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NUCLEAR
Haig Said Nixon Joked of Nuking Hill
Fiery Hell on Earth, Part 1
US seeks to answer 'dirty bomb' threat with $450m plan
CDC offers $1.5 million for thyroid study related to nuclear testing
Russia, U.S. to Clean Up Nukes Around the World
CORE highlights BNFL's MOX failure
Are the US 'dirty' bombs used in Iraq being tested in the Philippines?
CDC Offers $1.5 Million for Thyroid Study
India's new leftist coalition committed to 'credible' nuclear program
Iran's Khatami Warns UN on Future Atomic Cooperation
U.S. Accuses Iran of Intimidation on Nuclear Issue
British journalist arrested in Israel
Tokyo to spend US$897 million more if Japan wins
Brazil Says China Atomic Deal Would Be Peaceful
Analysis: Russia's super subs sink
Russia and US strike nuclear safety pact
Washington and Moscow agree to repatriate Russian-origin HEU
US, Russia Work with UN on Global Nuke Threat
Nuke sites ready for terror
To lay waste
MILITARY
Pact Signed Toward Ending Sudan War
Report: Israel may purchase two submarines from Germany
Military intelligence head in Serbia and Montenegro sacked
Blair Backs U.S. on Control of Troops in Iraq
Ghostbusters descend on British navy base
Iraq Arms Contract Misses Deadline
Lockheed, Gen'l Dynamics Get Design Deal
EPA issues fine over release of nerve gas
Ukraine to add 150 troops to its Iraq force
How Much Is Hussein's Departure Worth?
A Different Street Fight in Iraq
U.S. Agrees to Suspend Fighting in Najaf After Deal With Cleric
U.S. General Says Iraqi Security Will Run Abu Ghraib by August
Israelis, Palestinians Disagree on Damage Done in Rafah Camp
US wants to station warplanes at Turkish base: report
NATO invites Ukraine's president Kuchma to summit
Explosives found in Slovakia ahead of NATO meeting
Karachi Bombs Hit Near U.S. Consulate
Army detention policies outdated
US Kills & Aids Killing Of 3,000 Prisoners In Cold Blood
Prison Interrogations in Iraq Seen as Yielding Little Data on Rebels
U.N. missions painted as booze-soaked orgies
U.N. Council Members Want Iraqis at Negotiations
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Court Rules on Aided Suicide
Nichols Guilty of 161 Counts of Murder
FBI Seeks Tips on 7 Linked to Al Qaeda
High Security Planned for Mall
Credible Intelligence Hard to Pin Down
Rights Eroded in War on Terrorism, Amnesty Says
Is the Nation Ready for a 'Dirty Bomb?'
Britain Arrests Radical Cleric Who Faces U.S. Terror Charges
POLITICS
2006 Cuts In Domestic Spending On Table
Some Seek Broad, External Inquiry on Prisoner Abuse
As Ashcroft Warns of Attack, Some Question Threat and Its Timing
Scepticism over new US terror warning
The Bush orthodoxy is in shreds
Gore Calls for Top Officials to Resign
ENERGY
Maryland Boosts Clean Energy, Bay Restoration
39 Ocean Windmills Are Planned to Expand Power on L.I.
Is nuclear power really the answer to climate change?
OTHER
Poll Finds Americans Want More Environmental Action
'Dead zones' threaten fisheries
Death Toll Mounts Around Pakistan's Manchar Lake
Mouth Bacteria May Defend Against AIDS
ACTIVISTS
Israel: Mordechai Vanunu still censored
Israel's nuclear whistleblower under close watch since release
Israel detains British journalist who broke nuclear whistleblower's story
Israel should free British journalist later Thursday: ministry
Lebanese demonstrators shot dead
Sen. Clinton gives, receives praise at Pattern conference
U.S. arrests seven animal rights militants
-------- NUCLEAR
Haig Said Nixon Joked of Nuking Hill
Transcripts of Phone Talks Are Released by Archives
By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 27, 2004; Page A29
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58802-2004May26.html
President Richard M. Nixon jokingly threatened to drop a nuclear bomb on Capitol Hill in March 1974 as Congress was moving to impeach him over the Watergate scandal, according to transcripts of telephone conversations among his closest aides that were released yesterday.
"I was told to get the football," White House Chief of Staff Alexander M. Haig Jr. told Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger less than five months before the president's forced resignation, during a conversation in which the two men exchanged stories about Nixon's increasingly erratic behavior.
"What do you mean?" asked Kissinger, who had called Haig to express concern that the president might unwittingly unleash a Middle East war with his new, get-tough policy against Israel.
"His black nuclear bag," replied Haig. "He is going to drop it on the Hill."
The March 20, 1974, exchange is among 20,000 pages of transcripts of telephone conversations that Kissinger deposited in the Library of Congress in 1976 with the stipulation that they remain secret until at least five years after his death. Kissinger turned the transcripts over to the National Archives in February 2002 after being threatened with legal action by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit group that campaigns against government secrecy. The National Archives reviewed the transcripts for national security and privacy purposes and released almost all of them yesterday.
The transcripts shed light on the extraordinarily complex relationship between Nixon and Kissinger during a turbulent period in American foreign policy, from the bombing of Cambodia in 1970 to the Yom Kippur war of 1973 and diplomatic breakthroughs with China and the Soviet Union. Even as Kissinger attempted to convince Nixon of his loyalty, he adopted a sardonic tone in conversations with Haig and other aides.
In the March 20 transcript, neither Kissinger nor Haig seems alarmed by threats to bomb Congress or "to go after the Israelis" after "he is through with the Europeans."
"He is just unwinding," Haig told Kissinger. "Don't take him too seriously."
On other occasions, as in December 1970, when Nixon proposed an escalation in the bombing of Cambodia, Kissinger and Haig felt obliged to humor the president while laughing at him behind his back. During that episode, Kissinger was still serving as national security adviser, and Haig was one of his deputies.
The Air Force is "not designed for any war we are likely to have to fight," Kissinger told Nixon after the president railed against U.S. pilots for "farting around doing nothing" over Cambodia and "running goddamn milk runs in order to get the air medal." Both men suspected North Vietnamese guerrillas of using Cambodia as a sanctuary and supply line to South Vietnam.
"It's a disgraceful performance," Nixon went on. "I want gunships in there. That means armed helicopters, DC-3s, anything else that will destroy personnel that can fly. I want it done!! Get them off their ass."
"We will get it done immediately, Mr. President," Kissinger replied.
After talking to Nixon, Kissinger got on the phone with Haig to pass on the president's orders for "a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia," using "anything that flies on anything that moves." The transcript then records an unintelligible comment that "sounded like Haig laughing."
The transcripts include several episodes that appear at odds with Kissinger's version of events, such as his claim that Washington had nothing to do with the September 1973 military coup in Chile that toppled the democratically elected, leftist government of Salvador Allende. "We didn't do it," Kissinger told Nixon, "I mean we helped them. [unintelligible] created the conditions as great as possible."
Peter Kornbluh, a Latin America specialist at the National Security Archive, said the passage appeared to mark an acknowledgment by Kissinger that U.S. policy paved the way for the coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power. "It's diametrically opposed to the account he provides in his memoirs," Kornbluh said.
The transcripts show Nixon and Kissinger congratulating each other on the overthrow of "a pro-Communist . . . anti-American" government in Chile. The president agreed with Kissinger's assessment that the American press was guilty of "unbelievable, filthy hypocrisy" in expressing concern over Allende's overthrow while calling for the outlawing of the apartheid regime in South Africa.
In return for Kissinger's flattery, Nixon expressed concern for his aide's state of health and his frenetic lifestyle. In February 1974, he told Kissinger he was sending one of his doctors "over tonight to rub you down. Use him every night you need him. A couple or three times a week."
As the Watergate crisis deepened, Kissinger began to worry about Nixon's mental state. On October 11, 1973, according to the transcripts, he rejected a British request for a telephone conversation between the president and Prime Minister Edward Heath on the grounds that Nixon was in no condition to take the call.
"Can we tell them no?" Kissinger said to his deputy, Brent Scowcroft. "When I talked to the president, he was loaded."
While Kissinger continued to express support for the president in their private conversations, he criticized him behind his back. Speaking of what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre of top Justice Department officials in October 1973, Kissinger told former defense secretary Melvin Laird, "it's a goddamn disaster." The following day, he told Nixon that Attorney General Elliott Richardson "stabbed you in the back."
The transcripts show that Kissinger cultivated close contacts with leading journalists and publishers, including several who were being frozen out by the White House because of their newspapers' aggressive pursuit of Watergate. In November 1973, for example, he telephoned Katharine Graham of The Washington Post to invite her to lunch, while insisting that she keep the meeting secret from her own reporters. "I will be looking for a job if my leader finds out," Kissinger said, in an apparent reference to Nixon.
----
Fiery Hell on Earth, Part 1
Rachel's Environment & Health News #792,
May 27, 2004
http://www.rachel.org/bulletin/index.cfm?issue_ID=2436
For some time now, I have been searching for answers to a deeply perplexing question: Why is the United States promoting the spread of atomic bombs worldwide?
By "atomic bombs" I mean the kind that turned Hiroshima and Nagasaki into a fiery hell in 1945 -- A-bombs made from plutonium (Nagasaki) or "enriched" uranium (Hiroshima).
In this series, I will briefly examine the facts, then consider some of the possible reasons why the U.S. might favor the proliferation of atomic weapons worldwide.
In at least four different ways, the U.S. is refusing to limit -- and in some cases is actively promoting -- the spread of atomic bombs around the globe.[1]
(1) The U.S. is helping foreign nations acquire nuclear power plants, which everyone acknowledges have provided the basis for A-bomb programs in India, Pakistan, South Africa, North Korea and, during the 1980s, in Iraq.[2] In the hands of a willing nation, nuclear power equals nuclear weapons.
(2) The U.S. is dragging its feet in achieving its stated goal of preventing theft of nuclear weapons within the former Soviet Union.[1]
(3) The U.S. is failing to retrieve 35,000 pounds of weapons-grade uranium that the U.S. loaned or gave to 43 countries during the past 50 years. A crude but effective A-bomb requires 110 pounds (50 kg) of enriched uranium.[3]
(4) President Bush has ordered a fundamental shift in U.S. nuclear weapons policies, initiating what the New York Times calls "the second nuclear age."
These new policies entail (a) creation of a new class of smaller nuclear weapons, (b) guiding small A-bombs to their targets from outer space, (c) reducing the time it takes to launch a nuclear strike, and (d) a new policy of pre-emptive first use of nuclear weapons even against non-nuclear states.
"It is precisely these kinds of provocative new weapons capabilities -- at a time when the administration seeks to prevent proliferation of weapons of mass destruction elsewhere -- that worries even hawkish Republicans," says James Sterngold of the San Francisco Chronicle.[4]
Let's examine each of these four developments in more detail:
I. Nuclear power = nuclear weapons
The U.S. is urging -- and subsidizing -- foreign nations to build new nuclear power plants to generate electricity, while acknowledging that every nuclear power plant certainly provides the stepping stones to A-bombs.
For example, when Vice-President Dick Cheney visited China in April, 2004, he was promoting the sale of Westinghouse nuclear power plants to the Chinese.[5] Current U.S. policy restricts the export of nuclear technology to China but the Bush administration is expected to lift those restrictions in September. The immediate beneficiaries will be Westinghouse and General Electric.[6] China has already announced plans to build 32 nuclear power plants, and to export the technology to other countries. For example, China has said it intends to help Pakistan build two large nuclear power plants capable of producing plutonium.[5]
Within the U.S. itself, in recent months two corporate consortiums have proposed building new nuclear power plants.[7] President Bush is an enthusiastic supporter of nuclear power.
But nuclear power plants always carry an unspoken danger. For nations that want to build A-bombs, nuclear power provides the basis for all that's needed in the way of technology, opportunity and know-how.
No one disputes this view -- the "nuclear club" has been able to expand only because the spread of nuclear power plants has been encouraged and subsidized. Why does the U.S. continue down this path?
As the New York Times wrote recently, "'If you look at every nation that's recently gone nuclear,' said Mr. [Paul] Leventhal of the Nuclear Control Institute, 'they've done it through the civilian nuclear fuel cycle: Iraq, North Korea, India, Pakistan, South Africa. And now we're worried about Iran.' The moral, he added, is that atoms for peace can be 'a shortcut to atoms for war.'"[8]
The Times goes on, "Today, with what seems like relative ease, scientists can divert an ostensibly peaceful program to make not only electricity but also highly pure uranium or plutonium, both excellent bomb fuels."[8]
And: "Experts now talk frankly about a subject that was once taboo: 'virtual' weapon states - Japan, Germany, Belgium, Canada, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Taiwan and a dozen other countries that have mastered the basics of nuclear power and could, if they wanted, quickly cross the line to make nuclear arms, probably in a matter or months."[8] Experts call crossing that line "breakout."
Other nations thought to have the know-how (though not necessarily the inclination) to cross the breakout line include Egypt, Syria, Nigeria, and South Korea.
The U.S. is on record as vigorously opposing the proliferation of nuclear weapons. However, U.S. actions to prevent proliferation are half-hearted and contradictory at best.[1,9] For example, when U.S. allies break all the rules and export A-bomb technology, the U.S. looks the other way. Earlier this year, the world was rocked by news that Pakistan's chief nuclear engineer, Abdul Qadeer Khan, had sold a "complete package" of A-bomb technology to Libya, to North Korea, and probably to Iran. The "complete package" included enriched uranium, centrifuges for making more enriched uranium, and one or more designs for A-bombs.[10] Dr. Khan even maintained a telephone support hotline for his A-bomb customers. It was a good business -- Dr. Khan reportedly received more than $100 million from Libya alone.[11]
When Dr. Khan's international smuggling network was discovered, the President of Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf, forced Dr. Khan to retire as head of Khan Research Laboratories, then turned around and gave him an official pardon, lavished him with praise and gave him the title "special adviser" to the president.[10] According to the New York Times, "...some former and current American officials say there was considerable evidence that General Musharraf was turning a blind eye to Dr. Khan's activities, which they say may have involved parts of the Pakistani military."[12]
The Bush administration did nothing. "Although Mr. Bush has vowed to pursue and prosecute those who spread nuclear weapons technology, the administration did not criticize Mr. Musharraf when he decided to pardon Mr. Khan, who ran what now appears to be one of the largest nuclear proliferation networks in the past half-century."[10]
Did Dr. Khan provide bomb-grade uranium and nuclear know-how to Al Qaeda? "It's mystifying that the administration hasn't leaned on Pakistan to make Dr. Khan available for interrogation to ensure that his network is entirely closed," writes New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof. "Several experts on Pakistan told me they believe that the [U.S.] administration has been so restrained because its top priority isn't combating nuclear proliferation -- it's getting President Pervez Musharraf's help in arresting Osama bin Laden before the November election," Kristof writes.[13]
Pakistan was not the only U.S. ally involved in selling A-bombs to Libya, North Korea and Iran. Dubai in the United Arab Emirates served as the "key transfer point" for all the technology Dr. Khan was selling. Just as the Cayman Islands are known for laundering drug money, Dubai is known for laundering black-market products like A-bomb parts.[14]
When President Bush learned of Dubai's role in Pakistan's atomic shopping mall, he again did nothing. As the scandal was breaking in March, 2004, the Times reported that Lockheed Martin was proceeding with the sale of 80 F-16 fighters to Dubai -- apparently a reward to a trusted and valued ally.[14]
Even when wealthy, technically-savvy governments play strictly by the rules, the civilian nuclear fuel cycle has proven impossible to control. For example, the Japanese acknowledged earlier this year that they have lost 435 pounds of plutonium -- enough to make about 25 nuclear bombs as big as the one that wiped out Nagasaki in 1945. They know they produced it but they have no idea where it went.[15]
So long as the U.S. continues to promote nuclear power for itself and its allies, the fiery hell on earth draws ever closer and more vivid.
I used to think this problem of "nuclear weapons proliferation" was the "Achilles heel" of nuclear power -- the uncontrollable problem that would finally convince the world to stuff the nuclear power genie back into the bottle and never let it out again.
I am now wondering whether I had it exactly backwards: perhaps nuclear weaponry is the main appeal of nuclear power -- both to those who are buying it AND to those who are selling it. (More on this in Part 3.)
II. Turning a Blind Eye to Loose Soviet A-Bombs
The U.S. has continually failed to secure nuclear weapons left over from the cold war in countries of the former Soviet Union. As the New York Times reported in March 2004, "The bipartisan [U.S.] program to secure weapons of mass destruction is starved for funds -- but Mr. Bush is proposing a $41 million cut in 'cooperative threat reduction' with Russia."[13]
"I wouldn't be at all surprised if nuclear weapons are used over the next 15 or 20 years," Bruce Blair, president of the Center for Defense Information, told the New York Times recently, "first and foremost by a terrorist group that gets its hands on a Russian nuclear weapon or a Pakistani nuclear weapon."[13]
There are an estimated 15,000 nuclear weapons in the countries of the former Soviet Union -- 7,000 of them strategic weapons plus an estimated 8,000 tactical weapons.[3] Strategic weapons are the big ones capable of incinerating whole cities. They are covered by disarmament treaties and so have been pretty well inventoried. They are also physically large and protected with several layers of elaborate codes and anti-detonation devices. It would be extremely difficult to steal one and set it off.
But tactical nuclear weapons are a different story. "The most troublesome gap in the generally reassuring assessment of Russian weapons security is those tactical nuclear warheads --smaller, short-range weapons like torpedoes, depth charges, artillery shells, mines. Although their smaller size and greater number makes them ideal candidates for theft, they have gotten far less attention simply because, unlike all of our long-range weapons, they happen not to be the subject of any formal treaty," says the New York Times.[3]
The commonly-used estimate of 8,000 tactical nukes is "an educated guess," says the Times. Other estimates range from a low of 4,000 to a high of 32,000 tactical A-bombs. Even the Russians don't seem to have a reliable inventory.[3]
"The other worrying thing about tactical nukes is that their anti-use devices are believed to be less sophisticated, because the weapons were designed to be employed in the battlefield. Some of the older systems are thought to have no permissive action links at all, so that setting one off would be about as complicated as hot-wiring a car," says the Times.[3]
But stealing a nuclear weapon may not be the easiest way for a terrorist group to join the nuclear club.
Bill Keller, who wrote the eye-opening article, "Nuclear Nightmares" for the New York Times magazine two years ago, says, "The closest thing I heard to consensus among those who study nuclear terror was this: building a nuclear bomb is easier than you think, probably easier than stealing one."[3]
III. Sluggish Response to Weapons-Grade Uranium
So the third way that the U.S. is promoting the spread of atomic bombs is by failing to retrieve the weapons-grade enriched uranium that the U.S. sent abroad during the past 50 years.
Here is the opening paragraph from a New York Times story March, 7, 2004: "As the United States presses Iran and other countries to shut down their nuclear weapons development programs, government auditors have disclosed that the United States is making little effort to recover large quantities of weapons-grade uranium -- enough to make roughly 1,000 nuclear bombs -- that the government dispersed to 43 countries over the last several decades," including Iran and Pakistan.[16]
Why would President Bush fiddle around in the face of a threat as serious and obvious as this one? --Peter Montague [To be continued.]
[1] This newsletter was written before the New York Times editorialized as follows on May 28, 2004:
"While the Bush administration has been distracted by the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it has neglected the far more urgent threat to American security from dangerous nuclear materials that must be safeguarded before they can fall into the hands of terrorists. That is the inescapable conclusion to be drawn from a new report that documents the slow pace of protecting potential nuclear bomb material at loosely guarded sites around the world.
"The report -- prepared by researchers at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard -- does not directly blame the invasion of Iraq for undermining that effort. It simply notes that less nuclear material was secured in the two years immediately after the 9/11 attacks than in the two years before....
"The most plausible explanation is that the administration has focused so intensely on Iraq, which posed no nuclear threat, that it had little energy left for the real dangers. Indeed, the Harvard researchers said that if a tenth of the effort and resources devoted to Iraq in the last year was devoted to securing nuclear material wherever it might be, the job could be accomplished quickly."
[2] In early June, 1981, Israel bombed a nuclear power plant under construction in Iraq, asserting that Iraq intended it for making A-bombs. See Steven R. Weisman, "Reagan Asserts Israel Had Cause To Mistrust Iraq: Senate Panel Not Convinced," New York Times June 17, 1981. pg. A1.
[3] Bill Keller, "Nuclear Nightmares," New York Times May 26, 2002.
[4] James Sterngold, "A new era of nuclear weapons: Bush's buildup begins with little debate in Congress," San Francisco Chronicle Dec. 7, 2003.
[5] H. Josef Hebert, "Cheney to shop Westinghouse nuke technology to China," Salt Lake City (Utah) Tribune April 10, 2004.
[6] Reuters, "Asian countries in race for nuclear power," Economic Times [of India] April 11, 2004.
[7] "A 2nd Consortium Wants a Reactor," New York Times April 1, 2004.
[8] William J. Broad, "Nuclear Weapons in Iran: Plowshare or Sword," New York Times (Science Section) May 25, 2004.
[9] "Editorial: Half a Proliferation Program," New York Times Feb. 16, 2004.
[10] David E. Sanger, "U.S. Widens Its View of Pakistan Link to Korean Arms," New York Times Mar. 14, 2004.
[11] David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, "Pakistani's Nuclear Earnings: $100 Million," New York Times Mar. 16, 2004.
[12] David Rohde and Talat Hussain, "Delicate Dance for Musharraf In Nuclear case," New York Times Feb. 8, 2004.
[13] Nicholas D. Kristof, "A Nuclear 9/11," New York Times Mar. 10, 2004.
[14] Gary Milhollin and Kelly Motz, "OpEd: Nukes 'R' Us," New York Times Mar. 4, 2004.
[15] Bayan Rahman, "Japan Loses 206 kg of Plutonium," New York Times Jan. 28, 2003.
[16] Joel Brinkley and William J. Broad, "U.S. Lags in Recovering Fuel Suitable for Nuclear Arms," New York Times Mar. 7, 2004.
-------- accidents and safety
US seeks to answer 'dirty bomb' threat with $450m plan
Some question nuclear cleanup
By Susanna Loof,
Associated Press
May 27, 2004
http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2004/05/27/us_seeks_to_answer_dirty_bomb_threat_with_450m_plan/
VIENNA -- Moving to ease the threat of ''dirty bomb" attacks, US Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham announced a $450 million global cleanup of nuclear materials yesterday to keep them out of terrorist hands.
The Global Threat Reduction Initiative would remove and secure high-risk radioactive materials that pose a menace to the international community, Abraham said.
''Where 100 years ago authorities had to worry about the anarchist placing a bomb in the downtown square, now we must worry about the terrorist who places that bomb in the square but packed with radiological material," he told an International Atomic Energy Agency conference on nuclear safety.
The head of the UN nuclear watchdog agency praised the initiative, but some independent specialists said it would not go far enough fast enough.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, concerns have grown that terrorists might be trying to acquire material for a so-called dirty bomb, a device that uses conventional explosives to spread low-level radioactive material over several city blocks.
The approach of the Athens Olympics, from Aug. 13 to 29, has focused fresh attention on the threat. The United States provided Greek police with radiation detection equipment this week to help guard the Games against a nuclear or dirty bomb.
Efforts to collect, secure, and dispose of nuclear material began long ago, but the new program offers an ''accelerated and more structured framework" for the work, he said.
Dirty bombs use lower-grade radioactive isotopes, such as those used in medicine or research. If such a bomb were to be detonated, the radiation release probably would be small. Nuclear bombs have cores made of either highly enriched uranium or plutonium, materials normally kept under tight security.
Even so, the initiative includes a plan to convert research reactors using highly enriched uranium to lower-grade fuel by 2013, Abraham said. Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the international atomic agency, said there are 100 such reactors in 40 countries.
Abraham said his first priority is to bring back to the United States about 330 tons of Russian-origin, highly enriched uranium by the end of 2005. More than 220 tons have been eliminated so far.
All spent fuel from Russia would be recovered by 2010, while all US-origin spent fuel would be recovered within a decade. Spent fuel can be processed to extract plutonium, which can be used to make nuclear bombs. Concerns that terrorists could obtain material for a dirty bomb have risen since the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, disclosed this year that he sold equipment used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons to Iran, Libya, and North Korea.
----
CDC offers $1.5 million for thyroid study related to nuclear testing
Associated Press
May. 27, 2004
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0527FalloutThyroid27-ON.html
SALT LAKE CITY - The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is offering $1.5 million for the next phase of a thyroid study involving people who lived downwind from nuclear weapons testing.
Southeastern Nevada, southwestern Utah and northwestern Arizona all were hit by radioactive fallout from the above-ground testing in Nevada from 1951 through 1962.
A University of Utah team has kept the program going for years after the federal government lost interest.
Study manager Mary Bishop Stone said participants are eager to continue the work that federal investigators began nearly 40 years ago.
"They tell us they are glad someone is addressing the concern they have had all these years," she said.
For decades, there has been debate over how the more than 900 atomic tests affected downwind residents.
Past studies produced conflicting conclusions as to whether the fallout caused increased numbers of cases of particular types of cancer.
The first phase of the thyroid study began in the 1960s and ended with the federal researchers concluding that fallout had not increased disease among 4,818 people living in Washington County, Utah, and Lincoln County, Nev., with residents of Graham County, Ariz., used as a control group.
In the mid-1980s, University of Utah researchers tracked down 3,122 of the original subjects. They say they discovered that exposure to fallout led to a higher-than-usual incidence of thyroid tumors.
To complete its study, the research team wants to conduct in-depth thyroid examinations of about 2,000 of the original study participants. Researchers say they will need about $800,000 more than the CDC has promised to complete the study.
Preston Truman, of the advocacy group Downwinders, applauded the decision to resume funding of the study.
"This new round would let them examine us now, some 50 years after we were exposed to the heavy original fallout, and to see what the effects would be over that segment of time from when we were checked last in the 1980s," said Truman, who became a study subject as a seventh-grader.
----
Russia, U.S. to Clean Up Nukes Around the World
May 27, 2004
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-russia-usa.html
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia and the United States agreed on Thursday to lock away some of the most dangerous nuclear material scattered around the globe to keep it away from ``terrorists,'' but experts said that was no easy task.
The accord is part of a U.S.-sponsored global cleanout of tons of highly enriched uranium (HEU) -- which can be made into nuclear weapons -- stored in dozens of poorly guarded research reactors around the world.
U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, speaking after he signed the accord, said it would ``reduce the threat of terrorism and prevent the proliferation of weapons-grade uranium.''
Under the plan, Moscow will secure the return of all fresh Russian-origin HEU fuel by the end of 2005 and all spent fuel by 2010 from more than 25 reactors in 17 states.
Abraham said the program would parallel efforts to reclaim nuclear materials of U.S. origin. A total of $450 million has been allocated to programs launched by both sides.
Nuclear proliferation, however, remains a thorny issue between the two countries.
The United States opposes Russian plans to build a nuclear reactor in Iran on the grounds Tehran could use the technology to produce bombs. Russia and Iran say the reactor is strictly for civil use.
Research reactor fuel is attractive to militants as it has weapons-grade nuclear material. It can be used to make a standard bomb as well as a ``dirty bomb'' that needs little nuclear material but can spread radiation after exploding.
Some experts said the program's deadlines could prove unrealistic for examining all reactors, gaining permission from host countries to repatriate the fuel and agreeing on removal terms.
``Also, officials should keep in mind that heaps of radioactive equipment will be left behind,'' said nuclear analyst Andrei Frolov at the PIR Center for Political Studies in Moscow.
``That stuff is also perfect for a dirty bomb.''
Under the deal, fresh fuel will be returned from closed reactors or those about to close, while spent fuel will be taken from working reactors after they are modernised to use lower-enriched fuel.
Thirteen countries have already agreed to return fuel to Russia, but officials would not identify them.
A source in Russia's Atomic Energy Agency said up to 10 nuclear bombs could be made from Russian material scattered around the world -- and many more ``dirty bombs.''
``Each research reactor has about 20 kg (44 lb) of fresh HEU on average,'' the source said. ``That's highly dangerous stuff because enrichment levels could be as high as 80 percent, compared to just a few percent in a normal power reactor.
``If you put your mind to it, you can make a wonderful bomb with just a few kilograms of that.''
-------- britain
CORE highlights BNFL's MOX failure
Whitehaven News
Thursday, May 27th 2004
UK Business Gazette
http://www.businessgazette.co.uk/viewarticle.asp?id=101592
ANTI-nuclear group CORE has been highlighting the failure of BNFL's Sellafield MOX Plant (SMP) to get into production in time to win a key Swiss contract.
BNFL last week confirmed reports from CORE that MOX has failed to deliver a MOX fuel order for the Beznau nuclear power station in time for the station reactors' annual refuelling outages this summer.
CORE spokesman Martin Forwood said: "A similar failure in the Spring of last year led to BNFL having to subcontract at least two SMP orders to rivals in France and Belgium.
Government estimates have shown that last year's delay and loss of contracts alone will have cost SMP 10's of £Millions in lost revenue. The financial and contractual fall-out from this year's failure is likely to be catastrophic for BNFL and SMP in terms of further lost revenues and damage to customer confidence.
"Ongoing research by CORE shows that the delays to actively commissioning all stages of SMP's production line have resulted in not one single MOX fuel assembly being produced.even though active commissioning of the plutonium fuel production line started over two years ago, in April 2002 when the first plutonium was introduced into the plant."
Mr Forwood said; "This MOX cock-up must be a huge embarrassment to BNFL. It will ring alarm bells with Government Ministers who controversially gave the go-ahead for the plant despite environmentalists' predictions that the plant was economically and technically unviable. With its reputation already in tatters, the kindest thing is to put SMP out of its misery and close it down right away ".
SMP was built at a cost of £470M with an eye to filling most of its order book with business from Japan.
With the £470M construction costs 'written off', the plant was assessed by Government appointed consultants in 2001 to have a Net Positive Value of just £216M - a value that relied heavily on Japanese business being secured.
Kansai Electric, has recently published its intention to sign a contract for MOX fuel with COGEMA in France.
But BNFL spokesman Ali McKibbin said: "It is true to say we have as yet to produce the first MOX fuel assemblies, but that is due to the need to complete commissioning to ensure that plant operates safely. We have kept our customer fully informed and we will not sub-contract this work. BNFL are confident that Japanese customers will want their plutonium returned to them is MOX fuel. It is Japanese national policy to recycle plutonium and Japanese plutonium is here at Sellafield."
-------- depleted uranium
Are the US 'dirty' bombs used in Iraq being tested in the Philippines?
Thursday, May 27, 2004
M CBN News
http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/NewsStory.aspx?section=Opinion&OID=51871
The scriptwriter who many years ago, in countless westerns, coined the famous phrase of, "Paleface speak with forked tongue" has, I hope, lived to witness the truth of this statement by listening to President George Bush Jr., George Burns look-alike Rumsfield and the host of clowns surrounding both. They state honorable intentions of freeing people from dictatorship and giving them democracy when the facts are they work for the benefit of a few major corporations and their further and rather pointless enrichment. In the whole of human history, never have so many been enslaved by so few. The message of Bush and Company is loud and clear, not just in Iraq but in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Their version of democracy is that people be allowed to vote into power those whom corporate bodies approve of.
To achieve this, however, they commit crimes so great against humanity that they make Hitler and his Holocaust appear as though he was Mother Theresa. They, and their allies, one of which (Britain) unfortunately is my own country of birth, not only conquer the land; in doing so, they also poison it to such an extent that any person, whether freeman or slave, living on it in the coming few thousand years, will inevitably develop terminal cancer due to radiation poisoning. This is because they have admittedly pumped out thousands of shells and bombs in which the explosive is encased in depleted uranium (DU), the same "dirty" bomb they are worried will be used by terrorists in their own cities.
When a DU shell is fired, it ignites upon impact. Uranium, plus traces of plutonium and americium, vaporize into tiny, ceramic particles of radioactive dust. Once inhaled, uranium oxides lodge in the body and emit radiation indefinitely. According to British radiation expert Roger Coghill, a single particle of DU lodged in a lymph node can devastate the entire immune system. These dust particles are carried in the winds. They get carried into the ground water system and their effects do not diminish with time as we know it.
Although the Pentagon continually states that there is no danger, one has to ask as to why then have 209,000 veterans of Desert Storm in 1991 filed for disability benefits based on service-connected injuries. Dr. Asaf Durakovic, a professor of nuclear medicine at Georgetown University, is reported as telling nuclear scientists in Paris that tens of thousands of sick British and American soldiers are now dying from radiation they encountered in that 1991 incursion and that 62 percent have tested positive with uranium isotopes in their organs, bones, brains and urine. At least they went home. Millions of people are left in these areas, including Afghanistan and even the Balkans, where this ammunition has also been used, to slowly suffer a painful cancer-induced death for generations yet to come.
The real problem with this ammunition is that it is impossible to clean up the contamination it causes, and its effect will last for 10,000 years. In Afghanistan experts with the Uranium Medical Research Center report that urine samples of Afghans show the highest level of uranium ever recorded in a civilian population. Who is next?
What should worry us are the war games and exercises conducted in the Philippines, particularly at the Crow Valley bombing range. Is this type of depleted-uranium bomb or shell being used here? It has to be continually tested somewhere and it certainly will not be on the hallowed ground of the United States because even the Pentagon doesn't believe its own denials. If so, the Philippines is also being contaminated. With friends like these Americans, who needs enemies?
Alan C. Atkins Circle Drive, Cubic Homes Parañaque City
Please send your comments or feedback to newsfeedback@abs-cbn.com
-------- health
CDC Offers $1.5 Million for Thyroid Study
May 27, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Fallout-Thyroid-Study.html
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is offering $1.5 million for the next phase of a thyroid study involving people who lived downwind from nuclear weapons testing.
Southeastern Nevada, southwestern Utah and northwestern Arizona all were hit by radioactive fallout from the aboveground testing in Nevada from 1951 through 1962. A University of Utah team has kept the program going for years after the federal government lost interest.
Study manager Mary Bishop Stone said participants are eager to continue the work that federal investigators began nearly 40 years ago. ``They tell us they are glad someone is addressing the concern they have had all these years,'' she said.
For decades, there has been debate over how the more than 900 atomic tests affected downwind residents. Past studies produced conflicting conclusions as to whether the fallout caused increased numbers of cases of particular types of cancer.
The first phase of the thyroid study began in the 1960s and ended with the federal researchers concluding that fallout had not increased disease among 4,818 people living in Washington County, Utah, and Lincoln County, Nev., with residents of Graham County, Ariz., used as a control group.
In the mid-1980s, University of Utah researchers tracked down 3,122 of the original subjects and found that exposure to fallout led to a higher-than-usual incidence of thyroid tumors.
To complete its study, the research team wants to conduct in-depth thyroid examinations of about 2,000 of the original study participants.
The team has reanalyzed the past data and has started in-depth examinations of 500 study participants at clinics in St. George, Phoenix and Safford, Ariz. The researchers say that to complete the study, they will need about $800,000 more than the CDC has promised.
The exams involve feeling the thyroid for abnormalities and drawing blood for hormone analysis, as well as ultrasounds.
Preston Truman, of the advocacy group Downwinders, applauded the decision to resume funding of the study.
``This new round would let them examine us now some 50 years after we were exposed to the heavy original fallout and to see what the effects would be over that segment of time from when we were checked last in the 1980s,'' said Truman, who became a study subject as a seventh-grader. He said it will be important to compare the U.S. results with those from studies of fallout in Chernobyl and Kazakhstan.
-------- india / pakistan
India's new leftist coalition committed to 'credible' nuclear program
NEW DELHI (AFP)
May 27, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040527115512.tmnzvbtz.html
India's new left-leaning ruling coalition said Thursday it remained committed to keeping a "credible" nuclear weapons program, but believed in a nuclear-free world and peace with rival Pakistan.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's coalition, known as the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), defeated the Hindu nationalist-led government, which in 1998 carried out shock nuclear tests, in polls this month. Pakistan carried out its own tests within days.
"The UPA government is committed to maintaining a credible nuclear weapons program while at the same time it will evolve demonstrable and verifiable confidence-building measures with its nuclear neighbours," the coalition's governing agenda said.
It added: "It (the government) will take a leadership role in promoting universal nuclear disarmament and working for a nuclear-weapons-free world."
Reiterating statements by Singh and his cabinet, the governing agenda said the new administration would maintain the current peace process with Pakistan launched by the previous government.
"Dialogue with Pakistan on all issues will be pursued systematically on a sustained basis," it said.
-------- iran
Iran's Khatami Warns UN on Future Atomic Cooperation
May 27, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-nuclear-iran-khatami.html
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran warned the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog on Thursday it might resume uranium enrichment and halt snap inspections of its nuclear sites if the body did not recognize Tehran's cooperation at a board meeting next month.
``The (International Atomic Energy Agency's) decision will have an influence on our cooperation with the agency,'' President Mohammad Khatami told reporters.
``We suspended (uranium) enrichment voluntarily, we implemented the Additional Protocolvoluntarily, so we can stop that at any time,'' he said.
Under intense international pressure following revelations it had engaged in an 18-year cover-up of sensitive nuclear research, Iran agreed last year to halt uranium enrichment, which can be used to make bomb-grade material.
It has also signed and agreed to implement the Additional Protocol to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) allowing short-notice, intrusive inspections of its nuclear facilities.
Iran insists its nuclear program is entirely peaceful and says U.S. accusations it is hiding a secret atomic arms program are unfounded and politically motivated.
Last week Iran submitted what it says is a full declaration of its nuclear activities, and it has repeatedly called for the IAEA board of governors to remove Tehran's case from its agenda after its meeting in Vienna next month.
Khatami acknowledged for the first time on Thursday that this was unlikely. ``We know this case is not going to be closed in June, but the June meeting's decision is very, very important,'' he said.
``DENIAL AND DECEPTION''
Diplomats said Washington may not push for the IAEA to report Iran to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions, despite believing it would be justified. But it is expected to push hard for an IAEA resolution condemning Iran for not cooperating with U.N. inspectors.
A U.S. official who follows the IAEA closely said there was still no end in sight for the inspection process in Iran.
``Given Iran's proven track record of denial and deception, we understand that the agency would need substantial time and full Iranian cooperation before it can resolve these outstanding issues,'' the official, who declined to be named, told Reuters.
Diplomats close to the IAEA have said the U.N. body has not been receiving full cooperation from Iran in recent weeks and has been denied access to some military sites.
Iranian officials have previously denied these charges but Khatami suggested that some sensitive sites had been put off-limits for U.N. inspectors.
``We will not let anyone have access to our military secrets,'' he said. ``But based on the regulations we have let the inspectors visit military sites which do not involve secrecy or confidentiality.''
The IAEA said it would circulate its latest report on Iran to the IAEA's 35 board member nations, which will discuss it at a board meeting beginning on June 14.
``The official position of the agency with regard to inspections will be known in a few days when the report...is issued,'' IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky said.
Khatami said Tehran wants the IAEA report to reflect Iran's close cooperation with the agency. ``If we feel that, under political pressure, they don't mention Iran's goodwill and cooperation, we will adopt new methods,'' he said.
But Khatami said Iran had no intention of following North Korea's example of pulling out of the NPT as some hard-liners in the Islamic Republic have wanted.
--------
U.S. Accuses Iran of Intimidation on Nuclear Issue
May 27, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-iran-usa.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States on Thursday accused Iran of intimidation with its threats to stop cooperating with the international community if the U.N. atomic watchdog agency persists in pressuring Tehran on its nuclear program.
But U.S. and European officials told Reuters the threats seem to be backfiring and Iran, unwilling to risk diplomatic isolation, was unlikely to follow through.
Iran is waging an aggressive multi-pronged offensive -- including threats to resume uranium enrichment and halt snap inspections of its nuclear sites -- to persuade next month's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board meeting to end an inquiry into its nuclear activities.
The offensive includes Iranian threats to deny some imports from Australia, which has joined the United States in demanding complete answers about the Islamic republic's nuclear intentions, said one U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
At a news briefing, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said: ``We don't think it's appropriate to try to intimidate the atomic energy agency or its board into overlooking many failures of Iran to meet its nonproliferation commitments.''
He spoke after Iranian President Mohammed Khatami told reporters in Tehran the IAEA's June decision ``will have an influence on our cooperation with the agency.''
Americans and Europeans are drafting separate resolutions for IAEA consideration. But officials on both sides say they are more united than ever in favor of a tough position and the board is expected to reach consensus on a final version that will keep the pressure on Iran.
UPPING THE ANTE
Iran is clearly trying to ``up the ante'' ahead of the IAEA meeting, but ``I don't take the threats too seriously,'' a senior U.S. official said.
If Iran withdrew from the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty -- including its prohibitions against uranium enrichment and its requirement for IAEA inspections -- it ``would become a pariah to everyone'' and ally itself with North Korea at a time when Tehran seems to want integration with the world, another U.S. official said.
With such threats, the Iranians are further ``digging themselves into a hole,'' a European diplomat said.
Washington insists Tehran is producing nuclear weapons. The argument was bolstered by revelations last year of an 18-year cover-up of sensitive nuclear research, which Iran claims is for peaceful purposes only.
Iran last week submitted what it says is a full declaration of its nuclear activities and it has repeatedly urged the IAEA board of governors to remove Tehran's case from its agenda. For now, that ``is not possible,'' a second European diplomat said.
The Bush administration has decided that barring some dramatic new revelation about Iran's program, it cannot win adoption next month of an IAEA resolution that would send the Iran case to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions.
Instead, some U.S. officials now look to the September IAEA board meeting for what one called a ``showdown'' on that issue, although other officials say the controversy could slip into early 2005, after the U.S. presidential election.
U.S. officials say Iran has hidden military-run nuclear facilities and they have shared information on this with the IAEA. But IAEA inspectors have had trouble getting access to these sites. This will be a focus of the June board meeting, officials said.
Although the United States and Europe have often been at odds on Iran, the Europeans are becoming increasingly disillusioned with Tehran.
-------- israel
British journalist arrested in Israel
Aljazeera
27 May 2004
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/6891CD7C-B9EB-47CE-BBA7-6DE465FAF90E.htm
Israeli police have arrested a British journalist who in 1986 exposed the country's nuclear secrets in an interview with whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu.
Witnesses said plain clothes policemen on Wednesday escorted Peter Hounam, who had been preparing a new documentary about Vanunu, to his Jerusalem hotel. They searched his room and then bundled him off in a car.
A spokesman from the prime minister's office, which oversees Israel's security services, confirmed the journalist had been arrested. A government gag order prevented release of further details in the case.
According to the website of the leading Yedioth Aharonoth newspaper, Hounam was being questioned on suspicion of committing "security offences".
Angry Vanunu
Vanunu said the arrest was part of "the continued war by the Shin Bet internal security service against me and my supporters and those who want to raise Israeli nuclear secrets."
In 1986, Hounam secured an exclusive interview with Vanunu, a former technician at the Israeli atomic reactor in Dimona. His story in London's Sunday Times led independent analysts to conclude Israel had stockpiled as many as 400 nuclear weapons.
Israel abducted Vanunu and jailed him for 18 years. Hounam came to Israel to greet Vanunu when he was freed on 21 April and has since spent time with him in a Jerusalem church despite Shin Bet restrictions on Vanunu's contacts with the media.
Hounam was making a documentary on Vanunu for the BBC, which expressed grave concern over his arrest.
"We are aware that Peter Hounam has been arrested. We are very concerned at this development," a BBC spokeswoman said.
-------- japan
Tokyo to spend US$897 million more if Japan wins experimental nuclear fusion plant, says report
Thursday, May 27, 2004
By Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-05-27/s_24296.asp
TOKYO - Tokyo would boost its investment in the world's first large-scale nuclear fusion plant by almost US$1 billion if the project's sponsors build the reactor in Japan, a newspaper reported Wednesday.
Construction of the US$12 billion International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), which would run on the same energy that powers the sun and stars, is scheduled to start this year.
But the project's sponsors - the European Union, the United States, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and China - remain deadlocked over whether to build the plant in Japan or France.
In an attempt to win the bidding war, Japan will offer to spend 100 billion yen (US$897 million) more than initially agreed, paying 370 billion yen (US$3.35 billion) of the estimated 560 billion yen (US$5 billion) building cost, the national Nihon Keizai financial newspaper said.
Tokyo plans to make its proposal at negotiations scheduled to be held in Vienna in mid-June, the paper said, citing unidentified government sources. Cabinet ministers were to discuss the proposal later Wednesday, the report said.
Science Ministry officials declined to comment.
Japan has proposed the northeastern village of Rokkasho, while the E.U. has put forward the southern French town of Cadarache. The host is expected to pay nearly half of the construction cost and a big portion of the operating cost.
Tokyo would use half of the additional money to build research facilities in France and set aside the remaining half as a backup fund in case any of the sponsors drops out, the Nihon Keizai reported. Canada already has backed out.
Fusion involves colliding tiny atoms at extremely high temperatures and pressure inside a reactor. When the atoms fuse into a plasma, they release energy that can be used to generate electricity.
The fusion reactor project, first proposed more than a decade ago, is designed to study the potential of fusion power as a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels, such as coal and oil, which are expected to run short in about 50 years.
Fusion power produces no greenhouse gas emissions and only low levels of radioactive waste. The reactor would run on an isotope of hydrogen, an abundant source of fuel that can be extracted from water.
-------- latinamerica
Brazil Says China Atomic Deal Would Be Peaceful
REUTERS CHINA:
May 27, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/25272/story.htm
SHANGHAI - China has expressed interest in purchasing enriched and unprocessed uranium from Brazil, but the Brazilian government does not yet have the technology or the authority to make such a deal, a Brazilian official said on Wednesday.
Brazilian Science and Technology Minister Eduardo Campos, who is in charge of Brazil's atomic power program and is visiting China with President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, was trying to clarify earlier statements that indicated Brazil would consider selling China unprocessed uranium.
Campos told reporters in Shanghai that Brazil will not have the technology to enrich uranium until 2008 and that Congress would have to amend Brazilian law before it could sell unprocessed uranium to a foreign country.
A statement handed out to reporters in Shanghai said Brazil would study the possibility of cooperating with China on peaceful uses of nuclear energy, such as for medical and agricultural purposes. A final decision on any cooperation will be made in August after Brazilian officials meet again with their Chinese counterparts, the statement said.
Brazil is fighting U.S. pressure to allow greater inspections of its nuclear facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
The United States and the IAEA have been pressing countries to open up their nuclear programs after Iran was discovered to be covering up potential arms-related atomic research.
Although Brazil is constitutionally barred from owning nuclear weapons, it has a small atomic power program and is home to the world's fourth-largest reserve of uranium.
Late Tuesday, a ministry spokeswoman said the sale of uranium to China would allow Brazil to finance its nuclear power program, which has been criticized for being underfunded. It needs $1.8 billion to finish its third nuclear energy plant.
China is one of five recognized nuclear powers, along with the United States, Russia, France and Britain. Brazil and China are both signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that aims to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.
Brazil and the IAEA have been talking since December about ways to inspect Brazil's uncompleted nuclear facility without jeopardizing commercial secrets, Brazilian Ambassador to the United States Roberto Abdenur said earlier this month.
-------- russia
Analysis: Russia's super subs sink
May 27, 2004
By Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040526-065910-3956r.htm
Washington, DC, May. 26 (UPI) -- The United States can call off the Hunt for Red October. The long proud and feared Russian submarine fleet is rapidly sinking to the bottom of the Barents Sea. This week alone, Russian news reports have revealed that the entire Akula attack class submarine class is being scrapped.
These gigantic leviathans of the sea were codenamed "Typhoons" by NATO analysts and they are still the largest submarines in the world. Displacing 33,800 tons submerged. At the height of their power, they had the capability of incinerating more than 100 American or European cities each with the 20 multi-independently targeted reentry vehicle warheads. They are now entirely toothless.
Their old missiles are no longer reliable enough to be even tested. And plans for a replacement missile have yet to even reach the prototype stage.
Now, veteran Navy Commander-in-Chief Fleet Adm. Vladimir Kuroyedov has ordered the entire Akula class to be scrapped, another senior admiral, Gennady Suchkov told the Interfax news agency in an interview published Tuesday. Fleet Adm. Suchkov also told the newspaper Novaya Gazeta that Kuroyedov issued the order on April 29, the Moscow Times reported.
The enormous Akulas are bigger and heavier than a British aircraft carrier. They provided the model for the famous Tom Clancy novel "The Hunt for Red October" and the highly successful movie adaptation starring Sean Connery.
But now all of Russia's long-feared Akulas face the threat of being deactivated because there are no longer any reliable intercontinental ballistic missiles for them to carry and launch, Suchkov told Interfax.
Suchkov was disgraced and given a suspended sentence following the loss of the nuclear submarine K-159 in August 2003 near Murmansk in the Arctic Ocean. However, Russian and American naval analysts believe his claims are accurate and that he may be speaking on behalf of disgruntled senior navy officers.
Suchkov said the Russian Navy is trying to develop a new nuclear missile, the Bulava, to rearm the Typhoons but it does not even have a prototype ready yet.
Russian officials have tried to play down Suchkov's claims. Navy spokesman Igor Dygalo claimed the Akula class "will continue to exist as it has existed."
But Ivan Safranchuk, head of the Moscow office of the American Center for Defense Information told the Moscow Times that the navy has in fact already been decommissioning Akulas for some time, even though many of them have not reached the end of their service lives.
However, the malaise of the Russian navy stretches across its entire submarine fleet, far beyond the Akulas.
It is now nearly four years since another enormous nuclear submarine, the Oscar-II class Kursk, sank in the Barents Sea during exercises in August 2000, dooming all 118 officers and crew on board. There were more humiliations in February this year when other submarines failed to successfully test fire a sub-launched missile, the RSM-52 two days in a row on Feb. 17 and Feb. 18.
That happened when President Vladimir Putin, who has been determined to revive Russia's maritime power, was at sea with the Northern Fleet in the Barents Sea above the Arctic Sea.
Indeed, Suchkov warned that Russia's entire fleet may disappear by 2008. He told Interfax that the production of RSM-52 missiles -- the same kind that had failed in the February exercises -- had already been ended. As a result, the Northern Fleet's 18th Division, consisting of the giant Akula-class subs Arkhanglesk, Severstal and Dimitry Donskoi had already been shut down, he said.
After the February missile test fiascoes, Pavel Felgenhauer, one of Russia's most respected and influential military analysts, warned in a Moscow Times analysis that the navy was likely to face more problems of a similar kind in the years ahead.
"The nuclear forces are armed with very old ICBMs," he wrote. "Some have been in service in underground silos for over 27 years. ... The number of ICBM replacements is inadequate. Each year the ICBM inventory is getting older and older. The life span of most Russian ICBMs, as guaranteed by their producers, has long since expired."
Indeed, the infamous RSM-53 -- NATO designation SS-N-23 -- was first developed in 1979 and phased into service more than 20 years ago.
Felgenhauer had a very different take on the February exercises than the image of a reviving, still potent Russia that Putin wanted to project.
"The main point of the exercise is to test aging ICBMs and bombers and the war game scenario is also antiquated, involving the West (the United States) as the potential foe," he wrote. "The military is caught in a time warp: Its hardware is old, its strategic ideas are outdated, it does not want to change nor does it seem able to -- irrespective of what happens politically in Russia or the world."
There was another reason the exercise was held, Felgenhauer wrote. "If a test-firing of an aging ICBM is successful, the warranted life span of all the other ICBMs of the same class is extended by a year. Typically, one of the oldest ICBMs of a class is launched every year. If the launch fails or there are serious problems, it is repeated. ... That is how it has been now for a decade."
Putin is determined to replace the broken sword of the navy's nuclear missile arsenal with up-to-date weapons. After the February missile failures, he lost no time in announcing ambitious plans to upgrade Russia's Strategic Missile Forces with a new generation of weapons and said he was considering building new anti-ballistic missile, or ABM defense systems, such as the one the Bush administration is now developing for the United States.
But such weapons are years, if not a decade away. Suchkov's claims and the grim continuing record of accidental submarine sinkings and losses indicate that the warships of the old Red Navy shaped by late Adm. Sergei Korshkov, for more than 30 years one of the most potent and feared military forces on the planet, now look doomed to the scrapheap.
Indeed, even Putin, while still determined to revive Russia's military and nuclear might, appears to have finally washed his hands of them. He only backs winners.
----
Russia and US strike nuclear safety pact
MOSCOW (AFP)
May 27, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040527151747.28puoxrx.html
Russia and the United States vowed Thursday to remove in the coming years all nuclear fuel that the two countries have shipped to research reactors and institutes in foreign nations over the past decades.
The agreement was signed by visiting US Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and his Russian counterpart Viktor Khristanko amid a new bid by the two countries to renew their cooperation in the fight against the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
Abraham said the United States would allocate 450 million dollars for the project -- about 100 million dollars of which will go to cash-strapped Russia for it keep up its end of the deal.
Rumyantsev said Russia would remove some 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) of uranium from 17 sites in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asian countries that had links to Moscow in the Soviet era, according to ITAR-TASS.
The news agency quoted Rumyantsev as saying the project was the first "concrete step" being taken by the two Cold War era foes to make sure nuclear material does not enter the hands of so-called rogue states.
Neither side said when the removal of material will be completed.
Each country has to negotiate directly with the nations in which it helped set up nuclear research facilities and it appeared that Moscow and Washington were uncertain about how long the process would take.
The project is not related to the nuclear power plants that Russia and the United States have built across the world in direct competition to each other.
Russia is currently feuding with the United States over its decision to complete construction of Iran's first nuclear power plant.
As a concession, Moscow has said it will not launch the project until it wins a guarantee from Tehran that all of the spent fuel from the Bushehr plant is safely returned to Russia.
The United States and Israel fear the material can be reprocessed by the Islamic state into a low radiation "dirty bomb."
----
Washington and Moscow agree to repatriate Russian-origin HEU from 17 countries
The Associated Press
Charles Digges,
2004-05-27
http://www.bellona.no/en/international/russia/nuke_industry/co-operation/34203.html
Russia and the United States will today sign an agreement geared toward locking down tonnes of the world's most dangerous and poorly guarded nuclear material under the aegis of a tri-lateral programme between the two countries and the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA.
The focus of the $450 m US-Russian driven programme, called the Global Threat Reduction Initiative, is the result of long-unheeded warnings from scientists that supplies of highly enriched uranium, or HEU, at research and university reactors around the world are particularly vulnerable to theft by terrorists. The programme will retrieve HEU sent by Moscow to 20 reactors in 17 countries and ship it back to Russia for storage.
"I am pleased to see [US] Secretary [of Energy, Spencer Abraham] join the chorus of voices that have called for more urgent action on this front." said Kenneth Luongo, executive director of the Russian-American Nuclear Security Advisory Council, which advises both governments on nuclear policy.
"This was the right decision at a time when terrorist threats against the US are intensifying. We've delayed too long and we need to move out rapidly on this mission."
The returned HEU will be stored at the Dmitrovgrad All-Russia Institute for Atomic reactors, known as NIIAR in its Russian acronym. Dmitrovgrad- situated to the east of Moscow-has been the beneficiary of much US threat reduction spending over the past several years to beef-up its security. Nonetheless, concerns about the safety of the material in Russia-where breaches are possible at even the most ostensibly well-secured sites are possible-remain high.
Nikolai Shingaryov, head spokesman for the Federal Atomic Enegy Agency, or FAEA-the successor organization to the Ministry of Atomic Energy after President Vladimir Putin's government reshuffle last March-acknowledged Russia's safety shortfalls Wednesday in a telephone interview. Nonetheless, he said Russia was up to the job.
"Our protection system against terrorist attacks must be modernized. We know this. We pay great attention to it." he said.
Shingarev nonetheless acknowledged "discrepancies" in inventory-taking at nuclear power plants and "very small thefts" of radioactive material.
Nuclear experts believe successful implementation of the US-Russia Global Threat Initiative programme will need some $80 million in funding by US Congress over the next two years.
What's the meat of the plan? The plan to transfer the HEU is to spend more money and sharpen the focus of both the US and Russian governments to repatriate this fuel, Secretary Abraham told reporters in Vienna on Wednesday. He will formally sign off on the programme in Moscow on Thursday with Alexander Rumyantsev, head of the FAEA. US Ambassador to Russia, Alexander Vershbow, is also expected be in attendance, said members of the US embassy staff in Moscow.
"Where 100 years ago authorities had to worry about the anarchist placing a bomb in the downtown square, now we must worry about the terrorist who places that bomb in the square, but packed with radiological material," Abraham told an International Atomic Energy Agency conference on nuclear safety.
Accelerating and concentrating existing efforts, Abraham said, the Bush administration will target the "most dangerous, least secure" nuclear materials first. In seeking to convert research reactors in the United States and abroad to less dangerous fuel, the most vulnerable ones will take priority.
Secretary Abraham tours a research reactor in Poland from which Soviet-origin HEU will be repatriated to Russia. The Associated Press The target countries for the Global Threat effort The programme covers fuel that the Soviet and Russian governments originally supplied to foreign atomic facilities. In some cases, those fuel shipments began as early as the 1950s. The United States also exported nuclear reactors and highly enriched uranium at the same time, starting with President Dwight Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" programme. More than a dozen plants using that uranium are still operating in the United States and elsewhere, but these fuel suppliesaren't covered under the new agreement with Russia.
Reactors in Uzbekistan, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania and Poland are thought to be among the highest priority targets for the upcoming "clean-out," experts said.
Edwin Lyman, senior scientist in the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington told the Knight-Ridder news service there are substantial quantities of highly enriched uranium in the former Soviet republic of Belarus.
"Many bombs worth," he said.
The other countries covered by the fuel-return program are Bulgaria, China, the Czech Republic, North Korea, Egypt, Germany, Hungary, Kazakhstan Latvia, Libya, Vietnam and Yugoslavia.
Facilities returning their highly enriched fuel to Russia must agree to convert their reactors to operate on low enriched uranium, which is considered less of a proliferation threat.
Analysts say the DOE has dragged its feet Abraham's announcement, months in the making, comes after criticism from outside analysts and the US Department of Energy, or DOE's inspector general that the administration has been moving too slowly. US Auditors said in February that large amounts of highly enriched uranium produced in the United States "were out of US control."
Just this week, a pair of Harvard University nuclear researchers, Matthew Bunn and Anthony Wier, said in a report that less fissile material was secured in the two years after September 11th, 2001, than in the two years before. The makings for an atomic bomb exist in hundreds of buildings in more than 40 countries, the report said.
Abraham-in Vienna to meet with Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the IAEA-intends to acknowledge in his remarks Thursday during the Global Threat Initiative's formal singing that more must be done.
'We would be fooling ourselves-and endangering our citizens-to think that these past efforts are enough,' an advance text of Abraham's speech obtained by Bellona Web reads. It describes "the 21st century's greatest conflict" as a battle between "the civilized nations of the earth and the terrorists and terrorist states that would use devastating technologies to destroy them."
Research Reactors and the stuff of 'dirty bombs' Efforts to collect, secure and dispose of nuclear material began long ago, but the new programme offers an "accelerated and more structured framework" for the work, Abraham said in his address to the IAEA.
Dirty bombs use lower-grade radioactive isotopes, such as those used in medicine or research. If a dirty bomb were to be detonated, the radiation release probably would be small. Nuclear bombs, by contrast, have cores made of either highly enriched uranium or plutonium, materials normally kept under tight security.
Even so, the initiative includes a plan to convert research reactors using highly enriched uranium to lower grade fuel by 2013, Abraham said. IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei said there are 100 such reactors in 40 countries.
The biggest worry is that such reactors are usually poorly guarded.
"Academic and research reactors at universities are simply not capable of providing a defence against a terrorist assault," said Lyman, according to Knight-Ridder. "The great concern is a paramilitary-type assault on one of these facilities and the material is forcibly removed."
Lyman said a US government study found that thieves could carry off the uranium in a storage pool in about an hour.
Is Russia biting off more that it can chew? The fuel coming back to Russia is expected to be stored at Dmitrovgrad, where it will be cooled and eventually downblended, as highly enriched uranium is in the US-Russian HEU-LEU agreement, which dilutes Russian HEU to LEU for sale to US nuclear power reactor operators.
But Russian officials say there is no storage room left at the country's only spent nuclear fuel-reprocessing plant, the beleaguered Mayak Chemical Combine facility in the Southern Urals near Chelyabinks. Mayak is swamped with fuel taken from Russia's northern fleet of rusting nuclear submarines and icebreakers. Indeed, most of the fuel being repatriated could not even be reprocessed with Mayak's equipment.
Scientists and some antinuclear activists are optimistic about the new fuel-return program, but they are also concerned that Russia is taking on large new imports of highly dangerous uranium. They point to Russia's poor record in storing and safeguarding the atomic material it already has.
"Bringing all this back to Russia, yes, it's a little paradoxical, given all the warnings about proliferation in Russia," said Lyman.
How far do US safety dollars stretch? The US DOE is spending some $40 m to help the Russians improve security at nuclear installations.
Many of the so-called "rapid upgrades" performed on insecure Russian nuclear sites by the DOE are slap-dash, ad hoc measures, replacing wooden doors with steel ones, putting iron bars on vulnerable windows and installing refrigerator-size concrete blocks to prevent access to nuclear storage casks. Other measures are more high tech, including closed-circuit TVs, electronic key-cards, motion sensors, walkie-talkies.
Russian officials have also asked for field-sobriety kits to test guards at their nuclear facilities.
The new U.S.-Russia programme got something of a test run on August 22nd, 2002, when military forces from both countries raided a research reactor outside Belgrade, the capital of then Yugoslavia.
The 17-hour operation, which cost an estimated $7 m, reportedly netted 100 pounds of highly enriched uranium, enough for two nuclear bombs. Because US Congress imposes funding limitiations on American threat reduction efforts by stopping them short of environmental rehabilitation, however, the Washington-based Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nuclear research NGO, spent $3m of its own funding to cover that.
Two other collections were made last year-14 kilograms of highly enriched uranium from Romania in September and another 13 kilograms from Bulgaria in December. Experts from the IAEA also participated.
-------- u.n.
US, Russia Work with UN on Global Nuke Threat
Story by Louis Charbonneau
REUTERS UN:
May 27, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/25273/story.htm
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-05-27/s_24290.asp
VIENNA - The United States and Russia are working with the U.N. nuclear watchdog to round up all nuclear material scattered across the globe to keep it out of the hands of rogue states and militant groups seeking atomic weapons.
U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham gave details of the initiative in a speech Wednesday to members of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Washington has earmarked more than $450 million for the plan, he said.
"This Global Threat Reduction Initiative ... (addresses) the threat posed by the entire spectrum of nuclear materials (and) reflects the realities of the 21st century that were so startlingly made clear on a September morning three years ago," Abraham said.
IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei said the initiative was a key step in reducing the nuclear threat in light of the recent discovery of a global black market that supplied sensitive atomic technology to countries like Libya, North Korea and Iran.
"We live in an increasingly polarized world," ElBaradei told reporters. "If you put these...things together -- a polarized world, the proliferation of (nuclear) technology, the proliferation of terrorism -- you know we will need to adjust, augment, strengthen our defense."
The initiative includes a plan to repatriate all unused Russian-origin highly enriched uranium (HEU) fuel by the end of next year and all spent nuclear fuel by 2010. Spent fuel can be reprocessed to extract plutonium.
Abraham is meeting senior Russian officials Thursday, when they are expected to sign a bilateral deal outlining the terms of the initiative, U.S. officials said.
U.S., RUSSIA ALREADY COOPERATING
Nuclear arms can use either weapons-grade HEU or plutonium. Of the two bombs the United States dropped on Japan in 1945, one had an HEU core and the other was made of plutonium.
"We will take all steps necessary to accelerate and complete the repatriation of all U.S.-origin research reactor spent fuel...within a decade," Abraham said. Some U.S. research reactors used bomb-grade HEU.
He also said they would convert civilian research HEU reactors to use low enriched uranium fuel instead -- not just in the United States but across the globe.
"We will target those reactors first where the threats and vulnerabilities are the highest," he said.
Washington is already working with Libya, which agreed in December to renounce all nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs, to convert its research reactor. Abraham said the U.S. and Russian governments had already cooperated on several missions to recover HEU from different countries, including 37 pounds of HEU fuel from Bulgaria, 31 pounds from Romania and 37 pounds from Libya -- all repatriated to Russia.
The initiative will not be limited to weapons-useable materials but also materials that could be used in a so-called dirty bomb -- created when an explosive like dynamite is laced with radioactive material to spread it across a wide area.
Asked why the initiative was limited to Russian and U.S. material and did not include countries like Pakistan that are known proliferators, Abraham said that it was partly because the United States and Russia produced the bulk of it.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Nuke sites ready for terror
The world is awash with the leftovers from civil and military nuclear programs
by Thom J. Rose
Washington (UPI)
May 27, 2004
http://www.upi.com/
Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Nils Diaz said U.S. nuclear sites are well protected against terrorism despite recent safety scares. "The level of security, which is what I'm concerned with, has continued to increase," Diaz said at a news briefing sponsored by the trade journal Energy Daily.
The safety of U.S. nuclear infrastructure has attracted greater public attention because of an increasing awareness of possible acts of terrorism and a series of high-profile safety breaches.
The security of nuclear and chemical facilities has been the subject of several recent bills in Congress and found its way into presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry's campaign speech Wednesday in Seattle, where he asked, "Why is it that chemical plants and nuclear facilities still don't have the plans in place, and the protections in place that are necessary?" Diaz strongly contradicted that characterization.
Still, several recent incidents have raised questions about the safety of U.S. nuclear infrastructure.
A report released Tuesday by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, questions the NRC's oversight of the Davis-Besse nuclear plant in Ohio.
A boric-acid leak at Davis-Besse caused what has been called the most serious nuclear-safety concern in the United States since the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979. Although no radioactive material was released in the Davis-Besse incident, the NRC estimated that a situation similar to the one at Three Mile Island could have occurred within 60 days if the corrosion caused by the acid had not been detected.
The GAO report faulted the NRC for failing to notice the weakness of the so-called safety culture present at the Davis-Besse plant. The report defines safety culture to include the priority given to safety measures and the attitude with which safety is addressed.
"This degradation (of safety culture) had allowed the incident to occur with no forewarning because NRC's inspections and performance indicators do not directly assess safety culture," the GAO report said.
Diaz rejected the GAO report accusations, however, saying, "We require our licensees to have a very good safety culture." He added, however, that attempting to micromanage each plant would make the NRC less effective overall.
In addition to the Davis-Besse report, further nuclear-security questions were raised May 20 when the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico confirmed that computer equipment potentially containing classified information was missing. The laboratory denied that the loss could represent a major security concern, but critics said the problem was in fact quite major.
While security concerns have always been an issue for nuclear facilities, the threat of terrorism has changed the range of concerns and the way the NRC goes about addressing them.
In addition to the problems the NRC has traditionally combated -- like the corrosion at Davis-Besse -- the commission is charged with preparing against terror attacks of all kinds.
"We are now a safety, security and preparedness agency; each one reinforces the others," Diaz said.
One of the first preparedness tasks the NRC undertook after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks was assessing the danger posed to U.S. nuclear facilities by an attack with a hijacked airplane.
"We are a lot better now than we were" with respect to such an attack, Diaz said. "We have answers; we have actual plans."
Diaz said that detailed assessments of the potential effects of an aircraft attack on a nuclear facility show such an attack would not likely pose a significant danger to the public.
"The combination of systems is so robust that even if something severe happens, we have plenty of time," he said. "In all cases there is time to protect the American people."
Diaz said nuclear plants located on large bodies of water have also prepared for the possibility of a ship-borne attack.
The potential for a coordinated ground attack by armed terrorists has also drawn considerable attention.
The private guard forces currently stationed at U.S. nuclear facilities have come in for significant criticism after being involved in several scandals, including allegedly cheating on security evaluations.
Controversy over private guards led Department of Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham to announce this month that he would consider federalizing the guard service at some more sensitive nuclear sites.
But Diaz said Abraham's statement only referred to guards at Department of Energy sites containing military materials, not to civilian sites.
A variety of sites will be subject to so-called emergency-response exercises. The NRC is planning 25 such exercises this year, with the first to take place June 8 at the Indian Point nuclear power plant in upstate New York.
Diaz said the Indian Point exercise will include a major force-on-force test, tabletop exercises involving state, local and federal agencies and a comprehensive preparedness exercise for the response to a terrorist attack. "I think it will be a very tough test," he said.
Despite concerns, Diaz said U.S. nuclear infrastructure is safe and has solid plans for an attack by terrorists.
He added, however, that good planning is no substitute for conservative policies and procedures.
He said when a large attack or safety concern does come, "It's always the one that you have not identified."
-------- new mexico
To lay waste
Weapons - and their byproducts - are not things of the past, and New Mexico has reason for concern, today's writer says
COMMENTARY
By Jay Coghlan
May 27, 2004
Albuquerque Tribune
http://www.abqtrib.com/archives/opinions04/052704_opinions_wmd.shtml
There's been a lot of Department of Energy news lately. New "security initiatives" were announced one week, but the next week Los Alamos National Laboratory says it can't account for more "Classified Removable Electronic Media."
After being rebuffed by a federal judge in Idaho, the DOE attempts a legislative end run by asking Congress to give it the authority to unilaterally reclassify much of its high-level radioactive wastes. If successful, this will result in much of those wastes being sent to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, near Carlsbad.
The New Mexico Environment Department will soon release a Corrective Action Order against Los Alamos National Laboratory. The order has been long delayed because the DOE and the lab filed six different lawsuits against it. I could go on, but my point is that the DOE is no friend to New Mexico or other states where it has nuclear weapon facilities.
The public generally believes the country's nuclear weapons business is largely over and is being cleaned up. To the contrary, the DOE has a pattern of evading its cleanup obligations while ramping up its weapons budgets.
The DOE wants to spend $6.57 billion in Fiscal Year 2005 for its core research, development, testing and production programs for nuclear weapons. This equals the all-time high set in 1985 under President Reagan's buildup.
Long after the Cold War, nuclear weapons are of little, if any, value in the "war against terrorism." Yet, the DOE plans to further raise its annual funding requests for core nuclear weapons programs to $7.5 billion by FY 2009, nearly double the Cold War average. In total, the DOE wants to spend $35.51 billion on nuclear weapons during Fiscal Years 2005 to 2009.
The DOE has explicitly stated the "FY 2005 budget continues to emphasize programs in the Nuclear Posture Review released by the Administration in January 2002. The review laid out the direction for America's nuclear forces for the next decade."
In fact, the review was a radical redirection in U.S. nuclear weapons policies. It expanded the potential nuclear targets from two countries to seven; called for new nuclear weapons; plans for industrial-scale plutonium pit production; and set a reduced lead-time to resume nuclear tests.
Under the Nuclear Posture Review, the DOE wants:
• $9 million for "Advanced Concepts," largely for the development of "mini-nukes," including • $82.37 million between 2005 and 2009.
• $27.56 million for the controversial Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, another $484.73 million during next four years and production engineering in 2009. • $336.47 million for pit production at Los Alamos, with another $1.28 billion during the next four years. As "triggers" for modern thermonuclear bombs, plutonium pits are the critical component of nuclear weapons (as well as being atomic weapons in their own right, as demonstrated at Nagasaki).
Included in this funding is $29.80 million for design of the Modern Pit Facility, capable of producing 450 or more pits per year at possibly either of two candidate sites in New Mexico. In effect, it's a new super bomb plant.
Of the $6.57 billion requested for 2005 for the DOE's nuclear weapons programs, 43 percent will be spent in New Mexico alone. And 70 percent of the DOE's total spending in New Mexico will be for its core nuclear weapons programs.
In contrast, only 2 percent will be spent on renewable energy technologies and 4 percent on cleanup. So, it is clear where the DOE's priorities are in this state.
As New Mexicans, we have a unique responsibility to change those priorities. This is particularly urgent now that our country has assumed a global policing role against unconventional weapons - including the use of pre-emptive war - even as the very core of our nation's own weapons programs continue to command increasing budgets for such efforts, and right here in our own back yards.
Coghlan is director of Nuclear Watch of New Mexico, in Santa Fe. The nonprofit organization promotes greater safety and environmental protection at nuclear facilities and changes to discourage the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
Pact Signed Toward Ending Sudan War
By Chris Tomlinson
Associated Press
Thursday, May 27, 2004; Page A28
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59075-2004May26.html
NAIVASHA, Kenya, May 26 -- Sudan's government and rebels from the southern part of the country signed key agreements Wednesday, paving the way for a comprehensive accord to end Africa's longest-running civil war.
The adversaries signed three protocols on power-sharing and the administration of three disputed areas in central Sudan, wrapping up outstanding issues that had prevented them from reaching a deal.
The pact is expected to lead to a full cease-fire and implementation accord to end a 21-year conflict between the government and the Sudan People's Liberation Army in which more than 2 million people have died, mostly in a famine caused by the war.
The signing took place in Naivasha, 60 miles west of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. The accords are not related to rebels fighting a separate insurgency in the Darfur region of western Sudan, where humanitarian groups have raised fears of ethnic cleansing.
U.N. officials have described the situation in Darfur as the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. Human Rights Watch, based in New York, cited local sources saying Arab militia fighters attacked five villages in Darfur on Tuesday, killing 46 civilians.
The latest effort to end the southern conflict began in Kenya in 2002, and the government and the rebels have already agreed on how to share the wealth in Africa's largest country and what to do with their armed forces during a six-year transition period.
But the talks stalled in recent months as the parties wrangled over how to share power in a transitional government, whether the capital, Khartoum, should be governed under Islamic law and how Southern Blue Nile, Nuba Mountains and Abyei -- areas in central Sudan -- should be administered during the transition period.
The protocols signed Wednesday covered all those outstanding issues.
"This is not the final stretch of the peace process," said Lazaro Sumbeiywo, the chief Kenyan mediator. "It is one of the giant steps."
Details of the agreements were not immediately available. But Sudanese Transport Minister Sammani Waseilah said the parties agreed that Khartoum will be governed under Islamic law, and that there will be provisions for non-Muslims, but no special protections. He declined to give details of the power-sharing arrangements for the three disputed areas.
The southern conflict began in 1983 after rebels from the mainly animist and Christian south took up arms against the predominantly Arab and Muslim north. Although often simplified as a religious war, the conflict is fueled by historical disputes and competition for resources, including major oil reserves.
-------- arms
Report: Israel may purchase two submarines from Germany
By Yossi Melman,
Haaretz Correspondent
27/05/2004
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/431966.html
Israel is planning to purchase two additional submarines from Germany, the German newspaper Bild reported Wednesday. Israel has in the past attained three submarines from the German government.
The paper quoted senior government officials who said Israel has made preliminary inquiries regarding the possible purchase.
The submarines, of the U-212 model, are manufactured in shipyards in the city of Kiel, and are considered very modern and hard to detect.
According to the report, German law prohibits the government from selling arms to conflict regions. However, in the past decade Israel has purchased three submarines, all funded by the German government.
The German government, headed by Helmut Kohl, agreed to supply and fund the three submarines after it became known that the Iraqi Scud missiles fired toward Israel during the Gulf war in 1991 were built with German aid.
Israel also decided to purchase the submarines from Germany rather than from the U.S. because the Americans only manufacture nuclear powered submarines and the German submarines are powered by diesel fuel.
According to various foreign reports, the submarines are capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
-------- balkans
Military intelligence head in Serbia and Montenegro sacked
BELGRADE (AFP)
May 27, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040527094353.5u2tbkje.html
The chief of military intelligence in Serbia and Montenegro has been sacked because of his claims that intelligence agents had infiltrated extremist groups operating in Kosovo, radio B92 reported Thursday.
Colonel Momir Stojanovic said in an interview in February that the military security agency VBA had been working in the Serbian province, and had managed to penetrate extremist organizations operating there, among them Al-Qaeda.
"The Defense Council discussed information given by the Ministry of Defense related to statements to media by the head of the Military Security Agency and decided to dismiss him," council head and Serbia-Montenegro's President Svetozar Marovic said.
The council, the top state body in charge of the army at the same session late Wednesday promoted Stojanovic to the rank of general, the radio said. He will be replaced by Colonel Svetko Kovac.
In his interview, Stojanovic claimed that the Al-Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden and other terror groups were present in Kosovo and northern Albania and were planning to step up their activities in the Balkans region.
Stojanovic, appointed to the post in March 2003, headed the Yugoslav army intelligence service in Kosovo during the 1998-99 conflict.
A witness at the war crimes trial to former president Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague has pointed to Stojanovic as the officer who had ordered a mass killing of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in reprisal for a murdered Serb officer.
Kosovo has been under United Nations and NATO control since June 1999, following a 78-day bombing campaign that forced Serbian armed forces out of the majority ethnic Albanian province.
-------- britain
Blair Backs U.S. on Control of Troops in Iraq
Media Storm Finds British Prime Minister Backing Away From Statement About Operations
By Andrew Cawthorne
Reuters
Thursday, May 27, 2004; Page A25
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59141-2004May26.html
LONDON, May 26 -- British Prime Minister Tony Blair sought Wednesday to suppress talk of a split with the United States over Iraq, saying foreign troops' operations should stay under U.S. command after an interim Iraqi government takes over.
"We are both absolutely agreed there should be full sovereignty transferred to the Iraqi people and that the multinational force should remain under American command," he told Parliament.
On Tuesday, he surprised some officials in Washington by saying Iraqis would have a veto over operations such as the recent attacks on Fallujah. That prompted Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to fire back that American forces would stay under U.S. command.
As reporters and opposition politicians in London highlighted what appeared to be the first open sign of division between London and Washington since the Iraq war began, Blair countered that he was still in line with President Bush.
"The ultimate strategic and political decision-making passes to the Iraqi government after the 30th of June. . . . Once strategic decisions have been made, the running of any operations is under the military forces and the commanders of those forces," he said.
Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott labeled talk of an Anglo-American split "complete rubbish."
Powell said Tuesday that the United States "would take into account" the Iraqis' views on political and military issues. "Ultimately, however, if it comes down to the United States armed forces protecting themselves or in some way accomplishing their mission in a way that might not be in total consonance with what the Iraqi interim government might want to do at a particular moment in time, U.S. forces remain under U.S. command and will do what is necessary to protect themselves," he said.
----
Ghostbusters descend on British navy base
LONDON (AFP)
May 27, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040527105122.x4nisyr7.html
Ghostbusting paranormal researchers will visit a big Royal Navy base in the south of England this weekend to investigate reports that it is haunted, their team leader said Thursday.
Psychics, mediums and investigators will spend two nights attempting to detect ghosts at Devonport Naval Base in Plymouth, using seances and sophisticated sensors.
They will focus their attention on the Hangman's Cell, reputed to be where more than 100 men were executed, and the Master Ropemaker's House which dates back to the 1700s.
Ian Addicoat, president of the Paranormal Research Organisation, will accompany the 20-strong team of investigators.
"With the history of the site and the alleged paranormal activity, we should be in for an interesting couple of days," Addicoat was quoted as saying by Britain's domestic Press Association news agency.
"If there are ghosts or strange occurrences, we stand a great chance of finding out as we will be using scientific equipment, bringing our best investigators and spending two full nights in the active areas."
The ghostbusters will analyse every sound and movement they record at Devonport and present their findings to the Royal Navy.
-------- business
Iraq Arms Contract Misses Deadline
By James V. Grimaldi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 27, 2004; Page A24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58768-2004May26.html
None of the bidders competing for an already-delayed contract awarded this week to equip the new Iraqi army were able to meet the schedule set by U.S. military officials, according to a U.S. Army contracting document.
ANHAM Joint Venture of Vienna, which the Army on Tuesday announced won the contract with a bid of $259 million, is a reconstituted version of the group of companies that won the first round of bidding in January only to see the award cancelled and the contract rebid because of complaints about the bidding process.
Senior U.S. commanders, preparing to turn over sovereignty to Iraq on June 30, have complained for months that delays in providing the basic military equipment called for in the contract have hampered efforts to rebuild Iraq's army, which is considered key to taming insurgents and maintaining security.
"None of the [proposals] meet the solicitation's desired delivery schedule," according to the Army's Source Selection Authority summary, dated May 21, which was obtained by The Washington Post. "ANHAM deliveries begin in September 2004 and conclude in March 2005, while [a rival bidder] deliveries begin in November 2004 and complete in December 2004," the contracting document states.
An Army contracting official familiar with the process said all bidders failed to meet the military deadline for providing supplies -- which include tents, first aid kits, rifles, machine guns and vehicles -- by an average of more than three months. He asked not to be named.
The document shows that ANHAM ranked second in terms of ability to meet the delivery deadlines. The next-closest bidder ranked slightly better, but contracting officials said they were impressed that ANHAM could begin armament deliveries sooner.
"They could start sooner," the official who asked not to be named said. "We know the urgency of it."
The winner's ability to deliver sooner, combined with a better bid price, which was deemed "clearly more advantageous than that of any other offers," helped make the difference, according to the document.
Army spokesman Maj. Gary Tallman said ANHAM was expected to begin providing some supplies Iraqi forces on July 15. A spokesman for ANHAM, Robert Hoopes, said, "We're going to start delivering materials on July 15, maybe sooner. Obviously they are in desperate need of this material, so were doing everything we can to get this material there."
ANHAM is only slightly different from Nour USA Ltd., which led the group that first won the contract. It is made up of American International Services/Uni Trans of Reston; Nour; HAIFinance Corp. of Tyson's Corner; Arab Supply and Trading Co. (ASTRA), of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and Munis Sukhtian Group of Amman, Jordan. Astra was not originally part of the Nour-led group.
A key ANHAM official, A. Huda Farouki, is a longtime friend of Ahmed Chalabi, the former Pentagon informant and Iraqi National Congress official whose offices were searched for evidence of espionage last week.
Chalabi's ties to Farouki -- a founder of HAIFinance and part-owner of American International Services -- go back more than a decade. Chalabi's Petra Bank lent money to a Farouki business that was having difficulties in the 1980s.
Rival bidders complained about the Chalabi ties, but their formal challenges to the Nour group's initial winning bid were based on the bidding process. The rivals said Nour's bid was unrealistically low to meet the terms set by the military. The rivals also contended that the Nour group lacked experience for a particularly risky operation.
An Army review found vague contract language, missing paperwork, staff turnover and general instability had made the process so flawed that the contract to the Nour group had to be terminated.
"There is a perception we have been fighting that Nour did something wrong, which is totally not true," Tallman said.
The Army contracting official who asked not to be named said yesterday that 60 percent of ANHAM's proposal contained items different than those in the original Nour contract. The bid was lower because the latest request was for fewer supplies. Military officials have supplied Iraqi forces through interim contracts.
After the first contract award, six contractors filed protests to the General Accounting Office. Yesterday none had done so, a GAO spokesman said.
--------
Lockheed, Gen'l Dynamics Get Design Deal
May 27, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/business/business-arms-lockheed.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Teams led by General Dynamics Corp. (GD.N) and Lockheed Martin Corp. (LMT.N) have won final design contracts that could lead to $12 billion or more in orders for the Littoral Combat Ship, a new series of quick, coastal fighters for the U.S.-declared war on terror, the Navy said Thursday.
The two beat out Raytheon Co. (RTN.N) which had won the right to offer a competing preliminary design of the new ship last July.
Both companies will be ``well-postured'' to compete for future ship orders, John Young, the Navy's assistant secretary for research, development and acquisition, told a Pentagon briefing after financial markets closed.
Asked about a Congressional Research Service analysis that said the Navy may seek 60 of the new shore-hugging ships worth some $12 billion, Young said the estimate was ``in the ballpark.''
The Navy said General Dynamics' Bath Iron Works unit's initial contract was worth $78.8 million with options that could boost it to $536 million for construction of a first ship starting in fiscal 2006, subject to congressional approval.
Lockheed Martin's was valued at $46.5 million, with options worth up to $423 million for construction of a first ship in fiscal 2005, also subject to congressional approval.
Each contract includes options for construction of two first-generation ships of each type. The first would be delivered in fiscal 2007, which begins Oct. 1, 2006. In addition, the Bush administration has sought funds for nine more such ships.
The highly modular ships are projected to cost up to $250 million each fully equipped. They are intended to support a wide range of joint missions in the face of threats from surface craft, submarines and underwater mines.
``Increasingly, you see the waterways being used to transit people, potential terrorists having the opportunity to employ explosives on boats,'' Young said.
``We need this ship today,'' the Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Vern Clark, said.
The Defense Department described the ships as shallow-drawing dynamos fine-tuned to fight enemies of the 21st century.
``Operational experience and analyzes indicate that potential adversaries will employ asymmetric capabilities to deny U.S. and allied forces access in critical coastal regions to include strategic choke points and vital economic sea lanes,'' it said.
The designs of the two ships are different, although both are capable of speeds upward of 40 knots and both need only 4.5 meters or less of depth to operate..
``It's extremely possible that we would get a mixture of the two,'' Rear Adm. Charles Hamilton, the Navy's program executive officer for ships, told the briefing, discussing possible future purchases.
The Navy wants a new ship that is versatile enough to back up special operations forces, thwart torpedo-armed ultra-quiet submarines and handle a variety of spy missions as well as coastal interdiction.
The craft is part of a new family of warships that includes the next-generation destroyer DD(X) and guided missile cruiser.
-------- chemical weapons
EPA issues fine over release of nerve gas on Pacific wildlife sanctuary
Thursday, May 27, 2004
By Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-05-27/s_24294.asp
SAN FRANCISCO - The U.S. Army and a contractor were fined nearly $52,000 for releasing a deadly chemical weapon on a wildlife sanctuary in the Pacific Ocean, federal environmental officials announced Wednesday.
An unknown quantity of VX nerve agent was released in August 2002 at a chemical weapons disposal facility on Johnston Atoll, said the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)'s office in San Francisco. The release occurred when a tray holding remnants of a VX shell was improperly loaded into an incinerator.
Exposure to the agent can cause paralysis and death within minutes, but there were no known exposures or reports of harm to any person or any wildlife, said Dean Higuchi of the EPA.
The atoll, located 825 miles southwest of Honolulu, is a national a bird sanctuary. It also held more than 6 percent of the nation's stockpile of chemical weapons: 412,000 different types of explosives, mustard and nerve agents. Congress ordered the weapons destroyed in 1986.
Disposal began in 1990 at a facility jointly operated by the Army and its contractor, Washington Group International of Boise, Idaho. Neither the Army nor Washington Group admitted wrongdoing as part of the fine.
The Army had agreed to pay nearly $400,000 for previous violations in 1994 and 2000 involving VX and sarin gas.
More than 4 million pounds of chemical weapons and agents have been destroyed on Johnston Atoll since 1990. The Army has dismantled the facility and is in the process of restoring the site to its natural role as a wildlife refuge.
-------- europe
Ukraine to add 150 troops to its Iraq force
KIEV (AFP)
May 27, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040527101205.w7iugb0i.html
Ukraine said Thursday that it planned to add an additional 150 troops to its 1,600-plus contingent in Iraq this summer, reinforcing its support for the US-led campaign.
"This is a decision forced by the situation" in Iraq, a defense ministry official told AFP by telephone, as officials advanced early August as the likely date for the soldiers' deployment.
A former Soviet republic that has been voicing its intentions to join the NATO alliance -- a likelihood that at the moment seem remote -- Ukraine has the fifth-largest contingent in Iraq, serving in the southern sector overseen by Polish troops.
Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, who has strained relations with Washington because of his country's much-criticized human rights record, has vowed to keep his forces in Iraq despite decisions by Spain, Honduras and the Dominican republic to pull out their troops.
Three Ukrainian soldiers so far have been killed in combat, and the country's parliament has passed a resolution allowing for up to 1,800 of its troops to be dispatched to the country.
They were first deployed to the region in September 2003.
-------- iraq
How Much Is Hussein's Departure Worth?
by Harry Browne
May 27, 2004
http://www.harrybrowne.org/articles/PriceOfRemovingHussein.htm
Despite all that's gone wrong with "Operation Iraqi Freedom" (such as the lack of freedom for Iraqis), we still hear over and over that "the world is a better place with Saddam Hussein gone."
Is it really?
Everything in life has a price - even getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Any goal or result must be compared with the price to be paid - in order to determine whether the goal is, or was, worth it. No goal can be said to be worth any price.
In the case of Hussein, the price involves the tens of billions of dollars of our tax money that have been lavished on the task of driving one man from power - and on cleaning up the mess that operation caused.
Name your Price
But, even more important, the price comes in the number of human lives that are snuffed out.
So we must ask ourselves:
How many human lives are a proper price to pay for the removal of Saddam Hussein?
Would you say removing Hussein would be worth it if a million people - Americans and Iraqis - had to die to achieve it?
If the answer is no, let's try a lower price. How about 100,000?
If that's too many, how about 10,000 lives being snuffed out to remove one man from power?
The Relevant Question
Let's make is simpler. Rather than throwing numbers around, let's ask just one question:
Would removing Hussein be worth it if the cost were just one human life - but that life was yours?
Would you be willing to die to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq?
If the answer is no, then anything you have to say about the world being a better place now - about collateral damage - about the glory of soldiers sacrificing their lives for their country - is meaningless. You're not willing to pay the price. You're like so many people who believe various government programs are wonderful - provided someone else pays for them.
Everyone who has died so far in Iraq had a life that meant as much to him as your life means to you. But now that life is gone, done, finished, nevermore.
By supporting the war in Iraq, you have supported the idea that it's okay to kill people - other people.
But until you're willing to volunteer to be one of those killed, your words don't carry any weight.
----
A Different Street Fight in Iraq
U.S. General Turns to Public Works in Battle for Hearts and Minds
By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, May 27, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58770-2004May26?language=printer
BAGHDAD, May 26 -- The American counterinsurgency effort in Iraq's largest urban war zone is being fought in the sewers. Maj. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, an earnest tank officer who recalled that he once dreamed of commanding "large mechanized formations across vast open deserts," is instead knee-deep in a very different fight.
The recently arrived commander of the Army's 1st Cavalry Division pulled up Wednesday to a trash-strewn lot in Al-Rashid, a treacherous southern suburb of Baghdad. A moat of sewage ringed the neighborhood, giving off an eye-watering stench in the noon sun. People assembled before easels and a podium. In front of them, huge pipes, pieces for a sewer system in a neighborhood that has never had one, waited to be set into the cracked mud.
"Your struggle is not with the occupation," Chiarelli told the several dozen community leaders and a pack of local reporters seated on plastic chairs before him. "Your struggle is right before your eyes."
A career tank officer who once taught political science at West Point, Chiarelli contends that public works projects may be more effective than guns in deciding the future of Iraq. He said he fears that time might be running out for the U.S. occupation after a year of enduring war and sluggish reconstruction that has left many Iraqis not knowing where to turn.
Chiarelli, the U.S. officer responsible for greater Baghdad, is among a number of commanders in Iraq who blame the U.S. civilian authority for many of the missteps that have plagued the occupation and turned many Iraqis against U.S. forces. The U.S. effort to improve the lives of ordinary Iraqis, hailed by President Bush this week as a notable achievement over a difficult year of occupation, has been largely forgotten in the recent surge of violence.
The armed resistance has targeted U.S. reconstruction efforts in the hopes of demonstrating to Iraqis that the U.S. occupation, despite its $18.4 billion development budget, has been a failure. If the resistance is successful, U.S. officials here fear, the Iraqi government scheduled to assume political authority from the Americans on June 30 would begin with very little public support.
Chiarelli described the next five weeks as the equivalent of an election campaign, and he said he intends to win it by drawing on lessons he once imparted to students: Understand your constituency and deliver on promises. He is targeting Iraq's "fence-sitters," his term for the mostly poor or barely middle-class Iraqis who he estimates account for 40 percent of the population.
They are deciding now, as the handover date approaches, whether to back the next government or an insurgency working in such neighborhoods as Al-Rashid to undermine it.
Chiarelli is tall and lanky, standing a head higher than most of his officers or the Iraqis he works with. His face is long, and his short black hair is graying at the temples. His arrival in March coincided with an upsurge in armed resistance, and he worries that beleaguered Iraqis may turn to the insurgency after months of neglect by U.S. civilian officials.
In a convoy of armored Humvees, Chiarelli rumbled Wednesday into a section of Al-Rashid known as Al-Shurta, the Arabic word for police. During ousted president Saddam Hussein's rule, members of Hussein's security services received free houses in the neighborhood. U.S. officials say those disaffected officials make up the backbone of the resistance.
Chiarelli kicked off two sewer projects that will cost $31 million, part of a $240 million pot of money he has to spend on public works construction and power generation. Instead of hiring private contractors, Chiarelli intends to turn senior military officers into project managers, saving the high security costs that have become a part of doing business in Iraq.
To prepare for the rebuilding, Chiarelli sent his brigade commanders to four months of civil affairs training, including a three-day seminar with the city planning department of Austin. From headquarters on the Baghdad International Airport grounds, the division peppers Austin planners daily with questions over a direct Internet link.
But those early perceptions of a nation-building operation vanished in the first days after the division's arrival. Intense street fighting in the concrete mazes of Al-Rashid, Sadr City and the town of Abu Ghraib during the first weeks of April stunned Chiarelli and his senior officers at a time when they expected to be dealing with the conflicting interests of Iraqi civil society. "If you'd have told me I was going to lose 36 soldiers in less than 45 days," said Chiarelli, his voice trailing off. He commands about 15,000 troops here. "The key to winning this is that we've got to show them progress."
"We're fighting at night and building by day," said Col. Steve Lanza, the burly, affable brigade commander from Brooklyn, N.Y., in charge of southern Baghdad.
Soon after the groundbreaking ceremony ended, a group of tribal sheiks strode up to Chiarelli. One complained that they were not formally invited to the event. "We think this means you don't respect us," Ismael Dona said.
About 10,000 neighborhood residents belong to the tribes and generally follow what the sheiks say. Chiarelli, the 54-year-old son of a butcher in Seattle who was a lifelong union member, realized immediately he was looking at what amounted to a wildcat strike before the job had even begun.
"Not at all, and this is the first of many ceremonies," Chiarelli bellowed good-naturedly about not respecting the sheiks. "How about some pictures?"
With that, the group walked over to a set of souvenir shovels and dug into the dirt for a second groundbreaking. The sheiks were appeased for the moment, but their long-term interests revolve around which tribe will secure the bulk of the 1,200 jobs on the project to lay seven miles of pipe and renovate a pump station to rid the streets of standing green slime.
"That's the next fight," Lanza said. "Who gets the work."
The people in the surrounding neighborhood, many of whom Chiarelli places among the fence-sitters, remain skeptical of the project. "Any possible improvements in basic services will help the Americans," said Ismael Saeed Abdul Rahman, a 50-year-old electrical engineer with a graduate degree, who has remained ambivalent about the occupation. "The Americans should have done it from the beginning, when they were welcomed."
Chiarelli said U.S. civilian officials have moved too slowly to free up public works money and failed to ask the Iraqis to draw up their own wish lists, as his senior officers have done and compiled in an inch-thick binder he flips through during meals.
He said he believes U.S. civilian officials focused too intently on satisfying the Iraqis who already support them -- a group he estimates at 55 percent of the population -- rather than reaching out to those who still might.
Referring to the insurgents, he said, "This is their worst nightmare -- our delivering on promises to these places." Of the fence-sitters, he added, "They don't believe me. They think this should have been done a year ago."
In seeking to minimize conflict with any Iraqi, even those among the 5 percent he says "we'll probably have to hunt down and capture or kill," Chiarelli has experimented with solutions short of war.
Last week, on the edge of the Shiite slum of Sadr City, a stronghold of an anti-occupation militia, Chiarelli's officers tried out a law enforcement technique imported from urban American: the weapons buyback.
The program, which pays Iraqis for weapons they turn in, was part of a truce arranged between Chiarelli's officers and sheiks from the neighborhood. The sheiks would rein in the militia, led by cleric Moqtada Sadr, and U.S. forces would cut down on patrols. Chiarelli's idea was to allow his soldiers back in the neighborhood to continue public works projects, but first he had to stop the shooting. The gun buyback was an incentive.
For days, men, women and children lined up outside a sports stadium on the neighborhood's dusty edge. They clutched burlap sacks filled with AK-47s, each selling for $200. Little girls held artillery rounds. A donkey cart dragged in a worn antiaircraft gun.
"If they keep this going a few more days, maybe I'd bring them a chemical weapon," said Khadar Hassan, 35 and unemployed, holding a sack full of assault rifles. "I have 35 more of these at home."
Capt. Kevin Baird, a 29-year-old from Nashville, watched the flow of weapons burn through his budget with an air of amusement and amazement. By the end of six days, he had collected 800 AK-47s and half that many rocket-propelled grenade rounds -- each one of which, he said, would likely have killed a soldier or crippled a vehicle.
"We knew everyone had an AK-47, but the tank rounds, artillery rounds, we had no idea," said Baird, surveying piles of munitions cluttering the stadium tunnels. "This is stuff they had just laying around the house. It's made a dent, maybe only a small dent, but there are now that many fewer guns that will shoot at us down the road."
The larger truce collapsed over the weekend after stepped-up attacks on U.S. soldiers, and Chiarelli's troops have been fighting intensely in the neighborhood ever since. Chiarelli said fighting continued because the sheiks could not control the fighters.
Chiarelli's intelligence officers have shown him a map of Sadr City that reinforces his belief that public services are key to defeating the insurgency. The map transposes information on unemployment, sewer capacity and electrical service with the number of guerrilla cells and attacks on U.S. troops. The areas where unemployment is highest and public services most feeble are the same areas where the insurgents are most active recruiting in mosques and schools, and attacking his soldiers.
"It's a classic insurgency -- you go to the have-nots," Chiarelli said. "This 40 percent could easily flip over to follow Moqtada. Someone else will fill the void."
Special correspondent Huda Ahmed Lazim contributed to this report.
--------
U.S. Agrees to Suspend Fighting in Najaf After Deal With Cleric
May 27, 2004
By CHRISTINE HAUSER and KIRK SEMPLE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/27/international/middleeast/27CND-IRAQ.html?hp
BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 27 - Leaders of the American-led occupation in Iraq agreed today to suspend offensive operations in the Shiite holy city of Najaf after local leaders struck a deal with a radical cleric who has led a two-month resistance to American-led coalition troops.
The developments could represent a breakthrough in the unrelenting and bloody standoff as the American-led governing authority prepares to hand over sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government on June 30. A coalition spokesman, Dan Senor, was careful in his assessment of the deal, calling it "a first sign" and "a first step."
Under the deal, coalition forces would remain in Najaf until Iraqi security forces return and assume full control of security in the city, Dan Senor, spokesman for the Provisional Coalition Authority, said at a news conference here. Once Iraqi security forces were in place, coalition troops would withdraw from the city leaving behind small "protective units" to guard the coalition offices and governor's building, Mr. Senor said.
During the changeover, he explained, coalition forces would suspend offensive operations in the city.
At the same time, fighters loyal to the rebel cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, would evacuate government buildings and, except for those from Najaf, withdraw from the city, according to the plan. Mr. Senor said Mr. Sadr has also agreed to begin discussions with Shiite leaders concerning the dissolution of his militia.
"Successful implementation of these commitments will permit the people of Najaf governate, who have been terrorized by Moktada's militia, to resume their normal lives," Mr. Senor said. "It will also permit the safe resumption of pilgrimage to the shrine of Imam Ali and the removal of further danger to that shrine by parties seeking to inflame the population."
Mr. Sadr is wanted by Iraqi and American authorities in connection with the murder of a rival cleric. Mr. Senor said that as part of the deal announced today, coalition authorities would temporarily halt efforts to capture him, but said that the coalition would continue to insist that the cleric abolish his militia and surrender to authorities. The spokesman refused to put a deadline on Mr. Sadr's surrender, leaving open the question of whether and when the Americans would move to seize the cleric if he did not turn himself in.
"We expect Moktada al-Sadr and the representative of the Shiite House to open discussions to resolve these issues as soon as possible," Mr. Senor said.
American authorities emphasized that they were acting at the behest of Shiite leaders who have been negotiating with Mr. Sadr.
Earlier today, Mr. Sadr's spokesman, Qais al-Khazali, publicly announced the cleric's terms in the deal.
Also today, Dr. Hussain al-Shahristani, an Iraqi nuclear scientist who had been mentioned as a likely candidate to lead a new interim government here, confirmed for reporters today that he had withdrawn his name from consideration, but did not provide a reason.
He said at a news conference that he intended to work at the grass-roots level to prepare the country for elections next year.
"I would rather ask questions in Parliament than answer them," he said.
But a source involved in the process said Mr. Shahristani would have been reluctant to accept the appointment because some of the parties on the Governing Council have wanted the position for themselves and did not feel that a non-partisan person would be the best candidate.
Assuming the deal takes effect, it would end at least temporarily the worst fighting in Iraqi Shiite cities since the start of the year-old American-led occupation. The battles have raged close to shrines in Najaf and in Karbala; both cities are sacred pilgrimage sites for the world's Shiite Muslims.
A delegation from the American-allied Iraqi Governing Council was in Najaf today staging a strike in mosques and shrines until a political solution is reached. "Our goal is to reactivate all peaceful initiatives," said a deputy to a governing council member, Jawad Bolani.
Hundreds of Iraqis have been killed in Najaf and Karbala, medical officials say.
The tentative deal between Mr. Sadr and the American authorities comes a day after coalition forces arrested Mr. Sadr's lieutenant, Riyadh al-Nouri, who is considered a key figure in the cleric's militia. He has been handed over to Iraqi authorities for prosecution in connection with the same murder in which Mr. Sadr has been implicated.
Christine Hauser contributed reporting from Baghdad and Kirk Semple contributed reporting from New York for this article.
--------
U.S. General Says Iraqi Security Will Run Abu Ghraib by August
By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 27, 2004; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58734-2004May26.html
BAGHDAD, May 26 -- The U.S. military plans to vacate Abu Ghraib prison by August, handing over operation of the facility to Iraqi security forces and transferring the remaining detainees 300 miles to the southeast, prison authorities said Wednesday.
In an interview at the prison, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, deputy commander of U.S. military detainee operations in Iraq, said the military had already relinquished the cell blocks at Abu Ghraib, where American soldiers were photographed abusing Iraqi prisoners late last year. The last of the security detainees -- civilians accused of attacks on U.S. forces -- being held by the U.S. military were moved last week from the cell blocks to tent camps on the grounds of the 280-acre Abu Ghraib compound, 20 miles west of Baghdad.
About 1,500 prisoners accused of common crimes remain in the cell blocks, guarded by Iraqi police.
The 3,000 security detainees will remain in tents here until they are released or transferred to Umm Qasr, the port in southern Iraq where 2,000 detainees are already being held at a facility called Camp Bucca. Miller said the prisoners will be safer at Camp Bucca than at Abu Ghraib, where a mortar attack in April killed 22 detainees and wounded 91.
The plans outlined by Miller made clear that the United States will maintain a large detention facility in Iraq after June 30 to deal with what it deems to be security threats. It was not clear, however, what authority the U.S. military will have to detain and operate a facility in Iraq when it is no longer the occupying power in the country.
Miller said 980 prisoners will be released from Abu Ghraib in the next two weeks as military officials attempt to reduce the prison population to 1,500 by June 30, when occupation authorities are to turn over limited authority to an interim Iraqi government. More than 1,700 prisoners have been released in the last 30 days.
Seven members of the U.S. Army's 372nd Military Police Company have been charged with abusing detainees at the prison. In statements to investigators, the soldiers said they were ordered to prepare prisoners for interrogations by military intelligence officers.
An Army investigation released in March found that Miller, who was brought here last fall to advise on improving interrogations of Iraqi detainees, had encouraged military police officers to play a greater role in interrogations. Miller has denied the assertion.
The top U.S. intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib also has said in sworn testimony that Miller inspired and promoted the use of guard dogs there to frighten the Iraqis. Miller has denied telling the officer, Col. Thomas Pappas, to use the dogs.
In an interview at Abu Ghraib on Monday, Lt. Col. Craig Essick, commander of the 391st Military Police Battalion, which has 700 soldiers at the prison, said his military police escort prisoners to interrogation and bring them back but do not "get involved directly with interrogations."
"We aren't doing anything except what we should be doing," he said.
As he toured the prison with a group of mostly Iraqi journalists on Wednesday, Miller walked past shiny chain-link fences topped with barbed wire. Behind the barriers, detainees wearing civilian clothes or towels draped around their waists signaled with their hands and called out in Arabic.
Miller said life in the prison has improved significantly in the past month. "Thirty days ago, they weren't waving," said Miller, the former commander of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. "We're working very hard. It's hard to be patient."
As Miller approached the fence, three English-speaking detainees spoke softly to him. They were the mayors of the section of the camp that was known as Camp Avalanche but was renamed Camp Redemption this month at the suggestion of a visiting member of the Iraqi Governing Council. The mayors represent different factions among the detainees.
"They always want to know the same thing: When am I getting out?" Miller said when asked what the detainees had discussed with him.
Miller said the military has made significant progress in winning back the trust of the detainees. He said violence among prisoners has dropped and the mood of the camps improved since detainees started being released.
A new visitor's center has been erected during the last several weeks, allowing up to 256 visits a day. Family visits had been limited to 30 per day. When families visit, the soldiers take a photograph of the detainee with his family. One copy is given to the family, and one is left with the detainee. "Being detained is hard enough," Miller said.
Convincing the rest of the Iraqi population that the military is treating the detainees humanely "will take more time," he said. "These detainees will have to tell the story."
Iraqis have complained that the U.S. military is unlawfully detaining people at the prison. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the military's top spokesman in Iraq, said Monday that the military is in the process of reviewing all prisoner files.
"We don't put them in Abu Ghraib to detain them for a period of time or to detain them until proven innocent," Kimmit said. "They are deemed to be a security threat by a judge through multiple sources. It's that simple. If they were innocent, they wouldn't be at Abu Ghraib."
Special correspondent Bassam Sabti contributed to this report.
-------- israel / palestine
Israelis, Palestinians Disagree on Damage Done in Rafah Camp
By Robin Shulman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, May 27, 2004; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58733-2004May26.html
GAZA CITY, May 26 -- After a week-long Israeli raid in the Rafah refugee camp, one of Israel's largest military operations since the Palestinian uprising began 3 1/2 years ago, Israeli, Palestinian and U.N. officials do not agree on how many residents were killed and how many homes destroyed.
Israeli army spokesmen and local health officials concurred that dozens of Palestinians had died during Operation Rainbow, which targeted Palestinian guerrillas in the refugee camp and tunnels used to smuggle weapons and other goods from nearby Egypt.
The Israeli army has reported 54 Palestinians killed in fighting during the operation. The military acknowledged that 14 of the dead were noncombatants but asserted that several of those were killed by Palestinian gunfire.
But at Najar Hospital in Rafah, which received the dead and injured, officials reported 62 dead, 25 of them under 18. Palestinian officials said few of the dead were gunmen.
The number of homes demolished is also in dispute.
The Israeli army reported 56 demolitions of structures in the refugee camp's Brazil and Tel Sultan neighborhoods, where the military operation was centered. The U.N. agency that serves Palestinian refugees, however, said 167 houses were "destroyed or rendered uninhabitable." And a committee of local people whose houses were destroyed has tallied more than 110 demolitions.
Capt. Jacob Dallal, an Israeli army spokesman, said Israel was only counting houses that were completely razed. "We don't keep track of partially demolished houses," Dallal said.
Dallal said the army assessed the extent of the damage by debriefing soldiers and examining satellite photos of the Rafah camp taken before and after Operation Rainbow. "There are always going to be conflicting figures," he said. "Our figure is an approximate estimation."
Peter Hansen, the commissioner general of the U.N. Refugee and Works Agency, said the agency's staff went house to house to examine the damage, tallying homes that either were destroyed or had lost walls or other structural elements that made them unlivable.
"We are on the ground, and we can count," Hansen said.
The 167 structures that the U.N. agency deemed uninhabitable had housed 379 families, or 2,066 individuals, Hansen said. The agency has counted 3,451 people made homeless by Israeli demolitions in Rafah since the beginning of May.
Yaron Ezrahi, a Hebrew University political scientist, said the issue of how many houses have been demolished is so contentious because the scope of the campaign of demolitions in Rafah affects Israeli popular opinion. This, in turn, could change the course of Israeli military action in the Gaza Strip. The presence of Jewish settlers and Israeli troops in Gaza, controversial for decades, has been the subject of particularly intense debate since Prime Minister Ariel Sharon proposed last year that they be withdrawn.
"Destruction at the level of 170 houses will remind people of bombing in World War II, the destruction of whole sections of cities," Ezrahi said. "That has a completely different impact" than the razing of a third that many homes, as reported by the military.
The disagreements came after a week in which Israeli and Palestinian officials repeatedly revised their accounts of what was happening in Rafah while Operation Rainbow was in progress.
Over the weekend, the army reported that only five houses had been demolished, but that did not jibe with television images of much wider destruction. On Sunday, the military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, reported 12 demolitions -- still far below the number that residents and journalists reported. By Monday night, the army had put the number at 56.
"It takes time to exactly assess numbers," said Dallal, the army spokesman.
Similarly, after Palestinian protesters were killed by Israeli tank and helicopter fire on May 19, Najar Hospital released figures saying seven children had been among the dead. It turned out later the number was four.
Ali Moussa, the hospital's director, said that initial miscounts were the result of confusion in the emergency room.
[Early Thursday, three Israeli tanks and a bulldozer destroyed three Palestinian houses outside the Gaza town of Deir el-Balah, witnesses and Palestinian security officials said, the Associated Press reported.]
-------- mideast
US wants to station warplanes at Turkish base: report
ISTANBUL (AFP)
May 27, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040527112021.mhgpijyn.html
The United States has asked Ankara for permission to station dozens of warplanes at a base in southern Turkey, which the US air force used to enforce a no-fly zone over northern Iraq prior to last year's invasion of the country, media reports said Thursday.
The deputy chief of the Turkish army, General Ilker Basbug, confirmed that they had received requests from the United States concerning the Incirlik base, without disclosing details.
"The requests are being evaluated," Basbug told reporters in Istanbul.
Both the NTV news channel and the Internet edition of the Milliyet newspaper reported that the United States had asked for permission to station 48 warplanes at Incirlik.
Basbug said an existing cooperation agreement between the two NATO allies allowed for the stationing of US jets at Incirlik only for training purposes.
Other missions will require an exclusive permission either by the Turkish government or the parliament, he added.
The Incirlik base was used by US and British fighter jets to patrol a no-fly zone over northern Iraq from the time of the Gulf War in 1991 until the invasion of Iraq last March.
Ankara then limited its use to logistical and humanitarian purposes.
US forces have also used the base for refuelling and troop rotation into Iraq and Afghanistan.
Washington has said it will like to use Incirlik as part of a project to realign its forces in Europe to better counter the threat of global terrorism.
Basbug declined to comment on reports that the United States was also seeking to use Turkish bases on the Black Sea coast, in the north of the country.
Ankara is eager to improve its relations with Washington, which soured last year when the Turkish parliament rejected a US request to use Turkish territory for an invasion of northern Iraq.
-------- nato
NATO invites Ukraine's president Kuchma to summit
KIEV (AFP)
May 27, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040527164132.qswrj9dr.html
Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, frequently criticized by Western powers for his record on media freedoms and human rights, has been invited to attend the June 28-29 NATO summit in Istanbul, a NATO official in Kiev said Thursday.
Kuchma attend the last summit in Prague in November, but was ostracized by the United States -- whose representatives should have been seated next to him, but made sure that they were not.
Washington at the time was pursuing an inquiry into whether Ukraine illegally provided sensitive military technology to Iraq and other nations seen as "rogue states" by the United States.
That probe proved inconclusive, and Ukraine denies the charges.
Kuchma has cautiously tried to position his country for future membership in NATO and distance itself from the dominating influence of its larger eastern neighbor Russia, on which it relies for its energy supplies.
Ukraine is a member of the Partnership for Peace program that NATO has set up for Eastern European republics, and has staged a series of joint military exercises with the alliance.
But NATO officials stress that Ukraine's membership remains on the distant horizon because of its unreformed military and disputable rights record.
Kuchma is due to step down after a decade in power in October.
----
Explosives found in Slovakia ahead of NATO meeting
BRATISLAVA (AFP)
May 27, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040527162636.koj41eu3.html
Two bags filled with explosives were found by Slovak police on Thursday near a building in the capital Bratislava where 300 NATO officials were to meet Friday.
The two plastic bags, containing a total of almost one and a half kilos (about three pounds) of industrial explosives and charges were discovered under a rubbish bin, interior ministry spokesman Boris Azaltovic said.
Around 300 representatives from 39 countries -- 26 members of the recently-expanded NATO and 13 associate members -- are due to gather for a five-day meeting of the transatlantic alliance's parliamentary assembly starting Friday in the city's concert hall.
Assembly spokesman Keith Williams described the discovery as "disturbing" but played down its significance and said that no changes to the meeting or extra security arrangements were planned.
"Given that the explosives were pretty old, the detonators were not linked up and no one has claimed responsibility this does not seem to be a serious threat. But it is possible that the intention was to activate the detonators later," Williams told AFP.
"It looks as if this was more a protest rather than a serious threat."
A spokesman at NATO headquarters in Brussels said: "We have full confidence in the ability of the Slovakian authorities to ensure security of the NATO parliamentary assembly."
Azaltovic said police had been warned by the Slovak secret services to be on the alert for explosives. They were alerted by a passer-by to the suspicious packages at 7 am (0500 GMT).
One bag contained 500 grams of Permonex 19, an explosive originating from the former Czechoslovakia, as well as a detonator, Azaltovic said. The second bag contained 920 grams of a yellow plastic explosive which contained Yugoslav-made Pentrit as well as an electric switch.
"The switch was not capable of sparking the explosive," said Azaltovic.
With security already tight in the city ahead of the meeting, Williams said no changes to the event or additional security were planned. Several streets have been closed off and police units plan to surround the building.
"If the situation changes or a non-benign warning is received then a change of plan could be considered," he said.
The Bratislava event comes two months after Slovakia and six other former Soviet bloc countries joined NATO on March 29. Slovakia also was among 10 mainly eastern European countries which joined the European Union on May 1.
The NATO meeting is set to discuss a variety of issues including the situation in Afghanistan and Iraq, the war against terror, nuclear proliferation and weapons of mass destruction and the security relationship between NATO and the European Union.
Permonex 19 is a red powder explosive manufactured from crystalline ammonium nitrate and TNT and is mainly used in open pits and underground mines while Pentrit is a widely-used explosive, particularly in quarrying.
-------- pakistan / india
Karachi Bombs Hit Near U.S. Consulate
Policeman Killed, 34 Hurt in Pakistan
By Kamran Khan
The Washington Post
Thursday, May 27, 2004; Page A28
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56766-2004May26.html
KARACHI, Pakistan, May 26 -- Two car bombs exploded Wednesday near the home of an American diplomat and an English-language school, killing a policeman and wounding 34 people, mostly policemen and journalists, police officials and doctors said.
The two bombs detonated about a half-hour apart in a heavily guarded neighborhood where the residence of the U.S. consul general and the Pakistani-American Cultural Center, a private school not affiliated with the U.S. government, are located.
Tariq Jamil, the head of police operations in Karachi, called the attack "the work of highly trained terrorists."
The bombings occurred one block from the U.S. Consulate, which has been the target of at least three attacks in two years, including a suicide bombing in June 2002 that killed 15 people. Since that attack, the consulate has not been open for normal business and has been run by a skeleton staff.
Police said the man believed to have organized the consulate bombing, identified as Kamran, was among at least eight Islamic militants arrested over the weekend in connection with a failed plot to kill Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, in April 2002. Senior police officials suggested that Wednesday's attack might have been carried out by Islamic guerrillas in retaliation for the arrests.
"Kamran, alias Atif, was the kingpin of terrorists who had sent suicide bombers to the U.S. Consulate in 2002," said Syed Kamal Shah, the chief of police in Sindh province. "We knew there will be a desperate response to his arrest."
Police said that the first bomb was apparently intended to attract a crowd and that the second, more powerful device inflicted most of the casualties.
The second explosion occurred just as a local television news crew was filming the car and describing it as an abandoned vehicle. Television images showed the explosion, followed by bleeding policemen and journalists emerging from behind thick smoke and debris.
"Luckily, many lives were saved because the injured people were quickly brought to the hospital by the ambulances which were already on the scene," said Hamid Jamali, a physician at Jinnah Hospital, where most wounded were taken.
Jamil, the head of police operations, said the first bomb apparently was planted in the parked car of a man who was visiting the school. "The higher-intensity bomb targeted against the police and journalist crowd was concealed in a car snatched only 90 minutes before the incident," Jamil said.
-------- prisoners of war
Army detention policies outdated
May 27, 2004
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040526-111106-5970r.htm
A pending Army inspector general's report has found that doctrines guiding the detention and interrogation of prisoners in the war on terror are Cold War relics that must be updated.
A Pentagon official, who asked not to be named, said Lt. Gen. Paul T. Mikolashek is in the final stages of writing his report, which is an investigation of detainee operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The official said one finding is that Army doctrines guiding military police and intelligence officers on how to treat and interrogate prisoners have not been updated for the war on terror.
The doctrines are basically leftovers from the Cold War, when scenarios anticipated holding enemy military personnel deemed prisoners of war who were specifically covered by the Geneva Conventions.
In this global war, the Army is holding different types of prisoners who receive different types of treatment and may not specifically be covered by the Geneva Conventions, or carry POW status.
The mix of prisoners includes terror suspects captured in Afghanistan, whom President Bush deemed "illegal enemy combatants." And in Iraq, they include foreign fighters and Iraqi insurgents, as well as common criminals who do not fit the classic definition of a prisoner of war.
"Everybody is learning from this," said the Pentagon official, referring to the prisoner-abuse scandal at the Abu Ghraib facility in Iraq that has the Army reviewing the way it houses detainees.
"It is not totally broken," the official said of current doctrine, "but it has to be revised."
The official said new doctrine will be written by U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, Fort Monroe, Va., and by U.S. Army Intelligence Center, Fort Huachuca, Ariz.
The Army has accused six military police soldiers of physically and emotionally abusing Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib. The Army says the soldiers failed to abide by Geneva Conventions that call for humane treatment of wartime detainees.
The new doctrine is likely to spell out what type of interrogation techniques are permissible for illegal combatants, as opposed to prisoners of war.
The Bush administration, in practice, has made distinctions between the two. In some cases, detainees have been put under stress to try to acquire intelligence information that could save lives by pre-empting attacks. Administration lawyers have ruled that some stress-inducing techniques, such as sleep deprivation, may be used without violating the Geneva Conventions.
Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Persian Gulf, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that the Army inspector general has not found systematic abuses of war detainees.
"I specifically asked the IG of the Army, did he believe that there was a pattern of abuse of prisoners in the Central Command area of operation, and he looked at both Afghanistan and Iraq, and he said no," Gen. Abizaid testified.
The Pentagon contends that the abuse at Abu Ghraib in the fall was inflicted by a small group of military police in two cell blocks holding some of the worst offenders, including some who had killed U.S. soldiers. Some MPs say they were ordered to make detainees strip and simulate sexual acts on orders from Army military intelligence officers.
Pentagon officials say all of this conduct is illegal and is likely to be specifically ruled out in new doctrine.
"They need new definitions of what to do," said a second defense official, noting that since the September 11 terror attacks, the military has had to adjust many tactics to fit the terrorist enemy and the times.
Larry Di Rita, spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, said yesterday that foreign fighters such as ones held in Afghanistan and Iraq could be determined "not in fact subject to the Geneva protections."
----
US Kills & Aids Killing Of 3,000 Prisoners In Cold Blood
http://www.acftv.com//more.asp?id=271&catid=5
Afghan Massacre The Convoy of Death
The film the United States authorities didn't want you to see: a compelling investigation into the true human cost of our "war against terror."
VHS Cassette (NTSC) Aspect Ratio 16:9 Anamorphic Running Time 50 Minutes £17.95
AFGHAN MASSACRE tells of the horrific forced journey undertaken by thousands of prisoners who surrendered to America's Afghan allies after the siege of Kunduz.
Bundled into containers, the lucky ones were shot within minutes. The rest suffered an appalling road trip lasting up to four days, clawing at the skin of their fellow prisoners as they licked perspiration and even drank blood from open wounds.
Up to 3,000 now lie buried in a mass grave, but this was NOT a simple matter of Afghans killing Afghans.
AFGHAN MASSACRE tells of how American Special Forces took control of the operation, re-directed the containers carrying the living and dead into the desert and stood by as survivors were shot and buried.
And it details how the Pentagon lied to the world in order to cover up its role in the greatest atrocity of the entire Afghan War. This is the documentary they did not want you to see.
AFGHAN MASSACRE was produced over ten months in extremely dangerous circumstances: eyewitnesses were threatened and subsequently killed, the film crew were forced into hiding and our researcher was savagely beaten to within an inch of his life. He was recently awarded the 2002 Rory Peck Award for Hard News, The SONY Award and the film has been nominated for a Royal Television Society Award for Current Affairs.
Please note that this it the NTSC version intended for use with NTSC video equipment in North America and Japan. An alternative PAL version is also available for European markets.
http://www.democracynow.org
DEMOCRACY NOW! DAILY EMAIL DIGEST May 20, 2004 http://www.democracynow.org
TODAY'S SHOW: Thursday, May 20
Afghan Massacre: Eyewitnesses Testify that US Troops Were Complicit in the Massacre of up to 3,000 Taliban Prisoners During the Afghan War
Listen/Watch/Read http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/20/147230
NOTE: This recording is not available for purchase through Democracy Now!. Buy the recording at ACFTV's web site at: http://www.acftv.net/more.asp?id=271&catid=5
----
Prison Interrogations in Iraq Seen as Yielding Little Data on Rebels
May 27, 2004
New York Times
By DOUGLAS JEHL and ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/27/politics/27ABUS.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, May 26 - The questioning of hundreds of Iraqi prisoners last fall in the newly established interrogation center at Abu Ghraib prison yielded very little valuable intelligence, according to civilian and military officials.
The interrogation center was set up in September to obtain better information about an insurgency in Iraq that was killing American soldiers almost every day by last fall. The insurgency was better organized and more vigorous than the United States had expected, prompting concern among generals and Pentagon officials who were unhappy with the flow of intelligence to combat units and to higher headquarters.
But civilian and military intelligence officials, as well as top commanders with access to intelligence reports, now say they learned little about the insurgency from questioning inmates at the prison. Most of the prisoners held in the special cellblock that became the setting for the worst abuses at Abu Ghraib apparently were not linked to the insurgency, they said.
All of the prisoners sent to Abu Ghraib had already been questioned by the troops who captured them for urgent information about roadside bombs, imminent attacks and the like.
The officials could not say whether the harsh interrogation methods used at Abu Ghraib were counterproductive. But they said few if any prisoners there had been able to shed light on questions to which Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top American commander for the Middle East, and his deputies had assigned highest priority, including the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein and the nature of the insurgency's leadership.
"Most of our useful intelligence came from battlefield interrogations, and at the battalion, brigade and division-level interrogation facilities," said a senior military intelligence officer who served in Iraq. Once prisoners were sent on to Abu Ghraib, the officer said, "we got very little feedback."
One American general who recently returned from Iraq put the concerns of many senior officers about what happened to the detainees this way: "There was a sense when someone was sent down there, they went into a black hole and never came out."
In Senate testimony last week, General Abizaid defended interrogation practices used in Iraq, saying the information obtained served to save American lives. But he made no specific mention of Abu Ghraib, and military officers said the kind of intelligence he was referring to, about the location of hidden explosives or the details of planned attacks, had been obtained more often by soldiers in the field.
General Abizaid made clear in his testimony that the intelligence-gathering effort that he and Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the top American commander in Baghdad, set in motion late last summer had fallen short of its intended goal of getting a clear picture of the insurgency.
"We were dealing with a systemic problem, and we still don't have as good a view as we'd like to have about the nature of the insurgency and who's in charge and where the cells move and how they operate," he said.
The Tier 1 cellblock at Abu Ghraib was set aside from the rest of the prison to house as many as 600 prisoners designated as "security detainees" because of their suspected involvement in or knowledge about attacks on American troops. This designation set them apart from the thousands of Iraqis imprisoned as criminals, who were held in less-secure sections of Abu Ghraib, and the 100 or so former top Iraqi officials designated as "high-value detainees" because of their suspected knowledge about Iraq's weapons programs or other such issues, and who were held in a special facility on the outskirts of the Baghdad airport.
In practice, however, many of the "security detainees" fell into a vague middle ground, between what Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld described this month as "high-value targets," who were "much more interesting from the standpoint of the interrogation process," and "a simple low-level person" who is "simply being kept off the street for a period."
In general, said a senior Army officer who served in Iraq, many of the prisoners held in the isolation wing at Abu Ghraib were kept there long beyond any period of usefulness because "no one wanted to be responsible for releasing the next Osama bin Laden."
According to two senior officers, in high-level meetings in Baghdad in December some top American commanders, including Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, commander of the Fourth Infantry Division, were openly unhappy about the quality of intelligence provided during a briefing by Brig. Gen. Barbara Fast, who as the intelligence deputy to General Sanchez oversaw the interrogation center at Abu Ghraib. "We weren't getting the feedback we wanted," one of the officers said.
The capture of Mr. Hussein later in December by soldiers from General Odierno's division and a team of military commandos was carried out on the basis of intelligence from sources interrogated outside the prison, senior Army officers said.
The Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib was established in September under the command of Lt. Col. Steve Jordan, and quickly established effective control over the cellblock set aside for the "security prisoners."
Many of the prisoners in that cellblock spent months in Abu Ghraib, and some became victims of horrific abuse at the hands of the military police. Army investigators are reviewing evidence that the guards were encouraged in their tactics by interrogators, who adopted harsh tactics used earlier in Afghanistan and were instructed to work closely with the guards to break down prisoners' resistance to questioning.
Interviews and documents obtained by The New York Times depict the interrogation center as a home to intimidating practices, including the use of dogs in interrogation rooms, some of which were constructed from shipping containers.
People who served there described a range of interrogation tactics, including interrogators' breaking tables as a show of force. One interrogation area, known as "Steel," was assembled in November from the shipping containers. Another, called "Wood," was built from that material in October, according to a former officer at the prison.
In some ways, the cellblock was much more tightly controlled than the rest of the prison.
An undated list of "operational guidelines" for the cellblock directs, among other things, that the officers overseeing the interrogation center "will provide Segregation M.P.'s with an access roster of persons allowed to access the cells and walkways in Areas 1A and 1B."
"Additionally," the document says, "it is recommended that all military personnel in the segregation area reduce knowledge of their true identities to those specialized detainees. The use of sterilized uniforms" - uniforms without insignia - "is highly suggested and personnel should NOT address each other by true name and rank in the segregation area."
No one from the interrogation center has been charged with crimes in connection with the abuses, several weeks after an initial Army inquiry suggested that Colonel Jordan, among three other senior officers and civilian contractors, was "directly or indirectly" culpable in the abuses.
General Sanchez and other Army officials have said broader control of Abu Ghraib was not transferred from a military police unit, under Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, to an Army intelligence unit, under Col. Thomas M. Pappas, until Nov. 19, when the intelligence unit was put in charge of protecting the prison against attack and of the inmates' safety. By then, abusive practices had been photographed in the prison for about a month, and the International Committee of the Red Cross had already filed an official complaint about the practices.
But the documents and interviews suggest that de facto control of the isolation cellblock had been given to the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center by mid-October.
A classified memorandum issued by General Sanchez on Oct. 12, outlining a new "interrogation and counter-resistance policy," directs that "the interrogator should appear to be the one who controls all aspects of the interrogation . . . as well as food, clothing, and shelter given to the security internee," according to a briefing provided to Senate staff members last week by two senior Army officers.
The Oct. 12 memorandum advocated an "interrogation approach designed to manipulate internees' emotions and weaknesses to gain his willing cooperation," the Army officers said in the briefing.
At the opposite end of the cellblock compound from the "Steel" interrogation site were the "Wood" interrogation rooms, according to Army officers who served at the prison.
The rooms in both sites included two-way mirrors, chairs and a table, but interrogations were also sometimes conducted in the showers, stairwells and other sections of the cellblock's isolation area, according to statements given to military investigators and included in the documents obtained by The Times.
The interrogation center also included an operations headquarters as well as what was known as Interrogation Coordination Element, or ICE, headed by Capt. Carolyn A. Wood of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, whose members had conducted interrogations at an American detention center at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.
On occasion, according to some statements collected in the investigations so far, members of the 372nd Military Police Company assigned to guard the isolation cellblock were invited into interrogation rooms and sometimes instructed to yell at or otherwise intimidate Iraqi prisoners being questioned. This is a violation of standard Army rules on the role of the military police.
One civilian interrogator, identified as Daniel E. Johnson, an employee of the Virginia-based CACI Premier Technology, is described in a Jan. 23 statement to an investigator as acknowledging that "he is aggressive in an interview, he generally yells in their face, and throws the table in the room."
Another civilian interrogator from the same company, whose employees were working in the interrogation center, was described as being known for breaking tables during interrogations.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the top military spokesman in Baghdad, has declined to respond to questions about the interrogation center or Colonel Jordan, saying that to do so could compromise an investigation being conducted by Maj. Gen. George Fay, the Army's No. 2 intelligence official.
But Col. Jill Morgenthaler, chief of public affairs at the military headquarters in Baghdad, acknowledged in an e-mail message that while Colonel Jordan had been "assigned to" Colonel Pappas's brigade, he was not under its operational control.
In interviews, several Army officers, including General Karpinski, said Colonel Jordan had received broad direction from General Fast, director of intelligence for occupation forces in Baghdad, who had been responsible for setting up the interrogation center.
-------- un
U.N. missions painted as booze-soaked orgies
May 27, 2004
By Stewart Stogel
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040527-121439-5861r.htm
NEW YORK - A book by three current and former U.N. employees about peacekeeping operations portrays wild parties with alcohol and drugs, and convicts and mental-asylum inmates passing as soldiers.
Embarrassed U.N. officials have threatened firing or other disciplinary action against two of the authors, Heidi Postlewait and Andrew Thomson. U.N. rules bar employees from writing about their work without approval, which had been denied in this case.
The third author, former U.N. employee Kenneth Cain, works full time as a writer.
The book, "Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Matters," covers the authors' experiences during the mid-1990s in Cambodia, Somalia and Haiti and paints unflattering pictures of the operations and the peacekeepers. It is due out on June 1.
The U.N. peacekeepers sent to Cambodia in 1993 to restore normalcy and supervise open elections, resembled "the international jet set on vacation," writes Mr. Cain, a Harvard law-school graduate.
The writers describe sex parties in "a villa" in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, that was "well-known for its Friday night parties," where alcohol and drugs were commonly used.
A favorite drink among the U.N. personnel at the parties was the "Space Shuttle." It was made "by distilling a pound of marijuana over a six-week period with increasingly good quality spirits. It is a work of love, and the final product is an amber-colored liquid that tastes like cognac. We drink it with rounds of Coke."
In another section, the authors say the "peacekeeping troops" sent to Cambodia by Bulgaria were not really soldiers.
They write that the Bulgarian government, starved for hard currency, actually cut a deal with inmates, offering them pardons if they accepted the U.N. assignment. Bulgaria, in turn, received financial compensation from the United Nations for its troops.
"The Bulgarians wanted the money, but didn't want to send their best-trained troops. So ... they offered inmates in the prisons and psychiatric wards a deal: Put on a uniform and go to Cambodia for six months, you're free on return," the book says.
Scores of criminals accepted the offer, were given uniforms and became U.N. peacekeepers, the authors say.
Mr. Cain describes the Bulgarians as "a battalion of criminal lunatics [who] arrive in a lawless land. They're drunk as sailors, rape vulnerable Cambodian women and crash their U.N. Land Cruisers with remarkable frequency."
The Bulgarian Embassy yesterday denied all accusations of wrongdoing in connection with its dispatch of peacekeepers to Cambodia.
"It is totally untrue that the mission was made up of prisoners. Its members were reservists, and they were led by military commanders. Our regular army units were forbidden by law from undertaking foreign assignments at that time," Ambassador Elena Poptodorova said.
On the charge that Bulgaria undertook the job because it needed hard currency, she said, "U.N. compensation for our expenses came much later."
She acknowledged that there were incidents involving the peacekeepers, but maintained that they were "the exception rather than the rule."
Without going into the merits of the accusations in the book, U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard conceded that the United Nations does not have a system to "verify" the credentials of troops offered for peacekeeping.
"When it comes to formed military units, we rely on the donor country to give us professional soldiers. ... There is not a quality-control test, and units vary in the degree of their training from country to country, even from unit to unit," he said.
Dr. Thomson, a U.N. physician, says in the book that he was sent to Haiti in mid-1993 to investigate human rights violations by the junta of Gen. Raoul Cedras.
In the country just a month, Dr. Thomson complained: "I'm already enraged, not by the work, but being unable to work. My patients are all either headless and rotting or alive and rotting, out of reach behind prison walls."
As conditions worsened, the United Nations decided on a pullout and sent Dr. Thomson to the nearby Dominican Republic.
"The U.N. yanked us out against our will into this catatonic tropical suburbia, this retirement home for failed humanitarians, leaving us sidelined with no way back in," he wrote.
Mr. Eckhard said a decision on whether to discipline the authors is "a political decision, but the authors have violated staff rules."
But he acknowledged that the world organization has no legal recourse to stop the publication of the book. A spokesman for the publisher, Miramax Books, said the company is not bound by obligations between the United Nations and the authors.
----
U.N. Council Members Want Iraqis at Negotiations
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 27, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58766-2004May26.html
UNITED NATIONS, May 26 -- France, Germany, Russia and China insisted Wednesday that Iraq's new interim leaders be allowed to participate in Security Council negotiations on the terms of a U.S. and British resolution on the country's political transition, potentially delaying plans to put the text to a vote as early as next week.
With the United States preparing to transfer power to the interim government on June 30, France's U.N. ambassador, Jean-Marc de La Sabliere, proposed that the 15-nation council deliberate for two weeks with a slate of Iraqi leaders to be named by U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi in the coming days.
The resolution would mark the formal handover of power to a "sovereign interim government" but establish an open-ended mandate for a U.S.-led multinational force to impose security and fight insurgents challenging the new government.
John D. Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador-designate to Iraq, said the council must move more quickly to adopt the resolution. "That just gets you up too close to the time of the actual transfer of sovereignty," he said.
The call for delay was one of a series of proposals Security Council members floated in a closed-door session. Most were aimed at pressing the United States to give the council and the Iraqis greater authority over the country's political future.
China presented a paper urging the United States and Britain to give Iraq's interim government control over its own police and troops. It also proposed that the mandate for U.S. and other foreign forces in Iraq expire in January 2005, when a new government is to be elected. Only the Security Council would have the authority to extend the mandate.
France and Germany, meanwhile, joined Britain in pressing the United States to grant the interim government authority to veto military operations by foreign forces on their soil. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, President Bush's chief ally in Iraq, said Tuesday that the U.S.-led multinational force will require Iraq's consent to conduct some military operations after June 30.
Negroponte said U.S. operations will be conducted with "the consent and approval" of Iraqi authorities. But he said "the mechanics and the details" of that arrangement "will be worked out on the ground between the political and military authorities on both sides."
The interim government, which will administer the country until the national elections are held by January 2005, will include a prime minister, a president and two vice presidents.
Ahmed Fawzi, a spokesman for Brahimi, issued a statement Wednesday saying that "progress is being made" in selecting a new government that "will have sufficient time to prepare to assume power and engage in meaningful consultations" on the resolution. Fawzi said Brahimi was not prepared to discuss the names of potential members of the new government "so as not to risk undermining the process."
But he sought to play down reports that a Shiite scientist, Hussain Shahristani, was the leading candidate for prime minister. Brahimi "has no doubt that Shahristani could serve his country well in a number of positions in government," Fawzi said. "Mr. Shahristani, however, has himself clarified that he would prefer to serve his country in other ways."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
Court Rules on Aided Suicide
Appeals Panel Says Ashcroft Overstepped Bounds in Oregon
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 27, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57399-2004May26.html
SEATTLE, May 26 -- A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that Attorney General John D. Ashcroft far exceeded his authority by interfering with Oregon's law on physician-assisted suicide.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco said that Ashcroft's order to the Drug Enforcement Administration to pursue and possibly revoke the licenses of physicians who prescribe lethal prescriptions "may not be enforced" because it goes against the will of Congress and contradicts federal law.
Ashcroft's 2001 order, even though it has been enjoined from enforcement pending appeal, caused a widespread "chilling effect" on the willingness of Oregon physicians to consult with or prescribe lethal drugs to patients seeking to die, said George Eighmey, executive director of Oregon-based Compassion in Dying.
"They told me they didn't want Ashcroft coming after them," Eighmey said. He said that in the past year, 142 people asked to start the process of assisted suicide, but only 42 went through with it.
Oregon's law is unique in the nation. The Bush administration has argued that "assisted suicide is not medicine." An assistant attorney general, Robert McCallum, said last year that a "caring society" should help the terminally ill cope with their problems, "not abandon or assist in killing them."
Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller said Wednesday that "we are reviewing the court's decision, and no determination has been made as to what the government's next step will be."
In his opinion for the 2 to 1 majority, Judge Richard Tallman concluded: "The Attorney General's unilateral attempt to regulate general medical practices historically entrusted to state lawmakers interferes with the democratic debate about physician assisted suicide and far exceeds the scope of his authority."
Tallman said the court -- often described as the most liberal appeals panel in the country -- was expressing no opinion on whether physician-assisted suicide "is inconsistent with the public interest or constitutes illegitimate medical care. This case is simply about who gets to decide."
The court found that Ashcroft has no such right.
It added "that the Attorney General has no specialized expertise in the field of medicine" and that he "imposes a sweeping and unpersuasive interpretation" of the Controlled Substances Act, which "directly conflicts with that of his predecessor," Attorney General Janet Reno.
In his dissent, Judge J. Clifford Wallace argued that Ashcroft's order neither exceeds his authority under the Controlled Substances Act nor challenges the will of Congress and should, therefore, be given "substantial deference."
Wednesday's ruling follows a stinging rebuke of Ashcroft delivered in 2002 by a federal judge in Portland, Ore. There, U.S. District Judge Robert Jones, noting that the people of the state have twice voted in favor of the suicide law, said that Ashcroft was trying to "stifle an ongoing, earnest and profound debate."
Oregon voters first approved the Death With Dignity Act in 1994, and then, after a failed legal challenge, approved it again in 1997.
In the first six years of the law, through 2003, 171 people died of legal lethal prescriptions, according to Compassion in Dying, which provides assistance to Oregon residents who want to find doctors who will prescribe lethal prescriptions. The group said that this figure represents about one-tenth of 1 percent of the people who died the state during the period.
About 550 physicians in Oregon have worked with patients seeking to die, either as consultants or by prescribing lethal prescriptions, Eighmey said.
He said he talked with 12 doctors in the past year who were afraid to be involved in any aspect of physician-assisted suicide for fear of losing their license.
--------
Nichols Guilty of 161 Counts of Murder
State Verdict Brings Oklahoma City Bombing Participant Closer to Death Sentence
By Lois Romano
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 27, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57767-2004May26.html
MCALESTER, Okla., May 26 -- A state jury on Wednesday found Terry L. Nichols guilty of 161 counts of murder for his role in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, bringing the mild-mannered father of three one step closer to the death sentence he avoided in his federal trial.
Judge Steven Taylor said the trial will move to the penalty phase on Tuesday, when the same jurors will hear at least a month of testimony on whether the state of Oklahoma should execute Nichols.
Nichols, who is already serving a federal life term for the bombing, looked straight ahead and showed no reaction as the judge read the verdict, which came after five hours of deliberation. His mother, Joyce Wilt, hung her head.
Relatives of the victims, who were warned by the judge to restrain themselves, clutched one another's hands with tears in their eyes. As soon as the court adjourned, many collapsed into the arms of prosecutors, thanking them.
"No one has ever been tried for these 161 murders," said Darlene Welch, whose 4-year-old niece perished in the blast. "It's good to know someone is now accountable for Ashley's death. He has never taken responsibility for any of this."
In 1997, Nichols and a former Army buddy, Timothy J. McVeigh, were convicted in federal court in Denver for the deaths of eight federal law enforcement officials in the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The blast killed 168 people.
McVeigh was executed for the crime, but -- to the disappointment of many relatives of the victims -- Nichols was convicted of manslaughter instead of murder at the federal trial, and he was spared the death penalty.
"I could hardly walk out of the courtroom in Denver -- I was devastated," said Diane Leonard, whose husband, Donald, a Secret Service agent, was killed in the bombing. "This jury understood the evidence. . . . I am so grateful these prosecutors hung in there with us to get this to trial here."
Death penalty foes cast the state trial as a search for vengeance, not justice. Over the years, many in Oklahoma lost their appetite for the $5 million trial. Public opinion surveys showed that a vast majority opposed trying Nichols again, believing that the money could be better used because Nichols was already serving a life sentence.
But Oklahoma County District Attorney Wesley Lane pushed forward, supported by many victims' families. Although he did not argue the case himself, he sat with the relatives Wednesday and held them as they received the news. Lane declined to comment, saying that a gag order was still in place.
Nichols, 49, was ultimately charged with the remaining 161 deaths, including that of a fetus. As in the federal trial, prosecutors built a circumstantial case to show that Nichols conspired with McVeigh for months to amass components for a two-ton truck bomb -- fertilizer and fuel -- and to hide them in storage sheds that they rented using aliases. They also alleged that Nichols robbed a quarry to get a detonation cord and blasting caps for the attack.
In the end, however, it was undisputed that McVeigh alone drove the Ryder truck to Oklahoma City, detonating the explosives in front of the Murrah building at the beginning of a workday. Defense attorneys argued that Nichols was set up by his old friend, for a crime McVeigh committed with others. They painted McVeigh as deceitful, someone who even had an affair with Nichols's wife. Nichols did not take the stand. He has never spoken publicly about the bombing.
Nichols's punishment for some of the other charges was announced as the verdicts were read. In the death of the fetus, the jury sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole. For the charge of arson, he was given 35 years in prison and a $25,000 fine. And for the conspiracy charge, was given 10 years in prison and a $5,000 fine.
Outside the courtroom, family members still raw from their losses in 1995 spoke of their relief.
"It's not about the death penalty. It's about accountability," said Shelly Thompson Fravert, who lost her mother, Virginia Thompson. "We felt our loved ones were left out of the Denver case. We didn't want them to be just a number. . . . I'll leave what happens to him now up to God."
But others clearly felt that it was about death. Asked if Nichols should receive the ultimate punishment, Dallas Davis said: "I don't think he should be able to visit with his mother and sister. I don't have the privilege of visiting with my daughter. You can draw your own conclusions."
-------- homeland security
FBI Seeks Tips on 7 Linked to Al Qaeda
Officials Convinced Attack on U.S. Is Being Planned
By Susan Schmidt and John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, May 27, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58760-2004May26?language=printer
The nation's top law enforcement officials, saying they are convinced al Qaeda is planning an attack on the United States in the coming months, issued an urgent plea yesterday for information about seven people who they said could be involved in such an effort.
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III asked for the public's help in tracking down six men and one woman associated with al Qaeda who either are familiar with the United States or have a history of involvement in attacks on U.S. interests.
All but one -- Adam Yahiye Gadahn, 25, a Southern California convert to Islam linked to top al Qaeda captive Abu Zubaida -- have been sought for many months by the FBI. Officials said they do not know whether any of the seven is in the United States.
"We need the public -- both in the United States and overseas -- to be on the lookout for these seven individuals," Mueller said at a packed news conference. "Have you seen them in your communities? Have you heard that someone might be helping them to hide?" If so, he said, "we need you to come forward."
Just hours before Mueller and Attorney General John D. Ashcroft spoke, however, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge appeared on five television networks telling the public to proceed with holiday plans and normal routines.
Ridge acknowledged the government's concern about the danger of an attack, but he offered a reassuring message as a counterbalance to the serious warnings from Ashcroft and Mueller.
"We need Americans to just go about living their lives and enjoying living in this country," Ridge said on CBS's "Early Show."
"America's job is to enjoy living in this great country and go out and have some fun," he said on CNN.
Ridge said there are no immediate plans to raise the color-coded terrorism threat level because the threat information is not specific enough.
The result was a message that left some saying that the government has offered little new information. "I haven't gotten specific information at all," said D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey. "We have been talking about different events taking place this summer for a while," he said, adding: "The city itself is a target -- we already know that."
The government is tightening security for ceremonies inaugurating Washington's National World War II Memorial on Saturday and for other Memorial Day events, as well as security for the Group of Eight meeting of industrialized nations in Georgia next month; the two political parties' nominating conventions, in Boston and New York; the Summer Olympics in Greece; and the presidential inauguration next January.
Ashcroft and Mueller said they do not know where or how attacks might be attempted, but they noted that there are indications terrorists want to mount an attack that would affect the upcoming national elections, as they had done in Spain with the March 11 Madrid train bombings
"Credible intelligence, from multiple sources, indicates that al Qaeda plans to attempt an attack on the United States in the next few months," Ashcroft said. "This disturbing intelligence indicates al Qaeda's specific intention is to hit the U.S. hard." He said the information has been "corroborated on a variety of levels."
But he and Mueller also acknowledged that they are not certain any of the seven suspected al Qaeda associates is participating in the attack planning. They said FBI agents across the country will launch a new round of interviews in Muslim communities to try to develop information.
FBI officials are particularly worried about Adnan G. El Shukrijumah, a Saudi native who lived in South Florida in the mid-1990s. "We know that he has been involved in terrorist planning with senior al Qaeda leaders overseas and has scouted sites across America that might be vulnerable to a terrorist attack," Ashcroft said. Shukrijumah has made repeated attempts to get back into the United States using false passports, he said.
The attorney general said al Qaeda's public statements indicate its intentions. Just after New Year's Day, al Qaeda announced that plans for an attack on the United States were 70 percent complete, he said. After the March bombings that killed 191 in Madrid, he added, an al Qaeda spokesman said plans were 90 percent complete.
Others the FBI is seeking are Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman who has a doctorate and studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian under indictment in New York for his alleged involvement in the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa; Fazul Abdullah Mohammed of the Comoros Islands, also indicted in the embassy bombings; Amer El-Maati, a Canadian citizen born in Kuwait; and Abderraouf Jdey, a Canadian citizen born in Tunisia who appeared in a "martyrdom" video recovered in Afghanistan.
The warning quickly became a partisan issue yesterday.
"I know that every American who watched the news last night or picked up the paper this morning was struck by the seriousness and the concern coming from this administration," said Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry. He said the threat points up the Bush administration's failure to make trains and chemical plants safer from attack and to inspect containers coming into the nation's ports. The senator from Massachusetts added: "We deserve a president of the United States who doesn't make homeland security a photo opportunity and the rhetoric of a campaign."
But administration officials said they are going to extraordinary lengths to secure the upcoming events.
Government officials said the biggest problem with the G-8 meeting is that its events will be spread out over dozens of sites across a 50-mile swath from Savannah, Ga., to Jacksonville, Fla. Many will be held in relatively secluded resort locations, including the G-8 summit meeting on Sea Island, Ga.
"We will be at the greatest level of security of any national event in our history," Asa Hutchinson, undersecretary of homeland security, said in an interview.
For July's Democratic convention in Boston, the Secret Service and local authorities have decided to shut down the highway next to Fleet Center each evening and to bar traffic in the area around the convention center. Subway operations will also be interrupted. But in Manhattan, officials will allow subways and trains to run under and alongside the GOP's Madison Square Garden convention site.
U.S. officials said they also fear that, far from these high-visibility, symbolic locations, terrorists could mount multiple attacks using car or truck bombs, or explosives detonated by remote control, on "soft targets." These include shopping malls, trains, train stations, hotels, tourist sites, churches and synagogues.
Several airport and aviation officials said yesterday that they had not been informed of any new warnings by Department of Homeland Security officials concerning the terrorist threats, nor had they been directed to step up security.
Terrorism experts said that besides measures to control traffic flow and to erect security barriers in some locations, the government has very limited ability to guard against terrorist attacks on soft targets. Among the available tactics, they said, is what Ridge did yesterday in several television interviews: enlisting members of the public to be on the alert for signs that something is amiss.
Staff writers Sara Kehaulani Goo and Spencer S. Hsu contributed to this report.
--------
High Security Planned for Mall
WWII Memorial Events Under No Specific Threat, Officials Say
By Spencer S. Hsu and Sari Horwitz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, May 27, 2004; Page A09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58840-2004May26.html
Federal authorities will erect a security cordon around the entire Mall for Saturday's dedication of the National World War II Memorial, but officials stressed that the plans are not based on any specific threat.
Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) said law enforcement officials have been drawing security plans for the event for a year, and federal officials encouraged people to go about their normal activities. Officials expect the Memorial Day weekend celebration to attract as many 200,000 people a day beginning Friday.
Homeland Security Department officials warned Tuesday that a string of high-profile gatherings in Washington and elsewhere could become targets for terrorists beginning this summer.
Identified as potential targets were the World War II memorial ceremony, the presidential nominating conventions in Boston and New York, the Group of Eight summit June 8-10 at Sea Island, Ga., the Summer Olympic Games in Athens and the presidential inauguration in January.
"The city itself is a target. We already know that," said D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey. "There is no specific threat that I know of. There is no specific threat that I've been told of." For most of Saturday, federal and local authorities plan to prohibit vehicles on the roads around the Mall from the U.S. Capitol to beyond the Lincoln Memorial, including areas near the White House and Tidal Basin. Within that perimeter, a ring of barriers will be erected around the World II Memorial, at 17th Street NW between Constitution and Independence avenues, to protect attendees. Pedestrians will be channeled to entry points along a barrier wall and screened for weapons.
Crowds will be guarded by 600 officers from local and state law enforcement agencies, along with platoons of federal agents. U.S. Coast Guard and D.C. harbor police crews will guard the Potomac River. Military and civilian aviation agencies expect to intensify surveillance of the 15-mile-radius no-fly zone around the Washington Monument.
Authorities also will reroute or monitor train shipments of hazardous materials bound for the District and place federal and local emergency response teams on standby.
"It is a massive security effort to safeguard the visitors and dignitaries related to the World War II Memorial dedication. It is a template for the inauguration and the Fourth of July," said Michael A. Mason, assistant director in charge of the FBI's Washington Field Office. U.S. Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer said: "We're asking the public to be as vigilant as I expect an officer in a police car to be. Walk with your eyes open. Don't assume innocence in activities you see. And don't assume somebody else is doing something about it."
Security officials say safeguards being announced have been planned for a year and were set in motion weeks ago.
Because vehicle access to the memorial is prohibited, the public is urged to use Metro and shuttle buses. Police will mingle with the crowds, ride buses and monitor events by closed-circuit television. Other sensor devices will be operating, and additional government aircraft will be overhead, a federal security official said.
Capitol Police have assigned officers to ride city buses in recent weeks and expanded random vehicle checks by uniformed officers.
"We're going to be doing covert activities," said Acting U.S. Park Police Chief Dwight Pettiford. "I can't get into it. We can't talk about it. Some of it is new technology. Some of it is new practices."
There will be a heavy police presence -- including regular uniformed, canine and undercover units -- during the National Symphony Orchestra's Saturday rehearsal and Sunday concert and the annual Rolling Thunder motorcycle rally, and Capitol Police will be more heavily armed than usual, officials said.
Planners concerned about World War II veterans and other elderly attendees say they are encouraged that the weather forecast calls for cooler, seasonal temperatures Saturday. Cooling tents and medical personnel on foot, bicycles and motorized carts will be available.
Although U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said yesterday that there are no plans to raise the national terror threat level advisory from yellow (elevated) to orange (high), regional officials said they moved on their own to a higher alert.
In coming months, authorities are bracing for other threats by groups that may attempt to strike Washington during a time of uncertainty, said Thomas J. Lockwood, whose first day as Homeland Security's national capital region coordinator was yesterday.
"We live here in the nation's capital," said Lockwood, who will spend Saturday with District emergency management officials. "We know we have to be pretty good."
Staff writer Lori Montgomery contributed to this report.
--------
Credible Intelligence Hard to Pin Down
May 27, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Intelligence-What-Is-Credible.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- In recent years, the government has told Americans it has credible evidence of impending terror attacks, of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and of collaboration between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein. But ``credible'' doesn't mean the same thing to every government official and even credible information can be wrong.
The warning this week from Attorney General John Ashcroft of a possible impending al-Qaida attack in this country has set off a new debate among ordinary citizens, on the presidential campaign and inside the government over the meaning of ``credible.''
Even some intelligence professionals were confused and suspicious of possible political motives for the announcement because there were no specifics about time, location or method of attack and no new information about the seven terror suspects. They also noted the Homeland Security Department did not raise the national alert level from yellow, midpoint on the five-color scale, to orange.
Al-Qaida's intent to launch a major attack in this country has been no secret for some time, former CIA counterintelligence chief Vince Cannistraro noted Thursday. ``The question is their capabilities and that we don't have.''
Retired FBI field office chief C.I. Smith, who spent most of his 25 years in counterintelligence, said, ``I was perplexed by the timing. ... If it was truly credible, you should have also had (Director George) Tenet from CIA and (Secretary Tom) Ridge from Homeland Security, too.''
An administration official said Ashcroft's news conference started out as a request for the public to be on the lookout for seven suspects and an announcement of stepped-up security efforts for high-profile events this summer. Instead, it turned into a major news story that the official said included references to new intelligence. The official requested anonymity to avoid causing friction between Homeland Security and Justice.
U.S. intelligence officials have said credible information suggests terrorists may want to target events this summer, but they also note U.S. authorities have been concerned about that threat for some time.
To professional intelligence analysts, credibility grows out of history. ``Specific credible intelligence'' of such an attack would mean details of plans from a source, either human or electronic, that had provided reliable information in the past, Cannistraro said Thursday. He didn't see any evidence of that in Wednesday's announcement.
Ashcroft ``presented it as though he was tracking this minute by minute when he said the preparations have gone from 70 percent to 90 percent complete,'' Cannistraro said, who called that bunk.
In addition, analysts would try to determine whether the informant had access to such data and what his motivations might be -- revenge, money, ideology or whatever, said Larry Mefford, former FBI counterterrorism chief. Then analysts try to see if all or parts of the information can be corroborated or fit with other known events.
But that makes it sound easier -- and more clear -- than it is.
Author Bob Woodward writes in a new book that National Security Agency director Michael Hayden tried to explain to his wife the difference between the black-and-white world of facts and the gray world of intelligence this way: ``If it were a fact, it wouldn't be intelligence.''
Sometimes intelligence isn't discovery of a missile but an attempt to peer into the mind of an enemy leader to learn when he will use it.
Inside the FBI, Mefford said, ```credible intelligence' is a term taken very seriously. It always referred to information we believed to be reliable.''
Nevertheless ``credible intelligence is a very subjective term,'' Mefford added. And the analysis of intelligence ``is not a science; it's an art.''
The FBI is still trying to improve the formal internal process by which it vets the reliability of sources, Mefford noted.
Recently, Secretary of State Colin Powell conceded the Bush administration accepted distorted reports of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Other administration and congressional officials said the misleading information came from Ahmed Chalabi, a prominent exile who wanted to get the United States to overthrow Saddam so he could return to Iraq.
In January, departing U.S. weapons inspector David Kay said he no longer thought such weapons existed in Iraq. He said it was clear by then that the CIA's problem was a lack of its own spies in Iraq who could provide credible information.
This March, however, Charles Duelfer, now the CIA's supervisor of the search, said his group regularly receives reports -- ``some quite intriguing and credible'' -- about possible weapons stashes hidden in Iraq. But if these informants are judged credible because of previous reliable reports, such earlier reports must be about something other than caches of weapons of mass destruction because none of those have been found.
This debate also has played out in congressional hearings. The CIA's Tenet told the Senate Armed Services Committee that policy-makers are entitled to flexibility in describing intelligence and don't use precisely the same words as intelligence analysts.
But Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., angry over what he saw as Bush administration exaggeration of the justification for the Iraq war, replied, ``I'm not talking about parsing words. We're talking about words that are basically warmongering.''
Associated Press writer Katherine Pfleger Shrader contributed to this report.
-------- human rights
Rights Eroded in War on Terrorism, Amnesty Says
By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 27, 2004; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58767-2004May26.html
The Bush administration has "openly eroded human rights" to win the war on terrorism and sparked a backlash that has made the world more dangerous, Amnesty International charged yesterday.
"As a strategy, the war on terror is bankrupt of vision and bereft of principle," Amnesty's secretary general, Irene Khan, asserted in releasing the human rights group's annual report. She condemned militants unequivocally but said governments are "losing their moral compass."
"Sacrificing human rights in the name of security at home, turning a blind eye to abuses abroad, and using preemptive military force where and when it chooses have neither increased security nor ensured liberty," Kahn said of the United States.
Amnesty's report comes amid deepening questions about U.S. interrogation techniques and the treatment of international prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Abuses have led to criminal charges against American soldiers and a range of inquiries into what orders and understandings were given by higher-ups.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan quickly dismissed Amnesty's conclusions. "My response is that the war on terrorism has resulted in the liberation of 50 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the protection of their rights," McClellan said. "People in those countries did not have the kinds of protections that we're used to in the United States, and now they do."
Amnesty researchers identified 177 violent groups that have operated in 65 countries in the past four years. More than half have killed civilians, and one in five has committed rapes or other sexual violence.
The response by governments has often been troubling and self-defeating, Amnesty officials said. Under cover of fighting "terrorists," many governments killed civilians and used torture and indefinite detention to challenge militants.
William F. Schulz, the organization's U.S. director, called it a "global street brawl, with governments and armed groups duking it out and innocent civilians suffering severely."
Among examples of repression, Amnesty pointed to China's persecution of Uighurs, Egypt's treatment of Islamists and the brutal fight by Russia to prevent Chechen independence. Spain and France drew criticism for what Amnesty called "regressive" anti-terrorist restrictions.
Amnesty challenged the Bush administration for using what it termed "indiscriminate and disproportionate means." A central argument is that the United States, long seen as a model, weakens international norms when it fails to honor the Geneva Conventions or guarantee access to lawyers and public, nonmilitary trials.
Hundreds of foreigners remained in indefinite detention without charge or trial outside the U.S. mainland, Amnesty noted. The nonprofit organization also said the United States had unlawfully killed Iraqi citizens.
State Department spokesman Richard A. Boucher questioned Amnesty's conclusions, calling Khan's comment about the U.S. anti-terrorism fight being bereft of vision "a sound bite that we would disagree with."
"This president has enunciated a very clear vision of defending civilization, defending society, defending decency from people who want only destruction," Boucher told reporters.
-------- terrorism
Is the Nation Ready for a 'Dirty Bomb?'
HomelandDefenseStocks.com Reports
POINT ROBERTS, WA (MARKET WIRE)
05/27/2004
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=67912
The federal government has announced that further terrorist attacks are likely this summer. Several new reports say a major concern is that terrorists may acquire and use a chemical, biological or radiological enhanced weapon.
In the opinion of at least one expert, a 'dirty bomb' is the most dangerous terrorist scenario we face.
"I think an explosive is by far the most likely scenario," says Dr. Carl Schultz(1), professor of emergency medicine at U of C, Irvine. "That's what they (the terrorists) do best and it's very hard to stop. It doesn't have to be particularly deadly radioactive material, because ANY radioactivity would take an entire area right off the map in the public's mind."
A dirty bomb would use conventional explosives to spread radioactive materials. It would have no atomic chain reaction and would likely be made without highly enriched uranium or plutonium, which tend to be well-guarded and difficult to move or handle.
"It would be incredibly hard to ever get people to go back to Disneyland, for example, after any radioactive release. Because the public 'knows' that radioactivity lasts forever, even though that isn't true," says Dr. Schultz.
So what will happen if Al-Qaida does manage to pull off an attack?
Dr. Schultz, who has published several papers on hospital preparedness, says there are lots of similarities between responses to earthquakes and a large-scale terrorist attack, and the biggest lesson the country has learned to date is the key to an effective response is a very robust public health infrastructure. He says that infrastructure has been badly neglected, and the government is finally moving to update it. Recent announcements suggest he's right."
Click here for the full article: www.HomelandDefenseStocks.com/Companies/HomelandDefense/Articles/Bioterror.asp
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Markland Technologies, Inc. (OTC BB: MRKL) www.marklandtech.com is positioned in the chemical detection sector with its subsidiary; Virginia based Science and Technology Research, Inc. (STR) and its Shipboard Automatic Chemical Agent Detection and Alarm System (ACADA). The ACADA is an automatic chemical agent alarm system capable of detecting and identifying blister and nerve agents simultaneously. The ACADA is man-portable, provides an audible and visual alarm, and has a communication interface to support battlefield automation systems. The Company recently completed a marketing agreement with Tradeways Ltd. to sell the shipboard version of ACADA systems to foreign militaries, and has seen growing domestic sales of the system.
Roaming Messenger, Inc. (OTC BB: RMSG) www.roamingmessenger.com is a breakthrough wireless solution for delivering real-time actionable information, to the right person, right away. The Company is currently in a partnership with FirstWatch(tm) from Stout Solutions, LLC as the Smart Messaging component of their Bio-Surveillance system. FirstWatch(tm) is an early warning syndromic and biosurveillance system designed to monitor real time public safety 911 and other key data sources for abnormalities that may indicate a stealth biological attack or other significant user defined event. Roaming Messenger provides capabilities beyond existing e-mail, text messaging and voicemail solutions by packaging time-critical information and decision points into a "smart courier" message. The result is a messenger that roams throughout the wired and wireless worlds -- from mobile devices to desktop PCs to central servers -- tracking down people and getting responses in real-time.
Bioterrorism Agents/Diseases: http://www.bt.cdc.gov/Agent/Agentlist.asp
HomelandDefenseStock.com includes a growing list of public companies in the sector. For a partial list of companies involved in homeland defense and security technology: www.investorideas.com/Companies/HomelandDefense/Articles/StockList.asp
Disclaimer: ECON Corporate Services is the owner of the domain www.HomelandDefenseStocks.com. HomelandDefenseStocks.com is a Registered WA Trade Name. The site does not make recommendations but offers an information portal to investors to research news, articles, and recent research. The site is currently compensated by its "featured companies": Aethlon Medical, Inc., MDM Group, Inc., Markland Technologies, Inc., Roaming Messenger, Inc., Spectrum Sciences & Software Holdings Corp. (OTC BB: SPSC) and Viscount Systems, Inc. but the current list of stocks is provided as a free research tool to investors.
Compensation Disclosure Specifics: www.InvestorIdeas.com/About/News/Clientspecifics.asp
Disclaimer: www.InvestorIdeas.com/About/Disclaimer.asp
(1) Dr. Carl Schultz, professor of emergency medicine at U of C, Irvine, serves on two national task forces on terrorism and is a consultant to the national ANSER Institute for Homeland Security.
For more information contact: Dawn Van Zant Trevor Ruehs Toll free: 800-665-0411 Email: dvanzant@investorideas.com or truehs@investorideas.com
POINT ROBERTS, WA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 05/27/2004 -- www.HomelandDefenseStocks.com (HDS), an investment research portal for the Homeland Defense and Security Sector, reports on recent terror threats and the country's state of preparedness to deal with a major attack. The site does not make recommendations, but offers a unique information portal to investors following the homeland security sector.
--------
Britain Arrests Radical Cleric Who Faces U.S. Terror Charges
May 27, 2004
By ALAN COWELL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/27/national/27CND-CLER.html?hp
LONDON, May 27 - The British police arrested a radical Islamic leader, Abu Hamza al-Masri, early today after the United States requested his extradition on a variety of charges, including trying to set up a terrorist training camp in Oregon and aiding Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Announcing an 11-count indictment unsealed in New York today, the United States Attorney General, John Ashcroft, said Mr. al-Masri faces charges of hostage-taking and conspiracy in connection with an attack in Yemen in 1998 on 16 tourists, including two Americans. Four hostages were killed and several others were wounded when the Yemeni Army tried to rescue them.
He is also charged with conspiracy to provide and conceal material support to terrorists, specifically Al Qaeda. The charges relate to Mr. al-Masri's attempts in late 1999 and early 2000 to set up a camp for "violent jihad" in Bly, Ore., the attorney general said.
In addition, Mr. al-Masri is accused of providing material support for Al Qaeda to further a holy war in Afghanistan, and conspiracy to aid the Taliban.
The maximum sentence for hostage-taking is the death penalty or life imprisonment, Mr. Ashcroft said. If convicted, Mr. al-Masri also faces a sentence of up to 100 years in prison on the additional charges.
In London early today, moving under the cover of darkness, the police closed off streets in a suburban area of west London where Mr. al-Masri, a 47-year-old Egyptian-born cleric, lived with his family.
At the time of his arrest, he was also facing extradition efforts from Yemen, which has accused him of fomenting terrorism in 1998. Additionally, authorities here were trying to strip him of the British nationality he acquired by marriage in the early 1980's, citing what they said was his support for Al Qaeda and for a terrorist cell in Yemen. Mr. al-Masri denies having ties to Al Qaeda.
Soon after his arrest, police officers began searching the home in the Shepherd's Bush district.
Mr. al-Masri, who lost an eye and both hands in what he has described as mine-clearing operations while fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, was formerly the preacher at the Finsbury Park mosque in north London. Both Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber, and Zacarias Moussaoui, accused of taking part in planning the Sept. 11 attacks, reportedly attended the mosque before their arrest. The mosque had been depicted by European antiterrorism investigators as a focus of terrorist planning.
Depicted as an object of hatred in British tabloid newspapers, Mr. al-Masri was barred from preaching at the mosque, which was closed down by the authorities last year, and has taken to preaching to his supporters in the streets outside. He has been accused by British authorities of making "extreme and political statements."
Those include praising Osama bin Laden as a hero and describing the crash of the space shuttle Columbia as "punishment from God." Mr. al-Masri has termed the American-led invasion of Iraq as a war against Islam and has described the events of 9/11 as a Jewish conspiracy.
Mr. al-Masri was expected to appear at a high-security court at Belmarsh in southeast London later today. His lawyers said he would fight the extradition request.
Mr. al-Masri moved to Britain in the early 1980's as a student of civil engineering and worked as a nightclub doorman. In the 1990's, however, he reportedly fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. After his return to Britain, Yemeni authorities accused him of plotting to kidnap Westerners in Yemen.
At a hearing last month related to British efforts to remove his citizenship, Mr. al-Masri was accused of providing "advice and support to terrorist groups." He was also said to have encouraged other people to make terrorist attacks in other countries.
Mr. al-Masri is one of several high-profile Muslim clerics in Britain who have been accused of supporting terrorism.
While some clerics, like Abu Qatada - said to be the spiritual counselor of Mohamed Atta, believed to have led the Sept. 11 hijacking team - remain in prison in Britain without charge. Others, like Sheik Omar al Bakri, leader of a movement called Al Muhajiroun, carry on a robust ideological campaign.
In a television interview today after Mr. al-Masri's arrest, Mr. al-Bakri said people like him and his fellow cleric were "guilty by default" because of a Western campaign against Islam.
Even more moderate Islamic figures, moreover, showed some unease at his detention.
"We are totally against his views, as we have shown," said Ahmed Versi, editor of the newspaper The Muslim News. "But the point of principle is an important one. There must be proper evidence against him which would stand in a court of law in this country."
And Anas Altikriti, a former president of the Muslim Association of Britain, declared: "The worrying thing is that these dawn raids and arrests are becoming quite a frequent occurrence in the Muslim community. It sets a flawed and dangerous precedent."
Only last month in Manchester, the police arrested 10 people - mainly Iraqi Kurds - in connection with a supposed terror plot but then released them without bringing terrorism charges.
Under British law, extradition proceedings can take months if not years and may collapse if British courts are not convinced by the evidence offered to them from the country seeking a suspect's extradition.
In one case after the Sept. 11 attacks an Algerian pilot, Lotfi Raissi, was held through months of hearings and finally released because a British court ruled that the United States authorities had not produced evidence to justify his extradition.
Since then, however, British rules have been relaxed somewhat to permit extradition hearings to proceed more swiftly.
Terence Neilan contributed reporting from New York for this article.
-------- POLITICS
-------- budget
2006 Cuts In Domestic Spending On Table
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 27, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58762-2004May26.html
The White House put government agencies on notice this month that if President Bush is reelected, his budget for 2006 may include spending cuts for virtually all agencies in charge of domestic programs, including education, homeland security and others that the president backed in this campaign year.
Administration officials had dismissed the significance of the proposed cuts when they surfaced in February as part of an internal White House budget office computer printout. At the time, officials said the cuts were based on a formula and did not accurately reflect administration policy. But a May 19 White House budget memorandum obtained by The Washington Post said that agencies should assume the spending levels in that printout when they prepare their fiscal 2006 budgets this summer.
"Assume accounts are funded at the 2006 level specified in the 2005 Budget database," the memo informs federal program associate directors and their deputies. "If you propose to increase funding above that level for any account, it must be offset within your agency by proposing to decrease funding below that level in other accounts."
J.T. Young, a spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget, said the memo, titled "Planning Guidance for the FY 2006 Budget," is a routine "process document" to help agency officials begin establishing budget procedures for 2006. In no way should it be interpreted as a final policy decision, or even a planning document, he said.
"Agencies have asked for this sort of direction," Young said. "Budgeting is basically a year-long process, and you have to start somewhere. They'll get more guidance as the year goes along."
The funding levels referred to in the memo would be a tiny slice out of the federal budget -- $2.3 billion, or 0.56 percent, out of the $412.7 billion requested for fiscal 2005 for domestic programs and homeland security that is subject to Congress's annual discretion.
But the cuts are politically sensitive, targeting popular programs that Bush has been touting on the campaign trail. The Education Department; a nutrition program for women, infants and children; Head Start; and homeownership, job-training, medical research and science programs all face cuts in 2006.
"Despite [administration] denials, this memorandum confirms what we suspected all along," said Thomas S. Kahn, Democratic staff director on the House Budget Committee. "Next February, the administration plans to propose spending cuts in key government services to pay for oversized tax cuts."
But with the budget deficit exceeding $400 billion this year, tough and painful cuts are unavoidable, said Brian M. Riedl, a budget analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Federal agencies' discretionary spending has risen 39 percent in the past three years. "I think the public is ready for spending cuts," Riedl said. "Not only does the public understand there's a lot of waste in the federal budget, but the public is ready to make sacrifices during the war on terror."
The administration has widely touted a $1.7 billion increase in discretionary funding for the Education Department in its 2005 budget, but the 2006 guidance would pare that back by $1.5 billion. The Department of Veterans Affairs is scheduled to get a $519 million spending increase in 2005, to $29.7 billion, and a $910 million cut in 2006 that would bring its budget below the 2004 level.
Also slated for cuts are the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, the Small Business Administration, the Transportation Department, the Social Security Administration, the Interior Department and the Army Corps of Engineers.
Agencies would have the option of preserving current funding levels for programs under their control if they find money from other parts of their budget. But the computer printout contains specific program cuts.
The Women, Infants and Children nutrition program was funded at $4.7 billion for the fiscal year beginning in October, enough to serve the 7.9 million people expected to be eligible. But in 2006, the program would be cut by $122 million. Head Start, the early-childhood education program for the poor, would lose $177 million, or 2.5 percent of its budget, in fiscal 2006.
The $78 million funding increase that Bush has touted for a homeownership program in 2005 would be nearly reversed in 2006 with a $53 million cut. National Institutes of Health spending would be cut 2.1 percent in 2006, to $28 billion, after a $764 million increase for 2005 that brought the NIH budget to $28.6 billion.
Even homeland security -- a centerpiece of the Bush reelection campaign -- would be affected. Funding would slip in 2006 by $1 billion, to $29.6 billion, although that would still be considerably higher than the $26.6 billion devoted to that field in 2004, according to an analysis of the computer printout by House Budget Committee Democrats.
Publicly, the administration has been dismissive of such figures. In February, Young said spending levels beyond 2005 were generated by a computer after administration policymakers set a growth limit of 3 percent for all programs, including defense, but set out multiyear decisions for only a handful of major initiatives.
Education Secretary Roderick R. Paige told House members in February: "It is my understanding that long-term estimates are calculated by formula. OMB has advised us that the numbers beyond 2005 do not reflect detailed policy decisions by this administration. They are roughly held estimates, and so we will have to await the policy decisions to draw conclusions about what the funding level will be in years outside or years in front of 2005."
The May 19 memo contains no such caveats.
"Continuing the strategy of last year's Budget, the 2006 Budget will constrain discretionary and mandatory spending while supporting national priorities: winning the war on terror, protecting the homeland, and strengthening the economy," the memo states.
-------- investigations
Some Seek Broad, External Inquiry on Prisoner Abuse
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 27, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58765-2004May26?language=printer
In response to mounting evidence that detainees in U.S. military custody were badly abused in Iraq and elsewhere, the Pentagon has launched an array of investigations, assessments and reviews aimed, officials have insisted, at exposing those responsible for the misdeeds and preventing recurrences.
But a close look at what is being investigated, and who is doing the investigating, reveals gaps in the web of probes as well as limitations on the scope, with none of the inquiries designed to yield a complete picture of what went wrong or address suspicions of a possible top-secret intelligence-gathering operation that may have helped set the stage for the misconduct.
"I can't tell if all the inquiries represent attempts to patch new holes opening in the boat every day, or if they're part of some carefully designed strategy to have lots of activity going on around the center of this thing without probing the center itself," said John Hamre, who served as deputy secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton and now heads the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
With one inquiry completed and five more underway -- not to mention dozens of criminal investigations into alleged abusive treatment of detainees inside and outside military-run facilities -- Pentagon officials continue to promise that all trails will be pursued wherever they lead and that the guilty will be held accountable.
But some military lawyers, lawmakers and defense experts point to what they see as fundamental shortcomings: Most of the probes involve the Army investigating itself, they say, and each investigation is focused on only one aspect or another of the burgeoning scandal -- the role of military intelligence personnel who served as interrogators, for instance, or the adequacy of training of reservists or the need for revisions in Army training and doctrine.
No investigating authority has been given the specific task of assessing the roles of top authorities either in the U.S. Central Command or at the Pentagon. In past high-profile cases, including the 1991 Tailhook scandal, the 1996 bombing in Saudi Arabia of an Air Force barracks and the 2000 attack in Yemen on the USS Cole, inquiries conducted by the affected military branches were criticized by investigators from outside the services for focusing on lower ranks and neglecting to assess supervision up the chain of command.
"I really doubt whether the Defense Department can investigate itself, because there's a possibility the secretary himself authorized certain actions," said Wayne A. Downing, a retired four-star Army general who headed a Pentagon task force that examined the Air Force barracks case. "This cries out for an outside commission to investigate."
The closest the Pentagon has come to initiating an overarching independent review of detainee treatment is Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's appointment May 7 of a four-member panel to help advise him. The panelists include two former defense secretaries (James R. Schlesinger and Harold Brown), a retired Air Force general (Charles A. Horner) and a onetime Republican House member from Florida (Tillie Fowler).
Schlesinger, the panel's chairman, said in a brief interview yesterday that the roles of top commanders, the possible involvement of government intelligence agencies and other key issues will be studied. But the panel has just two months to draft a report, and its charter calls only for identifying gaps in existing inquiries and recommending changes in training, organization and policies related to the handling of detainees.
In Congress, too, the investigative effort has yet to match major probes of the past. Republican leaders have resisted calls from Democratic lawmakers to establish a special panel of inquiry, as was done in the Iran-contra scandal of the 1980s, or authorize a blue-ribbon commission, like the one now investigating government mistakes related to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Instead, congressional action has been kept within regular committee channels, principally the armed services committees. And only the Senate committee, under the leadership of John W. Warner (R-Va.), has shown investigating vigor, convening a series of hearings that some senior House Republicans have complained are ill-advised and serve only to give more political ammunition to critics of the Bush administration.
The Senate inquiry has been hampered by the Pentagon's failure to provide it with a complete copy of Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba's report examining abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. After protests from committee staff last week, the Pentagon attributed the omissions to technical glitches and pledged to supply the missing pages. Although Warner has said he believes the department is working in good faith with the committee, some congressional staff members suspect the Pentagon withheld particularly sensitive documents.
"We need a master commission," said Eugene R. Fidell, a prominent lawyer who handles defense cases. "This is a very grave set of issues. The country's international reputation is on the line."
Pentagon officials defended the investigations undertaken so far as sufficiently empowered to probe where necessary, including up the Central Command chain and into the upper reaches of the Pentagon.
"My understanding is that the investigators will take their investigation wherever it leads them," Lawrence T. DiRita, the Pentagon's chief spokesman, said at a news conference yesterday. ". . . There's certainly no predetermined level above which the investigators -- are off-limits to the investigators."
As proof the military can credibly investigate itself, defense officials point to Taguba's work. Completed in April, his report has drawn widespread praise for its thoroughness and integrity.
But Taguba's charter was limited to looking at the 800th Military Police Brigade and its management of detention facilities in Iraq. Although Taguba implicated some military intelligence personnel in the abuses, he did not pursue those leads, nor -- as he told the Senate -- did he interview U.S. military authorities above the level of brigade commander. Among those not interviewed was Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, who ordered the inquiry.
A separate investigation, initiated in late April and headed by Maj. Gen. George R. Fay, is looking into the role of military interrogators. But Fay serves as deputy to the head of Army intelligence, which puts him in the chain of command of the units he is investigating.
The Army has two other inquiries underway. Since February, the service's inspector general, Lt. Gen. Paul T. Mikolashek, has been reviewing doctrine and training associated with detention operations throughout the U.S. Central Command area. Preliminary findings have cited problems in training, organization and doctrine but no "pattern of abuse" of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Senate testimony this month by Gen. John P. Abizaid, the head of Central Command.
Additionally, since March, the inspector general of the Army Reserve, Col. Beverly Ertman, has been assessing the training given military police and intelligence personnel on the laws of land warfare, ethics, leadership and Army values.
Earlier this month, the Navy's inspector general, Vice Adm. Albert Church, received orders to look at operations at two prisons outside Iraq and Afghanistan holding terrorist suspects -- the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the naval brig at Charleston, S.C.
Apart from those administrative reviews, the Army's Criminal Investigation Division is pursuing dozens of alleged abuse cases in Iraq and Afghanistan. Army officials said Friday that of nine open cases involving prisoner deaths since 2002, eight were determined by medical examiners to be possible homicides, involving acts committed before or during an interrogation. Investigators also are looking into an additional 42 potential cases of misconduct against civilians that occurred outside detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Regarding the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison, criminal charges have been brought against seven military police reservists but not against any military intelligence personnel, although the military guards say they acted under the direction of intelligence soldiers.
A senior Army officer with direct knowledge of the criminal probes said at a Pentagon briefing Friday that investigators have targeted military intelligence personnel. But responsibility for bringing charges rests with field commanders, he added.
Concerned that his client and other lower-ranking soldiers charged so far will end up shouldering all the blame, Gary Myers, a civilian military lawyer representing Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II, requested a special "court of inquiry" earlier this month. Such an inquiry, consisting of senior officers outside the chain of command at issue, was convened after a U.S. Navy submarine collided with a Japanese fishing boat near Hawaii in 2001.
But Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, the convening court-martial authority in the Abu Ghraib case, rejected the idea, informing Myers he saw no legal basis for it.
President Bush and other senior administration officials continue to portray the abuses largely as isolated incidents carried out by a small number of soldiers. But some defense experts suspect that the Pentagon may be trying to prevent investigations from exposing the possible existence of a secret intelligence-gathering effort that either overlapped with some of the publicized abuses or operated in the same combat zones.
An article in the New Yorker magazine this month by Seymour Hersh reported that as part of the administration's war on terrorism, Rumsfeld established a highly classified "special access program" aimed at capturing and interrogating "high value" individuals. The Pentagon has not confirmed such a program.
"Every intelligence operation has a breakaway point, where you try to protect the organization with a cover story," Hamre said. "What some people are saying is that the Pentagon is still trying to keep the breakaway line at the rogue-soldier level."
Others pointed to less covert factors that are complicating decisions by both the administration and Congress on how to investigate the detainee scandal.
"One thing that makes this unusual is that it is happening in wartime, where the results have the potential of affecting the war itself," said Peter D. Feaver, a professor of political science and public policy at Duke University. "The other factor is the presidential election. Any investigating commission set up now might get sucked into a partisan fight."
Rumsfeld and other senior defense officials also warned several weeks ago, as news of the abuses began to emerge, that the Pentagon ability's to investigate -- and publicize what it finds -- would be constrained by the need to avoid trampling on rights of the accused and jeopardizing future prosecutions.
Nonetheless, members of the outside panel set up by Rumsfeld say they intend to make their study as comprehensive as possible and to take advantage of the defense secretary's pledge to provide whatever documents and interviews with Pentagon personnel they request.
"We'll probably be doing some kind of timeline to start with -- who knew what when," said Fowler, one of the four members. "Each of us is pretty independent. The one thing you can be sure of from us is, ours will be a really thorough and reasoned review."
Staff writers Scott Higham, R. Jeffrey Smith and Joe Stephens contributed to this report.
-------- propaganda wars
As Ashcroft Warns of Attack, Some Question Threat and Its Timing
May 27, 2004
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON and ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/27/politics/27terror.html?hp
WASHINGTON, May 26 - The Bush administration said on Wednesday that it had credible intelligence suggesting that Al Qaeda is planning to attack the United States in the next several months, a period in which events like an international summit meeting and the two political conventions could offer tempting targets.
Attorney General John Ashcroft said at a news conference that intelligence reports and public statements by people associated with Al Qaeda suggested that the terrorist group was "almost ready to attack the United States" and harbored a "specific intention to hit the United States hard."
But some intelligence officials, terrorism experts - and to some extent even Mr. Ashcroft's own F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III - offered a more tempered assessment, saying, "For the next few weeks we have reason to believe there is a heightened threat to the U.S. interests around the world.'' And some opponents of President Bush, including police and firefighter union leaders aligned with Senator John Kerry, the expected Democratic presidential candidate, said the timing of the announcement appeared intended in part to distract attention from Mr. Bush's sagging poll numbers and problems in Iraq.
The administration did not raise the terrorist threat advisory from its current level of elevated, or yellow, and the White House said Mr. Bush would not alter his schedule because of security concerns.
"There's no real new intelligence, and a lot of this has been out there already," said one administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "There really is no significant change that would require us to change the alert level of the country."
Mr. Ashcroft said the government did not have any information about where the terrorists might strike, and he said there was "extraordinary" security being put in place for events like a summit meeting of international leaders next month in Savannah, Ga., the Democratic convention in Boston in late July and the Republican convention in New York in late August and early September.
Mr. Ashcroft called for greater public vigilance, especially in looking out for seven people sought by the F.B.I. who are suspected of being Qaeda members or sympathizers.
The names of six of the seven were publicly circulated by the authorities months ago, and officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said that they had no reason to believe any of the seven suspects were in the United States.
Asked about the timing of his new warnings about the suspects, Mr. Ashcroft said, "We believe the public, like all of us, needs a reminder."
Some intelligence officials said they were uncertain that the link between the fresh intelligence and the likelihood of another attack was as apparent as Mr. Ashcroft made it out to be. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security said just a day before Mr. Ashcroft's announcement that they had no new intelligence pointing to the threat of an attack.
Senator Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Democrat who is a member of the intelligence committee, said in an interview that the committee had received no word of any new information of the type Mr. Ashcroft described. Mr. Durbin said that if there were credible new information about a possible strike, he believed the intelligence committee should have been told about it.
Other officials said they supported Mr. Ashcroft's warnings.
"I think he was right on the mark in terms of what Al Qaeda's intent is," said one counterterrorism official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The White House came under criticism this year for not acting more aggressively in August 2001 when Mr. Bush was informed that Al Qaeda was planning to attack the United States or its interests abroad. In issuing a high-profile warning this time, the administration appeared intent on insulating itself from any perception that it was not responding vigorously enough.
But the announcement also came after weeks in which Mr. Bush's political standing has been battered by events in Iraq and as his re-election campaign is seeking to portray Mr. Kerry as opposed to the USA Patriot Act, the law giving the government broad powers to combat terrorism.
Harold Schaitberger, head of the International Association of Fire Fighters, told reporters in a conference call organized by Mr. Kerry's campaign that he found the timing of the announcement to be "politically convenient at best" because it came after "we see the president's approval ratings plummet."
Mr. Kerry issued a statement in which he said he knew Americans had been "struck by the seriousness and concern coming from this administration," but went on to attack the administration for not doing more to bolster domestic security.
Mr. Bush's campaign responded by saying that Mr. Kerry "has played politics with homeland security throughout this campaign."
Of the seven people Mr. Ashcroft asked the public and law enforcement agencies to watch out for, the only one whose name had not been previously released was Adam Yahiye Gadahn, 25, who officials said is an American citizen from California.
Mr. Gadahn converted to Islam and is believed to have attended Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan several years ago, officials said. He is thought to have done translation work for Al Qaeda and was associated with Abu Zubayda, a senior Qaeda associate now imprisoned by the United States, they said.
--------
Scepticism over new US terror warning
Aljazeera
27 May 2004
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/0C3E82CD-17FB-4070-BC79-FA25A9833825.htm
Sceptics have rounded on the Bush administration after the US attorney general warned of a new al-Qaida terror threat.
Critics cast doubt on the authenticity of the threat after John Ashcroft launched a hunt on Wednesday for seven "armed and dangerous suspects".
Harold Schaitberger, president of the firefighters' union, said on Thursday that the administration had known about the threats for a month.
He said: "I do find it awfully convenient and suspicious that it happens to be tied in right behind the president's recent message to the nation as well as his troubling, plummeting poll numbers."
And presidential contender John Kerry said the American people deserve a president who "makes the country safer".
"We deserve a president of the United States who doesn't make homeland security a photo opportunity"
John Kerry, US presidential candidate He told a rally in Seattle: "We deserve a president of the United States who doesn't make homeland security a photo opportunity."
The comments came after Ashcroft said "credible intelligence from multiple sources indicates that al-Qaida plans to attempt an attack on the United States in the next few months".
Suspects named
Ashcroft and Federal Bureau of Investigation director Robert Mueller released the names of seven suspects, including one woman, who could be part of an attack plot.
"Beyond this intelligence, al-Qaida's own public statements suggests that it is almost ready to attack the United States," Ashcroft added.
The new alert came just ahead of Saturday's dedication of a second world war memorial by President George Bush which is expected to draw about 100,000 people to Washington.
Authorities fear the upcoming Republican and Democratic party conventions and the presidential election on 2 November could also be targets.
However, Ashcroft highlighted there had not been a terrorist strike on US soil since the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington that killed around 3000 people.
"We are winning the war on terror," he asserted.
US lambasted
Aschcroft's alert came on the same day that a respected human rights group lambasted the US for abuses in the name of the "war on terror".
In a new report Amnesty International said Washington's global anti-terror policies are "bankrupt of vision" as human rights become sacrificed in the blind pursuit of security.
Amnesty chief Irene Khan said: "Violating rights at home, turning a blind eye to abuses abroad and using pre-emptive military force where and when it chooses has damaged justice and freedom, and made the world a more dangerous place."
Specifically, Amnesty lashed Washington for unlawful killings of Iraqi civilians; questionable arrest and mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan; and opposition to a new global criminal court.
-------- us politics
The Bush orthodoxy is in shreds
A series of investigations has shattered neocon self-belief
Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday May 27, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1225600,00.html
At a conservative thinktank in downtown Washington, and across the Potomac at the Pentagon, FBI agents have begun paying quiet calls on prominent neoconservatives, who are being interviewed in an investigation of potential espionage, according to intelligence sources. Who gave Ahmed Chalabi classified information about the plans of the US government and military?
The Iraqi neocon favourite, tipped to lead his liberated country post-invasion, has been identified by the CIA and Defence Intelligence Agency as an Iranian double-agent, passing secrets to that citadel of the "axis of evil" for decades. All the while the neocons cosseted, promoted and arranged for more than $30m in Pentagon payments to the George Washington manque of Iraq. In return, he fed them a steady diet of disinformation and in the run-up to the war sent various exiles to nine nations' intelligence agencies to spread falsehoods about weapons of mass destruction. If the administration had wanted other material to provide a rationale for invasion, no doubt that would have been fabricated. Either Chalabi perpetrated the greatest con since the Trojan horse, or he was the agent of influence for the most successful intelligence operation conducted by Iran, or both.
The CIA and other US agencies had long ago decided that Chalabi was a charlatan, so their dismissive and correct analysis of his lies prompted their suppression by the Bush White House.
In place of the normal channels of intelligence vetting, a jerry-rigged system was hastily constructed, running from the office of the vice president to the newly created Office of Special Plans inside the Pentagon, staffed by fervent neocons. CIA director George Tenet, possessed with the survival instinct of the inveterate staffer, ceased protecting the sanctity of his agency and cast in his lot. Secretary of state Colin Powell, resistant internally but overcome, decided to become the most ardent champion, unveiling a series of neatly manufactured lies before the UN.
Last week, Powell declared "it turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and, in some cases, deliberately misleading. And for that I'm disappointed, and I regret it". But who had "deliberately" misled him? He did not say. Now the FBI is investigating espionage, fraud and, by implication, treason.
A former staff member of the Office of Special Plans and a currently serving defence official, two of those said to be questioned by the FBI, are considered witnesses, at least for now. Higher figures are under suspicion. Were they witting or unwitting? If those who are being questioned turn out to be misleading, they can be charged ultimately with perjury and obstruction of justice. For them, the Watergate principle applies: it's not the crime, it's the cover-up.
The espionage investigation into the neocons' relationship with Chalabi is only one of the proliferating inquiries engulfing the Bush administration. In his speech to the Army War College on May 24, Bush blamed the Abu Ghraib torture scandal on "a few American troops". In other words, there was no chain of command. But the orders to use the abusive techniques came from the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld. Advertiser links Donate Your Car to an Animal Charity
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The trials and investigations surrounding Abu Ghraib beg the question of whether it was an extension of the far-flung gulag operating outside the Geneva conventions that has been built after September 11. The fallout from the Chalabi affair has also implicated the nation's newspaper of record, the New York Times, which published yesterday an apology for running numerous stories containing disinformation that emanated from Chalabi and those in the Bush administration funnelling his fabrications. The Washington Post, which published editorials and several columnists trumpeting Chalabi's talking points, has yet to acknowledge the extent to which it was deceived.
Washington, just weeks ago in the grip of neoconservative orthodoxy, absolute belief in Bush's inevitability and righteousness, is in the throes of being ripped apart by investigations. Things fall apart: the military, loyal and lumbering, betrayed and embittered; the general in the field, General Sanchez, disgraced and cashiered; the intelligence agencies abused and angry, their retired operatives plying their craft with the press corps, seeping dangerous truths; the press, hesitating and wobbly, investigating its own falsehoods; the neocons, publicly redoubling defence of their hero and deceiver Chalabi, privately squabbling, anxiously awaiting the footsteps of FBI agents; Colin Powell, once the most acclaimed man in America, embarked on an endless quest to restore his reputation, damaged above all by his failure of nerve; everyone in the line of fire motioning toward the chain of command, spiralling upwards and sideways, until the finger pointing in a phalanx is directed at the hollow crown.
· Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is Washington bureau chief of Salon.com
----
Gore Calls for Top Officials to Resign
Democrat Assails Bush's War Cabinet
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 27, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57543-2004May26.html
Former vice president Al Gore accused President Bush's war cabinet of reckless incompetence yesterday and called for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and CIA Director George J. Tenet.
"George W. Bush promised us a foreign policy with humility. Instead, he has brought us humiliation in the eyes of the world," Gore said at a speech in New York sponsored by the liberal MoveOn PAC. "We simply cannot afford to further increase the risk to our country with more blunders by this team."
Gore, jabbing his fingers and raising his voice to a shout, called the horrors of the Abu Ghraib prison "the predictable consequence of policy choices that flowed directly from this administration's contempt for the rule of law." His broad critique of that policy ranged from its aims to its vocabulary, and he complained about Bush aides' "frequent use of the word 'dominance' to describe their strategic goal."
The former vice president did not mention Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who successfully lobbied Bush to go to the United Nations before attacking Iraq. Gore, who lost the presidency to Bush by 577 votes in Florida and a 5 to 4 decision by the Supreme Court, said the victor "has brought deep dishonor to our country and built a durable reputation as the most dishonest president since Richard Nixon."
The speech, at New York University, was the highest-profile appearance by Gore since he endorsed former Vermont governor Howard Dean for the Democratic presidential nomination. Yesterday, Gore included an endorsement of Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), the presumptive nominee. "Our nation's best interest lies in having a new president who can turn a new page, sweep clean with a new broom," Gore said. He said Kerry "should not tie his own hands by offering overly specific, detailed proposals concerning a situation that is rapidly changing and, unfortunately, rapidly deteriorating, but should rather preserve his, and our country's, options, to retrieve our national honor as soon as this long national nightmare is over."
In calling for the resignations, Gore said that Rice "has badly mishandled the coordination of national security policy" and that "the nation is especially at risk every single day that Rumsfeld remains as secretary of defense." Gore said three of Rumsfeld's deputies should also resign: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz; Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy; and Stephen A. Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence.
The sixth resignation Gore demanded was from Tenet, a holdover from the Clinton administration. "He is a personal friend, and I know him to be a good and decent man. It is especially painful to call for his resignation," Gore said. "But I have regretfully concluded that it is extremely important that our country have new leadership at the CIA immediately."
Jim Dyke, communications director of the Republican National Committee, issued a statement saying that during Gore's eight years as vice president, "Osama Bin Laden declared war on the United States five times and terrorists killed U.S. citizens on at least four different occasions." "Al Gore's attacks on the president today demonstrate that he either does not understand the threat of global terror, or he has amnesia," Dyke said.
-------- ENERGY
-------- alternative energy
Maryland Boosts Clean Energy, Bay Restoration
May 27, 2004
ANNAPOLIS, Maryland, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/may2004/2004-05-27-095.asp
Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich, Jr. signed legislation Wednesday that will increase the state's renewable energy production and consumption, as well as a bill that funds efforts to reduce nitrogen pollution in the Chesapeake Bay.
The state currently gets less than one percent of its electricity from clean, renewable energy resources, such as wind and solar.
The new law - the Maryland Clean Energy Bill - requires the state's utilities to increase the amount of renewable energy to 7.5 percent by 2014.
With the law's enactment, Maryland is the 15th state to adopt a renewable energy standard.
"We applaud the governor for supporting such an important economic and environmental initiative," said Gigi Kellett of the Maryland Public Interest Research Group, which spearheaded an effort to get the state legislature to approve the bill.
"This legislation guarantees a local demand for renewable energy and positions Maryland and the region to benefit from the growing marketplace," Kellett said.
The law comes as interest in renewable energy technologies in the Mid-Atlantic region is on the rise, said Kellett, who coauthored a report last year that found the Mid-Atlantic region has ample opportunity to boost clean, renewable energy - in particular wind.
The region has enough land based natural wind resources to provide more than 17 percent of current electricity demand, according to the report.
"Investments in renewable energy increase the job and tax base while at the same time helping reduce air and water pollution," Kellett added.
Ehrlich also signed legislation expanding Maryland's net metering law, which allows electricity meters to run backward when on-site solar power generators produce more electricity than is used. The excess solar energy is sent to the power grid for use by others.
The law expands eligible resources to include wind power and allows business customers to qualify for the program.
Another bill signed into law Wednesday by Ehrlich sets up a fund to pay for upgrades of the state's 66 sewage treatment plants in order to to reduce nitrogen pollution in the Bay.
The Chesapeake Bay Restoration Fund will cost some $1 billion and will be funded by a $2.50 monthly fee on the sewer bills of Maryland residents.
Last year the Bay's dead zones - areas starved of oxygen because of nitrogen pollution - reached record levels, stretching some 150 miles from Baltimore to the York River in Virginia.
--------
39 Ocean Windmills Are Planned to Expand Power on L.I.
May 27, 2004
New York Times
By BRUCE LAMBERT
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/27/nyregion/27windmills.html
UNIONDALE, N.Y., May 26 - Facing ever-rising demands for electricity, the Long Island Power Authority is embarking on an unorthodox plan to expand its supply by one-fifth - 39 towering windmills in the Atlantic Ocean, an underwater cable to New Jersey likened to a huge extension cord - and more commonplace power plants.
Private companies would build and own the projects, including the island's first new major power plant in a quarter of a century, supplying about 1,000 megawatts of electricity to the state-run power authority as a guaranteed customer. The windmills could be in place by 2008.
"Our goal is to the keep the lights on for Long Island," the authority's president and chairman, Richard M. Kessel, said at a news conference here Wednesday morning. That night the authority's board was given plans to approve for two small generating plants scheduled to open by the summer of 2005. Other projects will be phased in over several years.
Energy demand is growing fast as people expand their homes, buy big-screen televisions, add computers and cable boxes and turn up their air-conditioners, Mr. Kessel said. Despite a stable population, power use is rising at 100-plus megawatts a year, with residential consumption up 15 percent in the last five years.
"We've kept pace with demand" so far, Mr. Kessel said. But he added that the authority desperately needs more power. It now has a capacity of 5,000 megawatts for the nearly three million people it serves in Nassau and Suffolk Counties and the Rockaways in Queens.
Though the projects will cost more than half a billion dollars, "the overall impact on ratepayers will be negligible, maybe a percent or two," Mr. Kessel said.
In fact, the plan will avoid even higher energy costs in the future, the authority said. Access to cheaper electricity from the mainland via the cable to New Jersey, for example, is estimated to save $1.1 billion over several years.
"We want not a Gilligan's Island but a Long Island connected to the rest of the world," Mr. Kessel said. The cable will provide cheaper electricity, including power from nuclear and coal-fired generators, from what he called an "energy corridor" in a growing power grid stretching across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Ohio and West Virginia.
Long Island is largely cut off from such power because it is surrounded by water and has limited connections through New York City.
Recently the power authority was frustrated when a new power cable across Long Island Sound to Connecticut was shut off because of opposition from Connecticut state officials who say it poses environmental hazards. New York officials are fighting to turn the cable back on.
No such hurdles are expected on the cable to New Jersey, where state officials support that project and the permit applications are nearing approval, Mr. Kessel said.
The most striking project is the offshore windmills. Though such projects exist in Europe, no offshore windmills have ever been built in the Americas.
The planned windmills will rise about 425 feet above sea level - equal to a 40-story building and higher than the Statue of Liberty's torch. They will be grouped about three miles south of Fire Island where it overlaps with Jones Beach, near Gilgo and Robert Moses State Parks. The total output would be 140 megawatts.
To build that project, the authority's review panel named FPL Energy, the nation's leading developer of land-based windmills, as the winning bidder.
The underwater cable to New Jersey would extend 67 miles from Sayreville, N.J., to Wantagh, N.Y., and run up the Wantagh Parkway to a converter station to be built at a Transportation Department yard.
For that project, the bidding review panel picked Neptune RTS of Pittsfield, Me. The project is planned for completion in 2007.
The new major power plant, a 326-megawatt generator, will be built on 92 acres of industrial land in Bellport on the south shore of Suffolk. The chosen bidder is Caithness of New York City.
Bids for two smaller plants, each producing just under 80 megawatts, were also recommended. Calpine was chosen to build a plant in Bethpage, and Pinelawn Power was picked for one in Babylon. They will be the first on the island with cogeneration, in which the main turbine's exhaust drives a second turbine.
"There are going to be critics of all these projects - not in my backyard," Mr. Kessel said, adding that hearings would be held.
Some people have objected that the windmills will protrude into the skyline at the beach. But environmental and civic groups have endorsed the windmills, and an array of local public officials is supporting the other projects as well, Mr. Kessel said, so he does not foresee strong opposition.
Six bids were also approved for conservation programs, like saving energy in apartment buildings and supermarkets. Those companies are Aspen Systems, Custom Energy, Ameresco, CSG Services, Honeywell and Johnson Controls.
Electrical power has a stormy history on Long Island. The old Long Island Lighting Company charged the highest electricity rates in the continental United States, partly because it spent $5 billion on the nuclear plant at Shoreham, which drew opposition from environmentalists and never went into service.
-------- energy
Is nuclear power really the answer to climate change?
Paul Brown
Thursday May 27, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/thisweek/story/0,12977,1224994,00.html
It's not a solution that will find much support. Twenty-five years ago most of the world thought James Lovelock had taken leave of his senses with the Gaia hypothesis. Just when his theory that the earth is like a giant super-organism that can cure its own imbalances has finally found wide scientific acceptance, he has set off at an even more controversial tangent.
The 84-year-old independent scientist and environmentalist is backing nuclear power as the solution to climate change, while most of the rest of the world has decided to look to renewables.
Lovelock is unlikely to win the argument. Despite gratitude from what most consider a dying industry, his long-term green admirers must wonder how this distinguished scientist came to such a strange conclusion.
He talks of the potential collapse of civilisation if the world fails to address climate change, which he says is much faster than cautious mainstream science claims.
Professor Lovelock claims that renewables are unable to deliver enough alternative generation capacity in time to prevent rapid climate change. Nuclear power generates electricity without producing greenhouse gases; its worst crime is, he says, to have produced extra cancers in an already cancer-ridden population.
It will take hundreds, probably thousands, of new nuclear stations to make a dent in fossil fuel use and Lovelock ignores the problem of increasing use of petrol and diesel. The public opposition to nuclear power and the vast capital cost in time and capital weigh against his call for urgent building. Wind and solar power produce energy quickly for local people without the need for a grid. Wave and tidal power are close to breaking through as exciting new technologies.
Lovelock's view is ultimately undermined by his own theories. If civilisation breaks down with 1,000 nuclear stations in operation the potential catastrophe of many Chernobyls on the human race will make the horrors of climate change far worse. It will also sorely test the professor's belief that the earth has the ability to heal itself.
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
Poll Finds Americans Want More Environmental Action
May 27, 2004
NEW HAVEN, Connecticut, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/may2004/2004-05-27-03.asp
Americans are seriously concerned about the country's environmental health and want more political action on the environment at the national and international levels, according to a survey of 1,000 adults nationwide by the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.
Eighty-four percent of those polled say the environment will be a factor in their vote in November. Thirty-five percent consider it a "major factor."
"This poll underscores that Americans are concerned about the environment, and they want the federal government to take action to protect it," said Gus Speth, dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
"It shows that the positions the presidential candidates hold on the environment will likely be a significant factor in the voting behavior of Americans this November," he said.
While the country is profoundly divided when it comes to national politics, the poll found that Americans of all political persuasions are as troubled by the problems of air pollution and toxic contamination of soil and water as they are by the much higher-profile issues of jobs and the cost of gas.
At the EPA's hazardous materials training school, students go through field training on air monitoring and hazardous waste sampling. (Photo courtesy EPA) "The environment rates as one of the top three challenges facing the United States in the decades ahead," wrote the Global Strategy Group, which conducted the survey. "There is also a new environmental concern in post-September 11th America - specifically bio-terrorism and the security of the country's food and water supply."
Some 59 percent of those surveyed rate the quality of the country's environment overall as "only fair" or "poor," while just three percent say America's environment is "excellent."
Only 16 percent said that the quality of the environment in the United States is getting better, while 50 percent said it is getting worse.
In regards to global environmental conditions, some 75 percent rank them as "only fair" or poor, and 63 percent say conditions are getting worse.
"There is a real concern on the part of the majority of Americans when it comes to the overall quality of our environment," said Speth, "and people are genuinely concerned that it is only going to get worse. Moreover, the public perceives a huge deficit between its aspirations for environmental protection and what our politics actually delivers."
According to the poll, 67 percent say the United States government does not do enough about the environment and should do more.
But the economy still tops the environment when it comes to the top issue of concern. When forced to choose between protecting the environment and maintaining a strong economy, a majority, 54 percent, of the Americans surveyed choose to keep the economy growing. Thirty-six percent of those polled said that protecting the environment should be a top priority, even if that means higher consumer prices.
"Political pundits usually dismiss the environment as an issue that affects elections because they think people do not listen when politicians talk about it - clearly, that is not the case," said Yale Professor Dan Esty, who took the lead in developing the poll with national polling firm Global Strategy Group.
More than half those surveyed said that the candidates should talk more about their plans for the environment.
Eighty-four percent believe the United States should enact stricter emissions and pollution standards for business and industry.
The phone survey was conducted by professional interviewers from April 26 to May 3. The nationwide sample was drawn from a random digit dial process. Respondents were over the age of 18. The survey has an overall margin of error of ±3.1 percent at the 95 percent confidence level. That is, if the same survey were conducted among similar respondents, the results would fall within the range of ±3.1 percent in 19 out of 20 cases.
----
'Dead zones' threaten fisheries
By Mark Clayton
The Christian Science Monitor
May 27, 2004
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0527/p13s01-sten.html
In midsummer, the northern Gulf of Mexico, where the Mississippi River empties into it, may shimmer like any other swath of sea. But a few score feet below, bottom-dwelling fish and other creatures struggle just to breathe.
This area - one of the world's biggest coastal "dead zones" - is rapidly being joined by a growing number of "hypoxic," or oxygen-depleted areas around the world. At least 146 such zones have been documented through 2000 - from the northern Adriatic Sea to the Gulf of Thailand to the Yellow Sea, according to a United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) report released in March. And their number has been doubling every decade since 1960, it adds. At risk: coastal fisheries near the most populous regions.
A handful of efforts are under way that could mitigate the effects. But because of lag times involved, the problem is likely to get worse before it gets better.
"I'm convinced this is going to be the biggest environmental issue in the aquatic marine realm in the 21st century," says Robert Diaz, a marine biologist and professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, who coauthored the study undergirding the UNEP report. "It won't take too much for these annual lower-oxygen events to expand throughout the year and actually eliminate fisheries."
Dead zones often grow where populations grow. But the real driver is the spread of nitrogen, many observers say, caused by runoff of nitrogen-based fertilizers, sewage outflows, and nitrogen deposits from burning fossil fuels. Some waters remain oxygen-depleted year-around. In other waters, the problem appears periodically.
In the northern Gulf of Mexico, one of the best-known and best-studied dead zones, hypoxia occurs seasonally from April to September. The zone's size depends on the weather and how much flow the Mississippi brings each year. Its waters are laden with fertilizer runoff from farms and lawns across the Midwest. Sewage and fossil-fuel emissions exhaust (from power plants and autos) are also factors, says a 1999 University of Alabama study sponsored by the fertilizer industry.
Excess nitrogen combined with placid summer weather results in an oxygen-poor bottom layer of water. The process works this way: In the top layer, the nitrogen and sun feed phytoplankton, which grow rapidly, then die and fall to the bottom. As they decay, they consume oxygen. Called eutrophication, the cycle depletes oxygen in isolated bottom waters. In 2002, one of the worst years since it was first documented in the 1970s, the northern Gulf's hypoxic zone reached more than 7,700 square miles. Despite its size, the problem is largely hidden from view, except to the trained eye.
"I see massive schools of stingrays, bottom dwellers, moving on the surface. Even shrimp come up 20 feet or so off the bottom trying to get to oxygen," says Nancy Rabalais, a marine biologist at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium in Chauvin, La. Only because they are desperate to breathe do such bottom-dwelling creatures flee upward, risking becoming easy prey. More mouths to feed
Such scenes will become more common worldwide, scientists predict. As populations grow, nitrogen and phosphorous-caused eutrophication will more than double in coastal areas by 2050, predicts a 2001 study published in Science magazine.
"There's been a big increase in these hypoxic zones that correlates strongly with increased use of nitrogen fertilizers, particularly in the '60s and 1970s," says Robert Howarth, a coauthor of the Science study and professor of environmental biology at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. "About half of the nitrogen fertilizer used on Earth in all of history has been used in the last 15 years."
One positive trend: Total global fertilizer use seems to be growing more slowly than in the past few decades. It plateaued in 1990 then declined after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the mid-'90s, global growth resumed, but much more slowly. For the decade, nitrogen fertilizer rose only slightly from 79 million to 82 million tons.
Still, scientists say it takes time for a rise in fertilizer use to harm coastal ecosystems. In a 2002 study, Howarth and other scientists found that falling levels of dissolved oxygen in coastal waters lagged 10 to 20 years behind increased chemical fertilizer use beginning in the 1940s. That lag effect is worrisome, he says, because fertilizer use has more than quadrupled globally since 1960.
The use of nitrogen has increased, too. Nitrogen fertilizers were 37 percent of all fertilizers used in 1961, but grew to 60 percent by 2001, according to Fertilizer Institute data. "If you look globally at what humans are doing to the nitrogen cycle, we're increasingly making nitrogen available to the environment," Dr. Howarth says. "Almost 75 percent of the increase is through fertilizers."
The fertilizer industry in the US has been working with farmers to reduce fertilizer overuse and resulting runoff since the 1960s. But pressure from the Environmental Protection Agency in the '90s also has pushed the industry toward new technologies. Global positioning satellite technology, linked to fertilizer applicators on tractors, permits "precision farming" in which each acre gets specific chemicals according to its soil condition.
"Applying more won't necessarily get more crop, and farmers understand that it's not good for their bottom line," says Rino Maddalena of the Fertilizer Institute in Washington D.C.
Even so, several farm authorities say it is not uncommon for farmers to use more nitrogen and other fertilizers than they need as a modest insurance policy. Better to slightly overfertilize than underfertilize and underproduce, the thinking goes.
To address this concern, the American Farmland Trust (AFT), a nonprofit group that attempts to protect cropland, has developed a new form of crop insurance. The risk-management program encourages farmers to apply less nitrogen fertilizer. In this scheme, a farmer agrees to use a lesser amount of nitrogen fertilizer, based on nutrient management advice. If the farmer's output falls below the output of a test plot on his land that has the maximum nitrogen fertilizer applied to it, then he receives the difference in cash.
So far, 27 pilot projects are under way in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Illinois, says Brian Brandt of the AFT's Agricultural Conservation Innovation Center. In three years, the project has seen a 24 percent reduction in nitrogen use among the farmers. Only a handful saw yields fall. They were paid the difference, about $6 per acre. It pays to use less
One participant, Burley Hall, a farmer with 2,100 acres north of Urbana, Ohio, now uses some 35 pounds less nitrogen per acre of corn - a reduction of more than 20 percent. That reduction saves him money. And once, when his crop came in a fraction of a bushel less than his test strip, he got reimbursed $900. But his enthusiasm for the program runs deeper than economics.
"We've got creeks that run through our land," Mr. Hall says. "We live here and drink the water. If I'm buying this stuff [nitrogen], I don't want to see how far down the stream I can run it. You've got to watch out for the environment by all means and this is one way of doing it."
One high-tech idea in the works would take another big whack at nitrogen use - but from the other end of the equation. Arcadia Biosciences in Davis, Calif., is working to make corn and other plants more efficient users of nitrogen already in the soil. For example, using genetic engineering, it has modified canola with a gene found in barley. The effect is to activate the plant's roots to absorb nitrogen more aggressively than before.
"We've grown the same yield as a conventional crop of canola using less than half as much nitrogen," says Eric Rey, the firm's president.
Arcadia has conducted three years of tests for the US Department of Agriculture. But the first commercial canola and rice seeds won't be ready until 2008 or 2009, Mr. Rey says. He acknowledges, too, current concerns over genetic engineering. On the other hand, farmers cut costs and use less fertilizer, he adds. "So the environment is improved by farmers making more money."
----
Death Toll Mounts Around Pakistan's Manchar Lake
May 27, 2004
KARACHI, Pakistan, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/may2004/2004-05-27-02.asp
Nineteen people have died and at least 1,600 are ill after drinking contaminated water released into the Indus River from Manchar Lake in southern Pakistan. Three children are among the fatalities, which affected the cities of Hyderabad and Thatta and villages around Pakistan's largest lake.
The contaminated water is supplied by a state-run water agency, which gets the water from Manchar Lake, outside Hyderabad, in Pakistan's southern Sindh province 100 kilometers (60 miles) northeast of the port city Karachi. The source of contamination is not known, and two official investigations are underway.
Doctors are warning people in the city of Hyderabad to drink only boiled water, and provincial health experts as well as the World Health Organization are separately writing reports after taking water samples from the lake.
Dr. Hadi Bakhsh with the main Hyderabad hospital said people suffering from diarrhea began arriving at the hospital May 10.
Jhangara Union Council Nazim Syed Zahid Hussain Shah claimed on Sunday that many more people have died from the contamination than has been reported in the local media. Briefing journalists at the press club in Dadu, he told the "Dawn" newspaper that the victims are Manchar Lake fishermen and people from the villages of four union councils, Bubak, Jhangara, Chhinni and Channa.
Manchar is the largest shallow water natural lake in South Asia. (Photo courtesy Dadu District) Shah said irrigation officials released water from Manchhar Lake into the river due to coming monsoon season. He said that Manchar fishermen and other local people drank the water as there was no alternate system to provide clean water.
Head of the Pakistan People's Party Parliamentarians Makhdoom Amin Fahim is blaming the government for the deaths. In a statement issued from Bilawal House in Karachi Monday, the PPP leader called for a judicial commission headed by a senior judge to probe the incident.
Fahim said the health of many people is at risk, but the government has taken no appropriate steps for providing proper medical aid, nor have any positive steps been taken for stopping the release of contaminated water, he claimed.
He said that in Hyderabad, Thatta, Sehwan and other areas, a large number of affected people are coming to the Civil Hospital in Hyderabad, Preetabad government hospital and other hospitals but regretted that they were not being provided adequate medical treatment.
The government claims that fresh water has reached the Kotri barrage and people have been stopped from flushing contaminated water from Manchar Lake. But Fahim says contaminated water has not yet been flushed out of several canals in Thatta and other areas.
Local fishermen have been warning about contamination in Manchar Lake for years. Last July, fisherman Ghulam Mustafa Mirani said at a dialogue on Manchar Lake at Islamabad's Sustainable Development Policy Institute, "The lake has become an agricultural waste dump for those living upstream."
Meanwhile, on Wednesday the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) jointly authorized a project to provide access to a safe water supply, improved sanitation and natural resources management in Punjab and Sindh.
The project is the first ever joint program by the two United Nations agencies in Pakistan.
The signing ceremony was held at the United Nations office in Karachi on Monday. The documents were signed by the UNICEF representative, Omar Abdi and UNDP resident representative, Onder Yucer.
The program will provide a grant of US$428,000 for implementation of water, sanitation and natural resources projects in Punjab and Sindh under UNICEF and the UNDP Small Grants Programme.
The project aims at community mobilization for reducing water contamination through rational use of chemicals and remediation to remove arsenic from the water supply in selected schools. At least 250,000 people are expected to benefit.
The UN agencies plan to work jointly with the Ministry of Science and Technology and local governments to install 240 water treatment plants.
-------- health
Mouth Bacteria May Defend Against AIDS
REUTERS USA:
May 27, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/25275/story.htm
WASHINGTON - Bacteria in the mouth can latch onto the AIDS virus and prevent it from infecting cells -- which could help protect infants from catching the deadly virus from their mothers, researchers report.
Two strains of Lactobacillus bacteria can hook onto HIV and stop it from getting into cells. The bacteria also cause immune cells to clump, which could be used to stop HIV-infected cells from infecting other cells, the researchers told a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in New Orleans.
"While studies have been done so far only in the laboratory, we believe this work opens up new possibilities for preventing the transmission of HIV through mothers' milk," said Lin Tao, associate professor of oral biology in the University of Illinois at Chicago's College of Dentistry.
"Unlike standard retroviral drugs, which are too toxic for newborns, lactobacilli are 'friendly' bacteria already inhabiting the human digestive tract and milk products, and so should pose no danger to infants."
The AIDS virus affects an estimated 43 million people worldwide and has killed more than 25 million. It is passed through body fluids like blood, semen and mother's milk.
Many babies born free of HIV are infected by breast feeding -- an estimated 25 percent in some areas. Up to 800,000 babies are infected each year globally.
Giving the mother and baby antiretroviral drugs, especially one called nevirapine, can protect the infants at birth, but they risk becoming infected later if they are breastfed.
"This discovery opens up a possible means of preventing the transmission of HIV from mother to infant through breast feeding," Tao, who led the study, said in a statement.
Tao's team studied bacteria taken from volunteers.
"The two strains were found to bind with several varieties of HIV, the related simian immunodeficiency virus, and immune cells that HIV targets for infection," Tao said. "Further analysis showed that the bacteria inhibited HIV infection of immune cells in the laboratory."
-------- ACTIVISTS
Israel: Mordechai Vanunu still censored
Silencing a whistleblower and those who hear him
Index Online,
May 27, 2004
http://www.indexonline.org/news/20040527_israel.shtml
In April this year, James Thackara went to Israel on behalf of Index on Censorship to greet the Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu on his release from Ashkolon Prison. The terms of his release are very restrictive: no passport, no right to speak to 'foreigners', no right to travel around Israel or to go within 100 yards of an embassy or port. An interview with Vanunu was confiscated by the Israeli authorities, and the Sunday Times journalist Peter Hounam was arrested in Jerusalem on 26 May. In other words, Vanunu is still being censored.
James Thackara has had a long involvement in nuclear issues and the Mordechai Vanunu case, and is the author of the novel America's Children concerning the Manhattan Project and the fate of Robert Oppenheimer. Eighteen years ago, Vanunu, an Israeli scientist working at Israel 's secret Dimona nuclear weapons plant revealed the fact that Israel had an atomic bomb project, a secret which had been shrouding US-Israeli relations since the days of Kennedy and Ben Gurion, perhaps involving collusion between the countries. Vanunu was kidnapped in Italy, returned to Israel and sentenced to 18 years in prison, nearly twelve of which he spent in solitary confinement.
Thackara speaks here to Ursula Owen, editor-in-chief of Index on Censorship.
"First of all, I was astonished that though the international press was outside the gates at Ashkolon to cover the release of Vanunu, who has spent 18 years in prison for the nuclear truth, not one single interview devoted itself, as far I could see, to any heightened or visionary debate about the morality and the existence of nuclear weapons in Israel or anywhere else.
"Israelis call their position on nuclear weapons their ambiguity policy. That ambiguity has legal significance, reflecting in turn a moral enigma. The World Health Organisation (WHO) brought a case at the World Court a few years ago, about whether or not nuclear weapons were legal and the Algerian judge in the case passed on it, saying 'Nuclear weapons are legal in times of peace, illegal in times of war.' I think that is in some way reflected in the ambiguity concept.
"But I would say in the case of Israel it also reflects upon the nature of the Holocaust State , the Jewish people's plight in the twentieth century, and the nature of the Jewish state in relation to all other states. It is a unique state, it is aware of its uniqueness, the world is aware of its uniqueness, and it deals with things in a rather unique way.
"When Truman became President at the time of Potsdam , he didn't even know there was a bomb, so when he was told, he thought it was just a slightly larger bomb. He wasn't particularly distressed to go along with the Army's very strong ambition to drop the bomb. This business of secrecy is very dangerous in nuclear weapons.
"Here we have the Israeli state saying they don't have nuclear weapons, and they could have anywhere beyond 150, perhaps as many as 400 warheads, some of them thermonuclear; also three German cruise missile suitable submarines. It's a major world nuclear power. We invaded Iraq for weapons that do not seem to exist (though they might have been close to existence at one time). The Israelis have avoided these kinds of inspections required by the Atomic Energy Agency by staging vernissage inspections by the Americans. I think it has put them in quite an awkward position.
"When you are talking about nuclear weapons, it's important to remember that technology has gotten way ahead of morality. However, simply to deny a secret project belongs to the primitive stage of nuclear weapons, the 1940s and 50s. We are moving out of that stage, and my comment at the moment I met Mordechai Vanunu was that his release meant the necessary end of it.
"Nuclear weapons are very much a project of twentieth century ideologies: ironically, the people building nuclear weapons very often felt they could bring peace in the world. In the early stages America and the Soviet Union had primordial power over this project.
'It produced a kind of conversation between the Russians and the Americans, a peaceful conversation based on the assumption that since they both had nuclear weapons and could incinerate each other and everybody else they weren't going to do things in the usual way, they were going to use little countries around the world to fight proxy wars for them. And that is how they did it basically; all conducted with the pawns and not the major pieces.
"Now, more and more countries have nuclear weapons. And lo and behold, this is very uncomfortable for those countries who thought they had this power, because they thought they were rather responsible: now other people with religions that don't agree with them, with racial prejudices that aren't in accord with them, don't actually accept everything the primordial group tells them. So there is now a kind of nuclear community, in which there is a discourse that goes on within the nuclear establishment, which is a kind of alternative government.
"For Israel , the exclusiveness of what happened to the Jews in the Holocaust is enshrined in their state. This exclusiveness, they believe, allows them to do things that other states do not. I think that is at the basis of why they have not joined the Atomic Energy Agency and do not reveal their nuclear capability, I think they feel they have a great confidence in their moral nature, they feel they are justified because of the imperative of survival. Israel feels that it is surrounded by anti-Semitic, aggressive people. Ariel Sharon's concept of the imperative of survival involves occupational thuggery which has put the Israeli state in the position of being a neo-colonial country.
"I think that the time of Vanunu's abduction in 1986 was a time of flux for Israel , it was redefining itself, it was having a kind of an identity crisis. It had occupied territories after the 1967 war, and gradually it became clear that the settlements were not going to be returned. And this produced a moral dilemma for Israel as well as security issues on the ground.
"At the time, the fact that Israel had a nuclear project was not at the forefront of Israeli anxieties, problems and guilt. They had their nuclear project, they were developing it, they were taking it beyond what might have appeared a reactor project into a weapons project. In the early stages Vanunu took security oaths based on it being perhaps more a research project and he was not concerned about that.
'Gradually he became aware that he was being involved with major proliferation. Vanunu found himself inside this totalitarian, repressive, secrecy-ridden state of denial and repression, this anti-human organisation - the nuclear community in the world. And at that point he was reading quite a lot of philosophy and he decided he was going to take responsibility for what he was doing.
'And that was particularly poignant for him because he wasn't actually a high level scientist, and he is often insulted for not being important enough to be taken seriously. He decided he didn't want to be involved in this lie any longer. He was gradually persuaded that it was important for him to say something.
"While we waited for Vanunu to come out of prison I was interviewed by what I believe is the second largest paper in Israel , Ma'ariv, The journalist took notes, he got more and more interested, he got more and more sober and at the end he turned to me and said, 'I want to speak to you personally. The Israel that Vanunu is coming out into is not the Israel he went in from. I believe that Vanunu will be accepted and admired by my generation of Israelis.'
"He made a personal apology to me about what happened to Vanunu. My interview did not go into the paper. A few days later they had a poll in that paper, asking Israelis what they thought should happen to Vanunu. And one of the options offered was to kill him. The paranoia has produced the most appallingly kind of conservatism. And this plays into the nuclear state aspect of Israel , because nucleonics is always totalitarian, undemocratic and conservative.
But the poll in (the Israeli liberal daily) Ha'aretz showed something like 50% wanted him released, 30% thought he should be kept under house arrest and silenced, and maybe 20% thought he should go on being punished forever. And imagine, in a North London liberal synagogue, I heard a man who claimed to have been at the Dimona project, say, 'Vanunu betrayed Judaism, he converted to Christianity, he was a low level technician. He betrayed his family, they denounced him. He betrayed the Jewish state. He is no better than Adolf Eichmann. He should be executed. '
"We are not going to have disarmament in our lifetime, or the lifetime of our children, but in 100 years, civilisation will evolve away from nuclear weapons. Meanwhile I think the presence of nuclear weapons in Israel is Israel 's greatest hope of joining the community of all the races and religions of the world as an equal - if it admits they are there.
"I can't say that to build instruments that are portable gas chambers and extinction weapons is a sign that the human species is a sane species on this planet. However, given the primitive state that humanity is in and has been for a long time, I would say that to have nuclear weapons is the assumption of an enormous, aggravated amount of responsibility.
"I present this to you as something of a joke; the Marshall MacLuhan Institute a few years ago said that nuclear weapons were the great teacher, and there should be a nuke in every market place. I would say there is a moral content in nuclear weapons, because it involves a conjunction of moral authority and powers of mass ecological destruction. When God wanted to punish people in the Old Testament, he invested the world with floods, plagues and such violence. Well, nuclear weapons are a plague and a flood - it is in fact the Old Testament God enshrined in science.
"In the post-Spenglerian world, very large numbers say God doesn't exist or God is dead, or even if they claim that they believe in God, people feel that they should be doing something to improve the planet. So if you take on nuclear weapons, in a sense you are saying, well God may have had virtue on his side, but we have gone beyond God now, man is responsible for everything. Every last ant on this planet is in the realm of human responsibility.
'And this weapon is saying to us, don't let other people solve your problems, don't argue with your neighbour because you are not going to get anywhere with him, because antithesis is going to produce Armageddon. For God's sake, get on with the business of solving the problems of the world. And here I would admonish the Israeli state; nuclear knowledge has a sacred aspect to it.
'It is something that belongs to everybody and when Klaus Fuchs gave away the secret of the implosion principle to the Soviets, he did it because he felt tortured that nuclear knowledge was larger than any nation or religion or anything, was being not shared, in fact in this case with our ally (during WWII) Russia.
"An Israeli negotiator said - and interestingly a Christian representative of the PLO here made similar comments - that in every negotiation with the PLO the fact that Israel has got a bomb project is an appallingly disheartening aspect of the discussion, because it is saying Israel is absolute, and obviously this creates a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.
'I mean the Iranians, the Iraqis, the Syrians, everybody would quite like to have nukes so they can just sit at the negotiating table with the Israelis.
"Nuclear weapons are of course very dangerous things to have on your territory, because they not only give you a kind of sovereignty, they not only give you immense moral prestige if they are not abused, they also put you into a position of having to defend the terrain that the nuclear project is on because it is too damn dangerous to fall into anybody else's hands, bin Laden's for instance..
"I think the release of Vanunu will force Israel to come clean. It's important that Vanunu walks as a free man on the planet, is not assassinated, is not harassed, not muzzled. After being locked away for 18 years, how could he have secrets dangerous to Israeli security?
"After eighteen years a head of Dimona would not be likely to have up-to-date dangerous secrets - especially as Vanunu put everything in the public domain in l986: diagrams of the facility on all levels, down to the last staircase, detailed processes of plutonium separation, production of Lithium 6, Tritium (which signify thermonuclear). Vanunu wants to leave Israel , he's said that in letters, he has been totally open about it. He wants to go to Congress - to do what?
"It seems that so great is the angst underlying US-Israeli relations that the same people who use American tractors to trash the homes of unarmed old women can't find the courage to give this man the passport he is guaranteed by Israel 's law.
"At the moment he's living in an Anglican cathedral in Jerusalem, quite close to the old city, to the Damascus gate When I visited him there were heavily armed police at both ends of the road, presumably to protect him. It would be a major international incident for Israel if anything were to happen to him, they don't want him dead. There was a conspicuous Shin Bet (Israeli Security Service) outside masquerading as reporters.
"To get in, I just had to hand a slip of paper to an attendant of the church saying 'James, Index on Censorship' . And he came back five minutes later, the gates were cleared and I was let in, we walked straight across the cloister into the colonnade. He looked over his shoulder and then he said 'now run left'. And we hurried down the colonnade into a very austere cloister with a long monk's table.
"And there, after 18 years, was Mordechai Vanunu sitting at the end of the table, with his brother Asher on the other side, and Meir at the end, whom I already knew. And he rose to meet me, he'd been told by his brother who I was and we spoke for maybe half an hour. One of the most beautiful things I've ever experienced. Because this man was totally calm, totally gentle, totally unhostile, apparently not angry, completely sane, witty, and funny, and innocent .
"I put the question how did he stay sane? And he said, well, every day they would question him, he was under continual questioning because they wanted to understand why he felt the way he did. As I understood it, his reply was that he was able to preserve his sanity by something like what I offered was Gary Kasparov playing chess. He would spend his whole time thinking about what they had said what the implications were, and replying to them.
"This mixture of Socratic discipline, heavy exercise, with these confrontations with in a sense his persecutors, but also his interlocutors and his contact with humanity, was what preserved his rational powers, and kept him a calm person, and probably even, I would imagine, supplied him with a certain sense of humour in a situation that was far from funny.
"I would emphasise here, and I don't think Vanunu would argue with me on this, that this man is not first and foremost a human rights victim. It is a human rights case, but he had access to certain newspapers, he was able to read, he asked his friends to send him videos and films. This was not a man who was nailed to a cross, and hung in public view; this is a person who was kept out of sight to guard a secret. I think it's important to see that this man is a censorship hero of a very particular kind.
"This particular man was crucified in a very modern way. He was quietly separated from humanity and made a prisoner of the nuclear state, which would not allow him to debate what every human being on the planet should be debating. This is a particular kind of modern psychopathology, it is insane, it reflects the psychotic state the human species are in."
James Thackera was interviewed by Ursula Owen, Editor-in-Chief of Index on Censorship.
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Israel's nuclear whistleblower under close watch since release
JERUSALEM (AFP)
May 27, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040527113958.9oq95knp.html
Mordechai Vanunu, who served 18 years in prison for blowing the whistle on Israel's nuclear program, is still subject to serious security restrictions and under constant threat of being re-arrested.
That threat grew more acute Thursday, one day after Israeli police detained Peter Hounam, the British journalist who revealed the one-time technician's secrets about the Jewish state's nuclear arsenal in the Sunday Times almost 20 years ago.
Vanunu was abducted by Israeli secret service agents in Italy, smuggled back to Israel and then jailed in 1986 after leaking top-secret details about the Dimona plant in southern Israel's Negev desert to the British newspaper.
The Moroccan-born Vanunu, 50, is defiant and says he does not regret his actions, but denies he had further secrets to reveal.
"To all of those who are calling me a traitor, I am proud and happy that I did what I did," Vanunu told reporters upon leaving Shikma prison in southern Israel on April 21, to the cheers of hundreds of foreign supporters.
"The whole Middle East is free of nuclear weapons. Israel does not need nuclear weapons," he said.
He called on Israel to open up the Dimona nuclear plant to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN's nuclear watchdog.
A convert to Christianity in the 1980s, Vanunu now lives in the Anglican church's St George's Cathedral in east Jerusalem.
Reviled as a traitor by most Israelis and disowned by his devout parents for abandoning Judaism, Vanunu is viewed abroad as a hero and cause celebre for the anti-nuclear movement.
He would like to live in the United States, home of Nick and Mary Eoloff, the Minnesota couple who legally adopted him in the 1990s.
But for the time being, he will remain in Israel due to the severe restrictions placed on his movements and contact with foreigners.
He is barred from leaving Israel for a year, and cannot go anywhere near the country's ports or airports for at least six months following his April release. Both measures are subject to renewal by Israeli authorities.
He must alert security services of his movements, and obtain prior approval for any meetings with foreign nationals.
Israel has never acknowledged having a nuclear arsenal but foreign experts believe it has produced between 100 and 200 nuclear warheads.
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Israel detains British journalist who broke nuclear whistleblower's story
JERUSALEM (AFP)
May 27, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040527105915.q2xwukhr.html
A month after Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu's release from prison, the Jewish state has revived the controversy by arresting the British journalist who exposed his revelations about its nuclear program nearly 20 years ago.
Peter Hounam, who broke the Vanunu story in Britain's Sunday Times in 1986, was arrested late Wednesday in Jerusalem by Israel's internal security services, witnesses and court officials said.
Police on Thursday were expected to ask that his remand be extended by Jerusalem's district court, which has imposed a gag order on any further details about the circumstances of Hounam's arrest.
Army radio said Hounam was suspected of having been in contact with Vanunu, a one-time technician at the Dimona nuclear plant in southern Israel who is barred from talking to foreigners without prior security service authorization.
Yuval Steinitz, chairman of the Israeli parliament's foreign affairs and defense committee, told public radio he believed there was a "possible violation here of the legal restrictions placed on Vanunu."
Amnesty International researcher Donatella Rovera, who witnessed the arrest, told army radio that Hounam had been detained by "five plainclothes security service agents."
The agents had escorted Hounam to his east Jerusalem hotel, searched his room, confiscated various documents and then taken him away for further questioning, the Haaretz newspaper reported.
"As they were taking him away to an unknown destination, he told me he has been arrested and that I must alert The Sunday Times and other media," Rovera said.
Hounam, who left the Sunday Times a few years ago and now works as a freelance journalist, reported on Vanunu's April release for the British newspaper and was working on a documentary for the BBC.
Vanunu was abducted by Israeli secret service agents in Italy, smuggled back to Israel and then jailed in 1986 after leaking top-secret details about the Dimona plant to the Sunday Times.
He was freed on April 21 after 18 years in prison, but is now subject to a series of sweeping restrictions, including a ban on travelling abroad as well as holding unauthorized meetings with foreigners.
Britain's ambassador to Israel Simon McDonald held talks Thursday with Israeli Justice Minister Tommy Lapid, Israeli and British officials said.
A spokeswoman for the British embassy in Tel Aviv said "the issue of Peter Hounam was obviously raised" at the meeting but declined to give further details.
Both sides said the McDonald-Lapid meeting had been scheduled before Hounam's arrest.
Israeli justice ministry officials said consultations were also ongoing about the issue in the offices of Attorney General Menahem Mazuz.
The BBC said on its website that it was "very concerned" about Hounam's arrest, but did not release any information about the content of its planned documentary.
"I don't know why Peter Hounam was arrested but this is obviously just a new episode in the campaign to persecute Mordechai Vanunu," the whistleblower's brother Meir told AFP.
One of Vanunu's lawyers Avigdor Feldman has petitioned the Jerusalem district court for access to Hounam, saying it was "totally unacceptable" that he could "disappear from one day to the next."
An opposition Labor member of the Israeli parliament, Yuli Tamir, condemned Hounam's detention, saying: "This arrest is dangerous for democracy."
Israel has never acknowledged having a nuclear arsenal but foreign experts believe it has produced between 100 and 200 nuclear warheads.
The country is one of the few not to have signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and has refused to allow inspections of its nuclear facilities by the UN watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
On his release from prison, Vanunu said he was proud that he had blown the whistle on the program, but denied he had further secrets to reveal.
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Israel should free British journalist later Thursday: ministry
JERUSALEM (AFP)
May 27, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040527143715.so6iw9b6.html
Israeli police should release detained British journalist Peter Hounam, who exposed the revelations of nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu in 1986, later Thursday, a justice ministry spokesman said.
"He will be released unless we have new developments in the investigation," a ministry spokesman told AFP.
Hounam's release was to take place at some point during the night, the spokesman added.
The British embassy in Tel Aviv said it could not comment on the possibility of Hounam's release.
Hounam, who broke the Vanunu story in Britain's Sunday Times in 1986, was arrested late Wednesday in Jerusalem by Israel's internal security services, witnesses and court officials said.
Vanunu, a former technician at the Dimona nuclear plant, was abducted by Israeli secret service agents in Italy, smuggled back to Israel and then jailed in 1986 after leaking top-secret details about the plant to the Sunday Times.
He was freed on April 21 after 18 years in prison, but is now subject to a series of sweeping restrictions, including a ban on travelling abroad as well as holding unauthorized meetings with foreigners.
Hounam, who left the Sunday Times a few years ago and now works as a freelance journalist, reported on Vanunu's April release for the British newspaper and was working on a documentary for the BBC.
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Lebanese demonstrators shot dead
An estimated half a million people protested against prices
Thursday 27 May 2004,
AFP
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/2EEDF0E2-2EEC-43F4-AAE2-C175C186903E.htm
Lebanese soldiers have shot at demonstrators in a Beirut suburb, killing three and wounding many more.
A doctor at the Sainte Therese hospital, Georges Karam, confirmed that two died from wounds to the neck while the third victim was shot in the stomach.
Security sources said soldiers opened fire when protesters began throwing stones on Thursday, angry over soaring fuel prices.
Two military vehicles were also damaged in the skirmish around the mainly Shia Muslim Hay al-Silum suburb.
Trade unions had called for a general strike to protest against the rise of fuel prices and the economic policies of the government of Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri.
Fuel price rage
Widespread anger at petrol prices has apparently bolstered support for Thursday's strike, with some estimating half a million protesters across the country.
Over the last several days, most labour unions and associations announced that they would participate in the strike, while shops and private businesses in the capital were preparing to close.
Meanwhile, Hariri has urged Justice Minister Bahij Tabbarah and the public prosecutor's office to take action against petrol stations for failing to comply with last week's cabinet decision to lower prices.
Petrol prices are currently around $0.80 a litre, while the government has demanded a charge of $0.74.
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Sen. Clinton gives, receives praise at Pattern conference
By Jonathan Ment,
NY Daily Freeman staff,
05/27/2004
http://www.dailyfreeman.com/site/news.cfm?BRD=1769&dept_id=74969&newsid=11806726&PAG=461&rfi=9
... THE demonstrators outside the theater had left by the time Clinton's 20-minute address ended, but a waist-high model of a human head labeled "depleted uranium" remained seated by the entrance as the senator was driven from the rear of the building in a short motorcade of black SUVs.
The Pattern conference, "Change Challenge Charter: An Agenda For Our Future," continues today at SUNY New Paltz with keynote speaker Michael Gallis, who will put the Hudson Valley in a global context leading into a discussion titles "The World in a Hudson Valley Context."
Following the session, smaller group caucuses will work on issues of environment, the economy, respectful social and political culture, and a dynamic cultural society.
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U.S. arrests seven animal rights militants
Thursday, May 27, 2004
By Reuters
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-05-27/s_24292.asp
NEWARK, New Jersey - Seven animal rights militants were charged Wednesday with terrorizing officers, employees, and shareholders of a British company in New Jersey that uses animals to test drugs, prosecutors said.
The indictment said the members of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty group advocated or carried out "20 top terror tactics," including smashing windows, spraying cleaning fluid in someone's eyes, and invading offices of Huntingdon Life Sciences based in East Millstone, New Jersey.
The company was started in Britain and has research centers there.
"This is not activism," said Christopher Christie, the U.S. attorney in New Jersey. "This is a group of lawless thugs attacking innocent men, women, and children."
The five-count indictment said the group used Web sites to encourage members to "operate outside the confines of the legal system" including vandalizing or firebombing cars and threatening to kill or injure an employee's partner or children.
FBI agents arrested the seven - six men and one woman - with addresses in New Jersey, New York, California, and Washington state Wednesday.
They face charges of animal enterprise terrorism, which carries a maximum penalty of three years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Three were also charged with stalking, which carries a maximum five years and a $250,000 fine.
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