nuclear weapons. This account funds such items as improving Nevada Test Site (NTS) readiness to resume underground nuclear test explosions ($30 million in fiscal year 2005) and reviving Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's (LLNL) Atomic Vapor Laser Isotope Separation (AVLIS) pilot plant, which was mothballed at the close of the Cold War. The pilot plant will likely separate additional supplies of a highly prized plutonium isotope, Pu-242, which can be used to test the behavior of a bomb's core of plutonium and high explosive at full scale without producing an explosive nuclear chain reaction. These "hydrodynamic tests," so named because the compressed material behaves like a moving fluid, are a key tool of stockpile stewardship.
A major preoccupation of the Science Campaign in fiscal years 2005 and 2006 will be fixing the Los Alamos National Laboratory's (LANL) Dual Axis Radiographic Hydrotest (DARHT) facility, arguably the most technically important facility in the science-based stockpile stewardship program. The facility is designed to provide rapid, high-resolution x-ray photographs simultaneously along two axes. Weapons scientists want to use this detailed three-dimensional imagery of surrogate primary-stage explosions as a benchmark to ensure the accuracy of computer simulations of the implosion process in the absence of nuclear testing.
DARHT began life in the fiscal year 1988 budget request as a modest $30 million upgrade of the existing single-axis x-ray capability to a dual axis machine. Sixteen years later, DARHT is still not finished, but now it costs $327 million, according to the Energy Department's inspector general, who predicted in May 2003 that the facility "would not be fully operational until June 2004."[3] As the fiscal year 2005 budget request makes clear, even this recent assessment is obsolete: deep within the document, the NNSA reported that the high-tech second axis is suffering from "high voltage breakdown" and that the "first 2-axis shot in support of stockpile assessment" would not be conducted until fiscal year 2007. That would be 19 years after the project's inception-a project that the Energy Department claimed was absolutely critical to the success of its stockpile stewardship strategy.
Engineering Campaign
While Science Campaign projects mainly flow to the two nuclear design laboratories, the Engineering Campaign element is largely within the purview of Sandia National Laboratory, managed for the NNSA by Lockheed Martin, the nation's largest defense contractor. Sandia is tasked with conducting non-nuclear component engineering and weapons system integration of the nuclear components developed by LANL and LLNL. The centerpiece of Sandia's engineering campaign is the $519 million Microsystems and Engineering Sciences Application (MESA) Complex in Albuquerque.
Its purpose is to develop new microelectronic machine ("microsystem") components to meet a postulated need for "continual advances in technologies" to improve nuclear weapon "surety" (i.e., built-in technical features that ensure against both unauthorized and accidental detonations). The complex will also endeavor to produce modern, highly integrated miniaturized replacement parts for the larger number of discrete non-nuclear components currently used in nuclear weapons, to meet the needs of the NNSA's large "refurbishment" programs for enduring stockpile warheads.
All in all, the MESA complex will comprise approximately 391,000 square feet and house some 650 engineers working on new microcomponents for nuclear weapons. How much of this is minimally necessary in order to extend the service life of existing weapons and how much is self-serving empire building by Sandia and corporate parent Lockheed Martin is difficult for outside observers to gauge. We do know, however, that, until two years ago, this project consisted only of a proposed $51 million upgrade for retooling the existing Microelectronics Development Laboratory. One may therefore surmise that some of the recent additional work, such as the new Weapons Integration Facility with state-of-the-art "visualization" facilities for designing new weapon components, is a gold-plated pork barrel add-on that is not strictly required to sustain the nuclear weapons stockpile.[4]
Advanced Simulation and Computing Initiative (ASCI) Campaign
In the NNSA's fiscal year 2005 request, the Bush administration reveals that it intends to spend $740 million next year on nuclear weapons simulation and computing and an astonishing $4.03 billion through fiscal year 2009-an average of $806 million per year just on nuclear weapons computing alone. Each of the nuclear weapons laboratories now has a new supercomputing center under construction or recently completed. The NNSA is nearing completion of a program to equip them with the second generation of ASCI supercomputing systems.[5]
From the inception of the ASCI program in fiscal year 1996 through fiscal year 2004, the Energy Department spent at least $4.75 billion on nuclear weapons computing. This sum does not include all the costs involved in setting up and gathering data from experiments designed to refine the physics models embedded in the various linked modules of code that attempt to simulate each stage of the implosion-explosion process. From fiscal year 2005 to fiscal year 2009, the NNSA plans to spend another $4 billion on further ASCI hardware and software development, for a total of $8.75 billion, or an average of $2.92 billion to equip each weapons laboratory with "state of the art" simulation capabilities.
In an era when "the network is the computer," apparently no one in government (save perhaps the General Accounting Office [GAO]) thought to ask why the NNSA weapons labs could not make do with networked access to a single center for "massively parallel" computing, rather than constructing and equipping three such centers, particularly in view of the GAO's repeated findings in the late 1990s that the Energy Department's existing supercomputer resources were seriously underutilized: "In 1997, for example, less than 5% of the jobs run on the largest supercomputers used more than one-half of the machines' capabilities."[6]
Inertial Confinement Fusion and High-Yield Campaign
After ASCI, the second-largest NNSA "campaign" in Bush's request in terms of funding ($492 million) is the Inertial Confinement Fusion and High-Yield Campaign. It is slated to account for total spending of $2.43 billion over the course of the NNSA's projected "Five-Year National Security Plan." Most of this planned funding is directed toward the National Ignition Facility (NIF), a massive, 196-beam laser facility under construction at LLNL. The funds will be used both to complete the facility and to achieve the technical readiness to begin NIF fusion ignition experiments. NIF is by far the largest single project in the NNSA budget and, quite possibly, the most expensive experimental facility ever built.
According to the NNSA, when laser system installation is finally completed in September 2008, construction of NIF will have "officially" cost $3.5 billion. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) estimates that the total actual cost of the project through fiscal year 2008, including ignition target research and development (R&D), production, and diagnostics, will actually be much higher, on the order of $5.2 billion, and further hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars will be required to reach the first "demonstration" of the facility's namesake mission, fusion ignition, now variously postponed until 2010-2014.
Recall that a driving rationale for the NIF was the ostensibly "critical" need to have an "ignition facility" capable of "propagating fusion burn and modest energy gain" in place by last year in order to help "validate" the three-dimensional computer codes under development in the ASCI program. In initially pointing to the 2003 date, the Energy Department had said that by last year "most of the weapons in the stockpile will be in transition from their designed field life to beyond field life design" and "the number of designers with test experience will be reduced by about 50 percent."
Readiness Campaign
The NNSA says its Readiness Campaign is intended to "revitalize the nuclear weapons manufacturing infrastructure" by improving both its "responsiveness" and its "technology base." Claiming marching orders from the Bush administration's December 2001 Nuclear Posture Review, the NNSA claims that "a truly responsive infrastructure is the cornerstone of the new nuclear defense triad" outlined in this document. "To be considered a credible deterrent, this infrastructure must include a manufacturing capability with state-of-the-art equipment combined with cutting-edge applications of technology, and an ability to quickly provide modified or enhanced capabilities and products to meet emerging threats."[7]
In fiscal years 2005-2009, the readiness program consists of five subprograms with a projected price tag of $1.65 billion. These include thermonuclear component ("secondary") manufacturing, high-explosives production and weapons assembly/disassembly, electronic and mechanical components, new computerized production technologies, and readiness to produce tritium for stockpile weapons. Some of this work is necessary for maintaining a nuclear deterrent stockpile, but much of it is not.
Apart from its evident self-serving qualities, there are some logical flaws to the NNSA's new deterrent construct. To be credible, nuclear weapons need not be produced with "state-of-the-art equipment" or "cutting edge technology." Indeed, Bush professes to have invaded Iraq to forestall development of what clearly would have been a crudely produced nuclear explosive device, the threat of which he nonetheless found to be credible. Further, one is hard pressed to see how, absent far-reaching changes in the global security environment, the existence of modern production infrastructure per se, rather than actual weapons and forces, would be considered a deterrent to armed attack upon the United States or its allies and friends. If this were true, the administration should have no objection to eliminating the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal and relying on its fearsome industrial capability to reconstitute the arsenal to discourage cheating on a global nuclear disarmament regime.
The NNSA seems to be positing a novel extension or reinvention of the concept of deterrence, one that is more accurately described as "dissuading" or "discouraging" potential rivals for global preeminence from even seeking to acquire nuclear-weapon capabilities commensurate with those of the United States. This approach has nothing to do with classic deterrence of nuclear attack through an assured survivable capability for nuclear retaliation, nor even with "extended" deterrence of conventional conflict through calibrated, "not incredible" threats to use nuclear weapons first. On the contrary, it is a self-serving argument to justify continued work for defense bureaucracies and their contractors.
One particularly wasteful aspect of the Energy Department's Readiness Campaign has been the expenditure of at least $2.6 billion since 1996 in maintaining and attempting to restore U.S. tritium recycling, production, and extraction capabilities.[8] The Energy Department has spent this huge sum even though U.S. tritium requirements have been declining steadily with continuing reductions in the requirement for "active" stockpile weapons and no fresh tritium was required or produced to support the stockpile throughout this period. The recent spending has been premised on restoring a capability to support the Pentagon's declared START II stockpile tritium requirement (i.e., 4,900 "active" nuclear weapons with filled tritium reservoirs plus a "five-year reserve" to "surge" deployment of additional weapons or replenish these reservoirs in the event production were disrupted for a prolonged period). The NRDC estimates that this artificially inflated requirement could be met from existing tritium supplies until 2007, at which time the reserve would dip below its "required" five-year support level. So, the lack of fresh tritium supplies would not begin to affect the ability to deploy actual weapons until 2012.
Suffice to say, after the force reduction envisioned in the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), this tritium requirement scenario is now outdated, but it has yet to be formally replaced with another, more realistic one. Supporting the reduced but still large nuclear force levels called for under SORT, for example, 1,700 "operationally deployed" strategic weapons and 300 operationally "deployable" nonstrategic weapons with a five-year tritium reserve, would not "require" resumption of tritium production to prevent a decline in the reserve until around 2012; actual weapons would not need fresh tritium until 2017. Clearly, the Bush administration and the Congress have a lot of flexibility and additional time to determine both "required" operational nuclear force levels and when or, indeed, whether to resume tritium production.
They should use this time to reconsider the administration's tritium plans. They could begin with the need for a five-year tritium reserve. The existing requirement makes no economic sense for a costly decaying asset such as tritium. Moreover, the president has the inherent authority under the Atomic Energy Act to direct production of tritium in any one of 100 civilians reactors in the (unlikely) event of a genuine national security "emergency." So, shifting to a shorter two-year reserve makes more sense and would further extend until 2015 the point at which new tritium production might be needed. Additionally, if the United States and Russia were to make further cuts, say, to a level of 1,000 deployed nuclear warheads each, such a U.S. force could be maintained with a two-year reserve until around 2022 without producing additional tritium.
Additionally, the NNSA's plans to satisfy future tritium requirements, largely inherited from the previous administration, are fraught with inefficiency, bad management, and a continuing failure to consolidate tritium R&D operations. The NRDC estimates that the tritium capabilities spending outlined in the administration's budget projections for fiscal years 2005-2009 totals at least $1.2 billion.
Rather than consolidating or eliminating sites where tritium R&D activities are conducted, in which each site requires their own (decaying) minimum inventories of tritium and carries high fixed-overhead costs for security and environment, safety, and health, the Energy Department has continued under President Bill Clinton as well as President George W. Bush to sustain tritium operations at both LANL and LLNL as well as at SRS. Indeed, the Bush administration's particular contribution is to reinvigorate the tritium R&D facility (B331) within LLNL's "Superblock Complex." Successive administrations have allowed the Energy Department to maintain tritium, plutonium, and radiographic hydrotest facilities in triplicate at LLNL, LANL, and NTS, as though the nuclear arms race with the former Soviet Union had never ended.
Pit Manufacturing and Certification Campaign
This weapons complex "campaign," ongoing since fiscal year 1993, has the immediate goal of "restoring [at LANL] some limited capacity to manufacture pits of all types" that was lost in 1989 when the main Cold War pit manufacturing plant, located at Rocky Flats northwest of Denver, imploded in a multibillion dollar debacle of contamination, criminality, and managerial incompetence.[9] The longer-range NNSA objective is the design and construction of a $2-4 billion Modern Pit Facility (MPF) to support long-term pit manufacturing beginning late in the next decade. This comes even as LANL is well along in a $2.3 billion, decade-long modernization of its pit fabrication and plutonium chemistry complex, which is scheduled to reach a capacity for producing 20 pits a year by 2007. (Another article in this issue looks in detail at the debate surrounding the need for the Modern Pit Facility. See page 10).
Quite apart from the MPF, however, the administration's five-year national security plan calls for spending $1.3 billion on pit manufacturing and certification from fiscal year 2005 to fiscal year 2009, on top of the $1.2 billion already expended during fiscal years 1998-2004. It is something of a mystery how so little capability could have resulted from the huge amount already expended.
In the next budget year, the NNSA intends to manufacture "at least six certifiable W88 pits" to augment the six being produced this year, with the goal of having these certified for use by 2007 as replacement pits for the 450-kiloton thermonuclear warheads for the Trident II submarine-launched missile. Manufacture of these six "certifiable" pits, not including the cost of the plutonium itself, will cost $132 million in the next fiscal year, or $22 million per pit, which amounts, at current prices, to roughly 480 times the value of the pit's weight in gold.[10]
By comparison, the Manhattan Project produced the first significant quantities of separated plutonium in human history and manufactured it into pits within three years. Now, we are supposed to believe that a half century of experience later, and tens of thousands of pits later, that LANL legitimately requires 11 years and more than $2.5 billion to confidently manufacture and certify one "war reserve pit" for the nuclear weapons stockpile?
Recommendations
Given the many problems with the NNSA's approach to the stockpile stewardship program, Congress needs to take action. It should defer consideration of any new facility or weapons refurbishment request until the administration has submitted and Congress has examined, debated, and approved the essential contours of a plan to reduce the nuclear weapons stockpile to levels that make sense for the post-Cold War world. Congress needs to cease ducking the nuclear weapons issue and have the debate, examining what can and should be changed. There are potentially billions of dollars in annual savings to be had from shifting to a far more compact, less alert, and less deployed nuclear force, supported by a smaller and more sustainable nuclear complex. This money could be used to reduce the federal budget deficit or improve U.S. national security by substantially increasing the $500 million annually NNSA spends on nonproliferation initiatives in Russia and other foreign countries.
Once Congress has approved a revised nuclear stockpile plan, it must determine how to rationalize and consolidate the NNSA complex to eliminate Cold War redundancies, reduce its environmental footprint, and reduce the security and safeguards overhead burden, which is growing rapidly. A key element will be to streamline and simplify the current, needlessly complex "virtual testing" paradigm for stockpile stewardship. After a decade, the current program has not built the kind of disciplined and conservative protocols that would permit indefinite, confident retention of a nuclear weapons stockpile at minimum cost.
The NNSA and its laboratories have mystified the basic tasks of sensible stockpile stewardship in ways that are beyond the bounds of fiscal sanity and reason. Far from boosting confidence, the current program is actually structured to function as a constant wellspring of uncertainty, thereby fostering continuing costly "requirements" and "milestones" for ever more elaborate experimental and computational facilities. Of course, the need to resolve the accumulated conflicts and inconsistencies in the data generated by numerous scaled experiments and weapons computations could just as easily lay the groundwork for what will appear to be an earnest case for a "limited" return to nuclear explosive testing to "resolve the uncertainties" and "calibrate the codes."
Indeed, the notion at the heart of the current bloated stewardship effort-that the United States must continually expand its nuclear weapons knowledge and capability while threatening or attacking others whom we suspect of doing the same thing -is an Orwellian mismatch with US nonproliferation objectives. The Administration's errant initiatives to increase readiness to resume nuclear test explosions, build a large Modern Pit Facility, and modernize thousands of Cold War legacy weapons-including conversion of high-yield strategic bombs to "robust" nuclear earth penetrators-all share the distinction of being both wasteful and politically destabilizing. Congress should decline funding for these efforts while taking meaningful steps to restructure and reduce the nuclear weapons complex.
NOTES
1. See Christopher E. Paine, "A Case Against Virtual Nuclear Testing," Scientific American 281, no. 3 (September 1999): 64; Christopher E. Paine and Matthew G. McKinzie, "Does the U.S. Science-Based Stockpile Stewardship Program Pose a Proliferation Threat?" Science and Global Security, vol. 7 (1998): 151-193; Matthew G. McKinzie, Thomas B. Cochran, and Christopher E. Paine, "Explosive Alliances: Nuclear Weapons Simulation Research at American Universities," Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC) Nuclear Program, Washington, DC, January 1998.
2. "The nuclear weapons program as currently conceived-a program focused primarily on refurbishing the legacy stockpile-will not meet the country's future needs." Defense Science Board, "Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Future Strategic Strike Forces," Washington, DC, February 2004, pp. 1-10.
3. Office of Audit Services, Office of Inspector General, U.S. Department of Energy, "Audit Report: Dual Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test Facility," DOE/IG-0599, May 2003, p. 4. The report cites an official "total project cost" of $270 million, plus $57.5 million in additional costs "associated with work elements transferred outside of the project." But NRDC estimates that the final cost of the fully commissioned DARHT facility will be even larger, probably on the order of $500 million.
4. The funding history of the MESA project supports this view. The fiscal year 2003 omnibus appropriations bill provided $113 million, an increase of $38 million above the request. The fiscal year 2004 Energy and Water Development Appropriations Act, P.L. 108-137, enacted December 1, 2003, provided $87 million for MESA, an increase of $25.2 million above the request. These increases were almost certainly done at the behest of the senior senator from New Mexico, Pete Domenici (R), chairman of the appropriations energy and water subcommittee.
5. The first generation of ASCI machines deployed from 1996-2000 had processing speeds ranging from roughly 1-10 teraOPS (trillions of floating point operations per second); the current second generation has speeds in the 10-100 teraOPS range; and the third generation, starting in 2005, will have speeds of hundreds of teraOPS to "petaOPS."
6. U.S. General Accounting Office, "Problems in the Management and Use of Supercomputers," GAO/T-RCED-99-257, July 14, 1999.
7. NNSA 2005 CBR, p. 158 (Weapons Activities/Readiness Campaign). See ibid., app. 20 (details of the Energy Department's efforts in "virtual prototyping" and increased automation of the nuclear weapons "enterprise").
8. Tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, is used to boost the fission reaction in the primary stage of nuclear weapons, enabling the use of lesser amounts of plutonium and high explosive and making the weapons more resistant to accidental nuclear detonation. Tritium decays at the rate of 5.47 percent per year, so the stockpile must ultimately be replenished when stockpile reductions can no longer keep pace with the decline in the tritium inventory.
9. In 1989, nuclear weapons production at Rocky Flats was abruptly halted because of serious environmental, safety, and health problems at the plant. Operations at the plant and the site contractor, Rockwell International, were the subject of an intensive two-year federal grand jury investigation that began in 1989 after FBI agents raided the plant. Rockwell, which had operated Rocky Flats for more than a decade ending in 1989, later pled guilty to 10 environmental crimes and paid an $18.5 million fine.
10. With gold priced at $405 an ounce.
Expensive Life Support for the U.S. Nuclear Arsenal
Extending the life of the current massive U.S. arsenal does not come cheap. If the NNSA sticks to its present "life extension" plans, over a seven-year period that will end in 2009, its direct costs for maintaining and updating nuclear warheads will amount to $11 billion, including $3.2 billion for 2,500-3,500 upgraded submarine-launched ballistic missile warheads; almost $2 billion for 1,700-2,500 air-delivered gravity bombs; $1.6 billion for 1,500-2,500 cruise missile warheads; and $1.3 billion for up to 1,500 ICBM warheads. On the other hand, it will spend only $235 million retiring and dismantling weapons.
Yet, that only scratches the surface. Looking at the next five years, only a little more than one-quarter ($8.2 billion) of the $36 billion that the Bush administration has proposed spending on the nuclear weapons complex will go toward the actual work that is needed for military commanders to be sure that their weapons are in working order. These tasks, "directed stockpile work," are spelled out in the president's annual Nuclear Weapons Stockpile Memorandum.
The rest of the five-year nuclear weapons budget, amounting to some $27.5 billion, represents a 330 percent "overhead charge" on top of the direct costs for the NNSA's "deliverable" product: stockpiled nuclear warheads.
Tellingly, the largest single category-almost $8.6 billion-in the Bush administration's five-year, $36 billion spending plan for nuclear weapons is not for actual programmatic work but for an amorphous category called "Readiness in Technology Base and Facilities." According to the budget request, this spending is used to operate and maintain a wide range of "program infrastructure and facilities...in a state of readiness, ensuring each capability (workforce and facility) is operationally ready to execute programmatic tasks identified in 'Campaigns' and 'Directed Stockpile Work.'"
WEAPONS ACTIVITIES
FY 2005 FY 2006 FY 2007 FY 2008 FY 2009 TOTAL
Directed Stockpile Work
$1,406,435 $1,521,175 $1,648,144 $1,778,400 $1,812,398 $8,166,552
Science Campaign
$300,962 4301,382 $307,784 $328,330 $341,028 $1,579,486
Engineering Campaign
$242,984 $268,207 $226,357 $284,020 $236,838 $1,258,406
Inertial Confinement Fusion & High Yield Campaign
$492,034 $521,319 $535,070 $437,069 $440,557 $2,426,049
Advanced Simulation & Computing Campaign
$741,260 $781,509 $825,705 $834,160 $848,359 $4,030,993
Pit Manufacturing & Certification Campaign
$336,473 $323,508 $314,180 $154,579 $158,168 $1,286,908
Readiness Campaign
$280,127 $330,801 $307,383 $357,027 $376,460 $1,651,798
Readiness in Tech Base & Facilities
$1,474,454 $1,600,185 $1,753,217 $1,839,266 $1,915,754 $8,582,876
Secure Transportation
$201,300 $185,000 $185,971 $190,014 $195,000 $957,285
Nuclear Weapons Incident Response
$99,209 $100,136 $100,657 $98,331 $100,609 $498,942
Facilities Recapitalization
$316,224 $372,707 $425,848 $472,114 $475,531 $2,062,424
Safeguards and Security
$706,991 $607,071 $618,684 $613,690 $626,298 $3,172,734
TOTAL
$6,598,453 $6,913,000 $7,249,000 $7,387,000 $7,527,000 $35,674,453
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
New Security Weighed for Nuclear Sites
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 7, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nuclear-Security.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Energy Department for the first time is looking at creating a federal police force to guard nuclear weapons facilities and plans to remove weapons-usable nuclear materials from some sites to protect against terrorists.
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said Friday that consolidation of nuclear material to fewer sites is ``one of the surest ways'' to increase protection of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium from terrorists.
In a speech prepared for security personnel at the Savannah River nuclear site in South Carolina, Abraham said that the possibility of replacing private guards with a federal security force at Energy Department weapons sites is being seriously discussed. He also said he is considering creating an elite security unit to guard high-priority facilities.
``Because the stakes are so high everything is on the table,'' Abraham said.
Currently private guards protect federal nuclear research laboratory and other facilities that are part of the vast nuclear weapons complex, including facilities holding plutonium and highly enriched uranium used in nuclear warheads.
The Energy Department has been under growing criticism from some members of Congress and public interest watchdog groups for failing to adequately improve security to meet the increased threats made apparent by the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in New York and on the Pentagon.
Next week, a House committee has scheduled another hearing into reports of security shortcomings in the department's effort to protect nuclear material. Recently congressional auditors said that the security upgrades ordered at the Energy Department sites after the Sept. 11 attacks may not be fully in place for another five years. The department hopes to finish them by the end of 2006.
A private watchdog group also has produced a number of ``whistleblowers'' who claim that the private guards at weapons facilities have poor training and morale.
Abraham announced what he called ``sweeping new initiatives'' to improve security in the nuclear weapons complex. The Energy Department develops nuclear weapons and maintains the nation's stockpile.
``Simply put (these materials) must not be allowed to fall into the wrong hands,'' said Abraham.
Abraham acknowledged ``security lapses'' at some facilities such as lost keys for secure areas. While calling such incidents rare, he said ``they are unacceptable'' and that failure to address such problems would not be tolerated.
Abraham also said he would:
--Provide new, more consistent training and more simulated attacks to test guards.
--Speed recruitment of technical personnel to deal with cyber security and new security technologies.
--Examine where nuclear weapons material might be consolidated within sites and remove it from sites where security is difficult.
Last month, lawmakers at a congressional hearing urged the department to consolidate weapon-grade material.
Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., said it ``should be immediately obvious'' that too many facilities are holding nuclear material.
Abraham said the department will consolidate these materials in fewer places and won't rule out moving plutonium and other weapons-usable material from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Lab officials oppose such a move on grounds they need the material for research.
He said that a program already is underway to transport plutonium from the Los Alamos National Laboratory to the Nevada Test Site, and he announced that within three years weapons-usable uranium now at the Sandia National Laboratory will be moved to a permanent storage site. Both facilities are in New Mexico.
He noted the department also is building a central facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee to consolidate highly enriched uranium within that sprawling site.
Sensitive nuclear material also is kept by the department at the Pantex Weapons plant in Texas, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, and facilities in Idaho and Nevada.
----
Statement of POGO on DOE's Nuclear Security Announcement
5/7/2004
US Newswire
http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=142-05072004
To: National Desk
Contact: Danielle Brian or Beth Daley, 202-347-1122 or beth@pogo.org
WASHINGTON, May 7 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Today, Department of Energy Secretary Abraham announced improvements to security at the nation's nuclear weapons complex, many following the recommendations that POGO has been urging since its 2001 report "U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex: Security at Risk." In making the announcement, Secretary Abraham called for "a change in our management culture" to "accept, analyze and respond to criticisms and concerns from outside the Department as well as from employees...without fear of retribution."
Danielle Brian, Executive Director of POGO, lauded the announcement saying: "Today Secretary Abraham has articulated the most important priorities for addressing homeland security vulnerabilities posed by the nation's nuclear weapons complex. The agency and its contractors, however, have a long history of stonewalling security reforms. We look forward to ensuring the Department implements Abraham's initiatives."
Among the most significant changes that POGO has recommended:
-- CONSOLIDATION OF NUCLEAR MATERIALS. Plutonium and/or highly enriched uranium will be consolidated from Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia Pulse Reactor Facility in New Mexico, and the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee. The Department will also consider removing special nuclear materials from Lawrence Livermore, a facility which POGO believes has serious vulnerabilities and poses a more devastating risk to the heavily- populated San Francisco Bay Area. His announcement is significant in the face of recent plans by Livermore to double the capacity of the facility to store plutonium.
-- DESIGN BASIS THREAT. POGO was the first to report that DOE's Design Basis Threat fell far short of national intelligence recommendations for what government facilities should protect against. Security Abraham has instructed the Department to examine whether the DBT should be more vigorous.
-- CYBER-SECURITY. DOE will move to a media-less environment as POGO had recommended, making it impossible for anyone in the complex to walk out the door with a diskette of downloaded classified information without proper security procedures.
-- DOWN-BLENDING OF 100 TONS OF TERRORIST-ATTRACTIVE HIGHLY ENRICHED URANIUM. Secretary Abraham has shown extraordinary leadership in proposing a study to assess the down-blending of large quantities of highly enriched uranium, as much as 100 tons, which would be most attractive to a terrorist intent upon building an Improvised Nuclear Device. This is the first time the Administration has recommended down-blending of U.S. nuclear materials, although it has made efforts to immobilize similar materials worldwide. POGO's 2001 report identified the need to dispose of the large quantities of nuclear materials which are no longer used yet make the nation's homeland security more vulnerable. -- BETTER TRAINING AND TREATMENT OF THE GUARD FORCE. In the age of outsourcing, the DOE is considering federalizing part or all of its guard force. POGO has brought forward a steady stream of whistleblowers and disclosures concerning the poor working conditions and training of the guard force.
POGO investigates, exposes, and seeks to remedy systemic abuses of power, mismanagement, and subservience by the federal government to powerful special interests. Founded in 1981, POGO is a politically-independent, nonprofit watchdog that strives to promote a government that is accountable to the citizenry.
http://www.usnewswire.com/
----
Feds prepare to boost nuclear sites' security
By Ralph Vartabedian
Fri, May. 07, 2004
LOS ANGELES TIMES
http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/8611555.htm?ERIGHTS=184961436559325647contracostatimes::et@nucnews.net&KRD_RM=3llmnsrlllrjkkjjjjjjjjkook|Ellen|N&is_rd=Y
U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham is expected to outline today a sweeping upgrade of security at the nation's nuclear weapons sites, a move that reflects growing concern over the facilities' vulnerability to terrorist attack.
The planned actions include the shuttering of several nuclear facilities, an improvement in cyber-security for sensitive data and an overall strengthening of gates, guns and locks throughout the nuclear weapons complex, sources said.
The nation's two major nuclear weapons labs -- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico -- each will get key upgrades to their site security, sources said, but Abraham is expected to stop short of completely removing plutonium from Lawrence Livermore.
A post-Sept. 11 review of security at the nation's nuclear weapons sites showed that highly trained teams of terrorists could puncture existing fences, walls and vaults with relative ease.
Once inside, they could create improvised nuclear bombs that could destroy a lab and the surrounding city.
In a report last week, the General Accounting Office warned that the Energy Department had moved too slowly to upgrade security and that the current level of protection fell short of the terrorist threat postulated by the intelligence community.
In the past, the main concern in the weapons sector was to prevent the theft of plutonium or uranium. But the strategy now has shifted to denying intruders access to the materials and preventing crude weapons from being built on site.
That means the safeguards currently in place at many facilities are no longer considered adequate.
The planned security upgrades originated at the highest levels of the Energy Department. The weapons labs, production plants and assembly sites for nuclear bombs are run by the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is part of the department.
Abraham also is expected to call for the decommissioning of the TA-18 facility at Los Alamos, an area that stores plutonium, conducts research and trains intelligence officials on the science of nuclear fission.
The site includes several fortified blockhouses, a vault where plutonium is kept and several administrative buildings.
The order would call for the removal of the plutonium to the Nevada Test Site's device assembly facility, an underground weapons plant that has been largely unused since the end of nuclear bomb testing.
By some estimates, the New Mexico site contains a ton of plutonium or highly enriched uranium that could be used by terrorists to construct a crude weapon.
The site is nestled in a canyon that critics have said would be difficult to defend against a capable team of terrorists armed with high-powered weapons.
The TA-18 facility would be turned over to the environmental management program at the Energy Department, the office that handles remediation efforts at former nuclear weapons plants scattered across the nation.
Sources said Livermore National Laboratory would undergo a number of security upgrades, including improvements to the firepower of its security staff and a consolidation of plutonium and highly enriched uranium at the site.
In addition to Los Alamos and Livermore, it is believed that Abraham will call for the decommissioning at South Carolina's Savannah River site of a nuclear reprocessing plant, commonly known as a canyon.
The highly contaminated plant is considered a security risk and no longer is used in bomb production.
An Energy Department advisory on Abraham's speech said the security upgrades would also affect the Y-12 complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., where massive amounts of highly enriched uranium are stored. Critics have suggested that the Oak Ridge plant build an fortified underground storage facility.
The advisory also said the Pantex nuclear weapons assembly site in Texas and a site in rural Idaho would be on the list to receive security upgrades.
However, all the decisions appeared to be somewhat fluid as of late Thursday.
-------- california
Radioactivity slipping past lab monitors, scientist says
Physicist says his tests of water, grass suggest gaps in detection systems at Lawrence Livermore
Friday, May 07, 2004
By Ian Hoffman,
Oakland Tribune
http://www.oaklandtribune.com/Stories/0,1413,82~1865~2133937,00.html
By testing water, grass and leaves harvested close to Lawrence Livermore nuclear-weapons lab, a scientist has found hints that the lab is lofting a garden variety of unreported nuclear byproducts into the neighborhood.
Physicist Norm Buske stressed that his tests don't show a clear human health threat to people living in Livermore. But they suggest gaps in a monitoring network supposed to alert the public to lab radioactive releases, he said.
"We're not saying everybody move away or take cover," said Buske, director of the RadioActivist Campaign, a Belfair, Wash., nonprofit hired by Livermore's Citizens Monitoring and Technical Assistance Fund for the tests. "What we suggest is the public takes action before something goes seriously wrong."
Even for fairly radioactive elements -- strontium-90, cesium-137 and americium-241 -- the reported quantities of radioactivity are in the trillionths of curies, not far above the limits of reliable detection for small numbers of samples.
But Buske is "very confident" most or all of these nuclear byproducts are coming from Livermore operations, unseen by lab and state environmental tests of air, water and soil.
"Our results suggest there are, and continue to be, releases to the environment around the lab. They're not reporting them, and so their monitoring system is not working," Buske said.
The lab's off-site tests look mostly at gross radioactivity, tritium and plutonium, but not the dozens of other byproducts of nuclear research. "They're blind to everything else," Buske said.
Livermore's sister lab, Los Alamos in New Mexico, does more sweeping off-site tests for strontium, cesium and americium.
Livermore environmental officials suggest some of Buske's results may be ghost detections that vanish in statistical error. Others look like they could be everyday fallout from nuclear tests that ended almost 40 years ago.
Anything else should be captured by air monitors sitting at the lab fence line, sniffing the air 24 hours a day, said Gretchen Gallegos, a lab environmental scientist and head of air-emissions compliance.
"We expect we should be able to detect anything of significance that comes out of this lab," Gallegos said.
"It's all within the global fallout levels," said Bert Heffner, a lab spokesman. "The laboratory has very little effect on the surrounding environment. We believe that protection of our employees and the public is our first priority and will continue to be so."
Marylia Kelley, head of Livermore-based watchdog group Tri-Valley CAREs, said the tests show the need for strong monitoring by the lab.
"These results tell the community that there are likely ongoing releases that the laboratory's monitoring program is not finding," she said.
Contact Ian Hoffman at ihoffman@angnewspapers.com .
----
Livermore Lab safety problems reported
U.S. probe finds ventilation flaws at plutonium building
Keay Davidson, Science Writer
San Francisco Chronicle
Friday, May 7, 2004
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/05/07/MNG1A6HEJD1.DTL
Federal investigators have found significant deficiencies in safety procedures at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, saying lab employees and the public face increased risks, including the possibility of a radioactive fire that could burn for days.
Investigators for the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board in Washington, D.C., a congressionally mandated advisory group to the U.S. Department of Energy, say recent changes by the lab to its safety plan are flawed and not as reliable as systems that were previously used.
In a five-page report dated March 17, the safety board investigators cite flaws in the lab's safety plan for Building 332, the lab's plutonium building.
The ventilation system, for example, is supposed to prevent radioactive material from escaping during an accident. But now, changes to the previously reliable ventilation system have downgraded it enough to raise concerns about public safety, says a letter from safety board Chairman John Conway to the Energy Department.
The April 12 letter, addressed to Linton Brooks, the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration administrator, accompanies the investigators' report. Both documents are posted on a federal Web site -- www.dnfsb.gov/pub_docs/llnl/sir_20040412_ll.pdf.
The charges are firmly denied by Joe Sefcik, program leader for Livermore's nuclear materials technology program, which includes the plutonium building.
"There is no hazard. . . . Even if anything goes wrong, we will be in a 'fail safe' condition," Sefcik said late Thursday. "We've gone to a level of safety that is unique in the (U.S.) nuclear weapons complex."
Livermore officials submitted their new safety procedures in October to the Livermore office of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which manages the nation's nuclear weapons complexes.
But the investigators say the following features of the plutonium building were downgraded by recent changes:
-- The emergency power system.
-- Ventilation systems linked to gloves that allow workers to work with plutonium inside sealed chambers.
-- Other parts of the building ventilation system.
-- Parts of the fire detection and suppression system.
"Some components of these systems (e.g. the uninterruptible power supply) have been further downgraded to nonsafety-level" -- in other words, made unsafe in the event of a power failure, says the report by two investigators identified only by their first initials and surnames, F. Bamdad and D. Kupferer. Bamdad and Kupferer's full names could not be determined late Thursday.
The report says parts of Livermore's new plan are unrealistic and inconsistent with other Livermore safety procedures. Also, Livermore probably underestimates the amount of radioactive material that would escape into the environment, the report notes. In addition, the safety plan naively assumes a fire would last no longer than two hours.
"In reality, such an event could continue for days," Bamdad and Kupferer wrote. During a fire, even radioactive particles that were initially trapped within the building eventually would leak outside as the building faced subtle physical stresses such as temperature changes because of day-night cycles and "wind impact on the building."
In a severe accident, "it is conceivable that the spread of contamination throughout the facility could jeopardize the facility's recovery and future use" -- that is, force its abandonment, they add. They note that some aspects of the safety plan are poorly defined.
Sefcik says, however, that the lab is safer partly because they've beefed up its power supply, which helps keep certain safety mechanisms -- such as the ventilation system -- working no matter what. The lab normally gets power from two outside sources: PG&E and (via a special cable) a public utility in Washington state. If those sources fail, then the lab has three diesel generators that can provide power, Sefcik said.
Even if all five power sources fail, other modifications ensure safety. For example, in case of fire, the heat would melt certain links in the ventilation system, causing the ventilators to shut automatically. Result: Lacking access to fresh air, the fire would suffocate.
"There are 200 of us that work in this facility every day," Sefcik said. "If it wasn't safe, none of us would work there."
E-mail Keay Davidson at kdavidson@sfchronicle.com.
-------- colorado
Udall letter wins some Rocky Flats document access
By RICHARD VALENTY,
Colorado Daily Staff Writer
May 7, 2004
http://www.coloradodaily.com/articles/2004/05/05/news/news06.txt
Regulatory agencies overseeing the cleanup of the former Rocky Flats plutonium trigger manufacturing plant could now have access to previously sealed grand jury information, but the public is unlikely to see the documents.
John Suthers, United States Attorney from the District of Colorado, wrote a letter dated April 19, 2004 to Congressman Mark Udall, D-Boulder, stating that agents from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE), the EPA and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) could review "65 boxes of documents" from the Rocky Flats grand jury investigation of 1989-1992.
According to Jeff Dorschner, U.S. Attorney's Office spokesman, this doesn't mean that an unlucky EPA staffer will be stuck in a basement reading 65 boxes of testimony.
"The U.S. Attorney has said that if an authorized representative of (CDPHE, EPA or DOE) makes a formal request in writing to him, he will try to accommodate that request," said Dorschner. "However, most of the documents are protected by a grand jury secrecy law, Rule 6 (e). Also, it is entirely possible that some of the documents in our possession are classified, and can only be reviewed by someone with a top-secret security clearance."
FBI agents raided Rocky Flats in 1989 to investigate alleged environmental crimes involving, in part, illegal disposal and storage of radioactive waste on the site. In August 1989, a Special Grand Jury was convened to hear the allegations, but the U.S. Department of Justice ended the investigation in March 1992. Rockwell International, the former plant operator, was fined $18.5 million.
Wes McKinley, Flats grand jury foreman, cannot speak about parts of the investigation due to Rule 6 (e), but still believes that some information about alleged Flats environmental crimes needs to become public knowledge.
In March 2004, McKinley and attorney Caron Balkany, Esq., released the book "The Ambushed Grand Jury," which in part described some of the alleged environmental crimes at the Flats site, including illegal incineration of plutonium-contaminated waste and improper waste dumping.
After "Ambushed" was released, Udall started seeking information from agencies involved with the Flats cleanup. On March 16, 2004, Udall wrote letters to CDPHE and EPA asking what the agencies were doing regarding allegations from the book. Both agencies responded and included statistical evidence of Flats environmental sampling and monitoring.
Udall received a letter dated April 5, 2004 from McKinley, Balkany and former Flats employee Jacque Brever, asking Udall to request that the U.S. Justice Department release "all documentary evidence of contamination at Rocky Flats which now lies sealed in the basement of the Justice Department offices in Denver."
Udall responded by sending a letter to Suthers, dated April 13, 2004 stating that if the Justice Department had "any information that would be useful to this important work, I think it should be provided to those responsible for the cleanup."
Laurence Pacheco, Udall spokesperson, said Udall wants cleanup workers and regulators to have every possible piece of information at their disposal. The site could become open for human recreational activity as a National Wildlife Refuge within several years, and Pacheco said Udall is "pleased" that Suthers responded to his request to release documents.
Steve Gunderson, Rocky Flats project coordinator for CDPHE, said his department could already be familiar with some of the sealed material.
"We, of course, have read the grand jury book,' said Gunderson. "Certainly there are people in our department that were involved in Rocky Flats at the time of the investigation, and some of them were part of a deposition process. Certainly, some of the material in the 65 boxes comes from the health department to begin with."
Gunderson said there has been extensive testing of the Flats surface soil, but the sealed documents could provide useful information about possible improper dumping that would allow contamination to seep deeper into the ground.
"More of our focus will be to compare their allegations of where stuff was dumped and buried with what we know about where waste was dumped and buried," said Gunderson.
According to Gunderson, his agency could begin work on deciding what information to request within "about two weeks," after meeting with his attorney and EPA representatives.
-------- south carolina
SRS to cut 140 jobs, fewer than expected
Fri, May. 07, 2004
The State (SC)
http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/business/8591107.htm
AIKEN - The company that operates the Savannah River Site for the federal government will lay off 140 workers, about half of what had been expected.
Westinghouse Savannah River Co. had asked the Energy Department for permission to lay off up to 300 workers. Some of the layoffs began Monday.
No further work force cuts are planned in the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30, Westinghouse president Bob Pedde told workers. But layoffs could resume in the next budget year.
----
Jobs are key issue in Aiken County
Residents hope announcement will make employment picture brighter
By JEFF WILKINSON
Fri, May. 07, 2004
The State (SC)
http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/local/8609273.htm
AIKEN - Marguerite Bowen has worked the cash register at the Carolina BBQ on Whiskey Road in New Ellenton for 15 years.
Bowen was there in the good times, when there were 25,000 highly paid workers at the Savannah River Site just down the road. And she is there today, when that pool of workers has dwindled to about 13,000.
The 68-year-old Bamburg native hopes today's announcement will help stop the flow of jobs out of the site.
"People come in, and you can tell they just got their pink slips," she said. "It's depressing."
Aiken officials say they are in the dark about what today's announcement by Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham might be.
They have their fingers crossed that the announcement will mean jobs.
"It's not just the money the jobs bring, it's the people," Mayor Fred Cavanaugh said. "They contribute to the community. They give to charities. They retire here. That's what the site means to us, as well as jobs and paychecks."
The city of Aiken is just eight miles south of Interstate 20. But there is little development between the picturesque downtown and I-20.
Most towns grow toward interstate highways like tree roots grow toward a stream. But in Aiken, the town flows south to the SRS site.
"It's a strange phenomenon," said Charles Weiss, president and CEO of the Aiken County Chamber of Commerce. "But it shows how important the site is. It affects everything, including how we grow."
SRS is the largest employer in the county and second only to Augusta's Fort Gordon in the Central Savannah River Area, which includes Edgefield, North Augusta and Augusta.
"This announcement could affect the CSRA region as whole," Weiss said. "But the site, without a doubt, has the largest single impact on Aiken's economy."
About 52 percent of the workers at SRS live in Aiken County - 32 percent in the city of Aiken.
Local officials hope Abraham will name the site a research, development and manufacturing center for futuristic hydrogen fuel cells for the auto industry.
"That's a $1 trillion industry," said Fred Humes, director of the Economic Development Partnership, a nonprofit organization serving Aiken and Edgefield counties. "Between the research facilities in the triangle of SRS, Clemson and USC, the state is well positioned to capture up to $10 billion of that."
But local officials admit that a hoped-for influx of new jobs will only stem the job losses at the site.
Most of the workers at SRS are crews cleaning up the old nuclear bomb-making reservation. As the site is cleaned up over the next 10 years, those jobs also will evaporate.
"It'll never get back up to 20,000 or 25,000 (jobs)," Humes said. "We'll be fortunate to maintain the levels we have now."
The loss of jobs over the last 15 years has hurt, Cavanaugh said.
But he said Aiken has been able to keep its unemployment rate at 5.7 percent through a mix of alternative industries.
The equestrian industry, particularly polo, has boomed in Aiken, with 40 new polo fields in the works.
Retirees, many from SRS, have flooded the town, bringing a positive cash flow and lowering the overall unemployment figures.
And the Bridgestone and SKF factories have added much-needed jobs.
"So even if we get nothing, it won't hurt us that much," Cavanaugh said. "But we hope the announcement will be very good."
Bowen, at Carolina BBQ, also is hoping for good news as she rings up customers at the buffet.
"I hate to see all these people losing their jobs," she said. "I want it to stop."
Reach Wilkinson at (803) 771-8495 or jwilkinson@thestate.com.
-------- washington
Air monitors being added at Hanford waste plant
05/07/2004
Associated Press
http://www.kgw.com/sharedcontent/APStories/stories/D82DULB80.html
A contractor building a plant to treat radioactive waste at the Hanford nuclear reservation plans to install air monitors, in response to concerns by some workers about chemical vapors from the nearby underground tanks that now hold the waste.
About a quarter mile separates the nearest field of underground tanks and the construction site for the Waste Treatment Plant, where the waste from the tanks will be turned into glasslike logs for stable, long-term disposal at a nuclear waste repository.
Seven workers at the construction site reported nosebleeds following reports of symptoms by workers in the tanks farms west and northwest of the project, according to Bechtel National, the contractor.
"We are responding to questions from employees asking, 'Are they safe?'" Jim Betts, project manager at the construction site for Bechtel, told the Tri-City Herald for a story Friday. "We are taking it seriously to prove nothing is coming across the fence lines."
The tanks closest to the 65-acre construction site have had no reports of the vapors that have caused symptoms in tank farm workers. But about 1 1/4 miles to the northwest, eight workers reported smelling fumes in other tank farms on March 16.
About 53 million gallons of radioactive liquid, sludge and other material from World War II and Cold War-era plutonium production sit in 177 underground tanks less than 10 miles from the Columbia River.
Experts have identified as many as 1,200 chemicals, including some known cancer-causing agents, in the tanks. The contractor operating the tank farms, CH2M Hill, and the Energy Department, which manages the cleanup, have said most of the chemicals are diluted and pose no danger to workers.
A nonprofit watchdog group, the Government Accountability Project, has raised allegations that tank farm workers are being endangered to speed cleanup at the site.
About 1,700 people work at the waste treatment plant construction site. None of the seven workers reporting nosebleeds to Bechtel National reported to the first aid station at the construction site at the time of their symptoms, said John Britton, Bechtel National spokesman.
Information from: Tri-City Herald, http://www.tri-cityherald.com
----
Health fears have workers at Hanford seeking answers
By Hal Bernton
Seattle Times staff reporter
Friday, May 07, 2004
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2001922204_hanfordworkers7m.html
RICHLAND - Rocky Fandrich first noticed the smells in March. A rank rotten-egg odor that occasionally wafted in on the spring breeze. Then there were metalliclike tastes in his mouth, nose bleeds and, some days, a feeling of profound fatigue as he ended a 10-hour shift helping to build a $5.78 billion plant to treat Hanford's chemical and radioactive wastes.
A half-dozen other workers at the 68-acre Hanford job site managed by Bechtel National also told The Seattle Times of odors and medical problems. They join an expanding number of Hanford workers who fear that vapors vented from 177 tanks containing more than 50 million gallons of radioactive and chemical wastes may be posing short-term and long-term health risks that include cancer.
These wastes, a fraction of which already have leaked into the ground, are the toxic legacy of the U.S. Cold War effort to build nuclear weapons. Contract officials say they have yet to detect harmful levels of vapors and have made worker safety a top priority.
But at the tank farms, dozens of workers in the past two years have sought medical care because of exposure from vapors. And the contractor, CH2M Hill, last month decided to invest in expanded chemical monitoring and to require use of respirators with supplied air for close-in duty.
The Bechtel construction site for the waste-treatment plant is located about 1,500 feet east of the closest venting tank. March weather-gauge readings analyzed by The Seattle Times indicated that at least 45 percent of the time prevailing winds blew from the tank farm toward the Bechtel construction site.
Bechtel officials have not required workers to wear any special protective gear. But Bechtel recently decided to install a new network of chemical monitors on the site. Those monitors will test for ammonia, nitrous oxides, volatile organic compounds and also include a portable infrared unit to test for 150 other chemicals. "We have thought that we were protected by distance and have no evidence of any harmful tank vapors," said John Britton a Bechtel spokesman. "But we are taking employee concerns seriously."
Waste very hazardous
The waste at the Hanford nuclear reservation is among the most hazardous in the world and includes a complex melange of liquids, thick slurries and saltlike cakes.
The waste-treatment project managed by Bechtel broke ground in October 2001. Employing more than 1,500 workers, this is the largest federal construction project in the United States and is expected to take 10 years to complete.
The project uses massive amounts of concrete and rebar to build thick-walled facilities that will sort high-level radioactive wastes from low-level wastes. The wastes will be blended with glass to produce stabilized materials, a process known as vitrification. Stuffed inside stainless-steel canisters, these materials could then be safely stored for thousands of years, say scientists.
Bechtel workers said they have no complaints about the pay or the pace of the work. Some said they often have slow periods that should allow them ample time to catch their breath, even in a 10-hour day. But last month, some 30 workers who attended an evening meeting in Kennewick said they feared that the chemical vapors from the tank farms might be creating serious health risks.
"We just don't know what we're being exposed to," said Fandrich, an ironworker who has complained of fatigue that included a brief lapse into sleep while driving home from the job.
"I want to know what's going on, and whether this is going to mess with my life."
Another six workers, who declined to be identified by name, spoke of foul, at times fruity, odors that appear to occasionally float in from the tank farm. They described symptoms that included bloody noses, headaches, chest pains and severe fatigue that sometimes made it difficult to get out of bed in the morning. Several said that the fatigue symptoms eased if they got a few days away from the job, and then returned as they went back to work.
"I kind of describe it like having flu pains, just sore and drained and no motivation," said one worker.
"It's a big thing, and people have left the job and gone to others because of it," said one ironworker.
Problems started in March
Most of the workers said the health problems started in March. That was roughly the same time that the tank farm, which employs more than 800 workers, had a series of incidents while transferring liquid wastes from single-shelled tanks to more secure double-hulled tanks. The transfers stir up the chemicals and can sometimes increase the venting of vapors.
By March 24, at least 10 tank-farm workers had been exposed to vapors, with six seeking medical evaluation, according to Tom Carpenter, a Seattle-based representative of the Government Accountability Project.
Carpenter has researched worker safety at Hanford for years and has helped to spur state and federal investigations of the safety concerns of the tank-farm employees.
"What we have seen is everything from nose bleeds to reduced lung capacity," Carpenter said. "And of course the long-term fear is cancer."
Dale Allen, a senior vice president of CH2M Hill, said that none of the tank-farm monitoring indicated any hazardous releases of vapors above federal regulatory levels. But by March 25, worker concerns had prompted CH2M Hill to issue a temporary stop-work order and then change policies to require respirators.
Allen said his company already has some chemical monitors that test for ammonia in the tank farm. But CH2M Hill will install new monitors to test for nitrogen oxides as well.
Some workers have urged that the company also install chemical filters to the venting system in addition to the radiation filters already in place.
Allen said that would be a difficult task.
"It's not a matter of costs but would be technically very challenging," he said.
Communication an issue
The March problems at the tank farm were not conveyed to the Bechtel workers until days later. That lack of communication was a sensitive issue among the workers.
"When everything can blow toward us, we have a right to know what is happening," said one worker. "It's our lives, and we have the right to make a decision on whether we stay and finish out the day, or go."
"That's a legitimate concern," said Bechtel's Britton. "I'm not sure how we are going to address that, but we are going to have to figure something out."
Seattle Times staff reporter Justin Mayo contributed to this report.
Hal Bernton: 206-464-2581 or hbernton@seattletimes.com
-------- us nuc waste
Provision Would Change Nuclear Waste Law
May 7, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nuclear-Waste.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Senate committee has approved changes in the law that will allow the Energy Department to avoid removing thousands of gallons of highly radioactive sludge from tanks at a federal nuclear site in South Carolina.
Energy Department officials expressed hope the breakthrough might also help them reach agreement with Washington and Idaho officials on the treatment of millions of gallons of liquid radioactive waste kept at DOE facilities in those states.
The Senate Armed Services Committee agreed to put the change in a defense bill, despite objections from Washington's two senators, who are not on the panel. The provision was sought by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who said the change -- limited to waste at the Savannah River site near Aiken, S.C., was needed to implement an agreement reached between the Energy Department and the state.
The provision was approved late Thursday during a closed committee meeting where the defense legislation was being crafted. The decision was made public Friday.
The Energy Department has been stymied in an attempt to reclassify some of the 90 million gallons of radioactive waste kept in tanks at federal facilities in Washington state, Idaho and South Carolina so it would not have to ship it to a special high-level waste repository.
The department claims the residual sludge, the byproduct of Cold War bomb-making, is too expensive to extract. Instead, the government says, it can be diluted by covering it with grout so it can be left in place as less radioactive ``low level'' waste.
After a federal judge in Idaho last year ruled that reclassifying such sludge as low-level waste violated the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the department began pushing members of Congress to change the law.
Graham's provision limits the change in the law to waste at the Savannah River site where 34 million gallons of highly radioactive liquid waste is being kept in tanks.
He said the agreement with DOE would allow the sludge lining the bottom and sides of the tank to remain in place and be covered by grout, saving $16 billion in cleanup costs and shortening the cleanup time by 23 years.
The provision, Graham said, still ``allows South Carolina and DOE to define high level waste in a very reasonable manner. ... There's nothing going to be left behind ... that will not be secured through environmental remediating to protect South Carolina.''
But state officials in Idaho and Washington oppose any changes in the law unless they are assured the states will have a final say in how the waste will be handled.
The changes put into the defense bill ``would minimize the role of (state) regulators in overseeing decisions regarding this waste's disposal,'' argued Democratic Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray of Washington in a letter to Sen. John Warner, R-Va., the Armed Services Committee chairman. They said it would give the Energy Department the go-ahead ``to define what constitutes cleanup.''
Deputy Energy Secretary Kyle McSlarrow said the change in the law, once it is approved by Congress and the agreement with South Carolina is signed, will ensure continued cleanup of the waste tanks at Savannah River. The department had threatened to withhold some cleanup funds after the court put its plans for dealing with the sludge into limbo.
McSlarrow said negotiations were continuing with Idaho and Washington ``so that we can devise a solution that will work for these other states as well.'' He has said the department would make no decision to change the law beyond South Carolina without involving the states.
There are 34 million gallons of waste in underground tanks at the Savannah River site; 53 million gallons in tanks at the Hanford site near Richland, Wash.; and 900,000 gallons in tanks at the INEEL facility in Idaho. The waste has been described as a ``witches brew of radioactivity'' left over from years of reprocessing to make plutonium for the nation's nuclear arsenal.
Geoffrey Fettus, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which brought the suit that led to the Idaho court decision, said the cleanup changes sought by the Energy Department and pushed by Graham ``would create nuclear waste cesspools'' and a ``legacy of radioactive pollution'' at the defense sites.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Six Soldiers Wounded in Afghan Taliban Attack
May 7, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-afghan-attack.html
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Six Afghan soldiers were wounded overnight in an attack by Taliban guerrillas in the south of the country, a local commander said on Friday. A Taliban spokesman said two Afghan soldiers were killed in the assault on a district building in Shah Wali Kot, just north of the city of Kandahar, but there was no independent confirmation of fatalities.
``Six Afghan soldiers were wounded in the attack and five vehicles were destroyed,'' said General Abdul Wasi, spokesman for the corps commander of the southern province of Kandahar, once the bastion of the ousted Islamic regime.
``They also destroyed a district building.'' The assailants used rifles, hand grenades and rocket-propelled grenades.
Taliban fighters opposed to the government in Kabul and the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan have been blamed for a wave of attacks that has claimed around 700 lives since August, as the country prepares for landmark elections in September.
Taliban spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi said two Afghan soldiers were killed in the clash, which began at 11 p.m. and ended at 3 a.m. on Friday (6:30 p.m. EDT on Thursday).
``There were about 100 Taliban involved in the attack. We have the bodies of two Afghan soldiers with us now,'' he said.
He added that the guerrillas took away ammunition stored in the district building they destroyed.
There are 15,500 U.S.-led troops in Afghanistan hunting remnants of the Taliban and al Qaeda, who are concentrated in the south and east of the country.
The Taliban was ousted in late 2001 by U.S.-led forces for sheltering al Qaeda and its shadowy leader Osama bin Laden.
-------- africa
Thousands of Muslims Flee Nigeria Town After Attack
Fri May 7, 2004
(Reuters)
By Tume Ahemba
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=5077065
LAFIA, Nigeria - Thousands of Nigerian Muslims braved hostile Christian roadblocks on Friday to flee the town of Yelwa after an attack by Christian militia killed hundreds earlier in the week.
Many wounded and exhausted, the refugees sought police escorts to take them to neighboring Bauchi and Nassarawa states as Christians manning road blocks in surrounding villages tried to kill them as they left.
"On our way to the hospital they blocked the road and we had to turn back and get armed escorts," said Ozero Yunusa, a blacksmith shot in the leg in Sunday's attack.
"Even then they still attacked our vehicles and one of my brothers was shot in the process," he said from his hospital bed in Nassarawa state capital Lafia.
Lafia hospital was overrun with scores of victims from Sunday's attack, with some badly wounded people sitting on floors due to lack of bed space.
The Red Cross said 955 displaced families were camped at a primary school in the town.
The conflict between the Christian Tarok tribe and the Muslim Fulani is rooted in their competing claims over the fertile farmlands of Plateau state in central Nigeria.
It has been stoked by a growing trend of religious hatred in Africa's most populous country, and the sense among the Christians that Muslims are outsiders in Plateau.
TOLL DISPUTED
Survivors of the Yelwa massacre said they had buried 630 corpses in several mass graves around the remote market town after Sunday's attack. It was not possible to confirm the figure independently, but a senior policeman spoke of "hundreds" dead.
Presidential spokeswoman Remi Oyo said 630 dead was an exaggeration, adding 67 corpses had been recovered by police.
Access to the town was still extremely limited on Friday due to continued skirmishing nearby.
The Yelwa attack was the latest in a three-month-long conflict between Muslim and Christian groups vying for control of Plateau state.
Before Sunday, the fighting had already killed at least 350 people on both sides, according to witnesses, military and Red Cross sources. The government routinely does not confirm death tolls in religious fighting for fear of reprisal attacks.
Wounded victims spoke of a military-style, two-day assault on the town by hundreds of Christian militia, armed with assault rifles and machetes.
"Some were shooting, others were burning houses, while others were looting. They had satellite phones through which they were communicating," said Abdullahi Bala, a truck driver who was shot in the back.
A Reuters eyewitness saw corpses in Yelwa on Tuesday showing signs of mutilation and sexual abuse.
"It was an organized killing," said Justice Abdulkadir Orire, secretary-general of Jama'atu Nasril Islam and leader of Nigeria's 60 million Muslims.
Yelwa had already witnessed one of the worst atrocities of the Plateau conflict in February, when Muslim militia killed almost 100 Christians, including 48 massacred in a church.
Nigeria is a battleground for the world's top two religions, with its population of 130 million roughly split between Muslims and Christians.
Religious violence has killed at least 5,000 Nigerians since 2000, when 12 northern Nigerian states established Islamic Sharia law.
----
Sudan Blamed in 'Cleansing'
Human Rights Watch Says Military Backs Militias in Darfur
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 7, 2004; Page A26
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6824-2004May6.html
UNITED NATIONS, May 6 -- A leading human rights organization Thursday published the most detailed independent account yet of Sudan's alleged complicity in the "ethnic cleansing" of more than a million tribal villagers in Darfur province and the killing of thousands more.
The 75-page report, by New York-based Human Rights Watch, charges that the Sudanese military, working with Arab militias, has committed massacres and burned villages, towns and mosques as part of a campaign to depopulate large swaths of Sudan's largest province, which has served as a base for rebels.
"The government of Sudan is responsible for 'ethnic cleansing' and crimes against humanity in Darfur," according to the report, based on a 25-day investigation in and around the province. "The Sudanese government and the Arab 'Janjaweed' militias it arms and supports . . . have killed thousands of [ethnic] Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa -- often in cold blood."
The military campaign in Darfur is targeted at potential civilian bases of support for the region's two rebel groups, the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement. The insurgent groups stepped up their armed struggle in February 2003 in an effort to force the government to agree to a power-sharing arrangement.
The Sudanese government has reacted fiercely, recruiting thousands of Arab militiamen, known as Janjaweed, and coordinating attacks on towns and villages that are considered sympathetic to the rebels, according to the report. The conflict has pitted the region's Arab nomads against black African farming communities. Both sides are predominantly Muslim.
Since the raids began, more than 1 million people have been driven from their villages, according to the United Nations. An additional 110,000 have fled to neighboring Chad.
The Sudanese government has said it was not involved in the raids on villages in Darfur. Sudan's acting U.N. ambassador, Omer Bashir Mohamed Manis, did not respond to a request for comment Thursday. But the envoy and other senior Sudanese officials said earlier this week that the government is trying to resolve the dispute.
"We are not saying there are no human right violations in Sudan," Khartoum's foreign minister, Mustafa Osman Ismail, said in Nairobi on Wednesday. "But we are doing our best" to stop it, he said.
The Sudanese government has restricted access to Darfur since the campaign began last year. Under mounting U.S. and U.N. pressure, Sudan recently allowed two U.N. delegations to visit the region. The delegations are to brief the Security Council on Friday.
The release of the Human Rights Watch report comes days after Sudan's membership on a U.N. Human Rights Commission was renewed for another three-year term, prompting a protest by the United States.
Speaking on the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan cited Darfur as the kind of crisis that requires a strong international reaction to avoid a repetition of large-scale killings. Annan said that the reports of abuses from the region "leave me with a deep sense of foreboding" and that "the international community cannot stand idle."
Georgette Gagnon, a spokeswoman for Human Rights Watch, said that most Security Council members have been reluctant to adopt a resolution condemning Sudan and calling on it to disarm the militias and provide for the safe return of refugees before the rainy season begins in the coming weeks. "The inaction is really appalling," Gagnon said.
Some delegations, including Britain's, have expressed concern that adopting such a resolution could jeopardize a separate U.S.-led effort to negotiate an end to a long-standing conflict between the government and Christian rebels in southern Sudan.
According to the Human Rights Watch report, Sudan's air force has frequently bombed villages, preparing them for attack by Sudanese soldiers and members of the Janjaweed militia. It documents 14 instances in the town of Dar Masalit, where more than 770 civilians were killed between September 2003 and February 2004. "In most of these attacks, shooting by government and Janjaweed appeared to be targeted at the civilian population," the report says.
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UN Finds Sudan's Darfur Region Scorched by Terror
May 7, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-sudan-darfur-un.html
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - A scorched-earth campaign by Arab militias to drive black Africans out of Sudan's Darfur region has spread in its wake hunger, homelessness and deprivation so crippling it is common to find three women sharing a single dress, senior U.N. officials said on Friday.
``One, there is a rein of terror in this area. Two, there is a scorched-earth policy. Three, there are repeated war crimes and crimes against humanity, and four, this is taking place before our very eyes,'' said Bertrand Ramcharan, the acting U.N. high commissioner for human rights.
Ramcharan and James Morris, head of the World Food Program, spoke to reporters after briefing the 15-nation Security Council on twin U.N. missions they led to the region after Sudan's government, which has played down the crisis and denied responsibility, invited them iroperty, burning villages and raping women and girls.
These attacks were based largely on ethnicity and carried out ``with total impunity,'' he said, urging the government to disarm and disband the militias, rein in its own troops, pe immediately disarmed and put under government control for relief efforts to become more effective.
-------- arms
Soviet arsenals a ticking time bomb: analysts
KIEV (AFP)
May 07, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040507185846.5sorviot.html
Former Soviet republics still hold on to millions of tonnes of aging armaments, a dangerous inheritance from the Cold War, as proven yet again by this week's deadly explosion at a military base in southeastern Ukraine.
Blasts and fire raged for the second day Friday at the armaments depot as local residents scrambled for cover. Five people have been confirmed dead, and scores have been injured, many losing their homes.
The base stored old arms that were pulled back by the Soviet Union from East Germany after it completed its reunification with West Germany in 1990.
Ukraine's public prosecutor accused officers overseeing the site of negligence. It was the second such incident in just a few months.
Defense Minister Evhen Marchuk initially denied that a blast had occurred, before eye witnesses told reporters about the disaster and footage of it appeared on the news, according to reports.
Some 60 percent of the armaments were kept in the open air and all stored in a single heap -- against strict regulations that say they should be separated by a wall, embankment or other defense shield in case of just such an accident.
According to respected military expert Serhei Zhurets, Ukraine "has two million tonnes of Soviet-era armaments, some of which are no longer in functioning order and are waiting to be destroyed. But there is not enough money to do this."
In all, Ukraine inherited 184 munitions arms depots, much of it equipment that was pulled back from Warsaw Pact nations after the bloc's collapse.
Ukraine has returned all of its nuclear warheads to Russia after the Soviet Union's collapse under a deal that the United States helped broker and insisted upon, fearing instability in independent Ukraine.
But the safe upkeep of the massive load of arms here is still prompting fears in the West, mindful of Ukraine's reputation for corruption in a nation where a quarter of the population lives below the official poverty line.
In March, Defense Minister Marchuk admitted that several hundred Soviet-era surface-to-air missiles remained unaccounted for in Ukraine.
He said this must only be a case of bad bookkeeping and categorically dismissed the possibility of the missiles being stolen, even though Ukraine has been accused in recent years of delivering arms to nations like Iraq on the black market.
According to some analysts, contraband armaments in the region are also seeping in from the Transdnestr, a separatist and largely lawless region of eastern Moldova that has one of the largest munitions dumps in the former Soviet Union.
But the situation is not much safer in Russia itself, which has been hit by several military catastrophes in recent years.
The most dramatic was the August 2000 Kursk nuclear submarine disaster that claimed the lives of 118 seamen and was followed with horror across the world as its crew suffocated on the bed of the Barents Sea.
Last summer, a fire at a military base in the Siberian region of Buryatia killed two people, prompting the evacuation of several thousand.
Russia also has up to 40,000 tonnes of chemical weapons that it does not have the cash to eliminate despite signing an international agreement to do so within years.
Analysts and media report that arms are regularly stolen and re-sold by Russian officers, who receive miserly pay.
-------- business
Pentagon Memo Warned on Army Contractors
May 7, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Contractors.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A year before the Iraq invasion, the then-Army secretary warned his Pentagon bosses that there was inadequate control of private military contractors, which are now at the heart of controversies over misspending and prisoner abuse.
The author of that memo, retired Army chief Thomas White, said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press that the recent events show the Pentagon has a long way to go to fix the problems he identified in March 2002.
``Clearly, there was a lot of work that had to be done and still needs to be done,'' White said Thursday.
In a sign of continued problems with the tracking of contracts, Pentagon officials on Thursday acknowledged they have yet to identify which Army entity manages the multimillion-dollar contract for interrogators like the one accused in the Iraq prisoner abuse probe.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld also acknowledged his department hasn't completed rules to govern the 20,000 or so private security guards watching over U.S. officials, installations and private workers in Iraq.
No single Pentagon office tracks how many people -- Americans, Iraqis or others -- are on the department's payroll in Iraq.
``You've got thousands of people running around on taxpayer dollars that the Pentagon can't account for in any way,'' said Dan Guttman, a lawyer and government contracting expert at Johns Hopkins University. ``Contractors are invisible, even at the highest level of the Pentagon.''
The problem has been known at the Pentagon for years.
In a March 2002 memo, White complained to three Pentagon undersecretaries that ``credible information on contract labor does not exist internal to the (Army) Department.'' The Army could not get rid of ``unnecessary, costly or unsuitable contracted work'' without full details of all the contracts, White wrote.
White's memo was first disclosed in April 2002 by the GovExec.com Web site, a trade publication for federal employees. It was provided to AP this week by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit government watchdog group.
Spokesmen for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the Coalition Provisional Authority did not return messages seeking comment Thursday.
The prison abuse controversy that erupted last week is not the first example from the Iraq war of contracting problems.
Investigators from Congress' General Accounting Office and the Defense Contract Audit Agency say lax oversight contributed to problems with several contracts in Iraq with Halliburton Co. The government is investigating allegations of kickbacks and inflated charges on several contracts with Vice President Dick Cheney's former company.
Guttman said the Pentagon in the past decades has significantly cut its contract management work force while increasing its number of contracts with private companies.
The contract with CACI International Inc. is one example. An Army report on alleged abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad says a CACI interrogator lied to investigators and ordered soldiers to abuse prisoners.
Pentagon officials said Thursday they have not determined which agency oversees the contract, which originally was with the Premier Technology Group, a smaller company providing contract interrogators that CACI bought last May.
``We haven't been able to find anyone who knows what contract that was,'' said Deborah Parker, a spokeswoman for the Army's Intelligence and Security Command. Parker said her agency did not hire any contract interrogators.
CACI in March landed an $11.9 million contract with the Army's European Command for ``intelligence analyst support services,'' which includes providing intelligence operatives for the global war on terrorism.
Pentagon officials said they did not know whether the CACI workers in Iraq were under a predecessor to that contract, which was not in effect at the time of the alleged abuse last fall.
CACI chairman J.P. ``Jack'' London, in a conference call with investment analysts Wednesday, did not identify the Army agency that managed the Iraq interrogator contract. London said the Pentagon had not told CACI about any problems.
The lack of oversight extended all the way down to the Abu Ghraib prison itself, said the report by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba. The contractors ``do not appear to be properly supervised within the detention facility,'' the report said.
``During our on-site inspection, they wandered about with too much unsupervised free access in the detainee area,'' the report said. Pentagon officials refused to release the report but said copies posted on the Internet by MSNBC and other news organizations are accurate.
White said contractors should not be in charge of interrogating prisoners.
``You can hire translators and people that would support the interrogation or the intelligence gathering efforts, certainly, but I would not think it would be wise to give up control of that process,'' said White, a Vietnam veteran and retired brigadier general.
---
Security Clearance Backlog Threatens U.S.
Friday, May 07, 2004
Fox
By Liza Porteus
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,119233,00.html
WASHINGTON - Clearing private contractors to do work on some of the nation's most important homeland and national security projects is taking way too much time and ultimately putting the country at risk, lawmakers and experts said Thursday.
"There's a lot of bureaucracy and paper shuffling so the system almost defeats itself by its own process," said Gary Nakamoto, CEO of Base Technologies, a federal contractor that operates data centers for the Customs and Border Protection Agency (search), among other things.
"As our needs grow, which clearly they have after 9/11, it's even more broken now because of the sheer volume [of clearances]. We're at a point in this country where our security process has imploded."
"Too often new, innovative firms that can provide invaluable services to the federal government are 'benched' due to the wait time of up to a year to be cleared," Rep. Jim Moran (search), D-Va., said during a House Government Reform Committee hearing on the issue.
"The enormous delays in granting security clearances have resulted in cost overruns and inefficiencies that ultimately have compromised our national security."
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the federal government began looking for new and improved homeland security technologies, such as systems used to track foreign visitors, to combat current threats and identify emerging risks. The demand for security clearances for both government employees and private contractors skyrocketed, but federal investigators have not been able to keep up with the pace.
The Office of Personnel Management (search) conducts background investigations for most civilian agencies as well as some for the Defense Department. Following Sept. 11, investigation requests spiked by almost 1 million names, said Stephen Benowitz, associate director for human resources at OPM. About 340,000 cases are waiting to be finished now.
And there aren't enough bodies to barrel through the caseload.
"Simply put, the demand for recent background checks currently exceeds capacity of the private-sector companies that provide these services," Benowitz said, noting that OPM has asked for more investigative contractors and government investigative staffs should be boosted by 50 percent.
In the private sector, companies and their employees are processed for clearances as part of the National Industrial Security Program (search). All federal agencies participate in the NISP; most leave it up to the Defense Department to oversee contractors that require access to classified information.
The Defense Security Service (search) conducts personnel security investigations for the Defense Department. Only the CIA (search), Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission (search) oversee their own investigations.
As of March, the Pentagon identified about 188,000 backlogged cases where industry personnel are waiting for clearances before they can start work.
Committee Chairman Tom Davis, R-Va., said the Pentagon set for itself a timeline for completing security clearance processes of 75 days for an initial secret clearance, 120 days for an initial top-secret clearance and 180 days for reinvestigating top-secret clearance. In fiscal year 2003, however, it took on average 375 days for a security clearance to get through the whole process.
Doug Wagoner, chairman of the Information Technology Association of America's Intelligence/Security Clearance Task Force and vice president of Data Systems Analysts (search) in Fairfax, Va., said that if a polygraph is required for a "top secret" Defense clearance, it could take up to 16 months.
"Let me be blunt: 375 days for a security clearance is unacceptable," Davis said. On Thursday, he sent a letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld saying many of the weakness in the clearance process were identified more than two decades ago, and urged Rumsfeld to speed up the clearance process or face legislative "solutions."
Any improvement in the speed of clearances would help private contractors, said ITAA. The group conducted a survey recently that found that 54 percent of companies surveyed consistently recruit workers with clearances from other contractors. It also found that 22 percent of those surveyed have 500 or more open positions that require some level of clearance - which means jobs are available but bureaucratic red tape is leaving them unfilled and the nation vulnerable.
ITAA members say current delays in obtaining security clearances consistently ranks No. 1 or No. 2 among their top concerns.
"A company is not going to pay someone indefinitely while they mark time waiting for a clearance to come through," said ITAA President Harris Miller. "In essence, this means skilled employees are losing out on good paying job opportunities while work on important government contracts goes undone."
The government needs to utilize better technologies to speed up the clearance process, experts said, such as constant monitoring of employee activity through databases to check for arrests or bankruptcy activity while on the job, to speed things up.
"There are projects that have to be completed in a very short time frame and many of these have clearance requirements on them and if you're waiting on them to start the project, obviously the delay that is caused is going to affect national security," Sudhaker Shenoy, chairman of the Northern Virginia Technology Council (search) and CEO of Information Management Consultants (search), told Foxnews.com after the hearing.
"You just can't be waiting to do a project ... some of these systems ought to have been done yesterday," he said. About 70 percent of NVTC members say they will only hire cleared workers.
Heather Anderson, acting director for the security office of the deputy undersecretary of defense, counterintelligence and security, said the Defense Department has made "great strides" in eliminating its backlog.
Anderson said DSS has pinpointed "bottlenecks" in investigations, such as pursuing overseas leads. DSS is in the process of hiring 200 more investigators and hopes to get them on board within 90-120 days.
DSS issued a prediction that all work prior to fiscal year 2004 will be completed by the end of September and that no cases will be more than one-year-old with the exception of some investigations on deployed workers.
Anderson said DSS also gave additional resources to the FBI, which has the largest backlog of record checks, so it can get rid of its backlog "within the next few weeks."
Although agencies are supposed to accept the clearances by other agencies - otherwise known as "reciprocity" - they often don't acknowledge them and conduct their own investigation.
Davis said that agencies denying transfer of clearances just because of turf issues is "inexcusable."
"I know of no empirical basis to support a claim that reciprocity reduces security or increases risk; instead, I contend that the failure to achieve full reciprocity can actually increase the overall security risk for the nation," said J. William Leonard, director of the Information Security Oversight Office at the National Archives and Records Administration (search) whose job it is to ensure compliance with NISP.
Leonard said there has been a recent, renewed effort by NISP members to solve the reciprocity problem so that industry can hold government accountable.
But "this declaration is not a silver bullet," he said.
----
Navy Demos Future Warfare Strategy
Bethpage NY (SPX)
May 07, 2004
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/uav-04y.html
The US Navy and industry partner Northrop Grumman have advanced, with a recent exercise, the service's warfighting goal of interconnecting sensors, manned and unmanned aircraft, ships and offensive weapon platforms in real time to locate and strike targets.
In the April 14 demonstration, engineers from the Naval Air Systems Command and Northrop Grumman's Integrated Systems sector used a Navy E-2C Hawkeye battle management aircraft to integrate and direct a precision strike mission using information provided over a network by a Navy RQ-8 Fire Scout unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), a simulated aircraft carrier operations control center, and an F/A-18 strike aircraft.
Northrop Grumman's Advanced Information Architecture (AIA), an Internet-like communications architecture of in-theater, platform-based servers, provided the data storage and sharing capabilities that enabled this first-time communication among manned and unmanned Navy airborne systems.
"The Navy/Northrop Grumman team created a non-proprietary, open-architecture network for this demonstration using commercial-off-the-shelf equipment - and we did it without writing a single line of software code, " said Tim Farrell, vice president and leader of Northrop Grumman's airborne early warning integrated product team.
"The network, which included the company's AIA server and related software, was up and running in less than a week, a testament to the joint team's ability to provide innovative, cost-effective solutions for complex FORCEnet requirements."
FORCEnet is the network of systems that the Navy envisions will integrate its Sea Power 21 operational concept. FORCEnet spans and integrates everything the Navy must do - from undersea to space operations, from procuring parts and systems to payroll and housing - to carry out its mission.
In the command and control exercise, the E-2C aircraft directed the Fire Scout vertical takeoff and landing tactical UAV to search for a suspected target within a specified area. The UAV captured and stored real-time video imagery of the target areas on board its AIA server.
The E-2C then downloaded this digital imagery from Fire Scout and sent it over a wideband network to a software-simulated aircraft carrier operations center in Newport News, Va., and ground stations in Bethpage, N.Y., and Arlington, Va.
Operators in both the carrier operations center and the E-2C Hawkeye used specialized targeting software to determine precise target coordinates, then posted them to a Web site. The Hawkeye crew used the data from that Web site to direct an orbiting F/A-18 Hornet aircraft to simulate an attack on the target.
"This concept demonstration proves that an innovative team armed with available technology can create a digital kill chain capable of reducing strike timelines from hours to a few minutes," said Capt. Robert LaBelle, NAVAIR E-2/C-2 program manager.
"The Navy will use this concept to develop proposed capabilities that could be further evaluated under its Sea Trial initiatives."
The team for this battle management command and control demonstration comprised elements of the Naval Air Systems Command's PMA-231 (E-2C), PMA-263 (Fire Scout), and PMA-265 (F/A-18) program offices, its VX-20 test squadron, and representatives from Northrop Grumman's Integrated Systems and Newport News sectors.
The Hawkeye and Hornet aircraft flew out of Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md. The Fire Scout operated from Webster Field, Md. The Virginia Advanced Shipbuilding and Carrier Integration Center (VASCIC) simulated aircraft carrier is located in Newport News, Va. A joint effort of the Commonwealth of Virginia, the City of Newport News and Northrop Grumman's Newport News sector, VASCIC is a "proving ground" for advanced shipbuilding and operations technologies.
The ground stations in Bethpage and Arlington are part of the Northrop Grumman nationwide Cyber Warfare Integration Network (CWIN), a synthetic engineering environment that links four company sites linked to one another and customer sites around the country. CWIN was created to design systems and "systems-of-systems" and evaluate them within real-time, full-spectrum battlefield, homeland security and other scenarios.
The April 14 test demonstrated that CWIN can receive data from ships, planes and other platforms, sensors, weapons and battle management command and control centers anywhere in the world, or from internally generated, high-fidelity models, to create real-world environments.
The Northrop-Grumman proposed Advanced Information Architecture stores imagery and other critical battlefield information in a network of high-capacity servers located on in-theater airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and battle management platforms.
It allows "bandwidth challenged" tactical users to download mission critical data on demand directly from platforms such as the U.S. Air Force's E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (Joint STARS), the RQ-4 Global Hawk aerial reconnaissance system or the Navy's RQ-8 Fire Scout tactical UAV.
AIA provides a faster, simpler alternative to the expensive, bandwidth-intensive process used in recent foreign conflicts to download Global Hawk image data to ground stations based in the U.S., analyze it, then push it back into theater on demand.
To date, the company has validated the concept in scenarios involving exchanges between Global Hawk; Joint STARS and ground users; and exchanges between a Global Hawk surrogate; a Fire Scout surrogate and ground users.
----
Lockheed Martin Wins $5 Billion Joint Common Missile Deal
Orlando FL (SPX)
May 07, 2004
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/missiles-04u.html
Lockheed Martin has been selected to develop the Joint Common Missile (JCM) system, the next generation air-to-ground missile that will be carried on U.S. Armed Forces rotary- and fixed-wing platforms.
The contract is worth approximately five billion dollars over the life of the program. Lockheed Martin received an initial contract valued at $53 million to commence work on the program's system design and development (SDD) phase.
The systems design and development contract includes a 14-month risk reduction phase and a 36-month testing/integration phase to ready the JCM for initial production. The first JCMs are expected to reach the field in 2010.
"We look forward to the opportunity to provide our nation's aviators with this outstanding new weapon system," said Richard Edwards, director of Tactical Missiles at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control.
"We recognize the trust that our customer has placed in Lockheed Martin, and we will continue to apply to the SDD contract the same disciplined performance we have brought to our company-funded, pre-contract risk reduction initiative."
"We are well-postured to enter the SDD risk reduction phase with high confidence of success," said Steven Barnoske, JCM program director at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control.
"Our extensive pre-contract risk reduction test program has significantly mitigated risk on the critical subsystems -- warhead, motor, tri-mode seeker -- our software is mature, and we have demonstrated a low-risk integration solution for both rotary- and fixed-wing platforms. We are ready and eager to develop the important new capabilities that JCM will provide to our nation's warfighters."
The U.S. Army, Navy and Marine Corps are expected to procure up to 54,000 JCM rounds to replace the Longbow/Hellfire missiles on the Apache, Cobra, and Strikehawk helicopters and the Maverick missile on the F/A-18 Hornet jet fighter, at a total contract lifetime value of approximately $5 billion. The United Kingdom's Ministry of Defence has also expressed potential interest in co-developing and producing the new missile.
The design and development of the JCM will be performed at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control in Orlando, FL, and the missiles will be produced at the company's award-winning advanced missile manufacturing facility in Troy, AL.
The Lockheed Martin team includes more than a dozen major suppliers located across the United States and in the UK.
JCM is equipped with a tri-mode seeker that combines semi-active laser for precision-strike, single-shot kill capability with low collateral damage, imaging infrared for passive fire-and-forget and countermeasure robustness, and millimeter wave radar for active fire-and-forget day, night and in adverse weather.
JCM has a multi-purpose warhead that packs both a highly lethal shaped- charge to defeat the most advanced armored threats and a blast fragmentation capability to defeat ships, buildings, bunkers and other "soft" targets by penetrating them with a precursor warhead and then detonating a time-delayed main warhead to incapacitate the target from within.
JCM also has a single rocket motor that can provide the required turndown ratio (boost to sustain) in the temperature extremes of both rotary- and fixed-wing environments, delivering maximum range from all required platforms.
Collectively, these three features will enable Army, Navy and Marine Corps aviators to perform a wide range of close air support missions from multiple platforms against diverse targets to support our forces in whatever scenario they find.
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Lockheed Martin Offeres Two Open Architecture Capabilities For Aegis
Moorestown NJ (SPX)
May 07, 2004
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/bmdo-04o.html
Lockheed Martin successfully migrated two key elements of the Aegis Weapon System to an open architecture environment, a move that will significantly enhance the capabilities and service life of the U.S. Navy's premier surface combat system while also reducing its cost.
"The Lockheed Martin Open Architecture team is making impressive progress," said Capt. Richard T. Rushton, the Navy's chief for the Network Systems & Integration directorate. "The team's innovative engineering approach and commitment to open architecture indicates we are on track for our upgrade timeline."
The first demonstration focused on the multi-mission, multi-sensor capabilities and portability of the Open Command and Decision (C&D) system. The demonstration exercised all sensor and weapon interfaces, data links and engagements across multiple warfare areas in various tactical conditions.
Open C&D, comprised of more than 500,000 lines of C++ source code, was demonstrated using a mainstream Open Architecture Computing Environment (OACE) Category 3 infrastructure. OACE Category 3 is the first OACE design allowing a change of hardware infrastructure without requiring changes to the software design.
The second demonstration included the SPY Radar Control Program detect, control and engage functions also operating on a Category 3 OACE. This demonstration built on the previous open architecture tracking capabilities demonstrated in February by adding missile acquisition and guidance capabilities.
Open architecture systems exploit commercial computing technology, allowing the Navy to install software and other technology upgrades faster and more cost effectively throughout the life of a ship, aircraft or submarine.
Both demonstrations used Navy-endorsed publish-subscribe middleware for intra- element communications and Network Time Protocol in order to align with OACE guidance.
"These successful demonstrations confirm our continuing commitment to the Navy Open Architecture vision for developing reusable application level components," said Orlando Carvalho, vice president of Lockheed Martin Maritime Systems & Sensors' Surface Systems line of business.
"While these results apply to Aegis ships, this approach can be equally applied to the Navy's next generation of warships, such as LCS, DD(X) and CG(X)."
The demonstrations represent key milestones on the disciplined spiral approach to evolve the current Aegis architecture and computing environments.
The first step, to be completed next year, will upgrade the radar control architecture and computing environment for all SPY-1 radar systems, beginning with SPY-1B/D radars. In parallel, the Aegis weapon control and display system are also being architected to operate in an open computing environment.
Lockheed Martin's approach to open architecture is built on nearly a decade of "open system, rapid capability" deliveries to the Navy, including the Acoustic Rapid Commercial Off-The-Shelf Insertion (ARCI) Program that provides open architecture solutions for the Navy's submarine force.
----
Lockheed Martin Completes Major Milestone On AEHF Milstar
Los Angeles (SPX)
May 07, 2004
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/milspace-comms-04x.html
Lockheed Martin announced today that it has successfully completed on-schedule the critical design review phase of the Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) program and is beginning production of the next-generation military communications satellite system.
More than 350 representatives from the Defense Department, including members of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Strategic Command, as well as contractor teams, recently attended a four-day System Critical Design Review (CDR) at Lockheed Martin in Sunnyvale, Calif. The review, which represented the culmination of the two-year CDR phase, validated the detailed design of the overall AEHF system to ensure it meets warfighter requirements.
"The team continues to make excellent progress on this vital program," said Julie Sattler, vice president, AEHF program, Lockheed Martin Space Systems.
"The highly successful review demonstrated to the customer and user community the strength of our AEHF design. We look forward to delivering the tremendous capabilities that AEHF will provide, allowing the warfighter to accomplish operational missions with greater speed and effectiveness."
AEHF is the successor to the Milstar system and will provide global, highly secure, protected, survivable communications for warfighters in all services within the Department of Defense. AEHF will deliver 10 times greater total capacity and channel data rates six times higher than that of Milstar II communications satellites.
The AEHF system will feature several state-of-the-art technologies, including a sophisticated payload and phased array antennas provided by Northrop Grumman Space Technology of Redondo Beach, Calif., and an electric propulsion system, provided by Aerojet of Sacramento, Calif. Lockheed Martin's A2100 design will serve as the AEHF spacecraft bus.
The Mission Control Segment, being led by Lockheed Martin Integrated Systems & Solutions in Valley Forge, Pa., will feature distributed communication planning, modernized commanding and high fidelity simulation.
Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Sunnyvale, Calif., is currently under contract to provide the first two Advanced EHF satellites and command control system to its customer, the MILSATCOM Program Office, located at the Space and Missile Systems Center, Los Angeles Air Force Base, Calif. The first AEHF satellite is scheduled for launch in early 2007.
-------- iraq
Gamble Brings Old Uniforms Back Into Style
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, May 7, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6897-2004May6?language=printer
FALLUJAH, Iraq, May 6 -- The crackle of gunfire, omnipresent here just a week ago, has been replaced with the din of car horns. Shops that had been shuttered during a month-long siege by U.S. Marines, giving this city on the Euphrates River the feel of a ghost town, have begun to reopen. Attacks on the few remaining American troops in the surrounding desert have nearly ceased.
But the seeming normalcy has come with a cost. Fallujah is now caught in a time warp. Iraqi soldiers wearing their crisp, olive-green army uniforms -- a sight unseen since former president Saddam Hussein's government was toppled more than a year ago -- now man checkpoints on roads leading into the city. Stout generals, their lapels adorned with stars and crossed swords, stroll around the mayor's office with the same imperious air they projected when Hussein was president.
The Iraqi soldiers are back because of an agreement that is one of the most significant military gambles in the 13-month-long U.S. occupation of Iraq. Over the past week, U.S. Marines have pulled out of positions in and around Fallujah and handed over responsibility for security to an untested militia led by a group of generals who had been barred from military service by the U.S. civilian administrator of Iraq.
The agreement to give the generals a chance was negotiated by Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, the top U.S. Marine commander in Iraq, who was eager to avoid an all-out attack on the resilient insurgency here. In secret discussions with Conway last month, the generals agreed to assemble a force of former soldiers to restore order to this troubled city.
Thus far, the generals appear to be opting for a strategy of co-optation instead of confrontation. They have recruited scores of young men who fought against the Marines last month, according to U.S. officials familiar with the new force, called the Fallujah Brigade. The officials said they believed that most members of the brigade participated in the fighting.
"Many of the guys who were shooting at the Marines have simply put on their old army uniforms and joined the Fallujah Brigade," said a U.S. official familiar with the new force.
Some of the Iraqi generals, including a leader of the new force, had been officers in Hussein's Republican Guard, an elite army unit dominated by Sunni Muslims and accused of human rights abuses against Shiite Muslims and Kurds. The generals, whose return to power has angered many Shiite and Kurdish leaders, do not pretend to hew to the U.S. military message about the insurgency in Fallujah. They have joined residents in proclaiming a victory over the Marines. They have publicly dismissed American claims that foreign militants are holed up in Fallujah. They have also urged U.S. troops to stay away from the city.
Mohammed Latif, a former official in Hussein's intelligence service who was named the brigade's leader, proclaimed to reporters on Thursday that "there are no insurgents" in Fallujah.
Conway's aides said they were not alarmed by these developments. More important, they insisted, was improving security in the city and getting Iraqis to take responsibility for restoring order. They said they were encouraged by former fighters joining the brigade. They also said that Iraqis without extensive military service would not have had sufficient clout to take charge in a city such as Fallujah, where a disproportionate number of men served in the army, particularly in the Republican Guard.
"We have a potential Iraqi solution to the problem that we didn't have 96 hours ago," Col. John Coleman, Conway's chief of staff, said in an interview Wednesday. "As long as they can continue to show positive progress toward the mission . . . we feel that we're closer to the end-state objective. The overarching aim of this [Marine] force is to basically work itself out of a job."
Although Marine commanders insisted that Conway's superiors were fully briefed about the arrangement and signed off on it, the unorthodox nature of the deal has led senior officials at the Pentagon, the U.S. military command in Iraq and the civilian occupation administration to react with skepticism. "It's Conway's thing," said one U.S. civilian official involved in the issue. "Either it works out, and he emerges as they guy who solved the Fallujah problem, or it turns into a big failure."
Uniquely Rebellious
From the very first days of the occupation, a unique confluence of religious fervor, tribal tradition and loyalty to Hussein's government in Fallujah created deep suspicion and outright hatred toward U.S. forces. Those sentiments hardened after a series of confrontations in which Iraqi civilians were killed by U.S. troops. Over the following months, the city became a hotbed of resistance. Military convoys were subjected to so many roadside bomb attacks that Army commanders ordered supply convoys to bypass Fallujah and limited trips inside the city to patrols, raids and other essential tasks.
As early as last July, the Army's 3rd Infantry Division sought to turn over security responsibilities within the city to a municipal protection force, hoping that Iraqis would be able to deal with the insurgents. That effort failed.
When they arrived in March, Marine commanders recalled, they sought to do things differently. They said they reasoned that the Army's strategy had allowed Fallujah to become a haven for resistance fighters and a staging area for bomb attacks in and around Baghdad.
The Marine commanders added that they had always planned to conduct more aggressive raids and more frequent patrols. But after four U.S. security contractors were killed and mutilated on March 31, the Marines were ordered to shift their strategy to an all-out attack on suspected insurgent positions.
On April 5, two battalions sealed off the city. Hours later, they pushed into the city backed by tanks, attack helicopters and fighter jets. Hundreds of suspected insurgents were killed in the initial incursion, Marine commanders said.
But the operation had unforeseen consequences. Thousands of women and children sought to flee the city of 200,000, complicating military operations. Arab satellite television stations broadcast claims that hundreds of civilians had been killed by the Marines, fueling a surge of angry protests in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq. By April 9, the Marines had declared a unilateral cease-fire to allow families to leave and local leaders to participate in peace talks.
On April 19, after a week of talks, a group of local civic leaders and a few Sunni politicians from Baghdad made a deal with Marine commanders. In exchange for relaxing a nighttime curfew and allowing families to return to their homes, the leaders promised to collect heavy weapons from the insurgents and hand them over to the Marines.
That never happened. All the Marines got was a pile of rusty, antiquated arms. Most of them didn't work.
The next day, an interlocutor approached Conway with an enticing offer: A group of former Iraqi army generals was willing to assemble a force that would restore order in Fallujah. Although the commanders and other U.S. officials were dealing with several other groups of Iraqis -- tribal sheiks, religious leaders and Sunni politicians from Baghdad -- this overture piqued Conway's interest, according to a senior Marine officer. Frustrated with the ability of the city's civilian leadership to influence the insurgents, he hoped the generals might have more clout. He scheduled a meeting with them on April 22.
Latif, a trim, graying man, arrived in a business suit. He was accompanied by Jassim Mohammed Saleh, a portly former major general from Fallujah who commanded an infantry division before the war.
Although Conway's aides wondered whether the generals had enough wasta -- or personal connections -- to marshal the more than 1,000 troops they promised, the Marine commander and other ranking officers who participated in the gathering were impressed with what they heard. "The conversation was in strictly military terms," Coleman recalled. "These were military professionals who understood a dynamic on the ground, who spoke in a language, although in a different native tongue than ours, that was very, very similar to how we perceived the problem."
Sitting across a table draped in brown camouflage fabric, the generals asked the Marines to hand over security responsibilities to them, saying they did not want money or equipment, Marine officials said. "Their offer had significant elements on the table that otherwise wouldn't have been an option for us, most significantly to put an Iraqi face on the solution to this problem," Coleman said. "This option brought back into the fold an opportunity for Iraqis to deal with an Iraqi problem."
Ad Hoc Planning
While interested in the generals' plan, Marine commanders were also planning to resume offensive operations because local leaders had not held up their end of the peace deal. On April 23, Marine units in the city were drawing up new battle plans. But by the following day, with the possibility of a deal with the generals and growing concern about the broader impact of an attack, senior officials at the White House and the Pentagon told Marine commanders to exhaust all their options before mounting another offensive, according to U.S. officials familiar with the issue.
On April 25, Marine commanders announced they would conduct joint patrols with Iraqi security forces in the city on the 29th. Marine combat officers expected the patrols to get shot at. One officer called the mission a "suicide patrol" aimed at providing justification for a renewed Marine assault.
A senior Marine officer said talks were continuing in many directions. "We had all these different tracks going on," the officer said. Describing the chaotic nature of the negotiations, he said: "Ad hoc would be kind."
As they prepared for the joint patrols, the officer said commanders were set to change the rules of engagement to allow Marines to shoot at anyone with a gun, instead of waiting for them to demonstrate hostile intent. But on April 28, commanders decided to hold off on that change because the joint patrols had been delayed for a day. Although no reason was given at the time, Marine officials said they did not want to interfere with a large meeting of tribal sheiks scheduled for the 29th. Neither the U.S. military command nor the civilian occupation authority thought that Conway was close to making a deal.
Later that evening, however, Conway did exactly that. He and the generals agreed to set up the Fallujah Brigade. Starting Friday, Conway decided that two of the four Marine battalions in the city would withdraw. In their place, 300 former Iraqi soldiers would assume control of checkpoints and perimeter positions on the city's southern border. Assuming that went well and the generals were able to recruit more soldiers, the other two Marine battalions would begin repositioning a few days later.
Senior Marine officials said Conway had been authorized to reach a deal by his superiors, including Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the overall military commander in Iraq, and Gen. John P. Abizaid, the U.S. commander for the Middle East. The Marine officials said they conveyed details of the deal to both Sanchez and Abizaid.
The next morning, however, internal reports of the deal startled officials with the civilian occupation authority in Baghdad. Although they knew Conway was making arrangements to set up an Iraqi force, they were unaware of the details until the deal was done. The civilian officials were alarmed by the decision to work with former generals, who nearly a year ago had been excluded from participation in the new security forces by L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator of Iraq. Bremer reversed that policy only on April 23.
"It caught everyone by surprise," an official with the occupation authority in Baghdad said. "Here was this Marine general making security policy, and we knew nothing about it."
Conway has described the Iraqi army as "the most respected institution in Iraq," and Marine officers have said that bringing it back would be key to restoring security, particularly in Sunni-dominated cities such as Fallujah, where thousands of former soldiers are unemployed and disaffected.
"These individuals may have seen themselves as somewhat left behind in the process of the last 12 months," Coleman said. "This is an opening and potentially an opportunity where they can contribute to the end state that the coalition is here to create."
But civilian and military officials in Baghdad remain wary. Among their biggest worries has been the schedule imposed by Conway, which called for Marine units to begin withdrawing before the new force was fully formed. "There's a lot of concern about the speed of implementation," the occupation authority official said. "We need to be very careful."
Coleman said Marine commanders opted to reposition U.S. forces right away because the Iraqi generals felt that doing so would encourage residents who had fled to return and evict insurgents who may have been holing up in their homes. "They said that some of the families would have been reticent to return until they see an Iraqi on the security perimeter," he said.
'A Noble Job'
Clad in their olive-green uniforms and toting AK-47 rifles, members of the Fallujah Brigade manning checkpoints leading into the city have been drawing honks and waves this week.
"We even get food and newspapers," said Maj. Majid Hamid, who is responsible for several checkpoints on the city's western fringe. "The people like to see us here."
Hamid, who spent 17 years in the army and eventually rose to command an air-defense unit, said he heard a call from a mosque loudspeaker asking for people to join the brigade. He said he signed up for a simple reason: "I don't want the American soldiers to enter our city again," he said. "That's why I'm here."
Across town in the mayor's office, hundreds of men swarmed about on Thursday trying to apply for jobs with the brigade. There were older men in officers' uniforms, former conscripts in khakis and young men in civilian clothes with no military experience. Many came looking not just to protect their city but for a job in a place where nobody else is hiring. The generals have not said how much they will pay their troops.
"I want to be a soldier again," said Yousef Ahmed, who spent three years in the Republican Guard before the war and now sits at home with nothing to do. "It is a noble job."
Nearby, former brigadier general Mohammed Jassim Zobai strutted around in his old uniform, which he had kept hidden in his closet for the past year out of fear that U.S. troops would discover it during a raid and haul him in for questioning. "Now I can wear this with pride," he said. "It is a wonderful day."
As of Thursday, leaders of the brigade said they had assembled more than 1,000 soldiers and would continue expanding the force. The troops have not yet begun patrols inside the city, but have been deployed along the outskirts, supposedly to prevent insurgents from entering or leaving.
But at Hamid's checkpoint, enforcement was a lax affair. His soldiers failed to stop a single vehicle during an hour-long visit.
"We're from this city," he said. "We know who is suspicious and who isn't."
Marine commanders said they intended to test the new brigade's success in combating the insurgency in a week or two, when they plan to send a convoy through the center of the city. "We're going to see whether anything has changed," one officer said. "If not, we'll just have to go back to where we were."
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'Real date for Iraq handover is January now'
By Judy Dempsey in Brussels and Andrew Jack in Moscow
May 7 2004
Financial Times
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1083180352858&p=1012571727102
European foreign ministers meeting in Dublin this week said they were now resigned to a largely "symbolic" transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis at the end of June, and would be reluctant to block a United Nations resolution over the issue.
Several European Union governments now say the most important handover date in Iraq will be January 2005, the timetable set for elections which diplomats believe will be much more significant than June in terms of passing genuine legitimacy to an Iraqi government.
Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's envoy to Baghdad who has just finished his six-month stint, recently told Nato ambassadors during a visit to Brussels they should now regard next January, not June 30 as the more important date.
He expressed the same view on Friday in The Economist. "The transfer of executive authority to an Iraqi government by June 30 2004 is less important than the end-year elections in the building of the new state," he wrote.
The shift from the significance of June 30 to next January stems from a growing consensus among EU governments that the US is not prepared to give the transitional Iraqi government sufficient powers to bestow legitimacy and sovereignty.
Michel Barnier, French foreign minister, told other EU foreign ministers this week "we must all look to the future, not to the past". He did not suggest that Paris would block a UN resolution, despite reservations over limited authority for the transitional government.
He was speaking after a "Euro-Mediterranean" meeting in Dublin of EU foreign ministers and their counterparts from North Africa and the Middle East.
Diplomats said European officials were unwilling to say publicly that the transitional government would not end the occupation since they did not want to fuel another transatlantic row. But statements by some foreign ministers about the powers invested in the transitional government made their criticisms clear.
Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister, openly questioned what kind of legitimacy the transitional government would have "if it did not have control over the budget and over security. There must be a transfer of visible sovereignty," he said.
It was unclear what stance Russia would take on Friday, as Sergei Lavrov, the new foreign minister, called for an international conference to determine the nature of a new Iraq administration before the handover.
Konstantin Kosachev, head of the Russian parliament's foreign affairs committee, expressed doubts that there would be any significant political shift in Iraq after June 30. "The situation will not change, just the decorations. If there is a resolution, it will be symbolic," he said.
Mr Kosachev stressed that Russia was not interested in the failure of the US and British operation, and would not in any way try to harm it, but that his country was "not ashamed of its position of opposition to the war".
The Pentagon this week said it would retain control over security, particularly the prisons where 8,000 Iraqis are held.
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U.S. Forces Take Key Building in Shiite Holy City
By Saad Sarhan and Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, May 7, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6898-2004May6?language=printer
NAJAF, Iraq, May 6 -- U.S. armored units moved into the Shiite Muslim holy cities of Najaf and Karbala on Thursday, seizing a key building in Najaf and fending off counterattacks by a militia loyal to the radical cleric Moqtada Sadr.
U.S. officials insisted that the raid into Najaf, the first deep thrust by U.S. forces into the city since Sadr's militia all but took control of it a month ago, did not constitute a full-scale assault. Units of the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment captured the governor's office without a fight, officials said. The office sits in the heart of the city, two miles from a pair of major Shiite shrines.
Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army, which has been characterized by U.S. military officials as a street gang, reacted quickly. Militiamen fired rifle rounds and rocket-propelled grenades at the governor's office and at a military patrol at the edge of a vast cemetery on one side of the city. News services reported as many as 41 Iraqi deaths.
In Baghdad, meanwhile, a huge car bomb exploded near an entrance to the Green Zone, where the occupation authority has its heavily fortified headquarters on the grounds of one of ousted president Saddam Hussein's palaces. Six Iraqis and one U.S. soldier were killed in an inferno that sent black clouds swirling high into the clear dawn sky.
The violence coincided with the return to Iraq of Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. envoy who is laboring to assemble an interim Iraqi government to assume sovereignty on June 30. Several Iraqi political parties, some of which may lose influence after the handover, signed a statement declaring that his effort "lacks credibility."
U.S. forces have been massed around Najaf and the adjacent city of Kufa, south of Baghdad, for more than a month in response to fighting sparked by Sadr and largely conducted by his militia. Military officials have avoided a major assault, both to avert the kind of protracted fight that took place over the past month in Fallujah, a Sunni Muslim city west of Baghdad, and to keep from triggering a broad uprising among Shiites in response to an attack on their holy cities.
"We're not going to go wading into Najaf. We know how sensitive it is," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the military's top spokesman in Iraq, said in Baghdad.
In Washington, a senior U.S. official involved in Iraq policy said the U.S. strategy in Najaf is to "chip away" at Sadr's forces and create "greater space" for local Shiite leaders to increase pressure on Sadr to back down.
"They need to stand up to this guy," the official said. "When we start to see the snowball effect of the erosion of Sadr's support, that gives us greater space to take military action.
"Ideally, if we take the governor's house and some of his supporters, it gives our nominal allies among the Iraqis more space to act. It's a lot better than going in with tanks."
On Thursday afternoon, U.S. tanks, armored vehicles and Humvees wound into Najaf from a nearby base and entered the grounds of the governor's office building. At 5:30 p.m., Mahdi Army fighters began to pepper them with automatic-rifle fire, rocket-propelled grenades and rockets.
After about three hours, a lull blanketed the nearby Ghadeer neighborhood. But the silence ended abruptly at 11 p.m., when guerrillas fired mortars at the U.S. base. By midnight, only sporadic shots were heard.
In Karbala, another Shiite holy city, U.S. tanks and armored vehicles moved into positions at a government building a few hundred yards from a Shiite shrine. Armored cars spearheading the assault fired heavy machine guns into an office sheltering Mahdi Army forces, and helicopters fired rockets into the town.
As in Najaf, the militia resisted, but fighting subsided by mid-evening. The Americans withdrew at about 10 p.m. One report said two Iraqis were killed. Earlier in Kufa, where Sadr is holed up, U.S. troops fought the Mahdi Army along a stretch of road, residents said. At least 21 Iraqis were killed in the clash, U.S. military officials said.
Amr Husseini, a spokesman for Sadr in Baghdad, said the Mahdi Army would answer the American operations "with force."
He warned against killing Sadr, who was last reported to be in Kufa's main mosque. "The assassination of Moqtada al-Sadr will bring revolution to Iraq," he said.
Sadr is wanted by the occupation authority on charges of involvement in the killing of another Shiite cleric last year. On Wednesday, the U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, accused the Mahdi Army of looting and said Sadr had established illegal Islamic courts.
"There is no room in the new Iraq for the kind of lawless, self-interested behavior we have seen in the past few weeks," said Bremer, who encouraged local leaders in Najaf to find a solution to the crisis and force Sadr to "face Iraqi justice."
Bremer named a new governor of Najaf, Adnan Zurufi, whom he wants to place in the governor's compound. Zurufi, who fled Iraq during the failed Shiite uprising against Hussein in 1991, succeeds a Bremer appointee who was arrested last June on charges of kidnapping, extortion and corruption.
Survivors of the bombing in Baghdad and relatives of victims focused blame on the Mahdi Army, saying militiamen had threatened Iraqis who work inside the Green Zone.
"They threatened the laborers in this neighborhood," said Hussein Ali, 24, who was looking for a pair of cousins who had left their nearby homes for work 15 minutes before the blast. "If they do this work, they will kill them."
Uday Muayed Habib, a janitor who was walking toward the Green Zone when the bomb went off and suffered head wounds from shrapnel, said he had heard such threats indirectly. "I heard everyone talk about it. They said we were all under threat of death," he said at Kindi Hospital, where several of the 20 wounded were treated. He appealed for painkillers, saying he had not been given relief at the hospital.
Ali Ahmed, a laborer who asked his family to take him to a private hospital for better treatment, said: "It's all a mess. The Americans have so many enemies now. They can't provide security."
Officials and witnesses said the bomb was loaded in an orange and white taxi that exploded in a narrow lane leading into the Green Zone. The route is protected by giant concrete barriers that channeled the force of the blast toward shops on a nearby street, shattering several storefronts.
In the northern city of Kirkuk, unknown gunmen killed a representative of the Iraqi Agriculture Ministry. Several Iraqi officials working with occupation officials in local and national government have been targeted in recent days.
Fallujah, meanwhile, has been largely peaceful since a brigade of former Hussein-era soldiers assumed security duties from U.S. Marines. On Thursday, an Arabic-language television station broadcast a videotape of an Iraqi American engineer who once resided in Fallujah and has been working on U.S.-funded road projects. The captive, Aban Elias, from Denver, appealed to Muslim groups in Iraq to negotiate his freedom.
The parties that opposed the mission by Brahimi, the U.N. envoy, included the Iraqi National Congress, headed by Ahmed Chalabi, a U.S.-backed former exile leader; two major Shiite parties; and two Kurdish parties that control northern regions of Iraq.
"The project . . . opens the way for the previous regime's men to return to power, leading to division and instability," the letter said.
The parties' leaders belong to Iraq's Governing Council, which Brahimi's proposals would put out of business. Brahimi wants sovereignty to be handed to a government of technocrats that would run Iraq until general elections are held in early 2005. He has also proposed that an assembly of 1,000 representatives elect a council to advise the new government.
Williams reported from Baghdad. Correspondent Scott Wilson in Baghdad, staff writer Robin Wright in Washington and special correspondent Zuhair Shihab in Karbala contributed to this report.
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U.S Troops in Heavy Fighting Around 2 Shiite Holy Cities
May 7, 2004
New York Times
By EDWARD WONG and MARIA NEWMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/07/international/middleeast/07CND-IRAQ.html?hp
KARBALA, Iraq, May 7 - American soldiers killed at least two dozen insurgents over a 24-hour period, officials said today, as fierce fighting broke out in parts of this holy city controlled by militiamen loyal to a rebel Shiite cleric.
The battles, which began on Thursday, were the most intense since the American military started an operation here Tuesday night to crush the militia of Moktada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric who has sought refuge in the nearby city of Najaf and its nearby town of Kufa.
In other fighting, around the central holy city of Najaf today, American soldiers killed 12 of members of Mr. Sadr's militiamen, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman, said in Baghdad.
The fighting in Najaf came a day after American forces captured the governor's office there, and General Kimmitt said that the troops were trying to respect the reverence of the holy city in installing a new governor.
"We remain extraordinarily sensitive to the religious significance of the town of Najaf," he said. "This restoration of the governor's building for the new governor should not be interpreted as an offensive against the city of Najaf, but simply an opportunity to restore legitimate Iraqi control by the appointment of the government - the new governor - as well as the restoration of a place for him to operate out of."
The seizure of the governor's office was the most aggressive move yet by the American military in its effort to quell the rise of Mr. Sadr, who has led a monthlong resistance in Najaf and nearby holy cities.
In Karbala, members of the militia, known as the Mahdi Army, attacked one American patrol after dark on Thursday and another this morning, resulting in firefights that lasted several hours.
In the first, soldiers killed at least five insurgents and wounded six, Maj. Mark Grabski of the First Armored Division said. Soldiers on patrol this morning killed at least 20 insurgents, Capt. Robert Adcock said.
A civilian riding by on a moped near the end of the clash today was accidentally shot by American soldiers and died, officials said, despite the efforts of an Army medic to save his life.
The fighting took place in a Karbala neighborhood less than a mile southwest of two of the holiest places of pilgrimage for Shiite Muslims, the golden-domed Shrine of Hussein and the ornate Shrine of Abbas. The American military has been careful not to encroach on the immediate area of the shrines to avoid inflaming Shiites across Iraq. Instead, commanders have been sending patrols through the troublesome neighborhood to draw fire from militiamen and then counterattack them.
"I think they had enough today," Captain Adcock said of the insurgents as he chewed on a cigar after today's fighting. "They may get ready and go back tonight. But right now they've had enough."
Soldiers first began moving into the neighborhood early Wednesday, and each patrol has met stubborn resistance. By this morning, the fighters had laid trunks of palm trees and large boulders across the neighborhood's main avenue in an effort to block the Americans' path. A dozen Bradley fighting vehicles and two armored personnel carriers rolled around the obstacles as more than 100 soldiers made their way on foot along the dun-colored buildings on either side.
The going was treacherous for fighters on both sides. Militiamen fired rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47 automatic rifles at the soldiers while ducking behind houses and racing down alleyways. The soldiers moved low along walls and inched their way down a milelong stretch of road, returning fire the entire time.
At one point, an American sniper killed an insurgent looking around the corner of an alley with a shot to the head. A rocket-propelled grenade whooshed past the faces of more than a dozen soldiers crouched against a wall. At least one Bradley fighting vehicle took a direct hit from an R.P.G., though no one inside was wounded.
One soldier fainted from heat exhaustion, and two were dragged into Bradleys and given water before they collapsed.
In the nearby town of Kufa, the cleric, Mr. Sadr, emerged from hiding today to address Friday morning prayer services at a mosque, something he has done for several weeks. Mr. Sadr rejected President Bush's public apologies for the American mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners.
Mr. Bush's "apology isn't enough," The Associated Press quoted Mr. Sadr as saying to worshipers. "This crime isn't tackled by an apology," he said. "Those who did this crime should be punished the same way in the same place."
American troops have surrounded Mr. Sadr's home city of Najaf and the cleric had to evade American forces in the area to reach the mosque in Kufa, which is about six miles from Najaf.
"What sort of freedom and democracy can we expect from you when you take such joy in torturing Iraqi prisoners?" Mr. Sadr continued, referring to Americans, according to The A.P.
"America claims that it is fighting terrorism, and not sponsoring it, and is spreading justice and equality among peoples and freedom and democracy," Mr. Sadr said. "Now it is doing the same acts done by the small devil Saddam and in the same place where Iraqis were oppressed."
United States officials have asserted that the prisoner abuses were isolated and that six soldiers are facing criminal charges, with the possibility that more will be charged.
On Thursday in Washington, Mr. Bush told King Abdullah II of Jordan that he "was sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families."
Just south of Baghdad, a Polish and an Algerian journalist were killed in a drive-by shooting today in the latest deadly attack against reporters in Iraq, several news agencies reported.
Both victims worked for Poland's TVP television, where officials identified them as Waldemar Milewicz, one of Poland's star television reporters, and his Algerian picture editor, Mounir Bouamrane, The A.P. said.
More than two dozen journalists have been killed in Iraq since the war began in March 2003, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Edward Wong reported from Karbala and Maria Newman contributed reporting from New York for this article.
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U.S. Forces Move on Outskirts of Najaf, Installing a Governor
May 7, 2004
New York Times
By EDWARD WONG and DEXTER FILKINS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/07/international/middleeast/07IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all&position=
KARBALA, Iraq, May 6 - American forces on Thursday captured the governor's office on the outskirts of the holy city of Najaf and quickly installed a new Iraqi leader there. It was the most aggressive move yet against the radical Shiite cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, who has led a monthlong resistance there.
The seizure of the governor's office came on another day of heavy fighting with Mr. Sadr's militia in southern Iraq. In a skirmish near the neighboring city of Kufa, where the bulk of Mr. Sadr's militia is concentrated, the Americans said they had killed 41 insurgents.
As American troops secured the governor's office, L. Paul Bremer III, the top American administrator in Iraq, announced the appointment of the new governor, Adnan al-Zurufi, and promised the restoration of American-backed authority in Najaf.
Mr. Zurufi, an opponent of Saddam Hussein who lived in exile for a time in Detroit, appealed to ordinary Iraqis and the country's religious leaders to help him disarm the militias in the city. Then he headed for the governor's mansion, where American officials said he started work right away.
The American move into Najaf, part of an operation that began earlier this week, reflected a high-risk strategy designed to subdue Mr. Sadr without alienating Iraq's Shiite majority population. The 31-year-old cleric and his armed followers, known as the Mahdi Army, took control of the two cities last month.
So far, in operations in Najaf and here in Karbala, another holy Shiite city, the Americans have avoided moving into the city centers, where the holiest shrines are. The governor's mansion is less than two miles from the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf, said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Baghdad, and near the military base the Americans took over from the departing Spanish troops last month.
American military operations continued in Karbala, seizing a large store of weapons being used by the Mahdi Army and killing one insurgent in an amusement park. Also Thursday, a videotape of a blindfolded man said to be a Pentagon worker in Iraq was shown on an Arabic-language television station.
The American operation against Mr. Sadr began Tuesday, just hours after moderate Shiite leaders in Baghdad issued a statement calling on Mr. Sadr to take his army out of the two cities.
The move bolstered the Americans' confidence in going forward with assaults on Mr. Sadr, a 31-year-old firebrand. The Americans seemed to be gambling that the insurgency that broke out in April was rapidly running its course. But the moderate Shiite leaders also warned the Americans against attacking Najaf and Karbala, where, they said, a misstep could turn the country's Shiites decisively against them.
Mr. Sadr and his militia have sought refuge in Najaf and Karbala in the hopes that Shiites across this country and elsewhere will turn against the Americans if the occupation forces invade two of the holiest cities of Shiite Islam.
But the Americans seemed, at least for now, to be avoiding the kind of all-out attack they mounted in Falluja, the Sunni stronghold west of Baghdad. A massive assault there by American marines last month left hundreds of Iraqis dead and inflamed anti-American sentiment across the country, including in Shiite areas.
A senior American military officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said his soldiers would try to strike the Mahdi Army inside the two cities while refraining from harming its holy sites.
"Najaf is not the target; Moktada al-Sadr remains the target," the American officer said. "We certainly have an obligation to restore Iraqi authority. We now have a governor who can go into the city so he can start exercising authority."
It was unclear how ordinary Iraqis would react to the American military action. Administrators at two hospitals in Najaf said Thursday that 5 civilians had been killed in the fighting and 24 wounded.
An Iraqi reporter working for The New York Times who was at Al Hakim hospital in Najaf said there was gunfire around the hospital.
The Americans sent a convoy of eight American tanks into a neighborhood in the southwest corner of Karbala that is believed to be a stronghold of the Mahdi Army.
In Baghdad, American officials also said today that two American soldiers were killed and two were wounded in a roadside bomb explosion just before midnight on Wednesday. According to the Reuters news agency, three American soldiers were killed in clashes in Diwaniya, where the Americans are also conducting operations against the Mahdi Army.
The video that showed what appeared to be a new Western hostage in Iraq was shown on Al Arabiya, a television network based in Dubai. The network said the tape was from a militant group that calls itself Islamic Fury and said the hostage's name was Aban Elias, a civilian engineer working for the Pentagon who was taken hostage on May 3.
The group made no demands in the tape. In Washington, Richard Boucher, the State Department spokesman, confirmed that the man in the tape was an American citizen but offered no other details. Although Mr. Bremer and the new governor of Najaf, Mr. Zurufi, promised a restoration of an American-backed administration in the city, it was unclear how much authority the new leader would exercise. When the Mahdi Army took control of the city last month, the local government and police force collapsed. The previous governor, Haider Mayali, fled to Iran.
But with a scheduled transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis less than two months away, American officials say they want to resolve the standoffs in Najaf, Karbala and Falluja.
In remarks on Thursday, Mr. Bremer made it clear he intended to crush Mr. Sadr's rebellion, one way or another. "There is no room in Iraq for the kind of lawless, self-interested behavior we have seen over recent weeks," Mr. Bremer said. "First, Sayyid Moktada must face Iraqi justice for the crime of which he has been accused and, second, his armed followers must disarm - as must the members of all such groups."
American military officers say their intention is still to "kill or capture" Mr. Sadr. In his remarks, Mr. Bremer asked the Iraqi people for help. "No individual is above the law, no group is beyond the law," he said. "That is why we encourage Najaf community leaders to come forth with proposals to bring matters to a reasoned and just resolution."
For his part, Mr. Zurufi also said his goal was to disarm the militias and restore American-backed authority there. He also promised to bring economic development and tourism to the city. Like Mr. Bremer, Mr. Zurufi appealed to local Iraqis.
"Now, I, as governor of Najaf, ask the religious authorities, the Maarja, the political parties and organizations, and the civil and humanitarian organizations, to help me achieve the goals we all seek," he said.
Edward Wong reported from Karbala, Iraq, for this article and Dexter Filkins from Baghdad.
--------
Iraq Sunnis Host Sadr Followers in Show of Support
May 7, 2004
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-sadr-sunnis.html
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Thousands of supporters of rebel Shi'ite Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr prayed in Sunni mosques in Iraq Friday, in what local leaders called a show of religious unity in the face of Iraq's occupiers.
The gesture was the latest display of solidarity among Iraq's Muslims since U.S. forces besieged the Sunni town of Falluja west of Baghdad and faced off with Sadr's militia in the Shi'ite holy cities of Najaf and Kerbala to the south.
Sadr's popularity among Shi'ites, who make up about 60 percent of Iraq's 25 million people, seems to have soared since his uprising began a month ago, particularly among the young and the poor.
Busloads of Sadr's followers carrying portraits of the young cleric and wearing the insignia of his Mehdi Army militia trooped to the staunchly Sunni Baghdad neighborhood of Aadhamiya to pray in the Abu Hanifa mosque, named for a pre-eminent scholar and thinker of Sunni Islam.
``Yes, yes to Moqtada!'' chanted Sadr's followers who jammed the mosque, outside of which others set up checkpoints to direct traffic and frisked worshippers as they entered from streets where posters bearing Sadr's face dotted many buildings.
Ahmad Hassan Taha, a Sunni cleric who led prayers at the mosque, said the presence of Sadr's followers was a message to U.S. forces who are massed around the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf in a bid to crush his insurgency.
``They have tried to sow discord among us, as Sunnis and Shi'ites, and they have failed,'' he said, referring to the U.S. occupiers. His words were echoed by Sadr aide Sheikh Abdel Hadi al-Darraji, who told worshippers: ``After finishing in Falluja, they have turned to Najaf.''
Several hundred Sadr supporters also prayed in Falluja, an insurgent stronghold that U.S. Marines surrounded and bombed last month after four U.S. contractors were killed and their bodies mutilated in the city.
The siege of Falluja prompted donations of blood and food from Iraqi Shi'ites, underlining the growing resentment of the U.S. presence in Iraq, where Shi'ites suffered persecution under Saddam Hussein. Since Saddam's ouster, Shi'ites who recall centuries of political marginalization under Ottoman, British and Sunni Iraqi rule have vowed not to concede power in the future, though mainstream Shi'ite leaders have largely avoided confrontation with the U.S.-led occupation authorities.
Rows of Shi'ite worshippers laid the small stones on which they place their heads during prayer -- in contrast to the rites of Sunnis -- across the carpeted halls of Abu Hanifa, often breaking into chants of Sadr's name that drew rebukes from the mosque's Sunni sheikh.
``Remember that this place has its own sanctity,'' said Taha, as an aide gestured angrily at the Shi'ite visitors to be quiet. ``In this mosque the only name mentioned is God's,'' he said.
----
Chemical agent found in Iraq shell
By Jonathan Landa in Washington
07may04
Australia Herald-Sun
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,9494111%255E1702,00.html
TRACES of mustard, a potentially deadly chemical agent, have been found in an old artillery shell on a Baghdad street, according to a US military report.
But because the shell was from a "very old stockpile", experts did not consider it evidence that former dictator Saddam Hussein was hiding illegal stockpiles of chemical weapons, said a senior official, who asked not to be identified as the find is classified information.
The report said tests identified the substance as mustard residue. The official confirmed that and said more tests were under way.
The Bush administration has been under fire because American arms inspectors have failed so far to find the stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and the nuclear weapons facilities that the president and his senior aides claimed that Saddam possessed in violation of UN resolutions.
Saddam's regime used mustard and other chemical agents against Iraq's minority Kurds in the late 1980s and against Iranian forces during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.
His regime said Iraqi experts and UN arms inspectors destroyed all of Iraq's biological and chemical weapons after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
However, when inspections ended in 1998, UN arms inspectors contended that Iraq had failed to account for about 550 artillery shells filled with mustard.
"It's possible, since the anti-coalition forces take artillery shells and turn them into IEDs (improvised explosive devices), someone scarfed this up somewhere and rigged it up without knowing what they had," the senior official said.
-------- israel / palestine
Talks With Palestinian Officials to Resume
Bush Commits U.S. To a 'Just Peace'
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 7, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6856-2004May6.html
President Bush said yesterday that he will open talks with Palestinian officials, with a written commitment to a "just peace," as part of a diplomatic offensive that White House officials said will include a meeting between national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia planned for next week in Europe.
"We will expand dialogue between the United States and the Palestinians," Bush said at a Rose Garden news conference with Jordan's King Abdullah at his side. Bush said he will also write a letter to Qureia to "make sure the Palestinians understand my desire for a just peace, my desire for there to be a prosperous country, my desire that the Palestinian people have a chance to realize their hopes and aspirations."
The decision to reopen high-level contacts with Palestinian officials -- after months of shunning them -- followed mounting pressure from Arabs after Bush last month offered written assurances to Israel on key land and refugee issues in a final peace deal. Though White House officials said Bush's assurances did not prejudge the negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, Arabs reacted with outrage and accused the administration of bargaining away Palestinian rights.
Moreover, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had sought the administration's support for a plan to unilaterally withdraw from the Gaza Strip on the grounds that there was no credible Palestinian negotiating partner. Though Bush yesterday emphasized his continued support for the Sharon plan -- which Sharon's Likud Party rejected earlier this week in a nonbinding referendum -- the decision to begin talking to the Palestinians appeared to mark an abrupt change in administration tactics.
Some administration officials attributed the shift to the continuing fallout from the published images of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by some U.S. soldiers. The photographs prompted outrage throughout the Arab world, and the White House has been trying to repair the damage all week.
Earlier in the week, the administration joined the European Union, the United Nations and Russia in a high-level diplomatic statement that stressed that the key issues dividing Israelis and Palestinians must be negotiated by both sides. Diplomats reported that the administration's negotiating stance on the document shifted as the political impact of the abuse photographs -- and Sharon's referendum defeat -- became apparent.
Rice was designated by Bush last year as his chief Middle East troubleshooter, but she made only one trip to the region, 10 months ago. U.S. officials have also been scornful of Qureia's performance as prime minister, suggesting that he is largely under the control of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Bush broke off relations with Arafat two years ago, saying he was corrupt and tied to terrorism. Now, Rice and Qureia are set to meet.
Abdullah, for his part, had canceled a White House meeting last month to protest Bush's perceived tilt toward Israel. And he had sought his own written commitment from Bush as a way of rebalancing the diplomatic scales. After intense debate within the administration -- which included an initial decision to reject the idea -- the president yesterday complied with the king's request.
"The king came on the clear understanding there would be a letter," a senior Jordanian official said.
Abdullah originally sought a declaration that Palestinians would be compensated for land and refugee trade-offs. The letter fell short of that goal but said "the United States will not prejudice the outcome of the final status issues, and all final status issues must still emerge from negotiations between the parties" based on key U.N. Security Council resolutions.
"Jordan also believes all final-status issues, including borders, refugees, Jerusalem and settlements, should be a matter for the parties to decide," Abdullah said. "I am encouraged by what I've heard from you today, sir."
A White House official said Rice will tell Qureia during their meeting that "there are real opportunities here, and the Palestinians should seize these opportunities." She will also stress that the Palestinian Authority must take greater steps toward fighting terrorism, including reorganizing its disparate security services into an effective unit.
Administration officials have argued that the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza would give the Palestinians a chance to show they can govern themselves effectively, and that they have begun working with the World Bank to set up an economic stabilization fund. Under the agreement with Bush, however, Israel will continue to control Gaza's airspace, territorial waters and land passages for going in and out.
Privately, Bush is said to be firmly convinced that he did the right thing in backing the Sharon plan, despite its defeat in the Likud referendum. Israeli officials say Sharon is committed to the plan and is determined to find another way to win its approval.
A senior Israeli official said he perceived "no backtracking" by the president in his appearance with Abdullah. "I don't know why the Arabs needed a corresponding statement. They have not lifted a finger" for peace, he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because this was a U.S.-Jordanian matter. "But I think it is fine."
-------- mideast
Saudi firms to dig 46 oil wells in southern Iraq
MENAFN
07/05/2004
http://www.menafn.com/qn_news_story_s.asp?StoryId=49688
(MENAFN) The Iraqi Ministry of Oil signed a joint cooperation agreement with Saudi companies to dig 46 oil wells in southern Iraq, Xinhua News Agency reported.
An official at the ministry said that the wells were distributed to the fields of Majnoon, Al Qurna, Omar River, the southern Rumaila, the wells of Bazrgan and other fields.
The official added that the agreement aims at expanding the horizons of economic cooperation between Iraqi and Saudi Arabia.
-------- pakistan / india
India-Pakistan ties showing marked improvement: Powell
WASHINGTON (AFP)
May 07, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040507181713.rfs1fhny.html
Relations between India and Pakistan have shown a "marked improvement" since the nuclear rivals nearly went to war two years ago, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said in an interview with AFP Friday.
He said he was glad to note that even while India, the world's largest democracy, was going through a massive election process at present, it was continuing to hold talks with Pakistan to enhance ties.
India and Pakistan decided to resume talks after a groundbreaking meeting between Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf on January 6 in Islamabad on the sidelines of a regional summit.
Following Vajpayee's meeting with Musharraf, senior officials of both sides met in mid-February for talks, which they said would continue in June.
The often-hostile neighbours' possession of nuclear arsenals has made South Asia one of the world's most feared potential nuclear flashpoints.
Many observers believed the subcontinent was on the verge of a nuclear conflict when the two sides came close to their fourth war two years ago over the disputed territory of Kashmir.
Powell, who played a pivotal role in coaxing the hostile neighbours back from the brink of war, said even though India held elections, "the Indians and Pakistanis continue to talk to one another, continue to improve relations."
"They are following the roadmap that they laid out for themselves in January.
"This is a marked improvement for where we were a year and a half or so ago, when the whole world held its breath as two armies got closer and closer to each other on the border and there was a likelihood of conflict that might escalate, some people thought, to nuclear conflict," Powell said.
Noting that the two countries had "come a long way from that point," he congratulated them "for realizing that they needed to talk to one another."
He said he was pleased that the United States had been able to play a "useful role" in strengthening Indo-Pakistani ties.
-------- prisoners of war
Photos of Dead May Indicate Graver Abuse
May 7, 2004
By JAMES RISEN and DAVID JOHNSTON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/07/politics/07DEAT.html
WASHINGTON, May 6 - Grisly photographs taken at Abu Ghraib prison of two dead men may indicate that the violence at the prison went far beyond degrading treatment of detainees. The Bush administration has provided only limited information about one of the men; the other remains a mystery.
The photographs come from the same collection of pictures that show military guards humiliating other detainees. All of the photographs, including those of the dead men, were taken at Abu Ghraib, according to people who provided them to The New York Times.
One photograph shows the body of a man with a huge head wound. Next to him is a piece of paper with a detainee identification number: 153399.
Pentagon officials have not answered any questions about the identity of that prisoner or the circumstances of his death. However, an internal military report completed in March by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba described the death of prisoner No. 153399 during a riot on Nov. 24, 2003. The Taguba report said that the guards were authorized to use deadly force, but it harshly criticized the handling of the incident.
Among the problems cited were overcrowding, lack of training for guards, poor communication between commanders and soldiers and "the mix of less than lethal rounds with lethal rounds in weapons."
The other unidentified photo shows the body of a man with facial wounds and a bandage under his swollen right eye. He is in an unzipped body bag covered with bags of ice. There is no other information.
Military officials have said they are investigating 10 deaths of detainees, but have not said where any of the deaths occurred and have so far declined to provide any explanation of the photographs or describe the circumstances of the deaths.
The photograph of the man packed in ice appears to match a reference in a diary entry made by Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick, who was a guard at the prison. He is one of six members of a military police unit charged in the abuse cases at Abu Ghraib.
The diary mentioned an incident in November 2003 involving a detainee that Sergeant Frederick described as an "O.G.A. prisoner." That reference to O.G.A., or Other Government Agency, usually meant prisoners under the control of the C.I.A. or other intelligence agencies.
In his diary, Sergeant Frederick wrote of the detainee: "They stressed him out so bad that the man passed away. They put his body in a body bag and packed him in ice for approximately 24 hours in the shower in 1B. The next day the medics came in and put his body on a stretcher, placed a fake IV in his arm and took him away. This O.G.A. was never processed and therefore never had a number."
Since the prisoner abuse scandal broke, the C.I.A.'s inspector general has said he is investigating the involvement of C.I.A. officers and contractors in three deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, including one at Abu Ghraib. In addition, the Justice Department is examining whether anyone violated federal law in cases involving the C.I.A.
Neither of the two photographs appears to fit the description provided by government officials of the death at Abu Ghraib that the agency is investigating. In that case, which occurred in early November 2003, an American official said the detainee slumped over in his chair and suddenly died while being questioned by a C.I.A. officer and a linguist who is a contractor working with the C.I.A.
American officials identified the dead man only by his last name, Jamadi. The officials said his death occurred after he had been captured by Navy Seals, brought to the Baghdad airport and transferred the same day to Abu Ghraib, where he was then questioned by the C.I.A.
Although the C.I.A. interrogated some detainees at Abu Ghraib, the prison was controlled by the United States military, the officials said. Most interrogations there were conducted by military intelligence, while the C.I.A. focused on fewer, "high value" detainees, the officials said.
The C.I.A.'s inspector general is also investigating the death later in November of a former Iraqi general, Abid Hamad Mahawish. He died in western Iraq in November several days after being interviewed by C.I.A. personnel. His death occurred after other American interrogators from other agencies questioned him as well, United States officials said.
The third death under investigation at the C.I.A. occurred in Afghanistan in June 2003. The dead man was named Abdul Wali, a former local commander who had fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980's and turned himself in to American forces last June in Asadabad, the capital of Kunar Province in eastern Afghanistan. He died while being interrogated by an independent contract employee of the C.I.A.
United States officials say that the C.I.A. notified the Congressional oversight committees of the three deaths when they occurred. The governor of the province, Fazel Akbar, said United States military officials said the man died of a heart attack.
Carlotta Gall contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan, for this article.
--------
A Timeline of the Abuse Controversy
May 7, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Prisoner-Abuse-Timeline.html
A timeline of the military's investigations into conditions at Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere:
-- Aug. 31-Sept. 9, 2003: Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who runs the military prison for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, conducts an inquiry on interrogation and detention procedures in Iraq. He suggests that prison guards can help set conditions for the interrogation of prisoners.
-- October-December 2003: Many of the alleged abuses at Abu Ghraib take place during this time period.
-- Oct. 13-Nov. 6, 2003. Maj. Gen. Donald Ryder, provost marshal of the Army, investigates conditions of U.S.-run prisons in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib. He finds problems throughout the prisons. Some units, including the 800th Military Police Brigade, did not receive adequate training to guard prisons, he notes. He also says military police (MPs) should not assist in making prisoners more pliable to interrogation, as their job is to keep prisoners safe.
-- Jan. 13, 2004: Army Spc. Joseph M. Darby, an MP with the 800th at Abu Ghraib, first reports cases of abuse at the prison.
-- Jan. 16: Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez orders a criminal investigation into reports of abuse at the prison by members of the brigade. The military also announces the investigation publicly.
-- Jan. 18: A guard leader and a company commander at the prison are suspended from their duties, and Sanchez admonishes Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who commanded the brigade.
-- Jan. 19: Sanchez orders a separate administrative investigation into the 800th. Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba was appointed to conduct that inquiry on Jan. 31.
-- Late January-early February: President Bush becomes aware of the charges sometime in this time period, according to White House spokesman Scott McClellan, although the spokesman has not pinpointed a date. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld tells Bush of the charges, McClellan has said.
-- Feb. 2: Taguba visits Abu Ghraib. Throughout the month, his team conducts interviews in Iraq and Kuwait.
-- March 12: Taguba presents his report to his commanders. He finds widespread abuse of prisoners by military police and military intelligence. He also agrees with Ryder that guards should not play any role in the interrogation of prisoners.
-- March 20: Six soldiers face charges stemming from alleged abuse at the prison. The military announces the beginning of possible court-martial proceedings.
-- Mid-April: Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asks CBS-TV to delay airing photographs it has obtained of abuse at Abu Ghraib. Myers says the photos would exacerbate an intense period of violence under way in Iraq. CBS delays its program for two weeks.
-- April 6: Third Army commander Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan approves Taguba's report.
-- April 28: CBS airs the photos, setting off an international outcry. Bush first learns about these photos from the television report, his aides say.
-- April 30: The military announces Miller has been put in charge of U.S.-run prisons in Iraq.
-- May 1: Sanchez approves Taguba's report. Six more soldiers receive administration reprimands; two are relieved of their duties. A seventh receives a lesser reprimand. Other investigations are also under way, including into the military intelligence unit that conducted interrogations at the prison.
-- May 3: Bush urges Rumsfeld to make sure that any guilty U.S. soldiers are punished for ``shameful and appalling acts.'' Rumsfeld's aides say he has not yet read the Taguba report, although they say he has kept abreast of the allegations of mistreatment.
-- May 6: Bush apologizes to the Arab world for abuse, says Rumsfeld will stay in his Cabinet.
-- May 7: Senate and House committees call Rumsfeld to testify. He apologizes for abuses.
Sources: Taguba's report, military and Bush administration officials.
--------
Israeli lessons for the US in Iraq
Aljazeera By Khalid Amayreh in the West Bank
07 May 2004
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/C182D988-28E3-4D48-ADFC-F15D6509B0EC.htm
The torturing of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghuraib prison by US occupying forces has shocked the world - but for most Palestinians they come as no surprise.
In fact, tens of thousands of Palestinians who have served time in Israeli prisons and detention centres see striking similarities between Israeli treatment of Palestinian prisoners and American treatment of Iraqi detainees.
In some cases, the torture technique or form of mistreatment is almost identical, some former Palestinian prisoners told Aljazeera.net.
Hisham Abd al-Razzaq is a Palestinian Authority minister in charge of overseeing and catering for more than 7000 Palestinian prisoners in Israel, many of them interned without charge or trial.
He believes that what the Americans are doing to the Iraqis amounts to a "carbon copy" of what the Israelis have been doing to the Palestinians.
"I am inclined to think that the Americans copied the Israeli techniques. I can't prove it in an objective manner, but the striking similarities are overwhelming."
Abd al-Razzaq, who himself experienced many forms of torture during his lengthy imprisonment in an Israeli jail prior to the Oslo Accords in 1993, described physical and psychological torture as the "modus operandi" of Israeli treatment of Palestinian detainees.
Torture techniques
He said that the so-called hooding technique - whereby the detainee's head is covered with a rancid-smelling sack for weeks or months - was always "the first order of business" in Israeli interrogation centres.
"The hooding itself is not an interrogation method. Its purpose is not to extract confessions from the suspect, but rather to demoralise him and destroy his mental balance."
"The hooding itself is not an interrogation method. Its purpose is not to extract confessions from the suspect, but rather to demoralise him and destroy his mental balance"
Hisham Abd al-Razzaq, Palestinian Authority minister
Abd al-Razzaq said that the filthy sack that he too was forced to wear was made up of three or four layers to make sure that the suspect "breathes the least possible amount of oxygen, enough to keep him or her alive".
In addition to the hooding, Israel, according to consistent reports by international human rights groups as well as testimonies by Palestinian detainees, continues to use harsh means of torture, both for extracting confessions and as a punishment for opposing the Israeli occupation.
These include, inter alia, brutal beating, (taltul) or violent shaking, forced-stripping, sleep deprivation (by playing extremely loud music inside a detainee's cell), cold baths in winter, actual or threatened sexual abuse, as well as the notorious shabh technique whereby a suspect is tied tightly tied to a small chair, with his hands tied to his back, for weeks.
Similarity denied
Ofer Yisler, spokesman for the Israeli Prison Authority, vehemently denies any "similarity between our treatment of the Palestinians and what we have seen in Iraq".
"There is no comparison whatsoever, what the Americans did in Iraq is something entirely different."
Palestinians say the US learned its torture tactics from Israel
But Yisler refused to comment on accusations that the hooding technique, the shabh, sleep deprivation and forced stripping were still being used by Israel. Yisler ended the interview and refused to answer further questions, insisting that written questions be submitted to his office.
Yisler's reluctance to speak, however, seems to underscore Israel's desire to stay away from the international outcry over what happened in Iraq.
But Israeli-Arab Knesset member Talab al-Sanai says Israel is indirectly but heavily involved in "the systematic mistreatment of Iraqi people at the hands of the American occupation troops".
Israeli experts
"It is not secret at all, there are many Israeli experts on torture in Iraq who are transferring to the Americans their accumulative experience of thirty seven years of torturing and mistreating Palestinians," al-Sanai told Aljazeera.net.
He said that American officers joined Israeli army units in Jenin several months ago for the purpose of learning Israeli methods and techniques of repressing civilians, which the Americans, he said, later applied in Iraq.
"It took Israel 37 years to develop and perfect these barbaric methods of repression and humiliation. Surprisingly, the Americans surpassed and outmatched the Israelis in their savagery in less than two years."
Al-Sanai condemned American behaviour in Iraq as "manifestly criminal", dismissing claims by the Bush administration that the torture incidents were isolated.
"Here in Israel, it is an ugly occupation, and Israel doesn't make any pretensions about it. But in Iraq, the United States is murdering, humiliating, torturing and raping the Iraqis under the rubric of freedom and democracy...
"Perhaps this is what they really mean when they talk about freedom and democracy ... namely, liberating the Iraqis from their dignity."
-------- spies
Briton Named to Top Spy Post Gave Disputed Iraq Arms Data
May 7, 2004
By SARAH LYALL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/07/international/europe/07brit.html
LONDON, May 6 - A career spy who presided over and approved a much-disputed British government dossier that asserted that Iraq had unconventional weapons was named Thursday as the next chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, Britain's equivalent of the C.I.A.
The spy, John Scarlett, 55, is currently chairman of the government's Joint Intelligence Committee. In that role, he oversaw the compilation of the dossier, which was released in September 2002. The weapons have not been found, and it appears now that British and American intelligence officials relied on faulty information.
The move was immediately criticized by Prime Minister Tony Blair's political opponents, who said that the government should wait until it completes its inquiry into how possibly erroneous intelligence was used to justify Britain's involvement in the Iraq war before allowing Mr. Scarlett's appointment to go ahead.
"In today's world, Britain's Secret Intelligence Services is central to our national security," Michael Ancram, the foreign affairs spokesman for the Conservative Party, said in a statement. "And it is essential that the whole country has the fullest confidence in it.
"The government-appointed Butler inquiry is currently reviewing the whole question of intelligence, and the use made of it, in the run-up to the Iraq war," he added. "Given that John Scarlett is central to that review, and that the inquiry has not yet reported, I believe that this appointment, at this time is inappropriate."
But Mr. Blair said Mr. Scarlett was recommended by a selection panel led by Sir David Omand, Mr. Blair's security and intelligence coordinator. Saying that Sir David had worked independently of the government, Mr. Blair told reporters: "You can only imagine what you guys would have been saying to me if I had interfered with that process."
Mr. Scarlett - who joined MI6 in 1971 and who served in Nairobi, Moscow and Paris, among other places - is to take over the job this summer, replacing Sir Richard Dearlove, who is retiring from the security services to become master of Pembroke College, Cambridge.
In the usually shadowy world of Britain's security services, Mr. Scarlett became an unlikely public figure last year when he testified before the Hutton Commission, the panel investigating the death of David Kelly, a government weapons expert who killed himself after being identified as the source of leaks to the BBC about the intelligence leading up to the Iraq war.
During the hearings, Mr. Scarlett defended the government against charges that it had deliberately "sexed up" its September 2002 dossier on Iraq's weapons to bolster its case for going to war, stressing that he had approved the dossier.
In his new post, the government said, Mr. Scarlett will lie low like his predecessors, neither giving interviews to reporters nor making public appearances.
--------
A Tangled Web: A History of CIA Complicity in Drug International Trafficking
[Prepared by the Institute for Policy Studies and inserted into the Congressional Record by Rep. Conyers.]
Congressional Record
(07 May 1998) [Page: H2955]
http://www.csun.edu/CommunicationStudies/ben/news/cia/7May98/ips.html
WORLD WAR II
The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), the CIA's parent and sister organizations, cultivate relations with the leaders of the Italian Mafia, recruiting heavily from the New York and Chicago underworlds, whose members, including Charles `Lucky' Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Joe Adonis, and Frank Costello, help the agencies keep in touch with Sicilian Mafia leaders exiled by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Domestically, the aim is to prevent sabotage on East Coast ports, while in Italy the goal is to gain intelligence on Sicily prior to the allied invasions and to suppress the burgeoning Italian Communist Party. Imprisoned in New York, Luciano earns a pardon for his wartime service and is deported to Italy, where he proceeds to build his heroin empire, first by diverting supplies from the legal market, before developing connections in Lebanon and Turkey that supply morphine base to labs in Sicily. The OSS and ONI also work closely with Chinese gangsters who control vast supplies of opium, morphine and heroin, helping to establish the third pillar of the post-world War II heroin trade in the Golden Triangle, the border region of Thailand, Burma, Laos and China's Yunnan Province.
1947
In its first year of existence, the CIA continues U.S. intelligence community's anti-communist drive. Agency operatives help the Mafia seize total power in Sicily and it sends money to heroin-smuggling Corsican mobsters in Marseille to assist in their battle with Communist unions for control of the city's docks. By 1951, Luciano and the Corsicans have pooled their resources, giving rise to the notorious `French Connection' which would dominate the world heroin trade until the early 1970s. The CIA also recruits members of organized crime gangs in Japan to help ensure that the country stays in the non-communist world. Several years later, the Japanese Yakuza emerges as a major source of methamphetamine in Hawaii.
1949
Chinese Communist revolution causes collapse of drug empire allied with U.S. intelligence community, but a new one quickly emerges under the command of Nationalist (KMT) General Li Mi, who flees Yunnan into eastern Burma. Seeking to rekindle anticommunist resistance in China, the CIA provides arms, ammunition and other supplies to the KMT. After being repelled from China with heavy losses, the KMT settles down with local population and organizes and expands the opium trade from Burma and Northern Thailand. By 1972, the KMT controls 80 percent of the Golden Triangle's opium trade.
1950
The CIA launches Project Bluebird to determine whether certain drugs might improve its interrogation methods. This eventually leads CIA head Allen Dulles, in April 1953, to institute a program for `covert use of biological and chemical materials' as part of the agency's continuing efforts to control behavior. With benign names such as Project Artichoke and Project Chatter, these projects continue through the 1960s, with hundreds of unwitting test subjects given various drugs, including LSD.
1960
In support of the U.S. war in Vietnam, the CIA renews old and cultivates new relations with Laotian, Burmese and Thai drug merchants, as well as corrupt military and political leaders in Southeast Asia. Despite the dramatic rise of heroin production, the agency's relations with these figures attracts little attention until the early 1970s.
1967
Manuel Antonio Noriega goes on the CIA payroll. First recruited by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in 1959, Noriega becomes an invaluable asset for the CIA when he takes charge of Panama's intelligence service after the 1968 military coup, providing services for U.S. covert operations and facilitating the use of Panama as the center of U.S. intelligence gathering in Latin America. In 1976, CIA Director George Bush pays Noriega $110,000 for his services, even though as early as 1971 U.S. officials agents had evidence that he was deeply involved in drug trafficking. Although the Carter administration suspends payments to Noriega, he returns to the U.S. payroll when President Reagan takes office in 1981. The general is rewarded handsomely for his services in support of Contras forces in Nicaragua during the 1980s, collecting $200,000 from the CIA in 1986 alone.
MAY 1970
A Christian Science Monitor correspondent reports that the CIA `is cognizant of, if not party to, the extensive movement of opium out of Laos,' quoting one charter pilot who claims that `opium shipments get special CIA clearance and monitoring on their flights southward out of the country.' At the time, some 30,000 U.S. service men in Vietnam are addicted to heroin.
1972
The full story of how Cold War politics and U.S. covert operations fueled a heroin boom in the Golden Triangle breaks when Yale University doctoral student Alfred McCoy publishes his ground-breaking study, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. The CIA attempts to quash the book.
1973
Thai national Puttapron Khramkhruan is arrested in connection with the seizure of 59 pounds of opium in Chicago. A CIA informant on narcotics trafficking in northern Thailand, he claims that agency had full knowledge of his actions. According to the U.S. Justice Department, the CIA quashed the case because it may `prove embarrassing because of Mr. Khramkhruans's involvement with CIA activities in Thailand, Burma, and elsewhere.'
JUNE 1975
Mexican police, assisted by U.S. drug agents, arrest Alberto Sicilia Falcon, whose Tijuana-based operation was reportedly generating $3.6 million a week from the sale of cocaine and marijuana in the United States. The Cuban exile claims he was a CIA protege, trained as part of the agency's anti-Castro efforts, and in exchange for his help in moving weapons to certain groups in Central America, the CIA facilitated his movement of drugs. In 1974, Sicilia's top aide, Jose Egozi, a CIA-trained intelligence officer and Bay of Pigs veteran, reportedly lined up agency support for a right-wing plot to overthrow the Portuguese government. Among the top Mexican politicians, law enforcement and intelligence officials from whom Sicilia enjoyed support was Miguel Nazar Haro, head of the Direccion Federal de Seguridad (DFS), who the CIA admits was its `most important source in Mexico and Central America.' When Nazar was linked to a multi-million-dollar stolen car ring several years later, the CIA intervenes to prevent his indictment in the United States.
APRIL 1978
Soviet-backed coup in Afghanistan sets stage for explosive growth in Southwest Asian heroin trade. New Marxist regime undertakes vigorous anti-narcotics campaign aimed at suppressing poppy production, triggering a revolt by semi-autonomous tribal groups that traditionally raised opium for export. The CIA-supported rebel Mujahedeen begins expanding production to finance their insurgency. Between 1982 and 1989, during which time the CIA ships billions of dollars in weapons and other aid to guerrilla forces, annual opium production in Afghanistan increases to about 800 tons from 250 tons. By 1986, the State Department admits that Afghanistan is `probably the world's largest producer of opium for export' and `the poppy source for a majority of the Southwest Asian heroin found in the United States.' U.S. officials, however, fail to take action to curb production. Their silence not only serves to maintain public support for the Mujahedeen, it also smooths relations with Pakistan, whose leaders, deeply implicated in the heroin trade, help channel CIA support to the Afghan rebels.
[Page: H2956]
JUNE 1980
Despite advance knowledge, the CIA fails to halt members of the Bolivian militaries, aide by the Argentine counterparts, from staging the so-called `Cocaine Coup,' according to former DEA agent Michael Levine. In fact, the 25-year DEA veteran maintains the agency actively abetted cocaine trafficking in Bolivia, where government official who sought to combat traffickers faced `torture and death at the hands of CIA-sponsored paramilitary terrorists under the command of fugitive Nazi war criminal (also protected by the CIA) Klaus Barbie.
FEBRUARY 1985
DEA agent Enrique `Kiki' Camerena is kidnapped and murder in Mexico. DEA, FBI and U.S. Customs Service investigators accuse the CIA of stonewalling during their investigation. U.S. authorities claim the CIA is more interested in protecting its assets, including top drug trafficker and kidnapping principal Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo. (In 1982, the DEA learned that Felix Gallardo was moving $20 million a month through a single Bank of America account, but it could not get the CIA to cooperate with its investigation.) Felix Gallardo's main partner is Honduran drug lord Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, who began amassing his $2-billion fortune as a cocaine supplier to Alberto Sicilia Falcon. (see June 1985) Matta's air transport firm, SETCO, receives $186,000 from the U.S. State Department to fly `humanitarian supplies' to the Nicaraguan Contras from 1983 to 1985. Accusations that the CIA protected some of Mexico's leading drug traffickers in exchange for their financial support of the Contras are leveled by government witnesses at the trials of Camarena's accused killers.
JANUARY 1988
Deciding that he has outlived his usefulness to the Contra cause, the Reagan Administration approves an indictment of Noriega on drug charges. By this time, U.S. Senate investigators had found that `the United States had received substantial information about criminal involvement of top Panamanian officials for nearly twenty years and done little to respond.'
APRIL 1989
The Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Communications, headed by Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, issues its 1,166-page report on drug corruption in Central America and the Caribbean. The subcommittee found that `there was substantial evidence of drug smuggling through the war zone on the part of individuals Contras, Contra suppliers, Contra pilots, mercenaries who worked with the Contras supporters throughout the region.' U.S. officials, the subcommittee said, `failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war efforts against Nicaragua.' The investigation also reveals that some `senior policy makers' believed that the use of drug money was `a perfect solution to the Contras' funding problems.'
JANUARY 1993
Honduran businessman Eugenio Molina Osorio is arrested in Lubbock Texas for supplying $90,000 worth of cocaine to DEA agents. Molina told judge he is working for CIA to whom he provides political intelligence. Shortly after, a letter from CIA headquarters is sent to the judge, and the case is dismissed. `I guess we're all aware that they [the CIA] do business in a different way than everybody else,' the judge notes. Molina later admits his drug involvement was not a CIA operation, explaining that the agency protected him because of his value as a source for political intelligence in Honduras.
NOVEMBER 1996
Former head of the Venezuelan National Guard and CIA operative Gen. Ramon Gullien Davila is indicted in Miami on charges of smuggling as much as 22 tons of cocaine into the United States. More than a ton of cocaine was shipped into the country with the CIA's approval as part of an undercover program aimed at catching drug smugglers, an operation kept secret from other U.S. agencies.
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CIVILIAN EMPLOYEES
Contractors in Sensitive Roles, Unchecked
May 7, 2004
By JOEL BRINKLEY and JAMES GLANZ
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/07/politics/07CONT.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, May 6 - The military's reliance on civilians to serve as interrogators and translators in Iraq is now so great that many people are being sent abroad without complete background investigations or full qualifications for the positions, government officials and industry experts say.
Once on the job, several experts said, many of the contractors are barely supervised.
Two contract workers have been implicated in the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, and investigators found that one of them, a translator working with interrogators who were trying to obtain sensitive information from Iraqi prisoners, had no security clearance at all.
The revelations at Abu Ghraib have also led to the disclosure that private contractors are now carrying out highly sensitive duties that until very recently were the province of government agencies only.
Although senior Pentagon officials have long called for privatizing much of the military's work, current and former officials say the new reliance on contractors for intelligence and interrogation work resulted from the unexpected demands of the war in Iraq and had not been long planned.
Kevin Hendzel, an officer with the American Translators' Association, which represents translators nationwide, said the government's need for Arabic translators "is so great that demand has completely outstripped supply, draining the pipeline," so that now "people with no real qualifications are being hired."
After a translators' association convention in December, he added, the government quickly hired more than 2,000 people.
Ralph Williams, spokesman for the Titan Corporation, which supplies translators in Iraq, was unapologetic about hiring bilingual people with unlikely professional backgrounds, like taxi drivers, for positions in Iraq and elsewhere.
"Just because he is a taxi driver does not mean he is not fluent in Arabic and English," Mr. Williams said. One Titan translator, a former taxi driver working at the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was arrested on charges of espionage last year. John Israel, the translator with no security clearance implicated in the prison abuse case, worked for a Titan subcontractor, the company said.
Mr. Hendzel said he worried that "if you just hire someone off the street, you have a security risk and maybe even a loyalty question."
Every company official interviewed said he did not consider it his company's responsibility to research the backgrounds of the people it hires for government contracts.
"No, we are not in the background investigation business," J. P. London, chief executive of CACI Inc., said in an interview Thursday. A CACI employee, Steven Stefanowitz, was implicated in the abuse case.
Ralph Williams, spokesman for Titan, said, "It's up the government to execute" background checks.
But in Congressional testimony last fall, Charles Abell, principal deputy undersecretary of defense for personnel, said he believed that the companies, including Titan, "run a background check and then, of course, the military does a more detailed check."
But Mr. Abell added: "In our rush to meet the requirements, the mere numerical requirements, I think folks were brought in based on those initial checks, and the more detailed checks followed as time permitted."
Mr. Abell declined a request for an interview this week, and military spokesmen said they could not produce records of contractors' security clearances on Thursday. Maj. Gen. Robert A. Harding, retired, who served in senior military intelligence positions until three years ago and now runs a company that supplies intelligence analysts and interrogators to the military in Iraq said the government's appetite is now so great that almost any qualified person can get a job."It doesn't surprise me that a lot of people are going in with only interim checks for secret" clearances, he said.
Thomas E. White, who was secretary of the Army until April 2003 and a leading advocate of privatization in the military said in an interview Thursday that he was surprised when he learned this week that employees of private companies were now involved in intelligence work, which suggests how abruptly the trend took off.
The expansion of the contractor force is, in one sense, simply an acceleration of a trend that first picked up speed after the end of the cold war in the 1990's. Largely because of troop cuts, the Pentagon began awarding contracts to private companies for logistics support, like delivering food and fuel to troops.
In the latest phase of this privatization, the major contract was awarded to the Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root, in 2001, and was expected to require about $100 million in work a year, said Col. Tim Considine, deputy commander of the field support command at the Rock Island Arsenal, which oversees the contract. Instead, costs are expected to run to some $6 billion in the 2004 fiscal year, largely because of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said.
But those contracts are focused strictly on noncombat roles and do not involve intelligence or interrogation. The use of contractors for such positions is much more recent, security consultants and former military and intelligence officers said.
The CACI contract at Abu Ghraib runs from Aug. 14, 2003, to Aug. 13. 2004, according to a summary of the contract prepared by Scott Northrup, Iraq country manager for CACI. "The interrogator conducts tactical, operational and strategic interrogations," the summary says. It adds: "No CACI employees are in positions of authority."
"The way the process works is that the United States government sets forth their needs and what requirements are in terms of these skill sets," Mr. London said. "We put together a project team and roster, if you will, of team staff that we believe meets the terms and requirements and so on that are set forth.
"I have every confidence that the skill sets are such that you're dealing with experienced people to meet these interrogator requirements," he said. "You're not talking about people that have been picked up at the bus stop."
On Tuesday, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, deputy commanding general for detention operations in Iraq, praised the earlier work of civilian interrogators in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay. Civilian interrogators in Iraq, he said, also seemed to be meeting that standard.
But Representative Ike Skelton of Missouri, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee said: "There was a crash course to hire these people. Unless we better understand what their duties and rules are, we could get in more trouble."
Joel Brinkley reported from Washington for this article, and James Glanz from New York.
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Group: Whistle - Blowers Have Protections
May 7, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Whistle-Blower-Protection.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A little known law protects members of the armed forces who inform about misdeeds involving others in uniform, and the Defense Department should warn potential whistle-blowers of their rights, a watchdog group says.
In a letter sent this week to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the National Whistleblower Center said it was troubled by the Pentagon's failure to tell members of the military and civilian contractors with the forces about protections the government offers.
The group asked that Rumsfeld reply by Wednesday how he plans to get the message out, said Stephen Kohn, the center's chairman of the board.
Defense spokesmen said they had not seen the letter.
The letter also asks the Pentagon to protect Spc. Joseph M. Darby, of Corriganville, Md., who tipped off Army investigators to abuse of Iraqi war prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.
Most military people do not know, Kohn said, that they are protected from being discharged, demoted or intimidated if they report suspected wrongdoing to the inspector general or a member of Congress, Kohn said.
The law does not require the department to inform soldiers of the guarantees, and lawyers connected with the center are now receiving inquiries about the law from people serving abroad, he said.
Darby's family has expressed worry about his safety, and the soldier should be seen as a hero and defended by the department, the group said.
``Anything short of such commendation would send the wrong signal to others who would make similar disclosures of wrongdoing and would be just plain wrong,'' the letter said.
The reports by Darby and other soldiers have launched investigations and created controversy at home and abroad after leaked photographs showing U.S. captors abusing their prisoners were televised.
Often when soldiers report abuses, they are implicating their immediate superiors, which could cause them to hesitate and withhold information if they are unaware of their rights, Kohn said.
``If people with information are intimidated and afraid to step forward, they are not going to get to the bottom of it,'' Kohn said.
On the Net:
National Whistleblower Center: http://www.whistleblower.org
Defense Department: http://www.defenselink.mil/
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Un-American activities
Washington Times
By Deborah Simmons
May 07, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20040506-085121-5269r.htm
You had to have been under a boulder these past few days if you have yet to see or hear the most despicable news to date out of Iraq: the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody. Apologies, adjectives and sorted remarks are flying fast and furious inside and outside the Beltway. (None more ludicrous than Tom Daschle and John Kerry's cry for an "explanation" of why congressional leaders were not informed of ["leaked"?] the story. Wish that our soldiers knew when and where the insurgentsare going to hit beforehand.) Some Democrats and Republicans are even asking for Don Rumsfeld's head on a platter - as if that would A) make the horrifying scenes disappear or B) leave us wiping our hands clean of the atrocities.
As heads turn toward the mistreatment of Iraqi detainees, more pressing issues - protecting the brave men and women in harm's way and the need to meet the June 30 deadline to turn the governance of Iraq over to the hands of freedom-minded Iraqis - risk easily being sidelined.
The deaths of at least 25 prisoners are under investigation, and there are scores of probes underway by Army investigators and others - as well there should be. The snapshots add an ugly dimension to the adage a picture is worth a thousand words. In one photo, a woman soldier, with a cigarette dangling from her mouth, poses like a gangster as she points at a naked Iraqi. In another photo, a woman soldier squats in front of several naked prisoners, who appear to be piled atop one another to form a pyramid.
One suspect in the ongoing criminal investigations, Pvt. Lynndie England, found herself reassigned to Fort Bragg, N.C., after she became pregnant. Which came first? The pregnancy or the photo op?
Call it Tailhook Meets Girls Gone Wild or Freaknit Meets Operation Iraqi Freedom.
You can even take the women out of the picture and the disturbing images remain the same. It's no laughing matter.
What were Congress and the Clinton White House thinking when they began, in earnest, legislative moves that essentially led to the feminization of America's armed forces? Did they think that there would be no cultural implications (pregnancies, rape and sexual assault, etc.?) Did they think there would be no effect on America's military readiness?
Indeed, the queen of women in combat, then-Sen. Pat Schroeder, led the phalanx on Capitol Hill, arguing that girls should be treated just like boys.
Look what we have wrought: a woman, with no experience running a penal institution, in charge of all penal institutions in Iraq; scores of reports about women soldiers participating in the mistreatment of male prisoners (including sexual degradation); photographic evidence that the "girls" were equal partners with the "boys" in these criminal acts - during a war, no less; the possibility that one of those "girls," a suspect in these wholly un-American abuses and shameful acts - was impregnated while fighting in a war.
Consider this as well: The Denver Post recently pried from the Defense Department tons of evidence that proves accusations of rape and sexual assaults from women in our armed forces are not being prosecuted by the military. There are men and women in our midst who do not want to criticize the military for its hush-hush handling of those facts because we are at war - as if that is a good "explanation" for the cover up.
Folks on the left and right are demanding swift action on the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners of war. I ask you if there is a difference? Is there a difference between women behaving badly and men behaving badly? Is mistreating a prisoner of war more egregious than a male soldier raping his female comrade in arms?
Most of us appreciate what President Bush, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Mr. Rumsfeld have said about the prisoner abuse. But few us appreciate, or even know, that we have a serious problem on the homefront.
American credibility, justice and sensibilities are on the line as these latest military scandals unfold. Determining who was involved with what on U.S. soil is as important as seeking the facts of abuse in Iraq. Their bottom lines are the same, too: All guilty parties must face the consequences of their actions or inactions. After all, that is the American way.
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The Face of War
Psychological Experts Say Under Stress of Battle, Potential for Abuse Could Surface in Anyone
ABC
Daniel K. Hoh
May 7
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/Living/US/prisoner_abuse_psychology_040507-1.html
Were the abuses of Iraqi prisoners the action of a few "bad apples" in the U.S. military, or the behavior of ordinary soldiers under the extraordinary stresses of war?
The specifics of the incidents at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq remain to be sorted out. But the answer seems apparent for experts in the psychology of war and other mental health professionals contacted by ABCNEWS - such behavior is not uncommon in a time of military conflict and the potential to abuse others may lie in all of us.
"In war, things do happen, often from emotion of the moment, exhaustion, frustration - a buddy killed, a unit hurt," maintains Samuel Watson, a former infantry officer in the Vietnam War who is now associate professor of public health at University of Pittsburgh.
Agrees Garret Evans, associate professor of psychology at University of Florida in Gainesville, "It is not far-fetched to say there is abuse on some level in any war."
And Dr. Carlyle Chan, professor of psychiatry at Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, says prisoner abuse is probably more prevalent than we would like to believe, given the trauma soldiers can experience.
"War is a particularly stressful place where soldiers can be under a constant state of danger and have witnessed death and destruction," says Chan.
Factors That Contribute to Abuse
What drives soldiers to abuse others in time of war? The key, believe these experts, is "the military culture" the soldiers and guards were immersed in.
In war, "the enemy is not represented as a similar human being to oneself, but rather as a brute who is savage and single-minded in destructive intentions," says Rona M. Fields, director for cognitive sciences at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
This depersonalization, explains Evans, is a psychological defense against the horrible events soldiers witness during war. But once the enemy is seen as less than human, it can be easy to treat them accordingly.
Another motivation for U.S. soldiers to mistreat Iraqi prisoners may have been simple retaliation, suggests Dr. Paul Ragan, a Navy psychiatrist during Desert Storm and now associate professor of psychiatry at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. "The emotional center of the brain, or the limbic system, wants to strike back. It's the concept of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."
While many U.S. soldiers have said they were horrified by the pictures of Iraqi prisoner abuse, one soldier returning from Iraq to his home base at Fort Bragg, N.C., said the images didn't bother him. "Those are some bad people, criminals killing our guys, so do what you got to do," he told local ABC affiliate WTVD-TV.
Ragan adds some of the accused prison guards and soldiers may have lacked war experience, and not known how to properly deal with the strong emotions found in military conflict.
In that sense, Ragan says, a young reservist suddenly given military authority over Iraqi prisoners is more likely to abuse his power, whereas someone with combat experience is used to controlling aggressive urges towards the enemy.
"When you're given a lot of power, but you're inexperienced, it can lead to abuse," says Ragan. "No one race or nation is immune to basic human psychology."
An Abuser in All of Us?
Is it possible the abusers were simply malevolent to begin with, the "bad apples" U.S. officials have repeatedly stressed were at fault, rather than the larger military culture?
Ragan acknowledges some individuals may have entered military service to act out their aggressive urges on non-Americans. But he argues it is unlikely, because plain aggression is probably not enough to motivate a soldier through the rigors of the military.
"In general, active military duty embraces so much, that just the desire to act out against foreigners in my opinion would not be enough to sustain being in active duty," he added.
Dr. Robert L. Trestman, professor of psychiatry at University of Connecticut in Farmington, agrees certain personalities may be more likely to take abusive actions in war situations, such as those described as having antisocial, dependent, or borderline personality disorders - psychological disorders linked to increased aggression and a lack of conscience.
But, adds Trestman, "I believe we are all capable of this behavior."
'Trajectory of Increasing Sadism'
Perhaps the best evidence normal individuals are capable of deviant behavior came from a unique experiment conducted by psychologist Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., in 1971.
The simulated prison study took a group of volunteer college students and randomly assigned them roles as either a guard or a prisoner.
The experiment was intended to last two weeks, but was stopped short after only six days because participant behavior became dangerous. The guards, who were by all accounts well-adjusted college students prior to the study, began abusing and humiliating the prisoners.
Zimbardo told ABCNEWS' Nightline this week he saw striking similarities to the photos now emerging from Iraq.
"We were seeing a trajectory of increasing sadism, increasing hostility, increasing boredom of the guards," Zimbardo noted. "I could imagine a very similar situation in our prison as in the Iraqi prison. ... As in the Iraqi prison, what we saw over a very short period of time is guards began to strip prisoners naked and make fun of them, do things to humiliate and confuse them."
Preventing Future Abuse
Experts agree future prevention is largely dependent on the command structure over soldiers, and that effective leadership is the best way to cut down on abuse.
"While specific training to reduce the risk of this behavior may be useful, a much more important factor is leadership," says Dr. Paul Newhouse, professor of psychiatry and director of the Clinical Neuroscience Research Unit at University of Vermont in Burlington. "Abuse of prisoners, civilians, etc., is evidence of a failure of command leadership."
Adds Watson: "The commander can't be everywhere all the time, so he or she has to rely on good subordinates, well-trained. The unit culture reflects the leader and what the leader works to inculcate to the soldiers."
Keeping soldiers mentally healthy is important, maintains Michael Allswede, director of strategic medical intelligence at the Center for Biosecurity at University of Pittsburgh.
"Rest and cycle them regularly off guard duty. I would also suggest avoidance of shifts of individuals working together over time as these friendships tend to allow this sort of thing."
But what if the leadership itself is commanding soldiers to behave in abusive ways? Would normal individuals be willing to follow morally abhorrent orders?
That's the defense being offered for Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick, one of the soldiers being criminally charged in the Abu Ghraib abuse case, whose attorney suggested he was encouraged to carry on the abusive behavior.
More than four decades ago the late Yale psychologist Stanley Millgram conducted a study on following orders, or - in his words - "how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to."
Not realizing they in fact were the guinea pigs, subjects were told to administer increasingly painful electric shocks to a patient in the next room. As the voltage increased the subject would scream, feigning pain to the point where the supposed subject, out of sight, was ominously no longer making any noise whatsoever.
Yet more than 60 percent of those tested obeyed the orders all the way to the end - 450 volts administered three times - to a subject in such pain he was no longer even responding.
Concluded Milgram: "Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. ... Even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality."
Concluded Massachusetts therapist and author Lauren Slater: "We have to judge the individuals who committed the horrible deeds, but we can't judge them through the lens of saying, 'I would never have done that,' ... because the Millgram experiments show that under orders, most of us will do that."
-------- war crimes
NATO posts ads warning war crimes suspects the noose is tightening
(AFP)
May 07, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040507104613.ysrb2suh.html
BANJA LUKA, Bosnia-Hercegovina NATO peacekeepers in Bosnia Friday posted full-page newspaper ads warning war crimes suspects the nooses was tightening around them.
The ad published in Bosnian Serb daily newspaper Glas Srpske read: "The people have began to speak" with a picture of a civilian whispering to a soldier of the NATO-led Stabilisation Force (SFOR).
"We are closer than you think," the caption below said.
SFOR spokesman Richard Morris said it was a "message to all war crimes indictees including Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic."
Wartime Bosnian Serb leader Karadzic and his army chief Mladic are still on the run despite being indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal for war crimes and genocide allegedly committed during Bosnia's 1992-95 war.
"We do not comment on specific intelligence that we have received," Morris told AFP asked to comment on possible tip-offs.
"SFOR is working hard at the moment to gain information on persons indicted for war crimes and their support networks," he added.
SFOR often runs similar public messages on Bosnian Serb television.
The charges against Karadzic and Mladic relate in particular to the 1992-95 siege of Sarajevo, in which some 12,000 civilians died, and the 1995 massacre of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica.
Under the peace accords that ended Bosnia's war the country is divided into two semi-independent halves -- the Muslim-Croat federation and Serb-run Republika Srpska.
The authorities in the latter have been repeatedly accused by the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague of helping Karazdic evade arrest.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
Okla. Witness Places McVeigh With Others
May 7, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nichols-Trial.html
McALESTER, Okla. (AP) -- A McDonald's manager testified Friday that Timothy McVeigh and a dark-skinned man were part of a group that piled out of a Ryder truck and entered her restaurant just days before the Oklahoma City bombing.
But the woman could not say whether the man with McViegh was John Doe No. 2, the enigmatic suspect who is the key to Terry Nichols' defense on state murder charges in the April 19, 1995, bombing. The defense contends others helped McVeigh plan and execute the blast and that Nichols was set up to take the blame.
Joan Rairden testified that the men visited the McDonald's in Junction City, Kan., shortly before midnight on April 13 or 14, 1995. She said three people came inside, including McVeigh and the man with the dark skin and slicked-back hair.
McVeigh went to the rest room, Rairden said, and the man with the slick hair placed an order. McVeigh came into the restaurant with the same group during the lunch hour a few days later, she said.
Rairden said she could not identify the other man from a sketch of John Doe No. 2 that was shown to her by FBI agents after the bombing.
``He was darker. It didn't look like exactly him,'' she said.
The sketch was based on a description by a worker at a nearby body shop where McVeigh leased the Ryder truck that delivered the bomb, which killed 168 people.
The drawing depicted a heavy, well-built man with brown eyes and hair who witnesses said was with McVeigh at the leasing agency.
On cross-examination, prosecutor Suzanne Lister asked Rairden why security videotapes from the restaurant show McVeigh there just once, two days before the bombing. Rairden said she had not reviewed the tapes.
The testimony came in the second day of questioning of defense witnesses.
Nichols, 49, was at home on the day of the bombing, but prosecutors allege he helped McVeigh gather bomb components and build the bomb.
He faces the death penalty if convicted on first-degree murder charges.
Nichols is serving a life prison sentence on involuntary manslaughter and conspiracy counts in the deaths of eight federal law enforcement officers in the bombing. In Oklahoma, he faces 161 counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of the other 160 victims and one victim's fetus.
McVeigh was convicted on federal murder charges and executed in 2001.
-------- human rights
Red Cross Says That for Months It Complained of Iraq Prison Abuses to the U.S.
May 7, 2004
By NEIL A. LEWIS and ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/07/politics/07RIGH.html
WASHINGTON, May 6 - The International Committee of the Red Cross regularly complained to senior United States officials in Iraq and in Washington over the last several months about prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, a spokesman for the group said on Thursday.
The spokesman, Roland Huguenin, said, "Our reports to the U.S. administration contained many aspects which have now been reported with clear descriptions of the treatment of prisoners."
Mr. Huguenin, who spoke by telephone from London, said the reports were based on the Red Cross's interviews with prisoners and "were very extensive and detailed."
"We knew everything that was going on," he said.
Mr. Huguenin would not describe the details of the reports, but he said that they included accounts of the abuses like those disclosed over the last week in news accounts involving prisoners made to strip naked and pose in demeaning positions. "We condemned most firmly these practices that are absolutely humiliating to anyone in the world," he said.
He noted that some people had said that the offenses were "even more awful" for the Iraqi prisoners because, in Arab culture, that kind of treatment is unbearably shameful.
He said one thing that Red Cross officials did not know was that guards were taking photos of what was occurring.
Other human rights groups, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Human Rights First, said this week that they had complained to the administration about reports of prisoner abuse and humiliation. Officials with the groups said they took personal appeals to L. Paul Bremer III, head of the occupation authority in Iraq, and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, but that their appeals often seemed to fall on deaf ears.
"Unfortunately, we have not gotten the impression they've dealt with these issues very seriously," said Alexandra Arriaga, who is in charge of government relations for Amnesty International, which issued a report in March that cataloged reports of beatings, torture and other abuse in Iraq.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, based in Geneva, is the only group whose officials are allowed to interview the prisoners in Baghdad.
In exchange for such access, the Red Cross typically does not publicize its findings but reports them only to the host government. But in rare cases like the situation at Abu Ghraib, it makes its complaints public when its officials believe its recommendations have been ignored.
The committee reports of the abusive behavior, Mr. Huguenin said, were distributed to the prison authorities in Baghdad as well as to senior officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the United States civilian administration running Iraq. In addition, he said, the reports were given to senior officials in the Bush administration, but he declined to say which ones.
He said that it was the committee's practice to make its complaints known widely inside a government to prevent any one person from sitting on the report, allowing senior officials to claim ignorance later on.
The assertion that the Red Cross warned United States officials of mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq comes as the Bush administration is depicting a situation in which many senior officials were unaware of the problem until a set of photographs was shown on CBS last week.
At the State Department on Thursday, Richard A. Boucher, the department spokesman, said the president of the Red Cross, Jakob Kellenberger, had phoned Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to discuss the situation in Iraq.
Mr. Boucher would not say precisely what information Mr. Powell knew about the earlier Red Cross complaints. But he noted that Red Cross employees had visited the prison at Abu Ghraib every five weeks for many months, and had unimpeded access to all the prisoners.
"They have - as is their job during visits, when they see things that they think need to be modified, improved or corrected, they raise them," he said. "We've made sure that appropriate authorities in the U.S. government heard about their recommendations."
A senior State Department official said that Mr. Powell had raised the issue of the Red Cross complaints about the prison at meetings of cabinet officials. But the official could not say whether Mr. Powell included the details of the Red Cross reports about the demeaning of prisoners.
Legal experts said this week that the United States could be obligated to try soldiers for war crimes.
Prof. Harold Hongju Koh of Yale Law School said that the Geneva Conventions were explicit in prohibiting soldiers from treating prisoners of war or civilians detained in a war in a degrading manner. The conventions describe violations of that section as a "grave breach," meaning they would be designated a war crime.
"The evidence we have so far would clearly give probable cause to see whether these grave breaches rise to the level of crimes against humanity," he said.
Fiona Fleck contributed reporting from Geneva for this article.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Two Guards Disciplined at Guantanamo
Four Others Cleared, Officials Say in Detailing Allegations of Excessive Force
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 7, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6873-2004May6.html
Two guards at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay have been disciplined for using excessive force against detainees since the facility opened in early 2002 and four others have been investigated but cleared, officials said yesterday.
The announcement of wrongdoing, which occurred in 2002 and 2003, and the punishment of two guards in the Army Reserve come amid growing international outrage about the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. military personnel at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.
In one of the substantiated cases of excessive force at Guantanamo Bay, a guard sprayed a prisoner with a hose after the detainee threw food out his cell window and splashed the guard with toilet water from his cell in September 2002, said Raul Duany, a spokesman for the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.
In the other case, which occurred in April 2003, an Army Reserve specialist observed a prisoner assaulting a fellow guard and hit the detainee twice on the head with his radio. After the detainee was subdued, the specialist hit him again at least once and possibly more times with the radio, Duany said, apparently because the detainee had bitten the first guard.
In each case, the specialist's rank was reduced to private first class, which substantially lowers their pay, Duany said. The specialist who wielded the hose also had his movements on the base restricted for seven days and was reassigned to other duties. The guard who struck the detainee with the radio received 45 days of extra duty and was transferred to a new job.
In a third case, which stemmed from a "disturbance" by at least one detainee in April 2003, an Army Reserve staff sergeant, "feeling the lives of his troops were in danger," used pepper spray to subdue a prisoner, Duany said.
Officials believed use of the spray was "outside the rules of engagement" in that case, and the guard was offered an administrative finding of wrongdoing, Duany said. The sergeant refused, and his case went to a court-martial, where he was acquitted, Duany said.
Three other allegations of wrongdoing involving detainees "were looked at and found not to be substantiated," he said.
"We look at all these cases as examples of our zero-tolerance policy" for impropriety by guards, Duany said. "If any allegation comes up, we deal with it expeditiously." Guards at Guantanamo Bay are continually drilled on military law and procedures, he said.
Detention operations are being reviewed at Guantanamo Bay and at the naval brig in Charleston, S.C., where the United States is holding three men it has labeled "enemy combatants." They are Yaser Esam Hamdi, a Saudi student who was born in this country and captured on an Afghan battlefield; Jose Padilla, an American citizen arrested in Chicago for allegedly plotting to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb;" and Ali Saleh Kahlah Marri, a Bradley University graduate student accused of being an al Qaeda sleeper agent.
Upon their release from Guantanamo Bay in March, four British detainees alleged they had been severely abused by prison guards, and one said he was forced to look at naked prostitutes. U.S. officials strenuously denied it. A number of other released prisoners have said they had few or no complaints about their treatment at the jail.
--------
Moussaoui Attorneys Seek Ruling By Full Court
By Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 7, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6874-2004May6.html
Defense lawyers for Zacarias Moussaoui asked a federal appeals court yesterday to reconsider its ruling that he cannot interview key al Qaeda witnesses and that he could be put to death if convicted for his alleged role in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
In a petition filed in Richmond, Moussaoui's attorneys are seeking a review by the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. A three-judge panel of the appellate court cleared the way last month for the long-delayed trial to proceed in U.S. District Court in Alexandria.
The defense petition was filed yesterday under seal and must be reviewed by government intelligence officials before it is publicly released because the case involves classified information.
Edward B. MacMahon Jr., an attorney for Moussaoui, said the restoration of the death penalty was the primary reason defense attorneys decided to appeal. A federal judge in Alexandria had struck the possibility of a death sentence for Moussaoui and any Sept. 11-related evidence as punishment for the government's refusal to turn over the al Qaeda witnesses sought by the defense. The 4th Circuit decision reversed that ruling.
"We don't think it's appropriate for the government to withhold a witness in a capital case who can potentially save a man's life and then still seek the death penalty,'' MacMahon said. "We think that's unconstitutional.''
The Justice Department declined to comment.
Moussaoui, 35, was charged in December 2001 with conspiring with al Qaeda in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He is the only person charged in a U.S. courtroom in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks.
Moussaoui and his lawyers had sought access to three top al Qaeda detainees, saying they had information that could help the defense. U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema ordered that the men be deposed.
When prosecutors refused to produce the witnesses, citing national security concerns, they were sanctioned by Brinkema. The 4th Circuit ruling said Moussaoui could not interview the witnesses but could gain access to statements they have made.
The three-judge panel sent the case back to Brinkema to craft alternative versions of the witness statements that could be presented to the jury in place of live testimony. That process will be on hold pending the defense's appeal.
--------
Abuse Suit Focuses on a Guard Involved in Earlier Scandal
May 7, 2004
By NINA BERNSTEIN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/07/nyregion/07guard.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Seven years ago, Raymond L. Cotton was a central figure in a federal prison scandal so big it had a cinematic name: Operation Badfellas. He was one of 12 guards accused by the government of turning a federal jail in Brooklyn into a Mafia social club where, in exchange for bribes, mob inmates could dine on smuggled-in manicotti while plotting crimes with their associates.
Unlike all the other guards arrested in the scandal, Mr. Cotton, then president of his union local, never lost his job. (The bribery charges against him were dropped after the government's chief witness was accused in an unrelated drug case.)
Now once again, he is a central figure in a ballooning prison scandal at the same place, the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. But while he was accused before of supplying Absolut vodka, pasta and garlic to criminals, now he is accused in a lawsuit of denying food, phone calls and medical care to abused Muslim detainees, and of physically humiliating them in ways that resemble the treatment of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers facing court-martial.
Once again, despite a blistering Justice Department report about widespread physical abuse at the Brooklyn detention center, Mr. Cotton remains on the job. Yesterday morning, he answered the phone at his office, where, as "Counselor Cotton," he is the chief liaison between detainees and the outside world.
How he has kept that position of authority after two major scandals is a deepening mystery to Stephen T. Grogan, the lead federal investigator on the Badfellas case. Mr. Grogan wrote a 70-page report submitted to the Federal Bureau of Prisons four years ago that detailed eight years' worth of evidence of corruption against Mr. Cotton, but the prosecution was derailed by the unrelated accusations.
"Based on the information that I had collected on him, this guy was involved in criminal activity and should no longer have been an employee of the Federal Bureau of Prisons," said Mr. Grogan, who retired last year. "All of that evidence was turned over to them. They should have taken administrative action, and if they had, maybe Cotton would not be involved in this current complaint."
As "Counselor Cotton," the 15-year veteran of the federal prison system was named as a defendant in a federal lawsuit filed on Monday by lawyers for Ehab Elmaghraby and Javaid Iqbal, two Muslim men who say that he and at least a dozen other federal officers and guards physically mistreated them during months of detention in the center's maximum-security unit after Sept. 11, 2001.
Among other allegations, the lawsuit charges that during a strip-search on Jan. 8, 2002, "Defendant Cotton willfully and maliciously pushed a pencil into Mr. Elmaghraby's anal cavity," that he denied Mr. Iqbal's requests for medical care after he had been beaten up, and that he prohibited detainees from calling their lawyers or disconnected such calls as soon as the men began to complain of the abuse.
The accusations closely track findings by the Justice Department's inspector general, Glenn A. Fine, in two scathing reports issued last year. Those findings detail a pattern of mistreatment of detainees in the maximum-security unit at the detention center with evidence that included videotapes of officers slamming unresisting, shackled detainees into walls and mocking them during body-cavity searches. Many of those abused had been picked up in the government's post-9/11 anti-terror sweep and were later released.
Among those faulted in the inspector general's report last June for denying detainees contact with lawyers was an individual who went unnamed but whose job description, "unit counselor," matched Mr. Cotton's.
The Justice Department recently decided not to prosecute any of the officers accused of abuse. Instead, Mr. Cotton could be a candidate for administrative discipline by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, where officials say they have begun their own investigation into officers accused of mistreating detainees.
Asked by a reporter about the accusations against him, now and in the past, Mr. Cotton responded by saying, "Let me send you to my executive assistant." He then transferred the call to an answering machine, but a message never received a response.
In a sworn affidavit in May 1997, Mr. Cotton denied ever bringing contraband into the prison or eating and drinking with inmates. He wrote that over his eight-year career, "inmates have attempted to bribe me with cash, cars, lobsters, hotel rooms, CD's, food, repairs on my wrecked vehicle" more than 50 times. He never reported these attempts at bribery, despite prison rules that he do so, "because I feared for my family's safety and for my own welfare," he wrote in the affidavit.
Dan Dunne, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, said he would not comment on pending litigation or, "for privacy reasons," on personnel matters. He would not say why Mr. Cotton retained his position after the bureau received the Badfellas report. But he added, "We understand the importance of taking immediate administrative action against staff when the situation warrants, and any suggestions that we act otherwise are misplaced."
According to the August 2000 inspector general's report on Mr. Cotton, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, a score of inmates and several fellow officers described him as having "a special relationship with organized crime" that included accepting bribes totaling about $30,000 to smuggle in everything from steroids and liquor to veal cutlets, drinking vodka and playing cards with mob inmates, hiding contraband for them in his office, warning them of cell inspections, and even arranging telephone calls for them to place racetrack bets.
On one occasion, detailed in the arrest complaint that resulted in a grand jury indictment for bribery, Mr. Cotton allegedly used his office to stash a gallon of olive oil, a box of garlic, 20 pounds of pasta and 10 hero sandwiches for his inmate clientele. Indeed, a mob inmate told investigators that being on Mr. Cotton's floor was like being on the street, and that the food was so good that he gained 40 pounds.
The contrast with the role the Muslim detainees say Mr. Cotton played with them is striking. In an e-mail message from Pakistan, Mr. Iqbal, who lost 40 pounds during his seven-month detention, described Mr. Cotton "as so hateful to all of us" that when the kitchen mistakenly put an apple on the 9/11 detainees' food tray, he confiscated it.
"He says we should die of hunger," wrote Mr. Iqbal, a cable technician who had worked on Long Island for a decade before being picked up in the anti-terror sweep.
On another occasion, the lawsuit says, after Mr. Iqbal had been badly beaten by other officers while cuffed and shackled, Mr. Cotton denied his requests for medical care, which, like requests for legal calls, typically went through him. In his imperfect English, Mr. Iqbal wrote that Mr. Cotton smiled and told him: "I wish they could have rape you and I would have ask you: Why you came to our country to kill my people?"
Mr. Iqbal was eventually cleared by the F.B.I. of any terrorism link and was returned from the maximum security unit to the general population in the detention center. Even then, Mr. Iqbal said, Mr. Cotton cursed and threatened him, saying that if he ever got out, "My boys gonna kill you."
It is unclear who Mr. Cotton meant by his "boys." In the earlier case, other officers told federal investigators that his friendship with mobster inmates extended to coming in on his day off to play handball with them. Several inmates also gave examples of how he forged, falsified and manipulated computerized visitor lists to allow convicted felons in the jail "so that mob business could be conducted in the M.D.C. waiting room," the report said.
Ten other guards accused in the Badfellas scandal went to prison; an 11th was fired when prosecutors dropped his case. After the Bureau of Prisons received the Badfellas report, said Mr. Grogan, the federal investigator, it sent him upstairs as counselor on the maximum security unit. When the shackled detainees arrived, he was the one they had to turn to.
-------- POLITICS
-------- budget
Lawmakers to Insist on Oversight of Iraq Money
By Dan Morgan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 7, 2004; Page A31
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6834-2004May6.html
Senior lawmakers in both parties, frustrated by several years of Pentagon secrecy about wartime spending, indicated yesterday that they will not give the Bush administration a free hand in the use of a new $25 billion installment for the war in Iraq.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.) said in a statement that his panel would "thoroughly vet" the request and "insist on accountability for the expenditure of these funds."
That position was endorsed by Sen. Robert C. Byrd (W.Va.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, who described the administration's accounting of money for Iraq as "a record of confusion, obfuscation, bumbling, denial and deception."
Chad Kolton, spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget, said the administration "will work with the leadership up there to see what's the most appropriate way of doing this."
The emphasis on oversight appeared to mark a shift from the more permissive mood that prevailed in the aftermath of the Sept . 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Recognizing the need for flexibility to deal with unknown threats, Congress handed the administration unprecedented leeway to spend money to defend the United States and fight terrorism abroad.
The Pentagon, for example, was allowed to set up the unique Defense Emergency Response Fund (DERF), from which about $28 billion has been withdrawn without the prior approval of Congress mandated by the Constitution.
That money, provided through a series of measures signed into law between Sept. 18, 2001, and Aug. 2, 2002, was used to pay for the war in Afghanistan, upgrade reconnaissance aircraft, improve security at U.S. military bases, pay for the call-up of reserves, and establish forward bases in Central Asia and countries in the Persian Gulf region.
On April 18, 2003, President Bush signed another "emergency" spending bill that set aside $62 billion for the Pentagon, of which $15.7 billion was in an Iraqi Freedom Fund. The provision gave the Pentagon "unfettered flexibility" over at least $10.5 billion to $11 billion of the amount, Defense Department Comptroller Dov S. Zakheim said at the time.
But in return for the flexibility, Congress required the administration to consult and report on the use of the special funds -- a mandate that some members in both parties believe was not always heeded.
A White House budget office report to Congress, covering DERF expenditures from Sept. 18, 2001, to June 30, 2002, was general in nature, listing, for example, $4.2 billion for "increased situational awareness," $1.1 billion for "enhanced force protection," $4.6 billion for "increased worldwide posture" and $1.5 billion for "offensive counterterrorism."
"The accounts that were set up had meaningless names and the extent to which the administration was using or not using the funds could not be determined," said Scott Lilly, then-Democratic chief of staff on the House Appropriations Committee.
Rep. John P. Murtha (Pa.), a strong pro-defense Democrat, said he believes the Pentagon observed the letter of the law but still "abused the trust of Congress."
"We're not sure exactly how they were spending the money," he said.
Young has echoed that concern. "We provided a great deal of flexibility because we didn't know what would happen back then," he said. But he added that former White House budget director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. "could have been more forthcoming on how the money was being used."
On Sept. 18, 2001, Bush signed a bill that allowed him to spend $10 billion as he saw fit. But he was required to consult with the chairman and ranking members of the appropriations committees about his use of the money. A second $10 billion installment could only be spent 15 days after Bush sent a plan to Congress.
But conflicts between Congress and the administration arose quickly.
On Nov. 8, 2001, Young and Rep. David R. Obey (Wis.), the ranking Democrat on House Appropriations, complained to Daniels that the administration "had not complied with [the] statutory requirement" to submit a plan for the second $10 billion, and requested that the money be frozen.
Asked last week what happened as a result of the letter, Young said, "Not much." A second spending law enacted on Jan. 10, 2002, required the Pentagon and CIA to tell Congress what projects and accounts were being funded out of DERF. Byrd and Obey charged in a letter to Bush last week that they were never consulted "as provided by law." Under pressure to provide even broader flexibility, Congress resisted a Bush request to allocate an additional $10 billion to DERF in the fiscal 2003 defense budget. It also rejected the administration's plea to allocate to DERF all $59 billion that Bush sought for the war in Iraq in the spring of 2003. Congress specified how most of the money would be spent and allowed only $15.7 billion to go to a new Pentagon discretionary account.
-------- investigations
Controllers' 9/11 Tape Destroyed, Report Says
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 7, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6892-2004May6.html
Six air traffic controllers provided accounts of their communications with hijacked planes on Sept. 11, 2001, on a tape recording that was later destroyed by a Federal Aviation Administration manager, according to a government investigative report issued yesterday.
It is unclear what was on the tape, but its destruction did little to dispel the appearance that government officials withheld evidence, the report by the Department of Transportation inspector general said.
The report found that an FAA manager tape-recorded an hour-long interview with the controllers just hours after the hijacked aircraft crashed into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. His intention was to provide the information quickly to the FBI. But months after the recording, the tape was never turned over to the FBI and another FAA manager decided on his own to destroy the tape, crushing it with his hand, cutting it into small pieces and depositing the pieces into several trash cans, the report said.
The existence of the tape and its destruction were revealed in a report that initially was to find whether the FAA had fully cooperated with an independent panel investigating the terrorist attacks after the panel complained last fall that it needed more information from the agency. Inspector General Kenneth M. Mead found that the FAA never intentionally withheld information, but he condemned the managers' actions and said they were required to keep such evidence for five years.
The report said investigators were told that the tape was never listened to, copied or transcribed.
"The destruction of evidence in the Government's possession, in this case an audiotape -- particularly during times of national crisis -- has the effect of fostering an appearance that information is being withheld from the public," the report says. "We do not ascribe motivations to the managers in this case of attempting to cover-up, and we have no indication there was anything on the tape that would lead anyone to conclude that they had something to hide or that the controllers did not properly carry out their duties on September 11. The actions of these managers . . . nonetheless, do little to dispel such appearances."
The FAA yesterday said it had taken disciplinary action against the employee who destroyed the tape. That manager, identified by a source familiar with the investigation as Kevin Delaney, was last week given a 20-day suspension without pay. Delaney appealed that decision, the source said, confirming a report last night by Newsday. The employee who recorded the tape, Mike McCormick, was not subject to a disciplinary procedure and is in Iraq for the FAA, helping to set up an air traffic control system, the source added.
The FAA said it has provided thousands of documents to government investigators and the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, known as the 9/11 commission.
"We believe the audiotape in question appears to be consistent with written statements and other materials provided to FBI investigators and would not have added in any significant way to the information contained in what has already been provided to investigators and members of the 9/11 commission," said FAA spokesman Greg Martin.
The 9/11 commission does not allege that FAA employees were attempting to cover up information related to the terrorist attacks. A spokesman for the commission yesterday said that it has received all information it sought from the FAA and that it interviewed controllers involved with the tape.
Evidence in the report and from the air traffic controllers union suggests that the decisions to make the recording and later to destroy it were meant to conform to traditional protocols following a plane crash. The actions also were aimed at protecting controllers who were under excessive stress and emotion, according to union officials representing the controllers.
According to the report, an FAA manager at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center in Ronkonkoma recorded 10-minute interviews with six controllers who communicated with or tracked two of the hijacked planes.
According to union officials representing air traffic controllers, it is almost unheard of to tape-record an air traffic controller's account of an accident. The normal procedure is for controllers to provide written statements after reviewing radar and other data. A union official representing the New York controllers agreed to the tape recording on Sept. 11 because the union wanted to help law enforcement officials, but only on the condition that the tape was to be a "temporary" document, a union official said.
Ruth E. Marlin, executive vice president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, said she could not speak to the question of why the union official involved in the incident wanted the tape to be "temporary." "If it were me, my concern would be that if tapes were saved permanently, they might be subject to FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request and then controllers would be subject to hearing their own voices recounted on television over and over again," Marlin said, adding that any accident can feel personal and emotional for controllers.
According to the report, a second manager at the New York center promised a union official representing the controllers that he would "get rid of" the tape after controllers used it to provide written statements to federal officials about the events of the day. The second manager said he destroyed the tape between December 2001 and January 2002.
The tape's existence was never made known to federal officials investigating the attack or FAA officials in Washington. Staff members of the 9/11 panel found out about the tape during interviews with some controllers who participated in the recording.
Staff writer Dan Eggen contributed to this report.
--------
Tape of Air Traffic Controllers Made on 9/11 Was Destroyed
May 7, 2004
By MATTHEW L. WALD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/07/national/07TAPE.html
WASHINGTON, May 6 - At least six air traffic controllers who dealt with two of the hijacked airliners on Sept. 11, 2001, made a tape recording a few hours later describing the events, but the tape was destroyed by a supervisor without anyone making a transcript or even listening to it, the Transportation Department said Thursday.
The taping began before noon on Sept. 11 at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center, in Ronkonkoma, N.Y., where about 16 people met in a basement conference room known as the Bat Cave and passed around a microphone, each recalling his or her version of the events of a few hours earlier. The recording included statements of 5 or 10 minutes each by controllers who had spoken by radio to people on the planes or who had tracked the aircraft on radar, the report said.
Officials at the center never told higher-ups of the tape's existence, according to a report made public on Thursday by the inspector general of the Transportation Department.
A quality-assurance manager at the center destroyed the tape several months after it was made, crushing the cassette in his hand, cutting the tape into little pieces and dropping them in different trash cans around the building, according to the report. The tape had been made under an agreement with the union that it would be destroyed after it was superseded by written statements from the controllers, the report said.
The quality-assurance manager told investigators that he had destroyed the tape because he thought making it was contrary to Federal Aviation Administration policy, which calls for written statements, and because he felt that the controllers "were not in the correct frame of mind to have properly consented to the taping" because of the stress of the day.
None of the officials or controllers were identified in the report.
The inspector general, Kenneth M. Mead, said that keeping the tape's existence a secret, and then destroying it, did not "serve the interests of the F.A.A., the department, or the public," and would raise suspicions at a time of national crisis.
The value of the tape was not clear, Mr. Mead said, because no one was sure what was on it, although the written statements given later by five of the controllers were broadly consistent with "sketchy" notes taken by people in the Bat Cave. (The sixth controller did not give a statement, apparently because that controller did not speak to either of the planes or observe them on radar.)
Mr. Mead had been asked by Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, to look into how well the aviation agency had cooperated with the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. McCain said in a statement that he looked forward to "appropriate disciplinary actions" and that he might investigate this matter further.
A spokesman for the 9/11 commission, Al Felzenberg, said Mr. Mead's report was "meticulous" and "came through the efforts of a very conscientious senator." Mr. Felzenberg said that the commission would not comment now on the content of the report, but that it "does speak to some of the issues we're interested in."
The quality-assurance manager destroyed the tape sometime in December 2001, January 2002 or February 2002. By that time he and the center manager had received an e-mail message from the F.A.A. instructing officials to safeguard all records and adding, "If a question arises whether or not you should retain data, RETAIN IT."
The inspector general ascribed the destruction to "poor judgment."
An F.A.A. spokesman, Greg Martin, said that "we have taken appropriate disciplinary action" against the quality-assurance manager.
--------
Abuse sets off bitter review on Iraq
Newsday
BY ANNE Q. HOY
May 7, 2004
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-usprob073791499may07,0,319788.story?coll=ny-nationalnews-headlines
WASHINGTON -- The furor over abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American forces unleashed in Congress yesterday a wide-ranging and at times bitterly partisan review of the Bush administration's policies in Iraq and the war on terror.
A day before the Senate panel opens its probe of the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by American forces with the appearance of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, lawmakers raised questions about the administration's policy of holding detainees in prisons throughout Iraq and Afghanistan, far beyond Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, the site of the abuse.
The handling of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the Pentagon's reliance on private contractors and reserve forces in Iraq and Afghanistan also faced new questions. With the administration seeking an additional $25 billion for the war, its cost also attracted new examination.
Many lawmakers stressed that the prison abuse controversy must be addressed immediately to ensure it does not distract from the war.
"There's a need for a rapid as possible investigation of the prison abuse issue so we can focus our attention on winning this conflict," said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "We must win. We can win. We will win and the consequences of failure, in my view, are too catastrophic to contemplate."
The episode brought to the surface long-simmering anger felt by many members of Congress that the administration, particularly the Pentagon, has not kept lawmakers informed.
Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), an opponent of the war, said reports of the abuse "strike at the heart of the moral argument for the administration's war in Iraq." He added, "The president has failed the Iraqi people and has failed America. He has presided over America's steepest and deepest fall from grace in the history of our country."
Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), a respected voice on foreign policy, said the abuse probe must be thorough. "The Iraqi people must have confidence in America's purpose and our motivation for being there, and this complicates it," he said.
Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) called for the International Red Cross and international observers to visit all prisons in the region where the United States is holding prisoners and for Abu Ghraib to be closed.
McCain went further, demanding that it be razed. "It was a symbol of torture and oppression under Saddam Hussein and it has become a place of shame," he said, adding that even though symbolic, such an act would be potent in the Arab world.
Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who serves both on the Armed Services and the Foreign Affairs panels, said the scandal will prompt a wide look at the administration's handling of detainees to determine whether the Iraqi prison abuse reflects "failures that go beyond a few people violating basic human law and basic human decency and basic human rights."
The controversy prompted a bitter, partisan exchange in the House, as some Republicans charged Democratic criticisms gave "aid and comfort to the enemy," as Rep. Steve Buyer (R-Ind.) put it.
The House adopted a resolution calling for a military but not congressional investigation, as Democrats had sought. The Senate began work on one condemning the abuse. House leaders reluctantly scheduled a hearing at which Rumsfeld will appear today.
House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) linked the war in Iraq to the September 2001 terrorist attacks. "We didn't choose this war. On Sept. 11, it chose us. Now, we must finish it. Some say that this war is unwinnable. I disagree strongly with that assessment," he said.
-------- propaganda wars
U.S. Faces Lasting Damage Abroad Moral High Ground Lost, Experts Say
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 7, 2004; Page A26
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7139-2004May6?language=printer
The United States faces the prospect of a severe and enduring backlash not just in the Middle East but also among strategic allies, putting in question the Bush administration's ability to make serious headway on a range of foreign policy goals for the rest of this presidential term, according to U.S. officials and foreign policy experts.
The White House damage-control campaign, including the long-awaited apology from President Bush yesterday, is likely to have only limited, if any, success in the near term, administration officials said yesterday.
The White House is so gloomy about the repercussions that senior adviser Karl Rove suggested this week that the consequences of the graphic photographs documenting the U.S. abuse of Iraqi detainees are so enormous that it will take decades for the United States to recover, according to a Bush adviser.
"It's a blinding glimpse of the obvious to say we're in a hole," conceded Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage. He said the backlash in Europe is even greater than in the 22-nation Arab world.
"For many of our European friends, what they saw on those horrible pictures is tantamount to torture, and there are very strong views about that," he said yesterday on CNN's "Paula Zahn Now" show. "In the Arab world, there is general dismay and disgust, but in some places we were not real popular to start with. So I think I'm actually seeing a European reaction quite strong -- quite a bit stronger."
In public and private communications, European officials have become critical or disdainful of the United States. France's foreign ministry said in a statement that the abuse is "totally unacceptable" and, if confirmed, "constitute clear and unacceptable violations of international conventions."
The issue for Arabs and other allies extends beyond the treatment of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison, which is seen as a metaphor for a stubborn and often defiant U.S. foreign policy under the Bush administration.
Washington first justified military intervention to oust Saddam Hussein, without U.N. support, by asserting that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were a real and imminent threat -- but then found none.
The administration has since shifted gears, arguing that its primary goal has instead been to create a democracy that would inspire Arabs and the wider Islamic world -- only to delay for several months acknowledgement or action on the chronic abuse of Iraqi detainees, analysts note.
As a result, the United States has lost the moral high ground in Iraq, putting its credibility on the line. Now, its broader goals for the region -- including an ambitious project to promote democracy, set to be unveiled by Bush at three international summits next month -- are in jeopardy, foreign policy and Middle East analysts say.
"The mask of civility has fallen. It used to be that Americans just don't do that. Now you hear Arabs say, 'Don't lecture us about democracy and respect for human rights,' " said Raghida Dergham, senior diplomatic correspondent for the London-based al Hayat newspaper. "No quick fix is going to reverse the current antagonism toward American policies."
The pictures -- and the global reaction -- will also complicate efforts by U.S. institutions, including private humanitarian and human rights groups, to promote greater respect for democratic reforms, added Mark Schneider, vice president of International Crisis Group.
Bush's attempt to invoke historic U.S. values to counter the international fallout is unlikely to ameliorate the foreign backlash. "Bush's moral confidence in the ultimate goodness of American culture and justice will not convince people who are hopping mad today, and who are chronically cynical about the words of politicians and leaders," said Ellen Laipson, former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council and now president of the Stimson Center, a foreign policy think tank.
The tragic irony, Arab and foreign policy analysts note, is that the third justification for the intervention in Iraq was the war on terrorism -- which they say the pictures of the abuse of Iraqi detainees will instead fuel.
"If you want recruitment tools, these are the best anyone could imagine. They are a big blow and a stimulant to spur people to act against the United States. The real kicker for terrorism is indignity and humiliation, and that's what these pictures are about," said Moises Naim, editor of Foreign Policy magazine.
The haunting pictures will serve as "manna from heaven" for al Qaeda and other extremist groups, increasing the dangers to U.S. national security, said Hisham Melham, Washington correspondent for al-Arabiya, an Arab television network.
The United States, for now, may also find allies reluctant to engage on other priorities.
"There are a slew of issues -- from drug trafficking and the environment -- that the United States won't make much progress on by acting alone. It needs the help of international countries, and it's going to be very hard for many politicians, not only Muslims, to be a friend of the United States," Naim said.
State Department officials are sanguine about the need for additional and dramatic overtures. "We know there is outrage and it's going to be around for a long time -- until it's clear we've cleaned it up and it will never happen again. We have to make sure we meet our promises to do that," said a senior State Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Yet Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol, who once worked for Vice President Dan Quayle, suggested that Washington will be able to turn around global public opinion by showing that abuse is not tolerated.
"It's terrible and it's made life difficult for awhile," Kristol said. "But if it becomes clear that this is the exception and [the troops involved] are held accountable, it could end up being an impressive demonstration to countries where torture is routine."
Staff writers Dan Balz and Glenn Kessler contributed to this report.
-------- us politics
Negroponte, Torture in Iraq, and PMCs
From: "Frida Berrigan" <BerrigaF@newschool.edu>
Date: Fri May 7, 2004
ATRC Update: May 7, 2004
So much has been said and written about the torture of Iraqi prisoners, that it is hard to feel like we have anything to contribute. Maybe the only thing to do is to bear witness, to watch, to continue to pay attention.
It is ironic (what an inadequate word!! Who was it who said that irony died when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize?) that John Negroponte was confirmed as the new ambassador to Iraq in the midst of the torture scandal.
He has the Curriculum Vitae for the job.
Covering up for torture? Been there. Turning away families of the disappeared? Done that. Carrying water for the CIA? Years of experience. Finding justification and explanations for massacres? He should be able to handle it.
Our friends at Foreign Policy in Focus did a profile of Negroponte when he was chosen as Bush's Ambassador to the United Nations. Here is an excerpt:
"During his tour as ambassador to Honduras that Negroponte earned his reputation for being soft on human rights abuses. From 1981 to 1985, Negroponte was U.S. ambassador to Honduras, where he helped prosecute the contra war against Nicaragua and helped strengthen the military dictatorship in Honduras.
"Under the helm of General Gustavo Alvarez Martínez, Honduras's military government was both a close ally of the Reagan administration and was disappearing dozens of political opponents in classic death squad fashion.
"On Negroponte's watch, diplomats quipped that the embassy's annual human rights reports made Honduras sound more like Norway than Argentina. Former official Rick Chidester, who served under Negroponte, says he was ordered to remove all mention of torture and executions from the draft of his 1982 report on the human rights situation in Honduras. In a 1982 letter to The Economist, Negroponte wrote that it was "simply untrue to state that death squads have made their appearance in Honduras." The Country Report on Human Rights Practices that the embassy submitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee took the same line, insisting that there were "no political prisoners in Honduras" and that the "Honduran government neither condones nor knowingly permits killings of a political or nonpolitical nature."
Yet, according to a four-part series in the Baltimore Sun, in 1982 alone the Honduran press ran 318 stories of murders and kidnappings by the Honduran military. In a 1995 series, Sun reporters Gary Cohn and Ginger Thompson detailed the activities of a secret CIA-trained Honduran army unit, Battalion 316, that used "shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves." In 1994, Honduras's National Commission for the Protection of Human Rights reported that it was officially admitted that 179 civilians were still missing.
During Negroponte's tenure, U.S. military aid to Honduras, a country of five million, skyrocketed from $3.9 million to $77.4 million. Much of this largesse went to assure the Honduran army's loyalty in the battle against political leftists throughout Central America. Embassy reports to Washington singled out for particular praise army chief Alvarez, a School of the Americas graduate who was direct commander of Battalion 316."
To read more visit http://www.fpif.org/republicanrule/officials_body.html#negroponte
In a recent speech, Noam Chomsky observed that around the time Negroponte was forward as the new Ambassador to Iraq, the Honduran government announced they would remove their troops from Iraq. Coincidence?
John Negroponte: The Right Man for the Job? Peter Ogden, Center for American Progress, April 26, 2004 http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=48778
BUSH'S "REALLY GOOD SECRETARY OF DEFENSE"
Members of Congress, citizens groups and others are calling for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's resignation over the torture of Iraqi prisoners.
The lead editorial in today's New York Times says, "The world is waiting now for a sign that President Bush understands the seriousness of what has happened. It needs to be more than his repeated statements that he is sorry the rest of the world does not 'understand the true nature and heart of America.' Mr. Bush should start showing the state of his own heart by demanding the resignation of his secretary of defense."
President Bush has defended Rumsfeld, calling him a "really good secretary of defense" who will "stay in my Cabinet."
Rumsfeld testifies Congress today. The Center for American Progress has produced a "Viewing Guide to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's Testimony" with questions that members of Congress should ask. Online at http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=68048
THE PUNISHMENT
Soldiers Are Court-martialed: What About CACI and Titan Employees?
While U.S. soldiers involved in the torture of Iraqi prisoners are facing court-martial and military discipline, it is not clear what sort of punishment civilian contractors named in the Taguba report will face.
Contractors are hired under an arrangement that assures them they will not be prosecuted under Iraqi law, he said. They are also, because of Supreme Court rulings, not held accountable to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Four civilians are named in the Taguba report: Steven Stephanowicz, John Israel, Torin Nelson and Adel Nakhla. They were assigned to work with the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade.
Stephanowicz, a civilian interrogator employed by CACI, "made a false statement to the investigation team regarding the locations of his interrogations, the activities during his interrogations, and his knowledge of abuses." He encouraged Military Police to terrorize inmates, and "clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse."
Civilians like Stephanowicz can be charged under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, which gives federal courts jurisdiction over any crimes committed by civilian contractors working with the military abroad. But this four-year-old law, passed after DynCorp employees in Bosnia were accused of sex trafficking and escaped prosecution, has never been used.
Stephanowicz's employer, CACI International Inc., is based in Arlington, Virginia and provides technology services and application development and implementation for the military. It also provides non-IT related services such as training, intelligence and national security services. Despite the revelations, the company maintains that its workers in Iraq have done "a damn fine job."
Titan, the other company named in the Taguba report, is already under SEC investigation for alleged corruption for allegedly making illegal payments to international officials. Lockheed Martin, the world's largest defense contractor, is in the process of buying the troubled company for $2.4 billion. But these allegations could scuttle the deal.
Representative Janice Schakowsky (D-IL) has called on President Bush to suspend all contractors with civilian contractors for security, supervision and interrogation of prisoners. In a letter sent to the White House she writes, "the sadistic abuses of Iraqis at a U.S. military prison raise serious questions about the accountability of U.S.-hired private contractors who are involved in illegal activities."
Arms Trade Resource Center director William Hartung is quoted in a Dallas New article today entitled "Who Investigates Private Interrogators?" Read it online at http://www.dallasnews.com/cgi-bin/bi/gold_print.cgi
Private Contractors and Torture at Abu Ghraib, Iraq Pratap Chatterjee and A.C. Thompson, CorpWatch, May 7, 2004 http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=10828
The Report The complete text of Major General Antonio Taguba's report on the torture of Iraqi prisoners is online at http://www.corpwatch.org/upload/document/taguba.pdf
Frida Berrigan Senior Research Associate World Policy Institute 66 Fifth Ave., 9th Floor New York, NY 10011 ph 212.229.5808 x112 fax 212.229.5579
The Arms Trade Resource Center was established in 1993 to engage in public education and policy advocacy aimed at promoting restraint in the international arms trade.
http://www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms
To sign up for our monthly email Updates, please contact Frida Berrigan.
--------
Bush Apologizes, Calls Abuse 'Stain' on Nation
'A Stain on Our Country's Honor And Our Country's Reputation'
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 7, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6866-2004May6?language=printer
A week after the release of photographs showing American soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners, President Bush apologized for the abuse for the first time yesterday and called the revelations "a stain on our country's honor and our country's reputation."
Bush spoke in the Rose Garden with King Abdullah of Jordan at his side and said he had assured the king in an Oval Office meeting that "Americans, like me, didn't appreciate what we saw, that it made us sick to our stomachs."
"I told him I was sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners, and the humiliation suffered by their families," Bush said. "I told him I was equally sorry that people who have been seeing those pictures didn't understand the true nature and heart of America."
A wide variety of officials in the administration had advised Bush to apologize on Wednesday when he gave interviews to two Arab television channels and were puzzled when he did not, senior U.S. officials said. An apology had been recommended in the talking points Bush received from the State Department and elsewhere, the officials said. Senior administration aides then made a push overnight for him to say he was sorry during his news conference with Abdullah, the officials said.
Bush's decision to personally ratify an apology that his subordinates had previously offered, and to do so next to an Arab leader and in language designed to resonate in Muslim culture, reflected growing concern among his advisers that the widening scandal could imperil the outcome of the Iraq occupation and his reelection campaign.
Bush said Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is "an important part of my Cabinet, and he'll stay in my Cabinet," although the president said he told Rumsfeld on Wednesday that the White House should not have learned about the extent of the problem, and the contents of a Pentagon investigation, from news reports. "I should have known about the pictures and the report," Bush said.
Fallout from the photos dominated both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, with the fracas emboldening Democrats to unleash their harshest, most personal criticism yet of Bush's handling of the war.
Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), long known for supporting the military and consulting with Rumsfeld and other Pentagon leaders, told reporters that the United States must send many thousands more troops to stabilize Iraq "or get out."
Bush continued his damage-control efforts yesterday by giving an interview to the Egyptian al-Ahram newspaper for more than 30 minutes, and White House officials said they planned to release a videotape of the exchange to Egyptian television and the European Broadcast Union.
Journalists in the interview said Bush teared up as he recounted a meeting he held in November with female Iraqi leaders. "The door opened to the Oval Office and the first woman that walked in looked at me and she burst out in tears, and said, 'You are my liberator,' " Bush said. "It touched my heart."
Bush kept to his public schedule, including appearing with conservative leaders James Dobson and Oliver L. North at an East Room event marking the National Day of Prayer. "Americans do not presume to equate God's purposes with any purpose of our own," Bush said. He said prayer "teaches us to trust, to accept that God's plan unfolds in his time, not our own."
White House press secretary Scott McClellan left open the possibility that Bush had learned about the investigation before a news release Jan. 16 but said officials still could not pin down when Rumsfeld mentioned the investigation. McClellan said Bush "asked the questions and wanted to make sure that there was a full investigation going on to address these matters, and he was told that there were."
A White House official said Rumsfeld brought up the investigation in a conversation with Bush and Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. "before or after a more formal meeting." The official said that White House aides are not looking through notes, e-mails and call logs to try to pinpoint the date because it is believed that no record exists.
Some Pentagon officials contend Bush was informed in January. Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday on CBS's "Early Show" that beginning in mid-January, everyone "up the chain of command . . . was kept apprised orally of the ongoing investigation."
Asked if Bush "was well aware of the situation," Pace replied: "Yes."
The Rose Garden appearance with Abdullah was designed for maximum impact in the Arab world, where the revelations have fueled anti-Americanism and fed doubts about White House claims that its Middle East policy is aimed at spreading democracy.
Bush promised to "take a good look at the whole system" to "make sure this doesn't happen again.
"I was sickened by what I saw, and sickened that somebody gets the wrong impression of people who are serving this country and this world with such dignity," he said.
An aide said Bush's statement about "the whole system" referred to the military prison system in Iraq, but pointed out that Pentagon officials have said they are looking at operations beyond Iraq, including the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the brig at the Charleston naval base in South Carolina.
On Capitol Hill, a blistering debate over the Iraq war erupted in the House. Murtha said he was exasperated by the administration's refusal to send at least 200,000 troops to stabilize Iraq, although he said more are needed now. He said U.S. troops "are suffering because of the lack of planning by those people over there at the Pentagon" and "bad intelligence, inept planning, careless mistakes made by the architect of this war.
"We cannot prevail in this war with the policy that is going today," said Murtha, a 32-year House member. "We either have to mobilize or we have to get out."
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) hastily called a news conference to answer Murtha's comments and said, "In a calculated and craven political stunt, the national Democrat Party declared its surrender in the war on terror.
"For two years, they have strutted down to the floor of the House and, out of sheer, brazen partisanship, undermined our troops, scoffed at our coalition, and shown the terrorists of this world that there are some Americans who will cower under their threats," DeLay said. "They want to win the White House more than they want to win the war."
House members later voted 365 to 50 for a resolution deploring U.S. mistreatment of Iraqi detainees in a prison near Baghdad. "The alleged crimes of a handful of individuals should not detract from the commendable sacrifice of over 300,000 members of the United States Armed Forces who have served, or who are serving" in Iraq, it said.
Numerous Democrats voted against the resolution because it did not call for bipartisan congressional investigations into the alleged abuses, especially those reportedly committed by civilian contractors.
Also yesterday, the government's chief classifier decided to open an investigation into the appropriateness of classifying the Army's probe of prison abuses. J. William Leonard, director of the Information Security Oversight Office, agreed to a request in a letter from Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists.
In the letter, Aftergood cited the executive order on classification, No. 12958, as prohibiting the classification of documents solely to "conceal violations of law." Government documents are supposed to be classified if revealing their contents would harm national security. Senior Pentagon officials have been unable to explain why the report, known as an Article 15-6, was classified. In response to a reporter's question on May 4, Pace said, "I do not know specifically why it was labeled secret."
At the same news conference, Rumsfeld also was at a loss to explain why the report would be considered secret. "You'd have to ask the classifier," he said.
Staff writers Charles Babington, Dan Balz, Dana Priest and Robin Wright contributed to this report.
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Bush Apologizes for Abuse of Prisoners
Criticism of Rumsfeld Intensifies, But President Says His Job Is Safe
By Bradley Graham and David Von Drehle
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, May 7, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6870-2004May6?language=printer
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's handling of the Iraq prison abuse scandal brought him under withering fire yesterday: Prominent Democrats, including presidential candidate John F. Kerry and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, demanded his resignation, while senior Republicans fumed over his failure to alert them to the brewing crisis.
Inside the administration, Rumsfeld's crisis inflamed the dueling camps of his supporters and his critics -- a rift that has become deeper and more public as the U.S. situation in Iraq has deteriorated. Some U.S. officials said Rumsfeld was resistant to repeated warnings from Iraq governor L. Paul Bremer -- delivered as early as last fall -- that the United States was detaining too many Iraqis for too long and in poor conditions. Bremer told Rumsfeld and other senior administration officials that if the problem persisted, the political fallout in Iraq would be serious, the officials said.
But senior Pentagon staff members portrayed Rumsfeld yesterday as a man who took the warnings seriously, dealt with them efficiently -- yet was surprised like everyone else by the airing of the photographs of American soldiers abusing and humiliating Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.
Aides said yesterday that while Rumsfeld has known of the photographs since January, when they came to the attention of U.S. commanders in Iraq, he had not seen them, and he was not aware that CBS was about to air them until just hours before they were broadcast last week.
Rumsfeld plans to defend himself in appearances before the Senate and House Armed Services committees today. In the Senate, Republicans as well as Democrats described the appearances as critical to his survival as defense secretary, aides to key senators in both parties said.
"There's growing anger" at the sometimes prickly defense secretary, said one senior Senate Republican staff member, who agreed to discuss the mood of lawmakers on the condition that he not be named. "Republicans' instinct is to throw him a lifeline, but he's not giving them anything to deal with."
Another staff member said many Republican senators wanted to hear from Rumsfeld before criticizing him in public. Given that Rumsfeld's congressional relations have been rocky since the early days of the administration, he will have to be open, candid and responsive to senators' questions, the aide added: "If he says anything arrogant, it's over."
From the White House, Rumsfeld's future appeared more secure. President Bush, after issuing a rare public apology during a Rose Garden appearance with Jordan's King Abdullah, called Rumsfeld "a really good secretary of defense" and said "he will stay in my Cabinet."
This endorsement came a day after Bush aides leaked the news that the president had scolded Rumsfeld for not telling him about the pictures. A friend of both men said yesterday that the endorsement more closely reflected the president's true feelings. The friend recalled that on April 30, as the world was digesting the first wave of photographs, Bush went to dinner at Rumsfeld's home, where a small group of guests, including Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.), heard the president express his "deep appreciation" for the job Rumsfeld has been doing.
Behind the scenes, the White House was taking no action to build support for Rumsfeld in Congress -- because the administration does not think he is in genuine danger, one senior official said. This wait-and-see approach allowed Bush's aides to watch as events unfold. Some Bush advisers weighed the pros and cons of replacing the civilian architect of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A White House official said that it is the view of a number of people close to Bush that getting rid of Rumsfeld would be "a self-inflicted political and policy wound disproportionate to the secretary's responsibility for this human failure on the part of a small number of soldiers."
Yet some presidential advisers argued that Rumsfeld's departure would allow Bush to distance himself from the scandal, and perhaps be the clean break that would allow the administration -- and Bush's reelection campaign -- to focus on other issues.
Rumsfeld scrapped his public schedule yesterday and hunkered down inside the Pentagon to prepare for his congressional grillings. Meanwhile, senior Pentagon aides and other U.S. officials discussed his handling of the prison problems on the condition that their names not be used.
According to these interviews, Bremer repeatedly raised the issue of prison conditions as early as last fall -- both in one-on-one meetings with Rumsfeld and other administration leaders, and in group meetings with the president's inner circle on national security. Officials described Bremer as "kicking and screaming" about the need to release thousands of uncharged prisoners and improve conditions for those who remained.
A State Department official described "extreme frustration" that months of pressure produced no real change.
But Rumsfeld's aides point out that at least two major internal assessments were ordered at the time. In one, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, the commander of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, led a team to Iraq to examine interrogation practices. In the other, Maj. Gen. Donald J. Ryder, provost marshal general of the Army, surveyed detention operations and recommended changes.
The abuses at Abu Ghraib that are documented in the photographs took place between October and December. On Jan. 13, a member of the 800th Military Police Brigade, which served as guards at the prison, told superiors in Baghdad that guards were mistreating detainees.
Rumsfeld was told about the report a day or two later, aides said, and shortly afterward at a White House meeting, Rumsfeld mentioned the allegations to Bush and said that an investigation would begin. On Jan. 16, the investigation was announced publicly in a brief statement.
On March 20, after Maj Gen. Antonio M. Taguba completed a detailed report on widespread abuses at the prison, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said during a news conference in Baghdad that a criminal investigation had resulted in charges against six soldiers, including conspiracy, dereliction of duty, cruelty and maltreatment, assault and indecent acts with another. Several weeks later, Pentagon officials learned that CBS had obtained the photos, which had not been widely dispersed through the government because they were key evidence in the pending criminal prosecutions.
Rumsfeld's chief spokesman, Larry DiRita, and Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned the network of the risks of showing the images, citing the possibility they could incite anger in Iraq and upset sensitive negotiations underway to quell uprisings in Fallujah and Najaf. CBS waited until April 28 -- and only then was Rumsfeld informed the network had the photos and told they would be broadcast, his aides said.
Defense officials said that key members of Congress -- the majority and minority leaders of the eight committees that oversee the Pentagon -- were warned of the broadcast not long after Rumsfeld learned the news. Rumsfeld, however, does not appear to have alerted Bush.
Meanwhile, Taguba's official report was working its way up the chain of command as fast as could reasonably have been expected, Rumsfeld's aides said. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, signed off on it April 30, after one of the most chaotic months of the Iraq war. The next day, New Yorker magazine writer Seymour Hersh posted a story detailing the contents of the report.
Staff writers Robin Wright, Helen Dewar, Al Kamen and Charles Babington and researcher Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.
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Kerry Says Rumsfeld Must Go
Democrat Cites 'Miscalculation' on War, Abuse Revelations
By Lois Romano
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 7, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6833-2004May6.html
COLTON, Calif., May 6 -- Sen. John F. Kerry called Thursday for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and savaged the Bush administration over its handling of the discovered abuses of Iraqi prisoners, saying that "as president, I will not be the last to know what is going on in my command."
"These despicable actions have endangered the lives of our soldiers and, frankly, have made their mission harder to accomplish," Kerry told a friendly audience of 400 at a high school here.
"When I was in the Navy, the captain of the boat was in charge, and captain always took responsibility," Kerry said to sustained applause. "I will demand accountability for those who serve, and I will take responsibility for their actions. . . . As commander in chief, I will honor your commitment, and I will take responsibility for the bad as well as the good."
Kerry spoke shortly before President Bush apologized in Washington for the abuse of the prisoners.
After his speech, Kerry said Rumsfeld should resign because of both his "miscalculation" on the war and the escalating outcry over the abuse revelations. "In this context, it compounds it," Kerry said. "It was the way it was handled, the lack of information to Congress . . . not dealing with it. . . . But look this is . . . the frosting. I think Iraq and the miscalculation, and the overextension of the armed forces, and the entire way in which they rushed the nation to war . . . is a huge, historic miscalculation. And I thought he should have resigned then, period."
Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt accused the Massachusetts senator of "playing politics with Iraq: voting for the use of force, then voting against support for our troops in the field, then declaring himself an antiwar candidate."
Kerry's comments -- at the end of a western education swing -- come a day after more measured criticisms of the administration, and at a time when Democrats are increasingly concerned he is too tentative. Some strategists believe the presumptive nominee is allowing Republicans to define him on character issues before the public has gotten a chance to know him. On Thursday night in Iowa, Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie showed supporters two videos of Kerry aimed at demonstrating that the Democratic challenger talks out of both sides of his mouth. One showed Kerry making contradicting statements about whether he owns an SUV, and the other shows him blaming a speechwriter for comments in his stump speech.
"Right now, it's about strength and character because of Iraq -- how George Bush responds and how John Kerry responds," said Tony Coelho, a former California congressman who ran Al Gore's 2000 presidential race. "He has got to tell people how he feels, who he is."
Before his speech, Kerry visited a class at Colton High School and was asked by students about questions critics have raised regarding his service in Vietnam and his war protests. "That's politics," Kerry responded, adding that his critics are trying to "sort of mess me up and throw . . . mud."
Kerry wrapped up his three-day education pitch Thursday with a plan for attracting better teachers through higher pay and tougher accountability standards. He proposed toughening teacher qualifying exams, and instituting minimum federal standards for dismissing bad teachers and additional financial incentives to attract and retain teachers.
"I believe we need to offer teachers more pay, more training, more career choices and more options for education, and we must ask more in return," Kerry said. "Some people who chose to go into teaching will be good, but some will not. It's like any profession. Not everyone always has the ability to make it."
Kerry pledged to allocate $30 billion over a decade for, among other things: mentoring programs for new teachers; initiatives to help parents become more involved in school; $5,000 bonuses for those who agree to teach subjects in which there is a shortage, such as science and math; and an additional $5,000 in salary for some who teach in geographical areas that are not able to attract good teachers. In addition, he proposed a teacher corps, which would give tuition assistance to college students who commit to teaching for four years in an underserved community.
Education sources said there could be resistance to certain parts of the plan, such as federal controls on teacher qualifications, which are historically monitored by states.
But a spokesman for the National Education Association, a powerful teachers lobbying group that supports Kerry, said the profession would probably be receptive to Kerry's plan because it offers a set of complementary proposals.
"If we make it easier to get rid of bad teachers, there has to be a mechanism to get good teachers, and this plan acknowledges that," NEA spokesman Michael Pons said.
-------- ENERGY
-------- alternative energy
Air Force Laboratory Selects Uni-Solar Ovonic For Solar Cells
Auburn Hills (SPX)
May 07, 2004
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/solarcell-04h.html
United Solar Ovonic Corp. (Uni-Solar Ovonic) today announced that it has been selected by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) in Kirtland AFB, New Mexico, to provide 3 kW of UNI-SOLAR lightweight solar cells deposited on thin stainless steel to supply power to an experimental satellite. Uni-Solar Ovonic also has an option to provide an additional 300 W of UNI-SOLAR ultra-lightweight cells deposited on polymer.
The Deployable Structures Experiment (DSX) is an AFRL flight experiment initiated in 2004 and baselined to be launch-ready in late 2008. According to Dr. Greg Spanjers, DSX Program Manager, the flight experiment is designed to achieve major technological advances in satellite power, aperture and operability in the medium earth orbit (MEO).
Research in these areas is expected to have a major impact on potential DoD space assets such as Space- Based Radar, communications, orbit transfer, and space capability protection.
The UNI-SOLAR lightweight and flexible solar cells are a key technology on DSX. The cells will be stowed during launch and rolled out in space in a structural configuration scaleable to the 50-100 kW regime envisioned for future operational missions.
"Our thin-film triple-junction products have received wide recognition for terrestrial applications," said Stanford R. Ovshinsky, chairman and CEO of Uni-Solar Ovonic and president and chief technology officer of ECD Ovonics.
"Their light weight and radiation hardness, as well as superior high- temperature performance, make them ideal for space applications as well. DSX is baselined to fly in a high-radiation MEO orbit, which will be an excellent testbed for the radiation tolerance and annealing expected with the Uni-Solar Ovonic thin-film solar cells."
"Uni-Solar Ovonic has been working under contract from our group for several years now to develop lightweight solar arrays for space and stratospheric applications," said Dr. Donna Senft, program manager of the AFRL Advanced Space Power Generation Program at Kirtland AFB. "They were selected for this challenging program because of their superior technology and production capability."
"The selection of our products for satellite application by the Air Force opens up new opportunities for us in this premier market," said Subhendu Guha, president and chief operating officer of Uni-Solar Ovonic. "We look forward to increasing sales of our unique products for providing power to satellites and airships."
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
Reservoir to trim flow of acidic waste into Sacramento River
Friday, May 07, 2004
By Don Thompson,
Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-05-07/s_23581.asp
SACRAMENTO, California - A reservoir was to open Thursday that would trim the flow of pollutants into the Sacramento River from a mine that federal officials said was once the country's largest source of toxic pollutants.
The Iron Mountain Mine once channeled more than a ton of toxins into the environment every day, poisoning the drinking water source for 70,000 people across northern California.
The Slickrock Creek Retention Reservoir, formed by a 150-foot-high (45-meter-high) earthen dam, will capture water flowing from the 4,400-acre (1,760-hectare) open pit and underground mine so that it can be cleansed and released by a wastewater treatment plant that opened a decade ago.
The plant has treated more than 1.3 billion gallons (4.9 billion liters) of acid mine drainage, the Environmental Protection Agency said this week. It has captured about 1.9 million pounds (855,000 kilograms) of copper and 6.6 million pounds (2.97 million kilograms) of zinc so far, trimming the flow of copper by 80 percent and zinc by 90 percent.
The reservoir will boost those levels to 95 percent, and EPA spokesman Mark Merchant said the rest can safely be released.
The EPA settled with the mine's former owner, France-based Aventis CropSciences USA, for nearly $1 billion in 2000, in one of the largest such settlements in the history of the federal Superfund program, which seeks to clean up the country's most polluted sites.
The settlement included $160 million to operate the treatment plant and $700 million to $800 million for additional work at the mine.
The mine, located west of Redding, began operating shortly after the Gold Rush, in 1860, and was shut down in 1962. Miners split open Iron Mountain in their search for iron, silver, gold, copper, zinc, and pyrite, exposing the heavy metals to rain and groundwater that combined to form a neon green toxic soup. Iron sulfide in the pyrite reacted with oxygen in the air and water to form sulfuric acid.
Workers trying to clean up the mine found the pooling acid so strong that it dissolved their metal shovels overnight and copper-plated tools in minutes. Water dripping on bare skin had to be neutralized with baking soda before it could burn.
Even scientists garbed in full-body "moon suits" with masks, goggles, and gloves suffered from the toxic fumes produced by what they concluded was the most acidic water ever discovered in nature - more acidic than battery acid, worse than water found in volcanic lakes.
They also discovered a microbe that thrives in the harsh conditions and dramatically speeds up the acid production.
Scientists say it will take an estimated 2,500 years for the water runoff to return to healthy metal levels.
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New Interpretation Of Satellite Data Supports Global Warming
Seattle (SPX)
May 07, 2004
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/climate-04y.html
For years the debate about climate change has had a contentious sticking point - satellite measurements of temperatures in the troposphere, the layer of atmosphere where most weather occurs, were inconsistent with fast-warming surface temperatures.
But a team led by a University of Washington atmospheric scientist has used satellite data in a new and more accurate way to show that, for more than two decades, the troposphere has actually been warming faster than the surface.
The new approach relies on information that better separates readings of the troposphere from those of another atmospheric layer above, which have disguised the true troposphere temperature trend.
"This tells us very clearly what the lower atmosphere temperature trend is, and the trend is very similar to what is happening at the surface," said Qiang Fu, a UW associate professor of atmospheric sciences.
He is lead author of a paper documenting the work published in the May 6 edition of the journal Nature. Co-authors are Celeste Johanson, a UW research assistant and graduate student in atmospheric sciences; Stephen Warren, a UW professor of atmospheric sciences and Earth and space sciences; and Dian Seidel, a research meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Air Resources Laboratory in Silver Spring, Md.
The team examined measurements from devices called microwave-sounding units on NOAA satellites from January 1979 through December 2001. The satellites all used similar equipment and techniques to measure microwave radiation emitted by oxygen in the atmosphere and determine its temperature.
Different channels of the microwave-sounding units measured radiation emitted at different frequencies, thus providing data for different layers of the atmosphere. In the case of the troposphere - which extends from the surface to an altitude of about 7.5 miles - it was believed there was less warming than what had been recorded at the surface.
The troposphere temperature was measured by channel 2 on the microwave sounding units, but those readings were imprecise because about one-fifth of the signal actually came from a higher atmospheric layer called the stratosphere.
"Because of ozone depletion and the increase of greenhouse gases, the stratosphere is cooling about five times faster than the troposphere is warming, so the channel 2 measurement by itself provided us with little information on the temperature trend in the lower atmosphere," Fu said.
Stratosphere temperatures are measured by channel 4 on the microwave units. Fu's team used data from weather balloons at various altitudes to develop a method in which the two satellite channels could be employed to deduce the average temperature in the troposphere.
The scientists correlated the troposphere temperature data from balloons with the simulated radiation in the two satellite channels to determine which part of the channel 2 measurement had come from the cooling stratosphere and should be removed.
What remained indicated that the troposphere has been warming at about two-tenths of a degree Celsius per decade, or nearly one-third of a degree Fahrenheit per decade.
That closely resembles measurements of warming at the surface, something climate models have suggested would result if the warmer surface temperatures are the result of greenhouse gases.
The previous lack of demonstrable warming in the troposphere has prompted some to argue that climate models are missing unrecognized but important physical processes, or even that human-caused climate change is not happening.
One reason previous data have not shown enough warming in the troposphere, Fu said, is because the stratosphere influence on the channel 2 temperature trend has never been properly quantified, even though there have been attempts to account for its influence.
Those attempts had large uncertainties, so many researchers had simply used the unadjusted channel 2 temperature trends to represent the temperature trends in the middle of the troposphere.
Fu's work is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
The findings, he said, could offer a new context for climate change discussion.
"I think everyone can understand our approach," he said. "I think this could convince not just scientists but the public as well."
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Plastic Debris Found in Oceans
Bits of Refuse on Beaches and Ocean Floor, Study Reveals
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 7, 2004; Page A07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6891-2004May6.html
Plastic debris dumped in the ocean over decades is breaking into microscopic particles that are cropping up everywhere from beaches to deep ocean sediment, according to a study being published today by a group of British scientists.
This phenomenon has consequences that are just beginning to unfold, the scientists warned.
Widespread littering has led to a steady accumulation of plastic fragments at sea, according to Richard Thompson, a professor at the University of Plymouth.
"It's a cause for concern rather than alarm," Thompson said in a telephone interview yesterday. "There's lots and lots of microscopic bits of plastic. It appears quite ubiquitous. It's likely to be a global problem," he said.
The researchers collected sediment from beaches and from estuarine and subtidal sediments around Plymouth, England. They then examined an additional 17 beaches and looked at plankton samples collected regularly since the 1960s off British shores.
Plastic turned up in small fragments and granules, according to the researchers. Even "biodegradable" plastics leave behind plastic fragments, the scientists discovered, and some cleaning agents contain abrasive plastic bits. "We found plastic archived among the plankton to samples back to the 1960s, but with a significant increase in abundance over time," the authors wrote in today's issue of Science magazine.
Thompson, who received roughly $300,000 in grants to study the prevalence of plastic refuse in the ocean from the Leverhulme Trust, originally funded by a Victorian businessman and entrepreneur, said potentially "it is quite a big problem."
"We need to be a bit more responsible in the way we deal with plastic waste," he said.
Seba Sheavly, director of pollution prevention and monitoring at the Ocean Conservancy, said the study highlights the negative consequences of "poor solid waste management."
"We can fix this. We know better," Sheavly said. "All the rules are out there; we're just not following them."
Rob Krebs, a spokesman for the American Plastics Council, said a lot of the data in Thompson's study "is old, and we'll have to review it."
"The most important thing industry can do about ocean debris is educate each of us about the personal responsibility we have to keep debris from getting into the ocean, no matter what type it is," Krebs said.
Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of legendary sea explorer Jacques Cousteau, said his nonprofit Ocean Futures Society seeks to educate the public about the ramifications of tossing refuse into the ocean and other environmental issues.
"Our standard of living is completely dependent on how we treat the environment," Cousteau said. "We have to look at nature as capital. You either manage it properly and you live off the interest from the capital. The minute you go beyond the interest to the capital you're heading toward bankruptcy."
"What we throw away doesn't disappear. It comes back one way or another," he added.
Tony Kingsbury, a member of the plastics group at Dow Chemical Co., said his group is working with organizations such as the Ocean Conservancy to curb the kind of littering that clutters the world's oceans.
"We've got to get people educated," said Kingsbury, whose group recently distributed a couple million bags to aid refuse-collection efforts. "Things just don't end up in the ocean."
-------- ACTIVISTS
Protesters Shout 'Fire Rumsfeld' During Committee Hearings
May 7, 2004
(Capitol Hill-AP)
http://www.wreg.com/Global/story.asp?S=1849112&nav=3HvDMw2p
A group of protesters interrupt Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee today. The protesters shouted "fire Rumsfeld" and shouted there should be a probe of other abuses in Iraq. The protesters were peacefully escorted out of the room. You can watch a video clip of the protest to the left on this story.
During his testimony, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld says he takes "full responsiblity" for the prisoner abuse in Iraq. He says, "I feel terrible about what happened to these Iraqi detainees." He said he offers his "deepest apology" for the treatment -- which he says was inconsistent with the nation's values and "fundamentally un-American."
Rumsfeld spoke as he began testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Rumsfeld says the photos showing the abuse of Iraqi prisoners "offended and outraged" everyone in the Department of Defense. He said they were "terrible acts" carried out by a "small number" in the military.
Rumsfeld said he's naming several senior former officials to look at the investigations that are already under way -- and see if additional probes need to take place. He said the department also needs to review its "habits and procedures."
He was interrupted by a group of protesters in the hearing room, demanding investigation of what they described as "other abuses in Iraq." Rumsfeld told the panel he failed to recognize how important it was to bring the abuse matter to the attention of those at the "highest level -- including the president and members of Congress." He also said he's looking at ways to provide "appropriate compensation" to the victims of the abuse. Taguba Report
The report was prepared by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba on alleged abuse of prisoners by members of the 800 th Military Police Brigade at the Abu Ghraib Prison in Baghdad.
http://www.wreg.com/Global/story.asp?S=1849545
---
CODEPINK disrupts Rumsfeld hearing...FIRE HIM!
Date: Fri, 07 May 2004
From: CODEPINK <codepink@codepinkalert.org>
Today on live television, from Washington DC, CODEPINK Protesters called for the firing of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as he testified at the Senate Armed Services hearing. With some clad in pink and holding pink signs that read "FIRE RUMSFELD," Gael Murphy, Pat Elder, Alison Flesher, Ellen Taylor, Andy Shallal, Ben Dolby, Matt Hanson and Analia Penchaszadeh interrupted Rumsfeld as he began giving his opening statement apologizing for the abuses of Iraqi prisoners.
CODEPINK activists made the following assertions, which echoed through radio and TV broadcasts nationwide:
"We need a wider investigation," called out CP co-founder Gael Murphy, "including an investigation into the killing of civilians, the use of collective punishment, the imprisonment of thousands of Iraqis with no due process." Seven other protesters joined in, speaking out against the war and occupation of Iraq, and calling for Rumsfeld to be held accountable for the disastrous situation in Iraq. "Fire Rumsfeld, War Criminal," the group of eight shouted as they were removed from the floor of the hearing. For the press release, and press reports and footage of the action check out http://www.codepinkalert.org
This is an example of CODEPINK's policy to "speak truth to power." This protest was organized in less than 24 hours with only eight local CODEPINK activists. Just a reminder that actions can be easier than you expect. We encourage you to continue to be in the streets and speak to the outrageous behavior of those with power in this country. Hold them responsible for the extreme atrocities that have happened on their watch. There is no excuse and "I am sorry" is not enough. This is just one more reason to call for an end to the occupation.
CODEPINK has brought reports of human rights abuses, torture, random shootings and night raids in Iraq since last July. We have presented them to the media, the UN and Congress and they were not taken seriously. You can find more of these reports on http://www.occupationwatch.org
CODEPINK has been asking for Rumsfeld to be fired since October of last year. It is more important now than ever to speak out. Write or call your local media and congressional members and pass this email on to your friends. See http://www.codepinkalert.org for details on how to act now.
In Peace, Andrea, Carol, Claire, Gael, Jodie, Lora, and Medea
Quick Links
Visit us on the web at: www.codepinkalert.org Subscribe to this mailing list at: http://codepink.kintera.org/updates
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Rice Speaks to Mich. Grads Amid Protests
May 7, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Rice-Speech.html
EAST LANSING, Mich. (AP) -- As dozens of people protested outside, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice urged Michigan State University graduates not to let ``history's failures and cruelties'' dampen their optimism.
Rice's visit on Friday came amid a growing prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq and drew about 100 protesters outside the basketball arena where she spoke.
``The first obligation of the educated person is to be optimistic,'' she said during the commencement address. ``The more we learn about history's failures and cruelties, the more our minds are tempted to despair.
``But for all of our problems today, and by just about every possible measure, the world is a better, more hopeful place than it has ever been.''
Her speech came shortly after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld offered his ``deepest apology'' to Iraqi prisoners mistreated by U.S. soldiers. Rice offered an apology of her own on Monday, telling the Arabic network Al-Arabiya, ``We are deeply sorry for what has happened to these people.''
Rice received an honorary doctor of humane letters degree on Friday. Outside, some protesters were angered by her presence.
``Condoleezza Rice has a lot of influence on how we are perceived by the world,'' Aaron Stuttman, 46, of Lansing. ``That perception does not foster unity or humanitarianism.''
On the Net:
Michigan State University: http://www.msu.edu
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