Archive By Date | Today's Links to Search By
Activists' News | Nuclear | Depleted Uranium | Military | Police
Alternative Energy Etc. | From Subscribers
NUCLEAR
Panel able to build nuke using items found on open market
Report assails U.S. nuclear security effort
Activist Urges Depleted Uranium Clean-Up in Iraq
N-programme non-negotiable
Iran Bars UN from Military Sites - Diplomats
World Must Prevent Spread of Nuke Arms: IAEA Chief
India's Policy On Israel Likely To Change - Expert
Israeli Nuclear Spy Appears in Court
Japan PM gambles on nuclear progress
North Korea provided Libyan uranium - NY Times
Nuke fuel mystery Evidence points to N. Korea as Libya's supplier.
The North Korean Uranium Challenge
Some Russian Submarines Said Mothballed
Report Urges Tighter Nuclear Controls
Los Alamos to conduct `subcritical' experiment in Nevada
Nuclear experiment planned at Nevada site
Nuclear Experiment Planned at Nevada Site
Road reopens after radiation spill; investigation continues
MILITARY
Projects Put Strain On Afghan Province
Afghan Deaths Linked to Unit at Iraq Prison
'Charlie's Angels' latest US weapon in Afghanistan
Raid in Sudan Claims 56, Villagers Say
Czech police stop illegal arms shipment to Iraq
UK Mulled Using Birds for Bio-War After WW2 - Files
Brown may increase war fund to £6bn
RAE Systems Wins $1 Million Radiation Sensor Contract From U.S. Military
The Ultimate Insider
South Africa says no legal challenges to new mine law
Contractors caught under a microscope
Some U.S. prison contractors may avoid charges
Army researches futuristic copters
U.S. Forces Move Into Stronghold Of Cleric
Factions Jostle for Top Posts in a New Iraq
G.I.'s Report Killing 36 Insurgents Around Kufa Mosque That Held Arms
U.S. Needs More Time to Train and Equip Iraqis
Iraq Homicide Rate 10 Times New York City's
Palestinians claim Israel dumped toxic waste in West Bank
Key Israeli Condemns Offensive In Gaza
Israeli Official Offers Empathy but Hits a Nerve
41 terrorists killed, 56 homes demolished in Rafah
UAE offers to build Gaza homes
Arab Summit condemns attacks on Palestinian, Israeli civilians
Nato launches review of Afghan failings
Reject Islamic Extremism, Musharraf Tells Pakistan
Prison abusers were 'stupid,' retired intelligence officer says
Chalabi Denies Charges He Spied for Iran
U.S. Steps Up Hunt in Leaks to Iraqi Exile
Mossad Goes On-Line to Recruit Spies...and Waiters
U.S. and Britain Present Resolution on Iraq Transfer
Text of U.N. Draft Resolution on Iraq
Iraq draft gives wide powers to US forces
Allied troops may win immunity from Iraqi laws
Army to deploy peel-and-stick armor in Afghanistan
Ex-U.S. Marine: I Killed Civilians in Iraq
Soldiers Vented Frustration, Doctor Says
Soldier claims he was beaten as part of training at Guantanamo
Retired General Assails Planning for Iraq War
US soldier jailed and thrown out of army for Iraq prison abuse
Base Closure Plans Divide Congress
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
U.S. Nearing Deal on Way to Track Foreign Visitors
Case Reveals Nuts and Bolts of Nuclear Network, Officials Say
POLITICS
Pentagon's postwar fiasco coming full-circle?
Wall Street Firms Funnel Millions to Bush
Senate Copy of Report On Abuse May Be Short
General Says Sanchez Rejected Her Offer to Give Address
The Ultimate Insider
ENERGY
James Lovelock: Nuclear power is the only green solution
Michigan Students Convert Fryer Oil to Fuel
S&P issues report on UK wind power sector
Iraqis fail to regain control of oil revenue
Russian energy industry has good future
OTHER
'Only nuclear power can now halt global warming'
WASA Studying Meters For Lead
ACTIVISTS
Permit or Not, Protesters Prepare for Republicans in New York
-------- NUCLEAR
Panel able to build nuke using items found on open market
May 24, 2004
Washington Post / Associated Press
http://www.tdn.com/articles/2004/05/24/nation_world/news03.txt
WASHINGTON -- Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. wondered aloud one day in 2002 whether someone could build an atomic weapon from parts available on the open market. His audience, the leaders of the government's nuclear laboratories, said it could be done.
Then do it, the Delaware Democrat, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, instructed the scientists in a confidential session. A few months later, they returned to the soundproof Senate meeting room with a workable nuclear weapon, missing only the fissile material.
"It was bigger than a breadbox and smaller than a dump truck, but they were able to get it in," Biden said in a recent speech. The scientists "explained how -- literally off the shelf, without doing anything illegal -- they actually constructed this device."
The relative ease with which U.S. scientists built an explosive nuclear weapon illustrates the need to secure plutonium and highly enriched uranium scattered in armories and research sites around the world, a pair of Harvard University researchers argue in a new study that contends the Bush administration is not doing enough.
Less fissile material was secured in the two years after Sept. 11, 2001, than in the two years just before, according to the Harvard report, which was obtained by The Washington Post. Half the equipment dispatched to Russia nearly four years ago as a fast, interim solution remains in warehouses, uninstalled because of bureaucratic disputes.
Calling it a "dangerous myth" that terrorists could acquire a nuclear weapon only with the help of a rogue state, authors Matthew Bunn and Anthony Wier use the Biden example to allege that a failure of U.S. commitment and leadership could lead to a nuclear calamity. They also warn that, in an unstable country, a nuclear weapon could be bought or stolen.
"What's missing is a sense of urgency," said former senator Sam Nunn, D-Ga., who heads the nonprofit Nuclear Threat Initiative, which funded the 111-page study. Nunn believes President Bush must focus on removing bureaucratic hurdles and work more pointedly with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"If one of the great cities of the world goes up in smoke, and you look back on these obstacles, it will make our retroactive rear-view mirror look at September 11th look like a waltz," Nunn said Sunday in an interview. "It would be so obvious that the obstacles should have been overcome by the presidents."
Bunn and Wier credit the Bush administration, particularly the leadership of the Department of Energy, for making strides. But they write that the U.S. commitment is no match for the danger. As they put it, U.S. authorities are not meeting Bush's own pledge to "do all we can."
In one case, plans were announced six years ago to destroy 68 metric tons of plutonium stripped from bombs and warheads in the United States and Russia, but the project remains stalled because of a dispute over who would pay if an accident or sabotage occurred in Russia. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., has blamed "trivial negotiating issues."
In another example, the administration on average has requested less money to control nuclear materials and technology than was sought in the final Clinton administration budget, adjusted for inflation.
Although 16 percent more money has been spent than if the Clinton numbers had continued, "essentially all" of the increase was injected by congressional initiative, write Bunn and Wier, who reviewed federal spending on nonproliferation as an analyst at the Office of Management and Budget.
They report that the United States has taken more effective action than any other country, spending $9.2 billion from 1992 to 2004 to dismantle and secure weapons of mass destruction. Yet they note that the Defense Department is seeking $9.2 billion in the 2005 budget year alone to build a largely unproven defense system against a small number of missiles in a corner of the United States.
"It's very easy in the standard political debate for them to point to the successes and not put them in the context of how small they are, and not showing what they have not yet done," Bunn said in an interview. "The president has an opportunity to take action now that would drastically reduce the danger of nuclear terrorism in a few years."
The Bush administration is preparing to announce an expanded effort to secure nuclear stockpiles and supplies of bomb-grade material, officials have said. In a Feb. 11 speech, Bush promised a series of strong steps to curtail the production and spread of fissile material that could be used in a nuclear explosive or scattered in a radiological device called a "dirty bomb."
Basic security improvements have not been made at dozens of facilities in Russia, where more than 60 percent of the country's plutonium and weapons-grade uranium is kept, the General Accounting Office has warned. In a more recent report, the GAO said U.S. government facilities are also vulnerable to an increased risk of terrorism.
Despite improvements in Russia, Bunn and Wier report that visitors continue to see broken detectors, decaying fences, vulnerable seals and paper records never designed for careful monitoring. They also note that fissile material exists in "hundreds of buildings in more than 40 countries."
Evaluating an extreme case, they point to Pakistan, which has perfected nuclear weapons, as a potential target of terrorists with potent weapons and political connections.
Bunn and Wier, analysts at the Project on Managing the Atom, challenge the argument that the danger of terrorists assembling a bomb and acquiring fissile material is small, unless sponsored by a nuclear-capable government.
"We believe that this view is profoundly wrong," the authors write. They contend that the availability of nuclear designs and the work of U.S. weapons scientists in the Biden experiment prove their point.
----
Report assails U.S. nuclear security effort
Sense of urgency missing, study sponsor says
Peter Slevin,
Washington Post
Monday, May 24, 2004
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/05/24/MNGOU6QPQM1.DTL
Washington -- Sen. Joseph Biden wondered aloud one day in 2002 whether someone could build an atomic weapon from parts available on the open market. His audience, the leaders of the government's nuclear laboratories, said it could be done.
Then do it, the Delaware Democrat, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, instructed the scientists in a confidential session. A few months later, they returned to the soundproof Senate meeting room with a workable nuclear weapon, missing only the fissile material.
"It was bigger than a breadbox and smaller than a dump truck, but they were able to get it in," Biden said in a recent speech. The scientists "explained how -- literally off the shelf, without doing anything illegal --
they actually constructed this device."
The relative ease with which U.S. scientists built an explosive nuclear weapon illustrates the need to secure plutonium and highly enriched uranium scattered in armories and research sites around the world, a pair of Harvard University researchers argue in a new study that contends the Bush administration is not doing enough.
Less fissile material was secured in the two years after Sept. 11, 2001, than in the two years just before, according to the Harvard report. Half the equipment dispatched to Russia nearly four years ago as a fast, interim solution remains in warehouses, uninstalled because of bureaucratic disputes.
Calling it a dangerous myth that terrorists could acquire a nuclear weapon only with the help of a rogue state, authors Matthew Bunn and Anthony Wier use the Biden example to allege that a failure of U.S. commitment and leadership could lead to a nuclear calamity. They also warn that, in an unstable country, a nuclear weapon could be bought or stolen.
"What's missing is a sense of urgency," said Sam Nunn, a former Democratic senator from Georgia, who heads the nonprofit Nuclear Threat Initiative, which funded the 111-page study. Nunn said he believes President Bush must focus on removing bureaucratic hurdles and work more pointedly with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Bunn and Wier credit the Bush administration, particularly the leadership of the Department of Energy, for making strides. But they write that the U.S. commitment is no match for the danger. As they put it, U.S. authorities are not meeting Bush's own pledge to "do all we can."
In one case, plans were announced six years ago to destroy 68 metric tons of plutonium stripped from bombs and warheads in the United States and Russia, but the project remains stalled because of a dispute over who would pay if an accident or sabotage occurred in Russia. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., has blamed "trivial negotiating issues."
In another example, the administration on average has requested less money to control nuclear materials and technology than was sought in the final Clinton administration budget, adjusted for inflation.
Although 16 percent more money has been spent than if the Clinton numbers had continued, essentially all the increase was injected by congressional initiative, write Bunn and Wier, who reviewed nonproliferation spending as an analyst at the Office of Management and Budget.
They report that the United States has taken more effective action than any other country, spending $9.2 billion from 1992 to 2004 to dismantle and secure weapons of mass destruction.
Yet they note that the Pentagon is seeking $9.2 billion in the 2005 budget year alone to build a largely unproven defense system against a small number of missiles.
The Bush administration is preparing to announce an expanded effort to secure nuclear stockpiles and supplies of bomb-grade material, officials have said. In a Feb. 11 speech, Bush promised a series of strong steps to curtail the production and spread of fissile material that could be used in a nuclear explosive or scattered in a radiological device called a dirty bomb.
Basic security improvements have not been made at dozens of facilities in Russia, where more than 60 percent of the country's plutonium and weapons- grade uranium is kept, the General Accounting Office has warned. In a more recent report, the GAO said U.S. government facilities are also vulnerable to an increased risk of terrorism.
-------- depleted uranium
Activist Urges Depleted Uranium Clean-Up in Iraq
Story by Lisa Richwine
REUTERS USA:
May 24, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/25212/story.htm
WASHINGTON - The U.S. military should clean up depleted uranium ammunition scattered across Iraq to prevent future health problems such as cancer and birth defects, a leading anti-nuclear activist said.
The Pentagon said it had not found any evidence the material, which is so dense it can pierce steel tanks, causes long-term health consequences. An ongoing study of 1991 Gulf War veterans has shown no ill effects.
But Dr. Helen Caldicott, a pediatrician and president of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, linked depleted uranium to higher rates of cancer and birth defects in Iraq following the Gulf War.
Depleted uranium ammunition is being used by U.S. troops in Iraq and could seriously harm civilians living there in the decades to come, said Caldicott, founding president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, an anti-nuclear group that shared the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.
"We should be taking responsibility for what is happening over there," she told reporters at the National Press Club.
The Pentagon should test buildings in Iraq for depleted uranium, destroy ones with high levels and bury the material underground, Caldicott said.
The U.S. government also should compensate people with cancer related to the material, she said.
Depleted uranium is a byproduct of nuclear fuel production. It strengthens ammunition and gives weapons twice the range of ones using other heavy metals. Tanks made with depleted uranium have proven impenetrable by enemy weapons, the Pentagon said.
There has been controversy about it since its use during the Gulf War and the Balkans conflict, including some claims that European soldiers may have developed leukemia after being exposed to the material in Kosovo in 1999.
"We don't see anything from the science" indicating long-term health problems to people exposed to depleted uranium in the environment, said Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, the Defense Department's deputy director for deployment health support.
An ongoing study of 70 Gulf War veterans who were hit by weapons using depleted uranium in "friendly fire" incidents has found no major health problems for the soldiers or their 35 children, Kilpatrick said.
Kilpatrick said research on potential long-term impacts is continuing.
"We are looking at it scientifically. We are keeping an open mind to it," he said in an interview.
-------- india / pakistan
N-programme non-negotiable
Jamali says world accepts Pakistan as nuclear power
May 24, 2004
Pakistan Daily Times
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_21-5-2004_pg7_1
ISLAMABAD: The nuclear programme is the cornerstone of Pakistan's security policy and is as such non-negotiable, Prime Minister Zafarullah Jamali said on Thursday.
"The policy of credible minimum deterrence has national consensus and has stood the test of time and events over many years. We continue to critically monitor our security environment," Mr Jamali said in a speech to the scientists and engineers of Kahuta Research Laboratories (KRL).
The prime minister said the government would continue to provide necessary resources for the qualitative development and advancement of the country's strategic programme. The prime minister was briefed on the role and functions of the uranium enrichment facility during his daylong visit to the KRL.
Mr Jamali dismissed apprehensions that the nuclear programme would be rolled back or frozen and asked the nation to develop confidence and maturity.
"We are a declared nuclear power," he said, adding that the international community had accepted the reality of a nuclear Pakistan. "The apprehensions of a roll-back in some cynical domestic circles are at least two decades late. There is only one direction, and that is forward dynamism, which will be maintained at all cost."
Mr Jamali said Pakistan had acquired nuclear capability strictly for defence and non-proliferation of nuclear technology was a declared national policy. "We moved swiftly to investigate the reports of past nuclear proliferation by certain individuals and we are determined to completely root out the network."
He said difficult decisions had been taken because Pakistan did not shy away from its international obligations. "We extended full cooperation to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in its efforts to investigate international proliferation and we will continue to do so, remaining within the bounds of national sovereignty and security."
During his visit to KRL, the prime minister saw various uranium enrichment plants and Ghauri missile production facilities and expressed his satisfaction at the standards being maintained in the plants running to capacity.
He complimented the officers and workers on their technical prowess and motivation level which, he said, had given Pakistan the ability to deter aggression.
Earlier on arrival, the prime minister was received by Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee Chairman General Muhammad Aziz Khan, Strategic Plans Division Director General Lt General Khalid Kidwai and KRL Chairman Dr Javed Arshad Mirza.
Online adds: Also on Thursday, the Saudi ambassador to Pakistan, Brigadier (r) Ali Awaddh Asseri, called on Mr Jamali at Prime Minister's House.
They discussed matters related to Pakistan-Saudi relations and the prime minister's upcoming visit to Saudi Arabia. Mr Jamali said Pakistan attached great importance to its relations with Saudi Arabia. He said that the traditionally close and brotherly relations between the two countries would be strengthened in the future. Mr Asseri said that the existing cooperation between the two countries in various fields would be enhanced.
-------- iran
Iran Bars UN from Military Sites - Diplomats
May 24, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-iran.html
VIENNA, Austria (Reuters) - Several Western diplomats on the board of the U.N. nuclear watchdog accused Iran of barring U.N. inspectors from military sites, but Tehran said the agency was getting full access inside the Islamic republic.
Diplomats who follow the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said IAEA inspectors had been prevented from inspecting around a dozen workshops at three locations.
``They have yet to allow access to the military sites,'' one Western diplomat said. ``This will probably be the topic of one of the inspection visits'' by IAEA officials.
``They (Iranian officials) have been obstructing visits to military sites,'' said another diplomat, adding U.N. inspectors were being escorted by members of Iran's Revolutionary Guards.
The United States says Iran has two nuclear programs -- a public one it has declared to the U.N. and a secret one aimed at developing atomic weapons. Tehran rejects this charge, saying its plans are limited to the peaceful generation of electricity.
Iran's ambassador to the United Nations in Vienna, Pirooz Hosseini, denied that the IAEA was facing access problems.
``This is not correct information ... from these unnamed diplomats,'' Hosseini told Reuters, adding that there were ``discussions'' between Tehran and the United Nations about site access.
``They're not problems. (The IAEA) will have access to the sites they want to visit. Everything is going in a smooth way.''
IAEA officials declined comment.
But a third diplomat close to the IAEA said the agency had the right only to what is called ``managed access'' to sensitive sites, not the ``anytime, anywhere'' powers U.N. weapons inspectors had in Iraq.
A fourth Western diplomat said any delays caused by discussion of ``managed access'' would only deepen suspicions that Iran is hiding something.
``Iran's got to throw open the doors,'' the diplomat said.
The IAEA began looking closely at Iran after an exiled Iranian opposition group said in August 2002 Tehran was hiding a massive uranium enrichment plant at Natanz and other facilities from the U.N. Iran later declared these sites to the IAEA.
NO HARD EVIDENCE
``There's a general hardening of opinion'' against Iran on the 35-nation IAEA governing board, the second diplomat said. ``The pattern of behavior suggests they're trying to hide something.''
However, he acknowledged there was no hard evidence that Iran was concealing anything, just suspicions.
He said a number of countries wanted IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei to criticize Iran's less-than-adequate cooperation in his new report on Iran, due out soon. But he said ElBaradei, concerned about Tehran's reaction, was putting up resistance.
The diplomat close to the IAEA disagreed, saying ElBaradei felt strongly about the importance of the IAEA being objective and would not withhold criticism for fear of anyone's reaction.
The first diplomat said Iran may grant the IAEA inspectors access to the sites right before ElBaradei's report comes out -- so ElBaradei would not need not to mention access problems.
ElBaradei's report will be discussed at a meeting of the IAEA's board of governors beginning on June 14, at which the United States is expected to push hard for a resolution that harshly condemns Iran's nuclear program.
--------
World Must Prevent Spread of Nuke Arms: IAEA Chief
Monday, May 24, 2004
http://www.indolink.com/displayArticleS.php?id=051604020837
New York, May 16 (NNN): The head of the United Nation's nuclear watchdog, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Mohammed ElBaradei, has called for a new global system to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.
Addressing a seminar of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, ElBaradei said that after the Cold War and the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US, many countries felt they could only achieve security through nuclear deterrent.
He also raised the threat of "extremist terrorists" who sought nuclear weapons.
ElBaradei said the crisis over North Korea's nuclear arms sent "the worst signal" to potential proliferators.
He said that a first step towards better international control could be a global moratorium on the right of any country to develop plutonium and highly-enriched uranium.
The two substances can be used to manufacture nuclear bombs.
ElBaradei said North Korea had shown that a country which protected its weapons programmes and accelerated them could force powerful countries to the negotiating table. "If you want to protect yourself, accelerate yourself ...then people will sit around the table with you," he said
The IAEA chief said Iran had the "know how" to enrich uranium, although there was no proof it had done so to military levels. However, he said, the issue would only be brought to a close when "we can say Iran's programme is dedicated exclusively for peaceful purposes, and we are not there yet."
ElBaradei said there were 100 facilities in 40 countries using highly enriched uranium, adding that it was time for a nuclear "clean-up".
-------- israel
India's Policy On Israel Likely To Change - Expert
The Congress allies backed Sonia's nomination for the premiership
May 15, 2004
By Khaled Mamdouh,
IOL Staff, (IslamOnline.net)
http://www.islam-online.net/English/News/2004-05/15/article06.shtml
CAIRO - Indian's foreign policy is likely to change, though not radically, under the new Congress-led coalition government, an Indian political analyst expected.
"The Congress, unlike the defeated Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People's Party), surely will not seek strategic relations with Israel, for example," Zafarul-Islam Khan told IslamOnline.net Saturday over phone from New Delhi.
He stressed that while the Congress is unlikely to severe ties with Israel, it will not seek strategic relations with Tel Aviv.
"The relations with Israel under the BJP dismayed not just [Indian] Muslims, but other Indian circles as well".
A B Bardhan, General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (CPI) - a main Congress ally - also criticised the pro-Israel policy of the outgoing BJP.
"Israel is the only nation in the world which practices state terrorism. There have been a number of U.N. resolutions on Palestine but Vajpayee government changed tracks on supporting an independent Palestine state," he told India Times.
--------
Israeli Nuclear Spy Appears in Court
May 24, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Vanunu.html
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) -- Mordechai Vanunu, who served 18 years in prison for revealing Israel's nuclear secrets, appeared in court in a libel suit Monday, his first public appearance since being released last month.
Vanunu has been secluded at a Jerusalem church since is April 21 release.
Wearing a blue Oxford shirt and a cross around his neck, Vanunu did not testify, and the case was continued. Asked by reporters how he was doing, Vanunu signaled with a nod that he was OK. He was whisked out of the courtroom by security guards without speaking to reporters.
Vanunu has filed a libel suit against the Yediot Ahronot daily. The newspaper reported in November 1999 that Vanunu had passed information on how to prepare explosives to Hamas militants in prison.
Yediot's lawyer, Mibi Moser, said Vanunu was seeking about $78,000 in damages.
During a procedural stage, Vanunu's lawyer, Avigdor Feldman told the judge that Vanunu lives in Jerusalem. The judge turned to Vanunu and asked him where in the city he lives.
``In the church, St. George,'' Vanunu replied. Vanunu, a convert to Christianity, has stayed at St. George, an Anglican Church near Jerusalem's Old City, since his release from prison.
Vanunu served 18 years in prison for providing The Sunday Times of London with information and pictures of Israel's nuclear reactor. Based on the pictures and information provided by Vanunu -- who worked as a technician in the reactor -- experts assessed at the time that Israel has the sixth-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world.
-------- japan
Japan PM gambles on nuclear progress
May 24, 2004
(Reuters)
http://www.arabtimesonline.com/arabtimes/breakingnews/view.asp?msgID=5848
TOKYO - Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi will win kudos at home if he reunites the families of kidnapped Japanese as a result of his upcoming summit in Pyongyang, but he needs to make progress in the crisis over North Korea's nuclear programmes to earn global applause as well.
Koizumi will meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang on Saturday to seek both a breakthrough in the dispute over the Japanese abductees and progress in deadlocked six-party talks on the communist state's nuclear arms programme.
"I think the prime minister has a very strong determination to act in a very proactive way to bring about peace and stability in the region," a government source told Reuters.
"We have no intention whatsoever of putting the question of nuclear weapons on the shelf," the source added.
Working level talks on the nuclear crisis ended in Beijing on Saturday with little apparent success in narrowing gaps between the two main protagonists, the United States and North Korea. The other participants were South Korea, Japan, China and Russia.
"The nuclear question is the delicate part," said Masao Okonogi, a Korea specialist at Keio University in Tokyo.
"There was little progress at the working talks and it is very hard for North Korea to compromise with the United States. Conversely, there is a chance that Kim wants to use Japan as a messenger, a mediator, and so will say something to Koizumi."
North Korea wants compensation for giving up its nuclear arms programme, with a deal for a freeze as a first step, and says it has the right to pursue nuclear projects for peaceful purposes.
The United States wants North Korea to abandon completely both a programme to make weapons-grade plutonium and a uranium enrichment programme that Pyongyang now says does not exist.
"It's very hard to expect North Korea to accept in talks with Japan the demand for complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantling that it has rejected in the six-way talks," defence policy analyst Satoshi Morimoto said in a weekend TV talk show.
But he added: "While not accepting complete dismantlement, North Korea may show a more positive stance towards freezing its nuclear programme."
The latest crisis over North Korea's nuclear ambitions emerged on October 2002, when U.S. officials said Pyongyang had confessed to pursuing a project to enrich uranium for weapons.
-------- korea
North Korea provided Libyan uranium - NY Times
REUTERS USA:
May 24, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/25208/story.htm
NEW YORK - North Korea secretly provided Libya with nearly two tonnes of uranium in early 2001, The New York Times has reported, citing unnamed U.S. officials and European diplomats.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said there was 1.7 metric tons of uranium hexafluoride, a standard raw material for enrichment through feeding centrifuges, but experts told the newspaper the uranium was far short of the potency needed to make a nuclear weapon.
A large quantity of uranium hexafluoride was turned over to the United States by the Libyans earlier this year as part of leader Muammar Gaddafi's agreement to give up his nuclear program. At the time, the United States identified Pakistan as the likely source.
However, the IAEA told The Times it found evidence that the uranium came from North Korea. The agency based its conclusion on interviews of members of the secret nuclear supplier network set up by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the former head of Pakistan's main nuclear laboratory.
While saying he could not confirm the information, White House spokesman Trent Duffy said, "That's why it's imperative that we continue with our policy of making sure that North Korea disarms in a complete, verifiable and irreversible fashion."
Duffy also said the United States is working with other countries, through the U.S.-led Proliferation Security Initiative, "to ensure that the illicit trading of weapons of mass destruction is caught and reversed."
American officials say the discovery of the North Korean connection is an intelligence success that resulted indirectly from Libya's decision to dismantle its nuclear program, and the ensuing drive to break up Khan's network, according to the newspaper's web site.
The uranium shipped to Libya could not be used as nuclear fuel unless it was enriched in centrifuges, which the Libyans were constructing as part of a $100 million program to purchase equipment from the Khan network, The Times reported.
The paper said the classified evidence had touched off a race among the world's intelligence services to explore whether North Korea has made similar clandestine sales to other nations or perhaps even to terror groups seeking atomic weapons.
Iran has bought centrifuges from the Khan network, investigators believe, but it has denied it is seeking a nuclear weapon.
Bush administration officials warned last year that North Korea could make good on its threats to provide nuclear materials or weapons. However, until recently U.S. officials said they had no evidence that the country was dealing in anything beyond missiles and missile technology.
----
Nuke fuel mystery Evidence points to N. Korea as Libya's supplier.
By George Jahn
Associated Press
Monday, May 24, 2004
http://www.sfexaminer.com/article/index.cfm/i/052404b_nukefuel
VIENNA, Austria -- North Korea has emerged as a possible supplier in the clandestine nuclear network, with diplomats on Sunday saying the communist country was the likely source of nearly two tons of uranium that Libya bought for its now-scrapped weapons program.
The revelations stoked concern that Iran and other nations also could have benefited from cooperation with the secretive nation to get fuel, components and the knowledge needed to build nuclear weapons.
Previously, Pakistan -- the key country implicated in a worldwide nuclear black market -- had been thought to be the source of 1.87 tons of uranium hexafluoride that Libya handed over to Americans in January as part of its decision to get rid of weapons of mass destruction.
Now, the evidence increasingly points to North Korea, the diplomats said, though they cautioned that the investigation was not yet complete and other sources for Libya's program could not be ruled out. The diplomats spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
The new evidence pointing to North Korea came from the International Atomic Energy Agency and was based on interviews with members of the clandestine network headed by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani scientist implicated in selling his country's nuclear secrets to Libya, North Korea, Iran, and possibly other countries, according to one diplomat.
A U.S. official, however, told AP that U.S. intelligence was "still pursuing" the alleged North Korean link "to see how much truth there is to it" and needed more information to "disprove" Pakistan as the source.
One major proliferation concern is Iran, whose nuclear program already is under scrutiny because of fears it might be developing weapons.
Iran's activities are up for review next month when the International Atomic Energy Agency's board meets to discuss the state of investigations into programs that go back nearly two decades and include covert attempts to enrich uranium, reprocessing small amounts of plutonium and other suspect activities with possible weapons applications.
Inspections last year by the Vienna-based IAEA showed that Iran failed to report imports in 1991 of large amounts of uranium hexafluoride -- the same substance shipped to Libya, apparently by North Korea.
While the origin of the Iran shipments was China, other channels of weapons cooperation between the communist North and the Islamic regime appear to exist at least since the early 1980s, when North Korea sold about 100 refitted Soviet Scud B missiles to Tehran, which used them in its war against Iraq.
More recently, Japanese media quoted unidentified military officials as saying North Korea and Iran had agreed on joint production of long-range ballistic missiles. One of the diplomats who spoke to AP on Sunday cited intelligence saying that North Korean officials were believed to have visited Tehran last year, possibly in connection with such a deal.
----
The North Korean Uranium Challenge
May 24, 2004
New York Times NEWS ANALYSIS
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/24/politics/24asse.html
WASHINGTON, May 23 - The discovery that North Korea may have supplied uranium to Libya poses an immediate challenge to the White House: while President Bush is preoccupied on the other side of the world, an economically desperate nation may be engaging in exactly the kind of nuclear proliferation that the president says he went to war in Iraq to halt.
Yet to listen to many in the White House, concern about North Korea's nuclear program brings little of the urgency that surrounded the decision 14 months ago to oust Saddam Hussein. When Mr. Bush has been asked about North Korea in recent months, he has emphasized his patience. He does not refer to the intelligence estimates that North Korea has at least two nuclear weapons, or to the debate within the American intelligence community about whether North Korea has spent the past 18 months building more.
Instead, he lauds the progress he says the United States has made in organizing China, Russia, Japan and South Korea to negotiate as one with the North Koreans - though those talks have resulted in no progress so far in ending either of North Korea's two major nuclear programs.
Just last week, the Pentagon even announced it was removing a brigade of troops that had been securing South Korea's border with the North, and sending it to provide additional forces for the Iraqi occupation.
With international inspectors recently reporting that North Korea may have shipped uranium, already processed into a gas that can be fed into centrifuges for enrichment into bomb fuel, the White House has been silent. On Sunday, a White House spokesman declined to talk about the reports, other than to issue a statement at the president's ranch in Texas that the news proves the need for "the United States policy for North Korea to disarm in a complete, verifiable and irreversible fashion."
"I admit there appears to be more than a little irony here," said one senior administration official, when asked how what he thought Mr. Bush might have said in public if Saddam Hussein - instead of Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader - had been suspected of shipping raw material for nuclear weapons to a country like Libya. "But Iraq was a different problem, in a different place, and we had viable military options," he continued. In North Korea, he said, Mr. Bush has virtually none. Indeed, the problems and the threats are different, even though Mr. Hussein's Iraq was lumped with North Korea as part of the "axis of evil" that President Bush cited in 2002.
Even hawks within the administration - a group led by Vice President Dick Cheney, who said on a trip to Asia last month that "time is not necessarily on our side" - see no major risk that North Korea will lash out at its neighbors or the United States.
The country is broke; American military officials say it can barely afford the jet fuel to give its fighter pilots time to train. Iraq, too, was in desperate economic straits, but it at least had oil revenue, skimmed from the United Nations oil-for-food program, and active trade. North Korea is literally starving; millions have died of malnutrition.
But the same poverty that makes North Korea less of a military threat makes it a potent proliferation threat. For years, the North's main export has been missiles. It has sold them to Pakistan, Egypt, Iran, Syria, Libya and others, often sending its engineers abroad to fabricate custom designs. The reports of likely uranium sales to Libya have created the chilling possibility that the North has now found a new and profitable product - and that Libya may not have been the only customer. "Many predicted that sooner or later we would have to worry about the North Koreans not only as users but as exporters of nuclear technology," said Daniel Poneman, a former national security official and co-author of "Going Critical" (Brookings Institution Press, 2004), a new book about the first North Korean nuclear crisis in the mid-1990's. It was this fear that Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage expressed to Congress last year, when he warned that North Korea would not have to develop complete nuclear arms to become a serious threat; it could sell ingredients.
In short, if the North's sales to Libya are confirmed, the nightmare that Mr. Bush discussed so often last year - the sale of "the world's worst weapons to the world's most dangerous dictators" - may be happening at the other end of the axis. Iraq, it turns out, had little or nothing to sell.
Mr. Bush has addressed the issue chiefly through an agreement among a growing number of nations to intercept suspected shipments of illegal weapons, nuclear parts or chemical precursors. The United States, Germany and Italy stopped a shipment of nuclear equipment to Libya last year, apparently convincing Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to give up his nuclear program.
Beyond the interception strategy, there is a widespread sense in Washington that neither the Bush administration nor North Korea has much incentive to confront the nuclear issue this year. Mr. Bush, notes Don Oberdorfer, the author of "The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History" (Basic Books, 2002), is not "prepared to do anything about North Korea because he is overcommitted in Iraq and has a great loathing of dealing with the North Koreans directly."
The result, Mr. Oberdorfer argues, is that the United States is not "making the kind of preliminary compromises that would be necessary to get a negotiation going."
Administration officials disagree, saying that North Korea should not be rewarded for cheating on its past nuclear agreements and must begin dismantling weapons before it sees any economic benefits.
So far this has been a prescription for stalemate. But many in the administration agree that Mr. Kim has his own reasons for not seeking a deal this year: the North Korean leader is presumed to be rooting for Mr. Bush's defeat in November, in hopes he will face a more willing negotiating partner in John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee.
The risk is that by the time the two countries re-engage, North Korea could have six or eight more weapons, according to the most dire estimates in the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency, a view that more cautious intelligence analysts say is based more on conjecture about the North's engineering skills than any real intelligence. Such a number could let the North keep one or two for its own use, and have more to sell, in whole or parts, which is a very different position.
-------- russia
Some Russian Submarines Said Mothballed
May 24, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Submarines.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- A top admiral alleged the chief of Russia's navy has decided to mothball its most powerful nuclear submarines after refusing to modernize their missiles. The navy denied it Monday and accused the admiral of divulging state secrets.
Adm. Gennady Suchkov, the head of the Northern Fleet, said that Adm. Vladimir Kuroyedov had ordered the navy to decommission the Typhoon-class submarines, depriving Russia of an important component of its strategic nuclear arsenal.
``Nuclear weaponry is the only thing that brings respect to our nation,'' he said in an interview published Monday in the liberal newspaper, Novaya Gazeta.
With a displacement of about 27,500 tons, the Typhoon-class submarines are the world's largest. Each is equipped to carry 20 intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Suchkov said in separate comments to the Interfax-Military News Agency that the Northern Fleet has three Typhoon-class submarines -- the Arkhangelsk, the Severstal and the Dmitry Donskoi. He said his pleas for modernizing the missiles had fallen on deaf ears, and that only the Severstal carries 10 missiles, while the other two are unarmed.
Suchkov said the navy had refused to earmark about $1.1 million, a sum he said was necessary to upgrade the submarines' missiles.
Navy spokesman Capt. Igor Dygalo insisted Monday that there are no plans to scrap the Typhoon-class submarines.
``They will remain on duty fulfilling their tasks,'' Dygalo told The Associated Press. He also assailed Suchkov for unveiling what he said was confidential information about the submarines' weapons.
But Suchkov said he had written a letter to President Vladimir Putin to inform him of Kuroyedov's plan to mothball the vessels.
``I don't understand this decision, because these submarines can remain in service for a long time to come,'' Suchkov said.
The outspoken Suchkov has long been on a collision course with Kuroyedov, the navy chief. Putin suspended Suchkov as the Northern Fleet chief after the August sinking of a decommissioned nuclear submarine, and a military court convicted him last week of negligence that led to the death of nine of the submarine's 10 crew and gave him a four-year suspended prison sentence.
Many in the navy blamed Kuroyedov for the accident and alleged Suchkov had been a scapegoat.
``The most powerful submarines have been taken off-duty,'' Suchkov told the Interfax-Military News Agency. ``And we haven't received new submarines yet.''
Putin went to sea aboard one of the Typhoon-class submarines, the Arkhangelsk, in February during an exercise of Russia's strategic forces. In the course of the maneuvers, Northern Fleet submarines failed to perform missile launches on two consecutive days, tarnishing Putin's efforts to restore Russia's military might.
The navy has kept quiet on results of the investigation into the failed launches. Independent observers have blamed the failures on the money crunch that has badly hurt Russian weapons industries and affected the quality of their products.
Since the 1991 Soviet collapse, the Russian navy has been plagued by a lack of funds, which prompted it to mothball relatively new ships because it couldn't afford maintenance.
Suchkov accused Kuroyedov of favoring one Russian shipyard, the Northern Shipyards, which charges much more for repairs, compared with others. He said one of two destroyers sent to the Northern Shipyards for repairs had instead been disassembled for spare parts, which were later put on a destroyer commissioned by China.
-------- terrorism
Report Urges Tighter Nuclear Controls
White House Not Doing Enough to Secure Weapons Materials, Analysts Say
By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 24, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50362-2004May23.html
Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. wondered aloud one day in 2002 whether someone could build an atomic weapon from parts available on the open market. His audience, the leaders of the government's nuclear laboratories, said it could be done.
Then do it, the Delaware Democrat, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, instructed the scientists in a confidential session. A few months later, they returned to the soundproof Senate meeting room with a workable nuclear weapon, missing only the fissile material.
"It was bigger than a breadbox and smaller than a dump truck, but they were able to get it in," Biden said in a recent speech. The scientists "explained how -- literally off the shelf, without doing anything illegal -- they actually constructed this device."
The relative ease with which U.S. scientists built an explosive nuclear weapon illustrates the need to secure plutonium and highly enriched uranium scattered in armories and research sites around the world, a pair of Harvard University researchers argue in a new study that contends the Bush administration is not doing enough.
Less fissile material was secured in the two years after Sept. 11, 2001, than in the two years just before, according to the Harvard report, which was obtained by The Washington Post. Half the equipment dispatched to Russia nearly four years ago as a fast, interim solution remains in warehouses, uninstalled because of bureaucratic disputes.
Calling it a "dangerous myth" that terrorists could acquire a nuclear weapon only with the help of a rogue state, authors Matthew Bunn and Anthony Wier use the Biden example to allege that a failure of U.S. commitment and leadership could lead to a nuclear calamity. They also warn that, in an unstable country, a nuclear weapon could be bought or stolen.
"What's missing is a sense of urgency," said former senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), who heads the nonprofit Nuclear Threat Initiative, which funded the 111-page study. Nunn believes President Bush must focus on removing bureaucratic hurdles and work more pointedly with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"If one of the great cities of the world goes up in smoke, and you look back on these obstacles, it will make our retroactive rear-view mirror look at September 11th look like a waltz," Nunn said yesterday in an interview. "It would be so obvious that the obstacles should have been overcome by the presidents."
Bunn and Wier credit the Bush administration, particularly the leadership of the Department of Energy, for making strides. But they write that the U.S. commitment is no match for the danger. As they put it, U.S. authorities are not meeting Bush's own pledge to "do all we can."
In one case, plans were announced six years ago to destroy 68 metric tons of plutonium stripped from bombs and warheads in the United States and Russia, but the project remains stalled because of a dispute over who would pay if an accident or sabotage occurred in Russia. Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) has blamed "trivial negotiating issues."
In another example, the administration on average has requested less money to control nuclear materials and technology than was sought in the final Clinton administration budget, adjusted for inflation.
Although 16 percent more money has been spent than if the Clinton numbers had continued, "essentially all" of the increase was injected by congressional initiative, write Bunn and Wier, who reviewed federal spending on nonproliferation as an analyst at the Office of Management and Budget.
They report that the United States has taken more effective action than any other country, spending $9.2 billion from 1992 to 2004 to dismantle and secure weapons of mass destruction. Yet they note that the Defense Department is seeking $9.2 billion in the 2005 budget year alone to build a largely unproven defense system against a small number of missiles in a corner of the United States.
"It's very easy in the standard political debate for them to point to the successes and not put them in the context of how small they are, and not showing what they have not yet done," Bunn said in an interview. "The president has an opportunity to take action now that would drastically reduce the danger of nuclear terrorism in a few years."
The Bush administration is preparing to announce an expanded effort to secure nuclear stockpiles and supplies of bomb-grade material, officials have said. In a Feb. 11 speech, Bush promised a series of strong steps to curtail the production and spread of fissile material that could be used in a nuclear explosive or scattered in a radiological device called a "dirty bomb."
Basic security improvements have not been made at dozens of facilities in Russia, where more than 60 percent of the country's plutonium and weapons-grade uranium is kept, the General Accounting Office has warned. In a more recent report, the GAO said U.S. government facilities are also vulnerable to an increased risk of terrorism.
Despite improvements in Russia, Bunn and Wier report that visitors continue to see broken detectors, decaying fences, vulnerable seals and paper records never designed for careful monitoring. They also note that fissile material exists in "hundreds of buildings in more than 40 countries."
Evaluating an extreme case, they point to Pakistan, which has perfected nuclear weapons, as a potential target of terrorists with potent weapons and political connections.
Bunn and Wier, analysts at the Project on Managing the Atom, challenge the argument that the danger of terrorists assembling a bomb and acquiring fissile material is small, unless sponsored by a nuclear-capable government.
"We believe that this view is profoundly wrong," the authors write. They contend that the availability of nuclear designs and the work of U.S. weapons scientists in the Biden experiment prove their point.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Los Alamos to conduct `subcritical' experiment in Nevada
May 24, 2004
KRNV TV
http://www.krnv.com/Global/story.asp?S=1872276&nav=8faONAoi
Los Alamos National Laboratory plans its eighth subcritical nuclear experiment at the Nevada Test Site this spring.
Los Alamos researchers say it will use bomb-grade plutonium. But they say the configuration of the explosives will prevent a full-fledged nuclear explosion.
The detonation will take place inside a high-strength steel, underground vessel to contain the explosion.
The United States banned nuclear testing in 1993.
Los Alamos' director of operations at the Nevada Test Site, Raffi Papazian, says subcritical tests help maintain expertise and equipment in case the United States decides to restart nuclear tests.
----
Nuclear experiment planned at Nevada site
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Monday, May 24, 2004
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apus_story.asp?category=1110&slug=Nuclear%20Experiment
LAS VEGAS -- Government scientists plan an underground nuclear experiment, short of a nuclear blast, at the Nevada Test Site on Tuesday. The experiment will involve detonating high explosives around plutonium in a steel sphere while X-rays, radar and lasers chart the behavior of the radioactive element.
Scientists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico will run the test in a tunnel nearly 1,000 feet below ground at the site about 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The test dubbed "Armando" is the 21st subcritical experiment at the site. Federal officials say the experiments are essential to maintaining the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
The experiments technically do not violate the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty because no critical mass is formed and there is no full-scale nuclear explosion. Anti-nuclear groups criticize the experiments as contrary to the treaty's spirit.
The U.S. has observed a nuclear testing moratorium since 1992, but has not ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
The Bush administration and Congress last year reduced from three years to two years the time it would take to resume full-scale nuclear tests.
On the Net:
National Nuclear Security Administration: http://www.nnsa.doe.gov
Nevada Test Site: http://www.nv.doe.gov/nts
Los Alamos National Laboratory: http://www.lanl.gov
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- nevada
Nuclear Experiment Planned at Nevada Site
May 24, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Nuclear-Experiment.html
LAS VEGAS (AP) -- Government scientists plan an underground nuclear experiment, short of a nuclear blast, at the Nevada Test Site on Tuesday. The experiment will involve detonating high explosives around plutonium in a steel sphere while X-rays, radar and lasers chart the behavior of the radioactive element.
Scientists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico will run the test in a tunnel nearly 1,000 feet below ground at the site about 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The test dubbed ``Armando'' is the 21st subcritical experiment at the site. Federal officials say the experiments are essential to maintaining the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
The experiments technically do not violate the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty because no critical mass is formed and there is no full-scale nuclear explosion. Anti-nuclear groups criticize the experiments as contrary to the treaty's spirit.
The U.S. has observed a nuclear testing moratorium since 1992, but has not ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
The Bush administration and Congress last year reduced from three years to two years the time it would take to resume full-scale nuclear tests.
On the Net:
National Nuclear Security Administration: http://www.nnsa.doe.gov
Nevada Test Site: http://www.nv.doe.gov/nts
Los Alamos National Laboratory: http://www.lanl.gov
-------- tennessee
Road reopens after radiation spill; investigation continues
May 24, 2004
(AP)
http://www.wkrn.com/global/story.asp?s=1872580&ClientType=Printable
OAK RIDGE, Tenn. - A portion of state Highway 95 where radioactive waste dripped onto the pavement was repaired and reopened near the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Reservation, a spokesman said Monday.
However, short-haul deliveries of contaminated material on the reservation were suspended pending a review of the Friday mishap, DOE-Oak Ridge spokesman Steven Wyatt said. A plastic-covered mixing tank containing strontium 90, a byproduct of the fission of uranium or plutonium, was found to have leaked while being moved in a dump truck around 11:30 a.m. Friday.
The watery, grout mixture was being taken from a shuttered waste cleanup project near the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to a new waste treatment facility near the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant.
Authorities determined the truck left the secure reservation for about three-tenths of a mile on state Highway 95 near the intersection with Bethel Valley Road. Contaminated asphalt was removed and taken to the waste management facility and the road reopened on Sunday.
A portion of Bear Creek Road within the Oak Ridge Reservation leading to Y-12 also was contaminated. One lane was reopened Monday with work continuing on the other lane.
No contamination was found on workers or more than 70 personal vehicles that were checked after passing along Highway 95, Wyatt said.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Projects Put Strain On Afghan Province
Disarmament and Poppy Eradication Leave Residents Feeling Persecuted
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, May 24, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A50495-2004May23?language=printer
MAIDAN SHAHR, Afghanistan -- On a windblown field, 300 leathery men listened Saturday to speeches praising their past bravery in battle and their current contribution to peace. Behind them, standing in soldierly rows, were rocket launchers, artillery and machine guns the former fighters were reluctantly surrendering to international peacekeepers.
Ten miles away, two dozen farmers watched sullenly from the edge of a neatly planted plot as a squad of government eradicators, wielding hoes and scythes, chopped down their carefully tended opium poppy shoots. On all sides, Afghan police and security guards hired by the U.S. Embassy stood watch against attack.
"The government has taken away our guns, and now it is destroying our livelihoods," protested Nasir Ahmad, 45, a sunburned farmer in the village of Kote Ashro. "We have agreed to turn in our weapons in the name of peace, but we don't have enough water to grow any other crops but poppy. Why are they bringing this cruelty on us now?"
By most standards, Wardak province should be a model for the rest of Afghanistan. It is the only place in the country where militia disarmament, poppy eradication and voter registration -- three efforts backed by the United Nations and Western governments -- are taking place simultaneously.
But some residents say they feel this ruggedly beautiful, impoverished province is less a showcase than a victim. They complain that it has been singled out for unpopular projects demanded by international powers because it is close to Kabul, economically vulnerable and without a dominant leader to resist the pressure.
Some local officials and U.N. officers said the simultaneous launching of the anti-poppy and disarmament programs could sharpen anti-government sentiment. It also could undermine provincial support for national elections in September, they said, which to succeed will require accelerated voter registration in rural areas by July.
"We are getting increasingly concerned about Wardak, because everything is taking place there at once, and it's putting a lot of pressure on people," said one U.N. officer in the capital. "People see the international process as one thing, whether it's disarmament, poppy eradication or voter registration. If they get upset enough to boycott the elections, it could hurt everything."
Wardak, just southwest of Kabul, might seem an ideal place to make a multi-pronged push for progress. It has enormous agricultural potential and strategically straddles the newly reconstructed north-south highway. It is dominated by ethnic Pashtuns, who make up the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan but have felt neglected by the current government.
The province has been largely free of Islamic terrorism, and its small armed factions have been far more willing to disarm than more powerful militia bosses elsewhere. Mohammed Musa Hotak, a local commander and Islamic cleric, volunteered to turn in his weapons and demobilize 100 fighters last month, earning high-level official praise.
Voter registration, a danger-fraught undertaking in many remote areas, has proceeded relative smoothly in Wardak since the government began opening rural registration sites May 1. Turnout among women has been low because of cultural taboos against their leaving home, but mobile voter registration teams are being trained so they can sign up women in their own villages.
Poppy is a relatively new crop in Wardak, and thus the region was deemed a relatively painless spot to initiate the government's new program to forcibly eradicate opium poppies. The sap collected from Afghan poppies is estimated to produce 75 percent of the world's heroin, and cultivation has skyrocketed since the collapse of Islamic Taliban rule in late 2001.
"We are happy the government is putting its programs into action in our province," said Mohammed Basir, the deputy governor. "We were the closest bunker to Kabul during jihad, so we are proud to be the first in disarming and contributing to national reconstruction." Jihad, or holy war, is the term Afghans use for the armed resistance to Soviet occupation in the 1980s.
Nevertheless, the simultaneous start of the disarmament and anti-poppy programs has aroused resentment in a region where poor farmers and ex-militia fighters are often one and the same, and where ethnic Pashtuns are suspicious of being abused by ethnic Tajik factions in the transitional government set up by the United Nations in 2001.
Many residents said they favored disbanding all militias and collecting their weapons and that they understood that poppy is used to create addictive drugs and is outlawed in Islam. But they questioned why Wardak, whose farmers grow far less poppy than those in many other provinces, was the first to be targeted after two years of official indulgence.
Such anger could undermine regional enthusiasm for the September elections. Voter registration, which has reached only 2.3 million of about 9.5 million eligible voters, must accelerate fast in rural provinces to guarantee a successful election, the highest national priority for Afghan, U.S. and U.N. officials.
In the village of Charaka, where no poppy has yet been destroyed, farmers took precious hours from their fields last week to trudge to a schoolhouse registration site. Sher Shah, 26, said his potatoes and apples needed watering, but that the first election in Afghanistan's history needed his vote.
"The time for fighting and chaos is over. We hope this election will bring us a good government, bring us peace and jobs," he said. "We want to choose our leaders. Everyone in my village wants this. Everyone in Afghanistan wants this."
But the mood was different Saturday in Zaibudah, a village where a guarded eradication team swept through the fields, hacking at poppy shoots that quickly turned from emerald to sickly yellow.
"We want the era of cruelty and guns to end, but we are very disappointed in the government, because it is condemning us to hunger," said Hajji Jalil, 64, a village elder. "How can they expect people to vote when they are hungry?"
The government originally announced it would spare 25 percent of local poppy crops, but the eradication teams have been instructed to destroy every plant they find. Because of delays in training, the program did not begin until after poppies had been harvested in other provinces, making Wardak appear to be a scapegoat.
During the past two years, farmers in traditional poppy areas such as Nangahar and Helmand provinces began replanting with a vengeance. Afghan officials could do little to stop them, and Western military officials, preoccupied with their anti-terrorist mission and in some cases reliant on Afghan militia leaders who grew poppy, looked the other way.
Now, with poppy harvests said to account for nearly half the gross domestic product and drug traffic burgeoning as well, Afghan and international authorities have awakened to the overlapping scourges of violence and drugs, and officials warn that Afghanistan could become a narco-terror state. But it is the small farmers of Wardak, newcomers to the poppy boom, who are the first to be punished.
"Our orders are to destroy whatever we see," said Gen. Sher Agha, an Interior Ministry official who is overseeing the Wardak eradication project and living in a guarded tent compound with his force of 300 poppy choppers. "There is no compensation."
The disarming of Wardak's militias has been handled with more diplomacy and compassion. At the ceremony Saturday outside the 42nd army division barracks in Maidan Shahr, the provincial capital, officials praised the militiamen for their bravery in defending the country and promised to provide them with job training and opportunities to join the newly formed national army and police.
In addition, provincial officials said U.S. diplomats had offered to finance the repair of an important hydroelectric dam in southern Wardak, damaged in fighting years ago, and to bring other development projects to the impoverished province.
Still, the weather-beaten fighters seemed skeptical and a bit sad as they caressed their heavy weapons before reluctantly lugging them into a wire cage, where U.N. and Afghan army officials received them for storage.
"This was my father's rocket launcher in the jihad against the Russians, and now it is mine. I know we have peace and freedom, so I will give it up," said Syed Rahman, 24, who plans to become a truck driver. "The government has promised us many things, but if they don't follow through, we can always take our guns back and begin the fight again."
In the coming weeks, the pace of both poppy destruction and voter registration in Wardak is due to pick up, while the effects of militia disarmament will begin to sink in. Perhaps the failure or success of the first two projects will mirror the fate of Mia Jan, 55, a militiaman who leaned Saturday on an enormous black machine gun. Once, he used it to mow down Russian soldiers; now he is surrendering it to history.
"We have our freedom, so I won't miss this gun," he said, patting the steel barrel. "They said the army will protect us now. They said the government will find us jobs, but we'll see. I have some land, but there's no water, and now they're cutting down all the poppy. What will happen to men like me, I really don't know."
--------
Afghan Deaths Linked to Unit at Iraq Prison
May 24, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL and DAVID ROHDE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/24/politics/24ABUS.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, May 23 - A military intelligence unit that oversaw interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was also in charge of questioning at a detention center in Afghanistan where two prisoners died in December 2002 in incidents that are being investigated as homicides.
For both of the Afghan prisoners, who died in a center known as the Bagram Collection Point, the cause of death listed on certificates signed by American pathologists included blunt force injuries to their legs. Interrogations at the center were supervised by Company A, 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, which moved on early in 2003 to Iraq, where some of its members were assigned to the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib. Its service in Afghanistan was known, but its work at Bagram at the time of the deaths has now emerged in interviews with former prisoners, military officials and from documents.
Two men arrested with one of the prisoners who died in the Bagram Detention Center that month said in southeastern Afghanistan on Sunday that they were tortured and sexually humiliated by their American jailers; they said they were held in isolation cells, black hoods were placed over their heads, and their hands at times were chained to the ceiling. "The 10 days that we had was a very bad time," said Zakim Shah, a 20-year-old farmer and a father of two who said he felt he would not survive at times. "We are very lucky."
The account provided by the two men was consistent with those of other former Afghan prisoners, including those interviewed by The New York Times and cited in reports by human rights officials.
In interviews, the two men and other former prisoners who were held at the center in Afghanistan at that time have described an environment similar in some ways to that of Abu Ghraib, whose outlines have been depicted in photographs and testimony. At both places, prisoners were hooded, stripped naked and mocked sexually by female captors, according to a variety of accounts.
In Iraq, at least three members of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion who had been assigned to the joint interrogation center at Abu Ghraib have been quietly disciplined for conduct involving the abuse of a female Iraqi prisoner there, an Army spokesman said.
At least one officer, Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, served in supervisory positions at the interrogation units both at the Bagram Collection Point from July 2002 to December 2003 and then again at the joint center at Abu Ghraib, according to Army officials. That center was established in the fall of 2003. In Congressional testimony last week, a senior Army lawyer, Col. Marc Warren, praised Captain Wood as an officer who took initiative in Iraq at a time when American commanders had yet to spell out rules for interrogation. But he also singled out Captain Wood and her unit as having brought to Iraq interrogation procedures developed during their service in Afghanistan. No one is known to have accused Captain Wood of any wrongdoing in connection with the abuses at Abu Ghraib or the deaths of prisoners there or in Afghanistan.
A spokesman for the 18th Airborne Corps, in Fort Bragg, N.C., identified Captain Wood as having been sent to Afghanistan in July 2002 as Company A's interrogation platoon leader, and having later assumed the duties of "operations officer in charge of the Bagram Collection Point." In a written statement sent Friday, that spokesman, Lt. Col. Billy Buckner, said Captain Wood had been assigned to the 519th Battalion at Abu Ghraib. But other Army officers have described her as having served as the officer in charge of the interrogation center there, under Lt. Col. Steve Jordan, a reservist who served as its director.
In an interview on Sunday, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who oversaw Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq but has since been admonished and suspended from command, described Captain Wood as an impressive and well-spoken expert on interrogations who oversaw the center. Colonel Buckner said that Captain Wood's commanding officer in Iraq, Lt. Col. Robert Whalen, was not available for comment. To date, seven enlisted personnel from a military police unit have been the only soldiers charged with crimes in connection with the abuses at Abu Ghraib. But an Army report completed in March identified Colonel Jordan as among four people who may have been among those "directly or indirectly" responsible for the misconduct.
Within days after the deaths of the two prisoners in Afghanistan in December 2002, both were ruled homicides by American military doctors in Afghanistan. But in a public statement at the time, the military described at least one death as the result of natural causes.
The deaths of two prisoners at the Bagram Collection Point in Afghanistan in December 2002 are believed to be among nine being investigated by the Army as possible homicides linked to interrogation practices in Iraq and Afghanistan. At least two other deaths being investigated occurred in Abu Ghraib, senior military officers have said, but it is not clear whether those prisoners were under the authority of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center.
The two former Afghan prisoners who were interviewed in Afghanistan on Sunday said they believed that their acquaintance, a young man named Dilawar whose death is considered a possible homicide, received the same harsh treatment that they did. Both prisoners were later sent to the American-run detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, but were released with letters from the Army saying they did nothing wrong.
The two men said that at Bagram they were forced to strip naked in the presence of female soldiers when receiving prison clothes, undergoing medical exams and taking showers. They said female soldiers were never present when they were naked in Guantánamo Bay.
Both men said appearing naked in front of women was deeply humiliating for Afghan men, who live in a conservative Islamic culture. "The other things don't matter," Parkhudin said, referring to the kicking and sleep deprivation. "But we are angry about this."
Since 2002, about 350 prisoners have been held at any given time at American-run detention centers in Afghanistan. The Bagram Collection Point, at Bagram Air Base, just north of Kabul, is the main American detention center, and is visited by officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross. No outside inspectors visit roughly 20 smaller American bases around Afghanistan where prisoners are also held.
The two Afghan prisoners who died in American custody in December 2002 are identified on death certificates only as Dilawar and "Ullah, Habib." Friends and family members have identified Dilawar as a 22-year-old farmer and part-time taxi driver. The second prisoner who died has been identified by family members as Mullah Habibullah, about 30 years old and a brother of a former Taliban commander.
The Dec. 13 death certificate for Dilawar says he died as a result of "blunt force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease." The document was signed by Lt. Col. Elizabeth A. Rouse of the Air Force, a military pathologist, and listed as its finding that the "mode of death" was "homicide," rather than "natural," "accident" and "suicide."
At the time, American military officials said Dilawar had died of a heart attack and had coronary artery disease. The fact that the military characterized his death a "homicide" was not publicly known until his family showed a reporter from The New York Times his death certificate in late February 2003. Family members, who do not speak English, were unable to understand the certificate.
According to military documents, Dilawar was found dead in his isolation cell on Dec. 10, his fifth day of captivity. The military later disclosed that the death in Bagram of Mullah Habibullah, which occurred on Dec. 3, 2002, had also been deemed a homicide by an Army pathologist. He too was found collapsed in a cell on the second floor of the center.
The two men interviewed on Sunday in Turiuba, a village in Khost Province in southeastern Afghanistan, said they had been held in isolation cells on the second floor of the Bagram center for the first 10 days.
Mr. Shah, the 20-year-old farmer, and Parkhudin, a 26-year-old farmer and former soldier, said they were later transferred from Bagram to the American detention center in Guantánamo Bay. Their first 10 days in Bagram were by far the most harrowing of their 15 months in American custody, they said.
Guards shouted at them or kicked them whenever they tried to sleep, the two men said. The only time they were allowed to move freely was during trips to eat or go to the bathroom, they said. If they tried to speak to a prisoner in an adjoining cell, guards beat them, they said.
"They were punching me and kicking me when I talked to the other prisoners," said Parkhudin, who like many Afghans has only one name. Mr. Shah said soldiers never struck him when he tried to sit, but they constantly shouted at him to keep him awake. "We were standing for the whole 10 days," said the young farmer, who said he grew so exhausted at one point that he vomited. "When we were trying to sit they would tell us `Hands up!' `Stand up!' " Parkhudin said his hands were chained to the ceiling for 8 of the 10 days. Mr. Shah said his hands were chained for only 4 hours in total over the 10 days. Parkhudin said he believed American interrogators treated him worse because they thought he was a Taliban commander.
A third detainee who was in the Bagram center at the time, Abdul Jabar, a 35-year-old taxi driver from the same area as Dilawar, said he saw him being led downstairs to the bathroom hooded. In a March 2003 interview with The New York Times, he said the young man "was struggling a lot."
He added, "He was scared because he could not get enough oxygen."
Sixteen months later, military investigations into both deaths have not been completed. Military officials have said that it has proved difficult to track the personnel who were on duty in the Bagram Detention Center at the time.
"It's complicated because forces have rotated outside of Afghanistan," Lt. Col. Tucker Mansager, a United States military spokesman in Afghanistan, said Saturday. "Our United States Army Criminal Investigative Division is having to follow those people to the various places they've gone in order to interview them and complete an actual criminal investigation into those allegations."
Douglas Jehl reported from Washington for this article, and David Rohde from Khost, Afghanistan.
--------
'Charlie's Angels' latest US weapon in Afghanistan
Afghanistan (AFP)
May 24, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040524023327.5w0sxs4s.html
"'Choop sha', no talking," American servicewoman Angela Bousquet firmly tells the Afghan women and children sitting at her feet.
Separated from the men of their village in insurgency-hit Uruzgan provinces, the group is being dealt with by the US military's latest improvement in its search for Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan -- 12 females in the infantry of the marines.
Young, pretty and toting shotguns, M-16s and pistols on their standard issue military uniforms, the six women assigned to 'C' Company of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit are part of a more culturally sensitive approach to detaining and questioning Afghan women.
As the US military is under fire in Afghanistan and Iraq for the alleged appalling treatment of some detainees, the sight of women searching and guarding Afghan women represents an acknowledgement from the US that what might be culturally acceptable in America does not work in conservative Afghanistan.
Searches of Afghan women by male coalition troops loom prominently among the 44 complaints against the US-led coalition force received by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission received since its formation in late 2001.
"Afghans have their own culture and they don't allow men to search females but during the searches this happens in some cases... and that is something against Afghan culture," commissioner Farid Hamidi said.
Although a man is still present at the interviews because all the interpreters with the unit are men, the 12 women are believed to be the first females to be deployed in combat patrol in the marines infantry in Afghanistan.
The six assigned to 'C' or Charlie company have been handed the call name 'Charlie's Angels' -- not surprising given the commanding officer of the marines in the field, Pakistan-born Lieutenant Colonel Asad Khan, goes by the tag 'Genghis.'
"They called me and said we've got a name for you and I thought 'I hope it's not Barbie,'" recounted Lori Butierries, 21, a hospital medic pulled from the US Navy to join the group.
In the remote villages, devoid of electricity and the most basic elements of modern life, the female marines are something of an oddity where many women rarely leave their homes or take part in public life.
"Generally, they are cooperative," said Second Lieutenant Melanie Scott of the Afghan women.
"But they don't know that we're women until we take off our Kevlars (helmets). They've just never seen females in uniforms, they've never seen women with weapons."
"Two of us smoke and that really gets them," adds specialist Bousquet, 28, from Minnesota.
Perhaps the worst reaction has come from the male marines --one woman found that her ammunition had been hidden around the camp as part of a prank.
"We got a lot of advice before we came out," Bousquet admits. "We were told 'The men have a mission. Stay out of the way'."
"They were shy," says Butierries of the men. "They didn't know how to react. They thought 'What are we going to do with a bunch of females?'
"But they respect you as long as you can hold your own."
The women have won grudging respect as it has become evident they are doing a tough job.
In their first two weeks in the field the women have been assaulted several times and in one case urinated on by a frightened Afghan lady, meanwhile they have not been given the extensive training handed to the men.
Yet after two weeks in the field unable to shower, sleeping in the open and tampon supplies exhausted, 'Charlie's Angels' remain cheerful and confident that they are doing important work.
Settling in for another cold and uncomfortable night in the mountains, they nod as Bousquet says: "Goodnight angels."
-------- africa
Raid in Sudan Claims 56, Villagers Say
May 24, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/24/international/africa/24suda.html
YALA, Sudan, May 23 - Arab militiamen killed at least 56 people in a raid in western Sudan, villagers said Sunday, just days after the government declared the region stable.
On Saturday, the militiamen, known as Janjaweed, raided Abga Rajil, a village about 30 miles south of Nyala, the capital of South Darfur State, witnesses said.
Abdel-Rahman Rizk, 29, speaking from a hospital bed in Nyala, where he was recovering from a bullet wound to the thigh, said the militiamen arrived on horses, camels and a car and surrounded the village.
"They were firing, and people were scattering, and they set fire to the houses and then they started picking off people as they ran out of their houses," he said.
Ibrahim Adam, also from the village, said: "The tally of those we buried was 56. Forty of them we buried in one grave."
Others from the area gave the same figure, although an official from the Sudan Liberation Army, one of the two main rebel groups in Darfur, said he had understood that 46 had been killed. Independent verification is hard to obtain in the remote Darfur region.
Villagers and rights groups accuse the government of arming the Janjaweed to loot and burn African villages and fight a proxy war against rebels who started a revolt last year to demand a fairer share of power and resources.
The government denies the accusations, calling the militiamen outlaws.
The United Nations says fighting in the impoverished and arid Darfur region has displaced about a million people and created one of the world's worst human calamities.
The rebels signed a cease-fire with the government in early April, but have since accused it of several violations.
The government said last week that Darfur was stable and that security would be maintained by the police. But many of those displaced from Darfur fear new attacks and are reluctant to return to their homes and fields, where they should now be planting crops ahead of approaching rains.
Aid workers fear the spread of disease. "Our priority is health," said Muhammad Abdullah, administrative manager for the Kas region. "These people are out in the open, and the rains will affect the health of the displaced people who are already malnourished."
-------- arms
Czech police stop illegal arms shipment to Iraq
PRAGUE (AFP)
May 24, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040524103632.bv0j6lfg.html
Czech police stopped in April illegal arms and ammunition shipments to Iraq and several Asian and African countries, police spokesman Blanka Kosinova said Monday.
Two Czechs were arrested by a special police unit for violating laws on trade in weapons, Kosinova said.
"They were sending weapons on order to Africa, the Middle East, Iraq, Iran and Israel and now face up to 10 years in prison," she said.
She said police had seized 157 long-range weapons, 20 pistols, nine machine-guns and six revolvers in raids.
She refused to comment on a report in the Prague newspaper Dnes on Monday that the alleged ringleader in the arms trade, a 43-year-old Czech, had been manufacturing ammunition at his firm in Pavlice in the southeast of the Czech Republic and was preparing to export ammunition to Iraq, using an American firm.
The ammunition was apparently destined for Iraq government units but Czech intelligence was afraid it could fall into the hands of anti-government forces, Dnes said.
-------- biological weapons
UK Mulled Using Birds for Bio-War After WW2 - Files
Reuters
May 24, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/25210/story.htm
LONDON - Britain considered training pigeons to deliver biological weapons after World War II but decided the birds had outlived their usefulness in battle, government files released last week show.
Homing pigeons carried vital messages in wartime, and the Pigeon Policy Committee of the day discussed training them to undertake ever more daring tasks.
"We can now train pigeons to 'home' to any object on the ground when air-released in the vicinity... Bacteria might be delivered accurately to a target by this means," the Head of the Air Ministry Pigeon Section Lea Rayner said in a 1945 report.
"With the latest developments of explosives and bacterial science I suggest that this possibility should be closely investigated and watched."
"A thousand pigeons, each with a two ounce explosive capsule, landed at intervals on a specific target might be a seriously inconvenient surprise."
But Rayner's enthusiasm was not shared by other committee members and in 1948 the armed services said they had no further interest in pigeons.
The secret services however thought anti-British forces would continue to communicate with each other via pigeons and asked a civilian pigeon fancier to keep 100 birds for MI5 to use to prepare countermeasures, but they abandoned that scheme in 1950.
Britain used around 250,000 pigeons to carry messages in World War II and 32 of the birds received the Dickin Medal, the highest award of valor for animals.
-------- britain
Brown may increase war fund to £6bn
independent.co.uk
By Ben Russell Political Correspondent
24 May 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=524307
Gordon Brown could be forced to ask Parliament for extra money to fund Britain's continuing presence in Iraq early next year, as new estimates suggest the cost of military action is running at about £4m a day.
Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokes-man, warned that the Chancellor's £3.8bn fund to pay for operations in Iraq could be exhausted by January or February, if the scale of British involvement is maintained.
He said the overall cost of the British operation could approach £6bn if troops remained in Iraq through 2006, and added that there was the danger of widespread economic damage caused by the huge costs of the American-led operation.
Ministers are still debating whether to send up to 3,000 extra troops to Iraq to help quell continuing unrest amid warnings that Labour voters will use the local and European elections on 10 June to protest against the war.
Last week Geoff Hoon, the Secretary of State for Defence, confirmed that Liberal Democrat estimates that the war was costing £125m a month were "roughly consistent" with the confirmed costs since the invasion last year. Mr Cable said the long-term effect of the war could be damaging to the global economy, with instability in the Gulf contributing to increasing oil prices, and American borrowing to fund military action threatening to increase long-term interest rates.
He said: "The first Gulf war cost £2.5bn but Britain got 80 per cent of that back because it was backed by the United Nations. This war will cost Britain many times that because it has been done unilaterally.
"All this spending has an opportunity cost. It could have been spent on something else. Compared with the size of the national economy it is not all that significant, but as we enter the public-spending round there are commitments which we will not be able to make."
He warned that the huge US military spending in Iraq was helping to fuel the American budget deficit. "When you stack all of this spending up in the context of the widening fiscal deficit, there are wide implications for the rest of the world, building up long-term interest rates which everybody ultimately has to pay."
He also warned that oil dealers were paying a $10-a-barrel risk premium because of the increasing attacks by Iraqi insurgents on many of the country's oil installations.
-------- business
RAE Systems Wins $1 Million Radiation Sensor Contract From U.S. Military
May 24, 2004
BUSINESS WIRE
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20040524005375&newsLang=en
RAE Systems Inc. (AMEX:RAE), a leading global developer and manufacturer of rapidly-deployable, multi-sensor chemical and radiation detection monitors and networks for homeland security and industrial applications, today announced that a branch of the U.S. Military has signed a contract worth approximately $1 million for radiation sensors to be used for base security at domestic and international locations.
The NeutronRAE Pager is a rapid detector of gamma-ray and neutron sources. Its cesium iodide (CsI) and lithium iodide (LiI) scintillators provide low level detection in a compact unit that is hundreds of times more sensitive than similar sized Geiger-Muller detectors. Even low energy neutrons in the thermal range can be counted. The NeutronRAE alerts first responders to the presence of a radiation threat well before they might be exposed to health threatening levels, and this same high sensitivity allows security personnel to instantly detect smuggled nuclear material.
The NeutronRAE Pager is particularly useful for detecting neutrons from weapons grade plutonium (239Pu), which are much more difficult to shield than gamma-rays. Outfitting a large number of security personnel with NeutronRAEs can help establish a "moving curtain" of radiation protection that can be more effective than large, fixed radiation detectors.
"The illicit traffic and use of radioactive material is clearly a growing concern for both government, military and civilian agencies," said Robert I. Chen, CEO of RAE Systems. "Unlike dosimeters, our radiation products provide highly sensitive detection and instant data that a threat exists. Since military bases are a particularly high-profile target, this better, faster data enables better, faster decisions that protect lives and mitigate damage."
About RAE Systems
RAE Systems is a leading global developer and manufacturer of rapidly-deployable, multi-sensor chemical detection monitors and networks for homeland security and industrial applications. In addition, RAE Systems offers a full line of portable single-sensor chemical and radiation detection products. RAE Systems' products enable the military and first responders such as firefighters, law enforcement and other emergency management personnel to detect and provide early warning of weapons of mass destruction and other hazardous materials. Industrial applications include the detection of toxic industrial chemicals, volatile organic compounds and petrochemicals. RAE Systems' products are used by many U.S. government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of State, as well as all branches of the U.S. military, and by numerous city and state agencies. Our end users also include many of the world's leading corporations in the airline, automotive, computer and oil industries. Our products are used in civilian and government atmospheric monitoring programs in over 50 countries. For more information about RAE Systems, please visit www.RAESystems.com.
Safe Harbor Statement
This press release contains "forward-looking" statements, as that term is used in Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Forward-looking statements are denoted by such words as "continue to be strong." These types of statements address matters that are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include, but are not limited to, the general economic and industry factors and receptiveness of the market to RAE and its products. In addition, our forward-looking statements should be considered in the context of other risk factors discussed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to our annual report on Form 10-K and 10-Q filings, available online at http://www.sec.gov. All forward-looking statements are based on information available to the company on the date hereof, and the company assumes no obligation to update such statements.
----
The Ultimate Insider
Richard N. Perle's Many Business Ventures Followed His Years as a Defense Official
By David S. Hilzenrath
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 24, 2004; Page E01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A50388-2004May23?language=printer
For longtime Pentagon adviser and boardroom insider Richard N. Perle, the bonus plan at newspaper publisher Hollinger International Inc. was a can't-lose proposition.
While Perle was overseeing Hollinger as a member of the board for the past several years, he also was co-chairman of a subsidiary that invested in dot-coms. He participated in a bonus plan that paid executives a share of the profits from successful Internet investments without taking into account losses on failures, the company said in a complaint against its former chief executive, Conrad M. Black, and others filed in federal court in Chicago this month.
Perle received $3.1 million in such bonuses from May 2000 to January 2001, the complaint said.
During that time, as a member of Hollinger's executive committee, Perle signed forms giving officers of the company license to negotiate deals that Hollinger now alleges improperly enriched the other two members of the executive committee, Black and F. David Radler, who was chief operating officer.
Hollinger said in court papers that one such executive committee authorization in September 2000 was "bogus" partly because Perle received the bonuses, "knew nothing about" the transaction and answered to Black and Radler, thus lacking independence.
Black and Radler have vigorously denied the company's charges. Perle was not named as a defendant in the recent Hollinger complaint. He was named as a defendant in an earlier suit filed in Delaware by a Hollinger institutional investor, which accused him of "standing idle" and failing to provide "any meaningful oversight" while Black and other executives looted the company. Proceedings in the Delaware suit have been held up, awaiting the results of an investigation by a Hollinger committee.
In an interview Saturday, Perle said the investor's lawsuit "is in many respects just out and out wrong and in other respects very misleading," and any suggestion "that actions or decisions taken by me involved a quid pro quo for compensation I received . . . is absolutely false."
"Did I take actions, inappropriate actions, because of actual or promised or anticipated rewards or compensation? The answer is flatly no," he said.
The Hollinger story opens a window on a less visible side of Perle's career since he left the Reagan administration, in which he was assistant secretary of defense. He has been a director on more than a dozen corporate boards, and has served with some of the same people on multiple boards.
On one level, Perle's business career is like those of many former Washington officials who used the expertise and contacts gained in government to carve niches in the corporate world. But more than most, Perle also has maintained an active public policy role. Perle, 62, is best known in recent years for his advocacy of war with Iraq and tough measures to fight terrorism. Over the weekend, Perle was trying to rally support for Ahmed Chalabi, the embattled head of the Iraqi National Congress, who for years Perle has backed.
Perle also is an author and lecturer, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and was a foreign policy adviser to George W. Bush's 2000 presidential campaign.
"There is no 'main gig,' " Perle said of his many roles. "It's all of these and it changes from one day to the next," he said.
"There are days when I am on the way to the airport and I say to myself, 'How am I managing to do this?' Sure there are days when I'm spread too thin and there are times when I've thought this isn't fair to my family."
Unlike many who pass through Washington's revolving door, Perle for 17 years managed to keep one foot in the government as a member of the Defense Policy Board, which offers advice on key issues to the secretary of defense.
That role created controversy last year after the New York Times and the New Yorker magazine reported on Perle's activities as a consultant to Loral Space and Communications Ltd. and Global Crossing Ltd., which had matters pending with the government, and as a partner in a venture capital firm pursuing investments in homeland security technology.
An investigation by the Pentagon's inspector general concluded last fall that Perle had not violated ethics rules, in part because certain restrictions did not apply to him as chairman of the Defense Policy Board and in part because he "did not mention or invoke" his unpaid position when he contacted the State Department on behalf of a company.
He gave up the chairmanship in March 2003, saying he did not want the controversy surrounding him to become a distraction for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. In February, he resigned from the board itself, saying that he did not want his strong views on key issue such as terrorism to become a factor in this year's presidential campaign.
"I think I've made a successful transition from public policy to the private sector, and the evidence of that is the readiness of a number of companies to invite me to join their board or assist them in other ways, and in many cases companies that have nothing to do with the government," Perle said. "I'm interested in interesting businesses, not in mundane ones, and of course in my business activity I'm driven by the necessity to provide for my family."
Tour at Defense
"It's well known that you can peddle your influence after you leave the government for a certain number of years," William Happer, a Princeton University physicist and former Energy Department official, who serves with Perle on the strategic advisory council of USEC Inc., a uranium-enrichment company, said in an interview. "It's an old American tradition, and Richard Perle I think is doing it in an honest way. He's one of hundreds and hundreds who do it."
Perle said he did not like Happer's characterization. "I don't believe that anybody has hired me for connections," he said. "Nothing is about connections," he said. "I do not ask the people I know to do things for me."
Later in the interview, however, he confirmed that he had contacted ambassadors from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in the 1990s on behalf of a company for which he was both a director and a sales consultant, seeking to sell security systems in the Middle East. "Was that a result of my influence? Yeah, it was. It was a result of the fact that they, the people I went to, knew me so they took my phone call," Perle said.
Perle, who started his career in Washington as an aide to Sen. Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson (D-Wash.), began applying his government experience to business soon after he left full-time employment at the Pentagon in 1987.
As assistant secretary of Defense for international security policy, Perle advocated increased U.S. assistance to Turkey. He chaired a U.S.-Turkey high-level defense group.
FMC Corp., a U.S. defense contractor, was working on a deal to sell armored personnel carriers to the Turkish government and enlisted Perle's help, former executives said. Perle's "main asset to us was his relationship with the Turkish government," Robert H. Malott, former chairman and chief executive of FMC, said in an interview. He said a U.S. ambassador to Turkey told him that the Turks regarded Perle "as a demigod."
A $1.1 billion deal, finalized in 1989, called for FMC and a Turkish partner to sell Turkey about 1,700 armored vehicles. Perle became a member of the board of directors of FNSS Defense Systems Inc. , the joint venture FMC set up to manufacture the vehicles in Turkey.
Perle said FMC's contract to sell Turkey the armored vehicles "was essentially done" when he got involved. He said he thought there were "occasions" when he talked about the venture with Turkish Prime Minister Turgut Ozal, whom he described as a "good friend."
Around the same time, Perle urged Turkish officials to establish a lobbying shop to advance the country's interests in Washington, he told the Wall Street Journal in a letter in 1989. Though he did not personally register as a lobbyist for Turkey, he became a paid consultant to the lobbying firm, International Advisers Inc., which was led by Douglas J. Feith, who worked under Perle in the Reagan administration and is now an undersecretary of defense. Perle received $255,000 from the firm from early 1989 through early 1994, according to lobbying records.
It was during that early period in the private world that Perle began a longtime relationship with Morgan Crucible Co. PLC, an English maker of industrial ceramics. He met company officials after speaking at a London conference hosted by an investment bank , he recalled, and they asked him to join the board. He served for 15 years before leaving last June, a period in which the company found itself in legal trouble.
In 2002, Morganite Inc., a U.S. subsidiary of the company, admitted to price fixing and agreed to pay a $10 million criminal fine. Morgan Crucible pleaded guilty to witness tampering and paid $1 million. Its former chief executive, Ian Norris, was indicted last year for allegedly conspiring to fix prices for more than a decade and then obstructing the criminal investigation. The government charged that he prepared a false script for employees to follow in the investigation and instructed employees to hide or destroy records.
Perle said the Morgan Crucible board cooperated with the authorities, appointed a special committee, retained legal counsel to advise it on how to proceed, "and I believe conducted itself in an exemplary fashion." Regarding the alleged crimes at the company, he said, "I don't believe they reflect on me or any of the other non-executive directors at all, and I don't know of any suggestion to the contrary by anyone."
He joined another board in 1990, that of Vikonics Inc., a New Jersey company that marketed security systems to the armed forces. He also had a consulting arrangement that entitled him to receive a 7 percent commission on contracts that he helped the company obtain, according to a regulatory filing.
John L. Kaufman, who was Vikonics' president at the time, recalled in an interview that "what he really had done was help us with introductions to people who he knew," including "high-ranking people in the areas of government there and in the military." He recalled traveling with Perle to Kuwait, where the former Defense Department official received a grateful and enthusiastic welcome shortly after the Persian Gulf War.
"The minister of this or the secretary of that -- no matter who it was, everyone wanted to meet him," Kaufman said. "I do believe that he did help us to gain contracts just by being there to help us."
In 1994, the company announced a contract to install a security system at Kuwait's Ministry of Information, and the kingdom was soon one of Vikonics' largest customers.
Perle recalled phoning the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, about Vikonics. "I talked to Bandar and said I'm on the board of this company, and we make some very high quality security devices, and if there's a market for thesein Saudi Arabia, we'd like to go talk to people who make those decisions. Same thing in Kuwait."
In 1995, Perle resigned from the Vikonics board. The company reported that he had been awarded no commissions and the company was de-emphasizing its efforts in the Middle East in part "due to the limited success to date."
In the early 1990s, Raytheon Co. retained the American Enterprise Institute to advise it on business opportunities in Turkey, and Perle "was one of the associates involved in that process," Raytheon said in a statement.
At times, Perle joined longtime associates in the boardroom. Former Army Chief of Staff Edward C. Meyer, for example, was a director with Perle in FMC's venture in Turkey, and has served with him on three other boards. An investment firm Meyer helped manage granted Perle stock options to run for a board seat. The options produced a profit of about $250,000 for Perle. At Perle's recommendation, Meyer was appointed to join him on another board.
The retired general praised Perle's performance. "I would say he's always been in the top one-third of all of the directors I've seen because he always goes out of his way to understand all the details of what the company is doing and how he can contribute to its success, and a lot of directors do not do that -- they just sit there and nod sagely," Meyer said.
"His contacts are particularly useful to companies that have businesses overseas," Meyer said. The contacts he's seen Perle use "did not have as much to do with the U.S. government as they did . . . foreign governments and foreign personages," he said.
Perle joined Hollinger's board in 1994, having met Black at an annual Bilderberg Conference, where members of the international business and foreign policy elite meet to network and discuss issues.
Friends Helping Friends
Through serving together at Hollinger, Perle became friends with Leonard P. Shaykinwho recruited Perle to serve on the board of a biotech company he headed, NaPro BioTherapeutics Inc., now known as Tapestry Pharmaceuticals Inc. As chairman of that firm's compensation committee, Perle now oversees Shaykin's pay. "Personally, I consider him a friend," Shaykin said in an interview. "I gained a great respect for both his judgment and his negotiating capabilities, which are legendary," he said. "I can tell you Richard hasn't rubber-stamped anything on my board."
Perle has served on the boards of two Washington area technology companies headed by Ken Bajaj, including a stint on an audit committee that did not meet one year. Bajaj has served on an advisory board of a venture capital firm that Perle co-founded.
Familiarity is the norm when boards recruit directors, and it can be a good thing if "you have learned that this director was an aggressive, careful, monitoring director who asked probing questions on some other board and you want him to do the same on your board," said John C. Coffee Jr., a professor at Columbia Law School. But familiarity can be bad if it involves mutual back-scratching or if the director in question "is simply never going to find fault with someone who is one of his close friends," Coffee said.
"It is an all too common practice to find the same directors popping up on boards with each other over and over again," said Gregory P. Taxin, chief executive of Glass, Lewis & Co., which advises institutional shareholders on how to vote in board elections. "The world of directors is a very incestuous one."
"If you are good friends with other people on the board and you all go to board meetings together, it's far less likely that you will start an acrimonious and strong debate in the boardroom about issues large or small," Taxin said.
Perle said Taxin's concerns do not apply to the boards on which he has served. "I have never hesitated to debate" when it was warranted, he said. "I don't think that people would say I am a wallflower."
Famous Company
On the board of Hollinger, which publishes the Chicago Sun-Times and London's Daily Telegraph, among other newspapers, Perle joined a gathering of luminaries. Directors have included former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger, former U.S. ambassador to Russia Robert S. Strauss, former Illinois governor James R. Thompson and former Sotheby's chairman A. Alfred Taubman, who remained on the board after he was convicted of antitrust violations.
For Black, Hollinger supported a lifestyle that included the use of corporate jets to fly to the Tahitian island Bora Bora and shuttle between houses around the world, the Hollinger lawsuit said. Black billed Hollinger for household staff such as chefs, butlers, chauffeurs, footmen and security personnel, the lawsuit said. Through an unusual system of annual management fees to a company owned by Black and Radler, Hollinger paid its top executives five to six times what competing companies paid for similar services, the suit said.
Black resigned as Hollinger chief executive in November and was removed as chairman in January. His holding company said in a recent statement that Hollinger's board members "were all extremely sophisticated professionals" and that the "vast majority" of matters the firm is challenging "were reviewed and approved by its independent directors." Black has sued several directors, alleging defamation.
During several hours of interviews for this article, Perle declined to answer most questions about Hollinger, citing pending litigation and the advice of counsel. Perle would not describe his relationship with Black, but confirmed that he once flew with Black on a company jet to the Middle East to attend a meeting with the crown prince of Jordan and to visit Perle's friend, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, in the mid-1990s.
By 1998 Perle was listed as chairman and chief executive of Hollinger Digital. He was one of three members of Hollinger International's executive committee, with Black and Radler.
As a member of the executive committee, Perle signed "unanimous written consent" forms authorizing management to negotiate terms of certain Hollinger newspaper sales, the documents show. For example, the Sept. 15, 2000, document authorized "the proper officers" of the company -- without naming them -- to "take all such actions" and negotiate "all terms . . . which in their sole judgment are necessary, proper or advisable" to carry out a $90 million transaction. The form expressly authorized the officers to negotiate a "noncompete agreement" without specifying all the details.
That noncompete agreement and others like it became devices for Black and Radler to divert millions of dollars to themselves, Hollinger alleged. Meanwhile, Black and Radler used such deals to acquire Hollinger newspapers at cut-rate prices, Hollinger alleged.
Perle was paid about $300,000 a year as head of Hollinger Digital, according to a Delaware suit by Hollinger shareholder Cardinal Value Equity Partners LP. That pay was in addition to his $3.1 million in bonuses, said a Hollinger source who would not agree to be identified because lawyers told company insiders not to speak to the press.
Hollinger Digital's "upside only" bonus arrangement was "virtually unheard of," the complaint said. The company paid $15.5 million in such bonuses, though the subsidiary's investments lost more than $65 million overall, it said. Perle said that, on balance, the investments for which he was responsible for were profitable. He said he urged the board to create Hollinger Digital because he envisioned the Internet transforming the newspaper business.
The Hollinger executive committee also approved the company's January 2001 $8 million purchase of papers of Franklin Delano Roosevelt so Black would have "exclusive and private access" to them while writing a book about FDR, the Cardinal lawsuit alleged. The Hollinger lawsuit put the price closer to $9 million and said most of the documents were stored in Black's homes. A spokesman for Black, James Badenhausen, said Black believed the papers were an attractive investment, and added that the contents of the papers were widely available to the public.
After Hollinger Digital invested money with New York financier Gerald Paul Hillman, Perle pursued a more entrepreneurial opportunity. He joined Hillman in setting up their own venture capital investment fund. Soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks , they formed Trireme Partners L.P., which stated that its focus was investing in technologies for homeland security. And the way they solicited capital for the fund would draw scrutiny.
Hillman also joined the Defense Policy Board after Perle recommended him to Rumsfeld, Perle said. The board's charter said its membership "will consist primarily of private sector individuals with distinguished backgrounds in national security affairs." Perle said he recommended Hillman because he was a brilliant analyst with a business background and "a lot of experience dealing with complex situations."
Trireme solicited Boeing Corp., with Hillman noting in a letter in early 2002 that he and Perle were members of the Defense Policy Board, according to a Boeing spokesman. Boeing committed to invest $20 million with Trireme. Ethics rules prohibit invoking government titles for private gain.
Perle said, "If we had not related that information we would have been withholding information." He added that the status as Pentagon adviser can be a drawback in business because "it means there are . . . things you can't say and can't do."
Last year Hollinger invested $2.5 million in a Trireme entity, the company said in an SEC filing. That was part of a $25 million commitment by Black, Bloomberg News reported in January. "I think that's right," Perle said when asked about the amount.
Black made the commitment to invest Hollinger money in Trireme without the board's approval, the Hollinger source said. When the audit committee learned about those actions last year, it canceled the commitment for the balance, the source said.
And when other directors discovered that Hollinger was paying for Perle's secretary, the company ended the arrangement, the Hollinger source said. Perle said the woman, based at a long-time Hollinger office at his Chevy Chase home, was not his personal secretary, but the sole secretary for Hollinger Digital. He declined to say if she handled all of his professional activities, saying the matter could become a subject of litigation.
Hollinger's complaint "is without merit and will be defended vigorously," said Josh Pekarsky, a spokesman for Radler. The company suit "repeatedly acknowledges that many of the things Mr. Radler is being accused of were presented to the Board, considered by the Board, and approved by the Board, yet it somehow fails to implicate the board in any of the alleged misconduct," he said in a statement.
A special committee at Hollinger is still examining the performance of the board of directors. Perle, who remains a Hollinger director, is no longer at Hollinger Digital or on the executive committee.
The perpetually busy Perle knows there may be more demands on his time.
"I've said to myself more than once and my wife has said even more often than that 'you've really got to scale back.' And then something really interesting comes along and I say yes and sometimes regret having said yes, like anyone else. I've got a piece due on June 1st that I'd forgotten I'd agreed to write. It's a chapter in a book."
He said he will squeeze it in.
Staff researcher Richard Drezen contributed to this report.
--------
South Africa says no legal challenges to new mine law
planetark
May 24, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/25220/story.htm
JOHANNESBURG - South Africa has not received any challenges to its new mining charter, a government official said last week, despite questions about whether it conflicts with bilateral treaties on expropriation.
A new law that took effect this month in South Africa, the world's biggest producer of gold and platinum, ends private mineral rights and transfers them to the state.
To gain mining licences, firms must now meet a range of conditions, including boosting the involvement of the black majority under the Black Economic Empowerment programme.
"We have not been given notice that anyone wants to challenge this," Jacinto Rocha, chief director of Mineral Resources Management, told Reuters.
An article on Mineweb (www.miningweb.co.za), an Internet mining information service owned by Moneyweb Holdings (MNYJ.J: Quote, Profile, Research) , said the government could face a flood of mining claims from companies arguing that bilateral investment treaties call for prompt and adequate compensation for any expropriation.
It said the government had been approached by lawyers on the issue.
The new law provides for "equitable" compensation in line with the constitution, where emphasis is put on the public interest demanding fair access to resources.
Most major mining companies, which consulted with government extensively about the new law, are working to implement it and several have said they have fulfilled initial requirements.
If any party wanted to challenge the new law under bilateral treaties, they would first have to get the backing of the foreign government concerned, since treaties are between states, not citizens, said Rocha, who works in the government's Department of Minerals and Energy.
"If the citizens feel aggrieved, they must approach their government first... We have not been informed by any other government with whom we have a bilateral agreement that we have violated these treaties," he said.
The new mining charter demands companies sell 15 percent of their local assets to black-controlled groups within five years and 26 percent in a decade.
Among an array of other targets, it also requires more representation in management by majority blacks, who were largely shut out of the mainstream economy during apartheid.
--------
Contractors caught under a microscope
washingtontechnology
By ROSEANNE GERIN
05/24/04
http://www.washingtontechnology.com/news/19_4/cover-stories/23555-1.html
Iraqi prison scandal raises questions about outsourcing
Outsourcing faces greater scrutiny in the wake of the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal.
Several lawmakers want the Defense Department and the White House to give a detailed accounting of the role contractors play in areas beyond traditional military support after employees with two companies were named as participants in the abuse of Iraqi prisoners.
Leading Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee have asked the General Accounting Office to examine the use of private security contractors in the Central Command's area of responsibility.
During recent hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee, lawmakers raised questions about the lack of oversight of contractors supporting the military at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, where the alleged abuses occurred.
Few government or industry officials expect the military to immediately reduce its reliance on contractors. Some regard the Democrats' calls for investigations as partisan posturing.
But questions about the contractors' involvement at Abu Ghraib, coupled with their prominent role in the military and rebuilding efforts, have made outsourcing a topic of public debate.
"Folks within both the House and Senate are, obviously, now activated on the issue and starting to not only demand a GAO investigation, but also [beef] up legislative language," said Peter Singer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, an independent Washington think tank.
For defense IT companies, outsourcing is a significant and growing opportunity. Defense spending on IT outsourcing projects, such as networking support, data center management and various technical services, is expected to rise from $3.8 billion in 2003 to $7.4 billion in 2008, according to market research firm Input Inc. of Reston, Va.
Overall federal spending on IT outsourcing will rise from $8.5 billion in 2003 to $15.5 billion in 2008, Input said.
Rep. Vic Snyder (D-Ark.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, is one of those calling for better oversight of contractors and a clear understanding of their functions.
Asked whether the prison scandal would cause Congress to look at federal outsourcing practices beyond the military in Iraq, Snyder said in an e-mail: "It is possible that there